Unwifeable(86)

“After two divorces, I’m kind of saving my next marriage for a girl who really likes to fuck.”

He smirks at me when he says that, and I squirm in my seat like he’s just seen through me with X-ray vision. When I took some friends from the Post to see Pat, he did one of his jokes about how he’ll never get married again, and city editor Michelle Gotthelf whispered to me, “Too bad.”

So I don’t take this joke about his “next marriage” seriously at all. Besides, I’ve ruled that out for myself. I am a realist at heart, and now I’m just enjoying the ride.

“The girl I’m dating right now,” Pat tells the audience, “told me she sucked a hundred dicks.”

What the . . .

I spit out my Diet Coke. It takes a lot to scandalize me, but here we are.

“Does that seem high to you?” he asks. “How many dicks is a woman supposed to suck? I don’t know. She’s almost forty, she started ‘dating’ at fifteen. After twenty-five years of dating, that’s about four dicks a year. That’s not bad. It’s one dick, quarterly. A lot of small-business owners would be grateful for that option.”

I’m laughing and burying my face in the table. The waiter brings me another soda and smiles.

“My first wife, she was my high school sweetheart,” Pat tells the crowd. “You marry your high school sweetheart, it’s like you’ve said, ‘You know what—I’ve looked all over the school.’?”

Pat is unlike any man I’ve ever dated before. He doesn’t give a shit. Doesn’t want to impress (or even offend) the right people. Doesn’t want to glad-hand those in the right circles. Doesn’t want to kiss the ass of the world as a whole. It’s scary to date someone who has less to lose than you do, but that’s what’s unfolding here, and I realize that every minute I spend with the guy.

Then he moves on to the story he mentioned on our first date.

“I had a woman try to murder me at an IHOP,” he tells the crowd. “It’s true. It’s a one hundred percent true story, which I’m opening up to share with you tonight. When I tell women that a woman tried to murder me at an IHOP, they all have the same question. Do you know what it is?”

Four or five women sitting at different tables yell out in near unison, “What did you do?”

“?‘What did I do?’ you want to know,” he repeats to the audience. “First of all, thanks for blaming the victim. But if you must know what I did, I fell in love, that’s what I did. I was thinking with my dick.”

Appreciative laughter, especially from the men. Some women titter, uncertain as to what’s to come next.

The story of the attempted murder he’s telling is a matter of public record, no matter how unbelievable I found it at first. My mistrusting nature led me to do a search for the 2004 police report, and there I saw it, the woman who had greeted him with a murder-suicide note in her pocket and police-issue Glock 9mm before he wrestled it out of her hands. At that point, she unleashed her fury on him, jumping onto his back, scratching his face, and trying to force her fingertips into his eye sockets.

The woman, who was convicted of second-degree attempted murder, had been his mistress in his failing second marriage. When he cut the relationship off and put all her duffel bags in a hotel room to avoid a face-to-face showdown, she grew obsessive and increasingly unglued. She called his family members, whom she’d never met. She incessantly called his parents, threatening his mother.

Having cheated death that time, Pat resolved to never cheat again.

“Would you like to know why men think with their dicks?” Pat asks the women who shouted out the question to him earlier, asking what he’d done. “Because I’ll tell you.”

A pause.

“Yes!” one woman cries out.

“It’s because,” he says, “our dicks have pretty good ideas.”

He’s killing, and he’s won the women over, too—the same way he’s winning me over as his girlfriend.

After the show, I see him mingling at the bar with the other comics, drinking a Coke and speaking out of the side of his mouth. He’s perpetually unperturbed, his military-close haircut alienating and cold, giving him a look akin to Travis Bickle-cum-Peaky Blinders, which works, since he has the swagger of a maniac, the guy who could either save the day or light the whole place up, unredeemable.

“Good set,” I say, sounding almost hesitant, which I never am anymore.

“Come downstairs with me,” Pat says, and he leads me through a narrow stairwell and into a hidden greenroom with a picture of Rodney Dangerfield hanging above us where he closes the door. Rodney has a look that says, I get no respect, and I giggle looking at it. Pat has taken me to a secret place. He swings one arm over my black lambskin jacket and black disco pants and pulls me close.

“You know who you remind me of? Blondie. Not Deborah Harry, the comic strip,” he tells me, running his hands up and down my body, which is boosted up and cinched into the tightest outfit I own. “When I was little, I thought Blondie was the sexiest woman in the world, with her figure and the tight dress, the hair. And now here you are with me. Big tits. Perfect face. Blond hair. Long legs . . .”

“Fuck,” I say, breathing into his ear. “You don’t seem scared of anything.”