IV.

When I first met her she was already a celebrity, a famous and dominant bitch of the silver screen. I have to be honest and admit that I didn’t recognize her as she downed drink after drink at the ultra-hip bar in the ultra-hip restaurant. I only happened to be there because a friend of mine told me that we’d be able to score some pills from one of the waiters. We got lucky and had to wait in line for an hour and a half only to find out that the waiter in question couldn’t finish his shift due to an overdose. He left in an ambulance. My friend and I cursed ourselves for having not come earlier. He left but I decided to stay. I figured if it took us that long to get in I might as well hang back and experience the life and times of people out of my league.

She was sitting at the bar wearing sunglasses, fiddling with her hair (which was shaped in a little bob haircut, very cute and very severe). I didn’t really pay much attention except to notice there was a diamond ring on her finger so huge that I thought it was one of those toy rings kids got out of those crappy machines. Put the quarter into the slot. Turn the handle. Wait for the plastic egg to be laid by Death and crack open to reveal a diamond the size of an eyeball.

I must have been staring too long because she turned to me and said, with a snotty attitude straight out of a soap opera, “Can I help you?”

There was venom in her voice but I can’t say that I hated it. I often found that women were more honest when they were pissed. Nice women made me suspicious. A woman flipping you the finger reveals all the truth you’ll ever need. A bitchy woman is a paranoid woman and a paranoid woman is an experienced one.

“Nothing, I’m sorry. I was just looking at your ring. It’s really big.” Really big. As soon as it came out of my mouth I was ready to bludgeon myself. I knew I wasn’t charming but surely I could do better than that.

“So?” Her sunglasses were big, black bug-eyes. Below them was a long, protruding nose and below that, a pair of dark, moist lips that parted, revealing small, bright (and unnaturally even) daggers of teeth. I couldn’t even imagine someone having teeth that clean. As a reflex, I ran my finger across my own and felt the filmy layer of grime on them.

“I’m sorry. I…” My face felt warm and so I grabbed my drink (bottom shelf scotch, neat) and stood up.

“Okay, I didn’t say you had to leave. Just sit down.” She bent her head and her eyes peeked over the sunglasses. If my life was a movie, this would be the part where she smiles and reveals that her prior attitude had been just a defense mechanism or a test to see if I wanted her badly enough.

But, you see, this wasn’t a movie.

Her face couldn’t have had less of a smile. In fact, I believe she looked even more pissed. So I sat back down and swallowed the rest of my scotch in one burning gulp that made my throat constrict.

For the next hour I sat and listened to her complain about everything under the sun. Her agent. Her co-stars. The director. The producer. Her mother. Her ex-boyfriend. Her ex-fiancé. Her dog. Her landlord. The whole thing was so vivid and absurd that it came out sounding like a Hollywood version of the Canterbury Tales. That is if Chaucer wrote his stories while drinking glass after glass of obscenely expensive champagne.

By midnight I was pretty drunk having consumed about two hundred dollars worth of scotch. That may seem like a fatal amount of alcohol but considering the prices of each glass, you’d be surprised. When the muscular but feminine bartender slipped my bill into the empty glass in front of me, I picked it up slowly, trying to let my partner for the evening see the amount as if that would impress her. I didn’t have that much cash on me (only about $40 which was originally allotted for the pills) but I had a credit card (for emergencies only! I’ve always told myself) that I took out of my well-worn faux-leather wallet.

“Put it away,” she said to me and then motioned to the bartender. “Put his drinks on my tab.” There was no “please”. It wasn’t a request. It was a command and the bartender followed that command as if the consequence for disobedience was death.

I said, “Uh, thanks, but you don’t have to do that.” I stumbled over my words, partly from being drunk but mostly because the act was unexpected and I wasn’t used to a woman buying me a drink let alone a night’s worth of unjustly expensive scotch.

“Don’t worry about it.” She didn’t say it cute. She said as if to tell me, “You think that’s a lot of money? It’s nothing. Why are you even acknowledging it? I might as well have bought you a newspaper.” Or at least that’s how I took it. I admit I could be paranoid at times.

Then she said, “You’re a good listener.” Normally this would have been a compliment but she said as if it was a bad thing, a criticism. I guess in her circle of friends, a good listener was someone who had nothing better to do. Women like her are attracted to men who acted uninterested. They want men with lives full of excitement and business deals. They want the go-getters, the ex-frat boys, the jocks. Those women never went for the nice guys, the sensitive guys, the guys who read books and never make eye contact.

Regardless of her attitude toward my listening skills, she asked for my number and I wrote it with a leaky blue ballpoint pen on the back of a moist coaster. Without looking at it, she put it into her purse, leaned over, and gave me a quick, casual kiss on the cheek. I felt the blood rush simultaneously to my face and dick; both blushed with excited embarrassment.

That night I went home to my apartment, horny but not insulted. Her bitchiness didn’t offend me, didn’t hurt my ego.

She was what she was and there was nothing I could say that would place any blame on her. Her stardom didn’t intimidate me but her personality did. I wanted more from her despite the fact that I knew that movie stars don’t date men like me: poor men who have boring, meaningless jobs. I started to convince myself that the whole night was one big joke on me. The universe took it upon itself to show me what an awkward fool I was. No woman like that would be interested in me, right? Well.

She called the very next day.