Family Affair (24 page)

He surrenders. “Just take her to a nice restaurant and go from there.”

I suppose I can’t choose burgers with the guys again.

• • •

Trying to figure out my options, I ask Coach Wells when I see him on the field the next day.

“I hear tapas is a good first-date option,” Coach Wells remarks. “The wife always wants to go out for tapas. I don’t know when tapas became such a big deal. It’s like sushi needed a rival for overpriced bullshit food. But she goes on and on about how it’s a collaborative effort, which creates conversation, sharing, eating with your hands, feeding each other….”

“Easy with the feeding each other,” I say. “You know I’m kind of a germaphobe. I don’t know where her hands have been.”

“Sounds like you really like her,” he observes.

“I’m kidding!” I say. Even though I really don’t like the idea of eating with our hands. Not at all. Instead, I say, “Isn’t tapas tiny food? I wouldn’t be surprised if the word actually means ‘tiny’ in Spanish. All I know is every time I’ve had it, I’ve always made a pit stop at Damiano’s for a slice before I got home.”

“Okay, so no tapas.” Coach Wells grunts. “You have a ton of other possibilities. Just think about what you want to say about who you are, and take the usual restaurant parameters into consideration: the vibe of the place, the location, the type of food. You might want to try a cozy, candlelit place—somewhere intimate where you can soak each other in and get to know each other. Or you could go the hip-and-trendy route. Ask one of the guys on the team to tell you someplace that will impress her and make you look like you have a life.”

“Which I don’t?” I ask.

“Just don’t take her anyplace where you might run into Layla,” he replies.

“Like the corn maze.”

“Yeah, you’re definitely not one for overthinking things,” he mutters. “We should have had this conversation before that happened.”

“Hindsight,” I say. “The only perfect science.” Still, I’m left with no real suggestion. I just want someone to say, “Go here,” and then I’ll do that. Is that so much to ask?

• • •

I ask Doug for his input, and all he offers is “I’m so laughing at you right now.”

Surprisingly, it’s Jared who saves the day. “Take her to the Santa Monica Pier,” he suggests. “There’s tons of stuff to do there. You can win her stuffed animals. You can fish….”

“Fish?” I echo.

“You won’t fish. But you can ride roller coasters, eat fun food, look through the coin-operated telescope….”

“You’re a huge dork,” I say.

“I love a telescope,” he says. “Don’t hate. I could have been an astronomer.”

“I’m not hating, dude,” I allow. “Honestly, you’re the only one who’s given me a solid suggestion that I can just take and not have to think about it.”

“It’s what I’m here for,” he says.

I pick Heather up at her apartment and tell her we’re going to dinner and then we’re gonna have some fun. She cocks an eyebrow, but I assure her that it will be incredible.

Before I got Heather I scoped the area, and it seems that the most efficient date plan leaves us with two restaurant choices: Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., which is actually on the pier, or The Lobster, which is just south of the pier on the southern side of Ocean Ave. The two restaurants couldn’t be more different.

The Lobster is a historical landmark that’s been around for as long as I’ve been alive, and I’m sure longer. It’s a top-notch seafood restaurant in such a prime location that no matter where you sit you will have an amazing one-hundred-eighty-degree view of the Pacific Ocean. If you go around sunset, you’ve got a breathtaking lookout and a very happy dinner companion. I’ve been there once. With Layla. And she got sick the next day, and we never knew if it was food poisoning from the mussels or if she got sun poisoning, because Layla was always very fair-skinned and we’d uncharacteristically spent the day lying out like a couple of beach bums. Okay, enough about that.

Bubba Gump is a casual, family-type place. I’m pretty sure it’s popped up only in the last fifteen years, and if memory serves it is a by-product of the movie
Forrest Gump
. Top five reasons why I’m leaning toward
not
taking Heather there: 1) It’s a chain .2) It’s a tourist trap. 3) I imagine there are several tables at all times with screaming kids. 4) It has Bubba in its name. 5) I don’t eat shrimp.

Oh, and 6)
Forrest Gump
. Stupid movie.

