I Hate Everyone, Except You(53)
I had made plans with her one stiflingly hot early August night in New York City. I hadn’t seen her in about six months so she came in from Long Island and we decided to have a few cocktails and dinner downtown at an outdoor café. She wore a skintight black sheath and seven-inch black platform stilettos. If her hair and makeup hadn’t been flawless, she would have looked like a total skank. In the middle of dinner, her phone rang and she answered it. With her hand over the microphone, she asked if I would mind if one of her clients met us for drinks. I didn’t mind. I was curious to see who was on the other end of the line.
“Wear a sweater, a thick one,” she said before hanging up the phone.
“Sweater?” I said. “It’s gotta be ninety degrees out with no breeze and one hundred percent humidity.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” she said.
About a half hour later a not-at-all-bad-looking guy showed up at our table in a suit and tie—with a wool sweater under his jacket. Ellen introduced us (he said his name was John, which to this day I don’t know was true or not) and he sat down. I became very uncomfortable almost immediately. I was in the middle of a business transaction with no idea what to expect or say. Was I supposed to treat him like crap too, or just Ellen? I regretted not asking her before he arrived.
Finally, I said, “Would you like a cold drink? You must be hot in that sweater.”
“Thanks, I’ll have a beer when the waitress comes around.” He smiled a big smile full of perfectly straight bright white teeth. He reminded me of the guy who played Elaine’s boyfriend in the final season of Seinfeld.
“How long have you known Ellen?”
“This is our,” he looked at her before answering, “third?” She nodded. “Our third date.”
“And what do you do for a living?” I was scared to death of letting the conversation lull out of fear that, given the opportunity, Ellen might punch him in the head or something and make a scene.
John told me he worked in banking. The waitress came by, and we ordered another round of drinks and while we drank them we talked about everything from politics to the TV shows we were watching. To any other table in the place, we probably looked like three friends catching up and sharing a few laughs, except one of us had a steady stream of perspiration running from his hairline past his ears and down his neck. The guy appeared to be crying from the top of his skull. It was actually getting painful to watch. And to make it worse, every time he would reflexively use his hand to brush a rivulet away from his eyes, Ellen would calmly stop him with a firm “No.”
While we were discussing a recent episode of The X-Files, a drop of sweat rolled slowly down John’s forehead into his left eyebrow, which at this point must have reached complete saturation because it went from his brow directly into his eye. It must have stung because he blinked his eyes really hard and pressed the knuckle of his left forefinger into his tear duct.
And as calmly as one might ask a dinner companion to pass the salt, Ellen said, “Lick my shoe.”
“What?” I said.
“I wasn’t talking to you.” Her face was expressionless except for her lips, which had shifted slightly off-center. “Lick. My. Shoe.”
John pushed his chair back from the table, noisily because the metal chair was on the concrete sidewalk. He lowered himself down on his knees and, I assume, licked Ellen’s stiletto. He returned back to a seated position, still sweaty. He had a strange look on his face, like he was thinking about something that happened a long time ago.
“The bottom,” Ellen said.
“Oh, God,” I said, barely audibly, so that it sounded more like Uh Guh.
And down John went once again. Ellen smiled at me across the table as if to say, Can you believe I get paid for this? When he came back up to a seated position, I wanted so much to tell John to run to the bar and swish some Scotch around his mouth then haul ass to the nearest hospital and beg for a tetanus shot. But I didn’t, because I was having a sort of out-of-body experience. I felt nauseated and like a third wheel, a third wheel on a boat, unnecessary and irrelevant. I paid the check and grabbed a cab as soon as I came to again.
*
When I stopped off at Leather Daddy’s table to drop the check, he snapped it from my hand, which was the last straw.
“Look, buddy,” I said, a little louder than I had intended. “You may get to treat this guy like a cocker spaniel, but not me. Got it?”
The cocker spaniel scowled at me, which really pissed me off because in my mind I was doing him a favor by helping him remember he was on a leash In a restaurant. L.D. pulled a credit card out of his wallet and held it out to me without glancing up. I took it from his hand and marched to the credit card imprinter. When I filled out the slip, I put a slash through the box marked TIP/MISC. I wanted to let the guy know I didn’t want his money, before he had the opportunity to stiff me.
I placed it on the table for his signature with an emotionless “Have a nice night.” Neither of them responded; both were looking out the window. When they left I returned to the table with a tray to clear the remaining silverware and pick up the signed copy of the credit card slip. On a forty-five-dollar meal, they left me a twenty-dollar tip, in cash. In tiny block letters someone had written on the bill WOOF.
“What do you think that means?” I asked Robert the bartender.
“Daddy thinks you’re hot,” he said. “Maybe he’s got an extra leash lying around, with your name on it.”