Justin Halpern - More Sh*t My Dad Says

I had been working at Villa Sorriso for a few months when the manager hired a new waitress: a cute brunette named Melanie who’d just moved from Colorado to pursue a career in acting. I was assigned to train her and spent a week teaching her the proper way to fold napkins, cut lemons for iced tea, and use the touch-screen computers. After we spent most of our final training day trading our favorite quotes from The Simpsons, I realized I had a thing for her. She was exactly the kind of girl I usually liked: smart, funny, and a little offbeat.

During a slow lunch shift the following week, I was chatting with the restaurant’s bartender, Nick, an aspiring male model who looked a bit like Colin Farrell if he were made of that shiny hard plastic they use to make action figures. “Melanie’s kinda hot, yeah?” I said.

“Yeah, man. She’s totally cute.”

“She seems cool,” I said, leaning on the bar as he dried some pint glasses.

“Totally. She also sucks a mean dick.”

“What?” I said, straightening up.

“Yeah, she blew me a few nights ago,” he said casually.

“She’s only worked here a week,” I replied, my voice cracking.

“Yeah. I think it was her first day, actually. We got some drinks after work, blah blah, then she swallowed a load in my car.”

“Wow.”

“Oh, shit, do you have a thing for her?”

“I just thought she seemed cool,” I said, slumping down on a bar-stool and trying to hide my disappointment.

“My bad, man. I totally would not have done that if I knew. Next chick you’re into, just let me know right away and I won’t hook up with her.”

“No, no. That would be… really weird and kind of depressing. I don’t really know right away, anyway. It usually takes me a little while to see if I’m into them or if they’re into me, you know?”

“Yeah, but what if you just want to bone down?” he asked.

I smiled at Nick and changed the subject. The fact was, though, that I’d never had casual sex before. Oh, sure, I had always wanted to. In fact, I’d spent most of my late teens and early twenties trying to. Eventually, though, I came to the conclusion that I was the male equivalent of a Toyota Camry You know: No one ever says, “I have to have a Toyota Camry.” But most people who spend some time in a Camry start to like it. “It’s pretty reliable,” they think. “It doesn’t have a lot of problems, and it’s not bad to look at. You know what? I’d probably prefer a nicer car. But I can live with a Camry.”

I had been shot down countless times after hitting on women solely because I found them attractive, and the experience was usually deflating, labor-intensive, and expensive. By the age of twenty-three I was tired of chasing women who usually chose to sleep with guys who looked like they weren’t even the same species as me. At this point I generally found myself motivated to pursue a girl only after I’d decided she was relationship material and that she might also be looking for something long-term. I usually went after girls I really enjoyed talking to, who were funny and often a little shy and awkward, and so far I’d had a few girlfriends, but none had lasted more than a year.

I had my strategy, and I stuck to it—which meant I paid little attention to the cocktail waitresses at our restaurant. Their job was to get people wasted, and to do that they had to be incredibly good-looking and, more important, able to pretend that every guy, if he bought enough booze and tipped just enough, just might end up having sex with them. Because of these requirements, a lot of them seemed to be pretty unstable. Every couple weeks one of the waitresses would get fired for some minor infraction, like hurling a glass vase at a manager or snorting cocaine in the walk-in fridge. Heeding all these warning signs, I rarely spoke to the waitresses, and none of them expressed much interest in driving a Camry.

So I was shocked when, a year and a half into my tenure at Villa Sorriso, a sultry South American cocktail waitress named Simone approached me. Simone was in her early twenties, with straight jet-black hair down to the middle of her back, full lips, and bright blue eyes that gave off the kind of intense, unsettling stare I had previously seen only on Tom Cruise when he was discussing Scientology. Simone’s butt protruded from the rest of her body as if it were itself a sentient being, capable of complex thought. She was so attractive that once, when I tried to pleasure myself to thoughts of her, my imagination couldn’t conjure up a plausible scenario in which she would agree to have sex with me, and I was forced to stop altogether.

“Where do you live?” she said now, as I folded napkins on the bar in preparation for that night’s dinner rush.

“Right outside Hollywood. Where do you live?” I asked.

“How come you never talk to me?” she said, ignoring my question.

“Um, I don’t know. You guys seem really busy over there.”

“You should talk to me,” she said, then walked away toward two customers sitting in the lounge next to the bar.

Nick had been listening in on the exchange from behind the bar.

“That was weird,” I said when he came by.

“That chick’s crazy. She’s trying to be a model, but she, like, also sells rabbit painkillers or something.”

“What?”

“I think she has a rabbit, and the rabbit has, like, cancer or something, and she gets the painkillers for the rabbit, but then she sells them to people. I guess it gets you fucked up.”

“Does she give any of them to the rabbit?” I asked.

“I don’t know, man. She’s smoking hot, though.”

“That’s a weird thing to say—‘You should talk to me,’” I said, playing the conversation back in my head.

“Maybe she’s into you.”

“I don’t think so.”

I went about the rest of my shift—and then the rest of the week—without speaking to Simone. I assumed she was just another really attractive woman who wouldn’t in a million years hook up with me, so I figured I’d spare myself the awkwardness that would inevitably come if I went for it.

One night the following week, while we were in the middle of a dinner rush, I was pouring a couple Diet Cokes at the soda station when I turned to find Simone standing in front of me.

“We should have dinner tonight,” she said, as if we’d been talking about it for the last ten minutes.

“I’m working till close tonight,” I said, as I popped lemon wedges into the sodas.

“I am too.”

“So…”

“I don’t have dinner when people say I should have dinner. I have dinner when my body tells me to have dinner,” she said.

“Well, I usually have dinner at around seven, so I kinda already ate,” I said.

“You can watch me eat.”

“Um, well, lemme just see what time I get out of here,” I said, then pushed past her with a tray filled with drinks. I knew I wasn’t handling Simone’s advances well, but no woman had ever come on to me so strong, and I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t want to end up the laughing stock of the restaurant, but I also didn’t want to pass up the chance to have sex with one of the most attractive women I’d ever met.

I dropped off the drinks, then made a beeline for Nick and told him what had happened.

“I’m telling you, I think she likes you,” he said.

“Why would she like me? I haven’t ever talked to her,” I replied.

“Maybe that’s why. Everybody tries to fuck her. I’ve tried to fuck her, the managers, customers. Pretty much everybody. Maybe she’s just thinking, how come this guy isn’t trying to fuck me? Or maybe she just likes you, man. I don’t know, but you should go to dinner with her.”