I have only two problems with The Lobster: 1) Layla and I went there. It’s probably not ideal to take a date to a place I’ve been with my wife … but at the same time, I’ve been with Layla for a thousand years, and that knocks off a whole lot of options. 2) Layla may or may not have gotten violently ill from it. That seems like a strong argument in the
against
column, but a) it could have been sun poisoning, b) it wasn’t me who got sick, and c) I’ll just steer Heather away from the mussels. What are the odds that she’s gonna want mussels? And d) Layla literally shudders when we drive past the place, so I know there’s no chance of running into her there. Yes, The Lobster is the better choice. It’s certainly the classier choice.

The maître d’ at The Lobster seats us at our table and hands us our menus.

“I love mussels,” Heather says, and I wince. Tiny beads of
sweat start to form on my upper lip, and I sit there and hope she doesn’t notice.

“Mussels …” I say. “They look good piled high on a plate, but really, not a lot of food in those shells. And the texture?” I shudder.

“Really?” she says. “Maybe you just haven’t had the right mussels.”

“Oh, I’ve had the right mussels,” I say. I don’t even know what that means.

“Have you, now …” she says, and it somehow sounds like we’re talking dirty, and I don’t know what she thinks I was insinuating, but I want to get off the subject of mussels yet still put the kibosh on her ordering them.

“There’s sand in them,” I say, as I point to the beach just in case she doesn’t know what sand is. “They’re dirty. If we were taking a vote, I’d vote no mussels. But we’re not voting. If you love them, you should order them. Order whatever you want. Get the mussels.”

“I think I will not get the mussels tonight,” she says, with a long look at the menu, now almost certainly taunting me. “Clearly you have issues with mussels, and I don’t want to send you to therapy.”

“My mother ran off with a door-to-door mussel salesman when I was five.”

“Well, you’ve grown up remarkably well, considering,” she says. “Anyway, in honor of my favorite writer, may he rest in peace, I may just
Consider the Lobster.”

“Good idea,” I say. “’cause I have had mussels in this part of town and that’s
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.”

Heather winks at me for playing off her reference, we share a quiet toast for David Foster Wallace, and from that moment forward, dinner goes off without a hitch. When we’re finished we walk to the pier. The sun is almost setting, and it’s a really
phenomenal view. I think about Layla and how much she loves sunsets. We used to argue about clouds. She’d say that it was the clouds that made sunsets beautiful, so when people would say, “It’s a beautiful day—not a cloud in the sky,” she’d think they were idiots.

The top of the pier is where they shot one of the openings for
Three’s Company
, so I mention this to Heather and then have the misfortune of getting the theme song stuck in my head for the rest of the night. We walk past the stand where you can get a grain of rice with your name on it, and Heather says she doesn’t understand why anyone would want a grain of rice with their name on it. I agree.

First, we walk through Playland, the arcade, and aside from the Skee-Ball, there’s nothing too exciting in there. What I do notice is that everything there is so much smaller than I remember it. I suppose it’s because every time I ever went to the actual pier I was a kid. I came with Layla when we were in high school a handful of times, and even then I remember it being bigger.

We exit Playland and start walking toward the rides. I’m surprised to see a Taco Bell on the pier, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t always there, and the Coffee Bean is definitely a new addition.

We get to the part of the park that has the roller coaster, the Ferris wheel, and the bumper cars. What throws me is that when I was a kid, I thought of the people who worked there and took our tickets and let us on the rides as adults. Now that I’m an adult, I’m stunned to realize that all of the people running the rides are teenagers in a permanent state of mild disinterest. And I wonder what my parents were thinking when they turned me over to these careless clods. Which then makes me feel very old.

“So,” Heather says, as she looks around at all of the carnival-type games. “What are you going to win me?”

Pressure. I look around. There’s a reason carnies have such an impeccable reputation for honesty and fairness. You’ve got your ring toss—the carnival midway equivalent of going after the
Triple Crown on the back of a three-toed sloth—tiny rings that you throw at a bottle neck that’s definitely wider than the rings. There’s the Whac-a-Mole, which I’m pretty sure is rigged. And the beanbag toss, where you have to knock three milk bottles off a barrel (hint: a howitzer couldn’t knock those lead bottles down). None of it looks winnable. “We’ll just have to see,” I say.

“We won’t be leaving until you win me something,” she remarks, and although she’s smiling, I can tell she means it. I suddenly feel parched.

“You look around and pick a game for me, and I’m gonna go buy a Coke,” I stall. “You want something?”

“No, thanks,” she says. She looks around, focused.

I walk toward the vending machine. No Coke. Only Pepsi. I walk to the other end of the amusement park area and again, Pepsi. The whole place only has Pepsi machines. Which I find offensive and oppressive. I like Coke. And this is America, and I like to have a choice. I don’t want my soft drink dictated to me. It’s not right.

I walk back empty-handed and see Heather with a giant blue stuffed gorilla—I kid you not, the thing is three-quarters the size of her—and she’s got this shit-eating grin on her face.

“I won!” she screams. “I won the ring toss! Nobody wins the ring toss. I got it on my second try!”

“How many attempts do they give you?”

“Twenty-five! They give you that many because it’s so impossible!”

“Yet apparently not,” I say, looking back and forth between Heather and the gorilla, knowing unfortunately that she’s just made it even clearer that I have to win her something and that I’m going to have to carry this fucking thing around for the rest of the night. I’ll be that guy everyone looks at and says, “Poor sucker.”

She hands Magilla to me, as expected, and then just stares, wide-eyed and waiting.

“I think I want that dog,” she finally says, and points to a stuffed beagle at the Whac-a-Mole.

I roll up my sleeves and hand the woman running the game three dollars. Yes, it costs three dollars for one attempt. I look to my right and my left to scope out the competition. There’s a cop (shouldn’t he be catching bad guys and not whacking moles?), a boy who looks to be about eight years old, his dad, and a sixteen-year-old couple side by side. I figure that the eight-year-old is my most serious competition. Probably a mole-shark. Looking all cute and innocent, but with the eyes of a killer …

The bell rings and we all start pounding the moles. It’s pretty easy. I’m fast, I’m accurate, I’m enjoying the game. I’m certain it’s a shoo-in. The eight-year-old wins.
Prick
.

I hand another three dollars to the woman and take a stance: the best, most comfortable position for me to whack those fucking moles. Now I’m pissed and I can see this may not be as easy as I thought.

The bell rings … I whack, I lose. Again. I hand over another three dollars. I play once more, this time pounding harder than I have thus far—not that it makes a difference but because I’m pissed off and taking my anger out on the moles. And one hour, twelve minutes, and sixty-three dollars later I have won Heather the small stuffed dog she requested. Totally worth it.

As the evening winds down, we eventually find ourselves standing at the pier. It is here that Heather turns to me and point-blanks it: “So when are you going to kiss me?”

I hadn’t actually done this on either of our other dates. Please don’t ask me why.

“Who said I was going to kiss you?” I tease.

She just looks at me expectantly. For a second I think about Layla, the only person I’ve kissed since high school. This is why I didn’t kiss Heather after the corn maze; for some reason, pulling the trigger on a kiss still feels like infidelity. But I realize I need to
push Layla out of my head, and the best way to do it would be to kiss this girl. This beautiful girl who is asking me to kiss her.

What the fuck am I waiting for, anyway? I go for it. I lean in and stop short just before our lips touch. Heather smiles, and I can feel her breath as she exhales a small laugh. I close my eyes, and the next thing I know I’m kissing a gorgeous girl on the Santa Monica Pier—but either she has freakishly long arms or there’s a very small person tugging at my jeans.

I break away from the kiss to look down, and there’s a small boy holding my leg.

“Hi,” I say to him.

Heather laughs and leans down. “Hi, there,” she says. “What’s your name?”

Before he can answer, his mother storms over and smacks him on the ass. She says something in Spanish and guides him away. She doesn’t acknowledge us (though I don’t know what I’d expect her to say), but the odd moment seems an omen that perhaps this date should come to a close. It was a very nice date, and that’s enough for now. For that reason, I tell Heather I’ve had a nice time and I start to walk us back to my car.

Oddly, I don’t even wrestle with whether or not I should go inside her apartment when she asks me. I simply tell her that “I’m not that easy,” and send her off with another kiss and the promise of a phone call.

Dating. Not sure how I feel about it. I guess it depends on your end goal.

Right now I still don’t know what mine is.