I Suck at Girls (12 page)

“Any milk left?” I asked, hoping to drown my hangover with Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

“Jeff had sex last night,” my friend Dan said.

I froze.

Maybe he’s joking, I thought. I looked at Jeff, who was standing in the corner of the room sipping a Gatorade with the swagger of someone who had won seven Super Bowls, and knew it was no joke.

“Jeff had sex?
Jeff
?” I said, in disbelief.

“Well, fuck you too, dude,” Jeff replied.

“Sorry, I’m just surprised. I’m happy for you,” I said.

I was not happy for him. Imagine you and a friend have been stranded on a desert island for the last five years. Then one day you wake up and see your friend on a raft in the ocean, paddling toward a rescue ship. Then, as you scream, “Come back! Don’t leave me!,” your friend laughs and waves at you, then keeps paddling, without even looking back. That is exactly how I felt in that moment. It didn’t seem that terrible to be a virgin when I wasn’t the only one. Now I was the only member left in the club, and it was awful.

I never felt pressure from my friends to have sex. Nobody was getting laid that regularly, and even Dan, who probably had more sex than any of my other friends, rarely talked about it, for a reason he put rather eloquently: “I play tennis every once in a while, but I don’t brag about it because I suck at it.” But now that Jeff had had sex, I couldn’t help but feel like they had stepped into manhood and I was on the outside looking in.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t been trying. It’s not like I had some special being-awesome-with-the-ladies gear that I just hadn’t chosen to shift into. I’d always been terrified of talking to women and usually just avoided it. When I headed to college, I tried to relax and not obsess over having sex, hoping it would just happen.

It didn’t.

A couple months later, I finished my second year at San Diego State. During my sophomore year, I had played on the baseball team and spent fifty-plus hours a week practicing, playing, attending classes, and studying. That didn’t leave much time for a job, so when summer rolled around, I had to make all the money I’d need for the year. On the first day of summer break, Dan and I drove around in his Mazda putting in applications at every restaurant, retail store, and hotel we could find. As we drove home from the last hotel just before sunset, we stopped at a stoplight near the beach. Directly in front of us, hanging from a blank storefront in a strip mall, was a giant banner:

GRAND OPENING

HOOTERS

NOW HIRING

“That’d be funny, if we applied to a Hooters,” Dan said as the light turned green.

We drove along quietly for a few moments.

“We should apply there,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Dan said, suddenly turning the wheel hard and making a screeching U-turn in the middle of the street.

We parked out in front of the banner and went inside. The restaurant was still being built, so the inside was filled with construction workers and raw materials. In the corner were two men sitting at a desk: a big Korean man in his twenties, and a five-foot-tall, grizzled white guy in his midforties wearing a Hooters T-shirt and hat. He looked like the kind of guy who, if he hadn’t killed a man himself, at least must have buried a body somewhere along the way. We approached them tentatively.

“Hi, are you guys taking applications?” I said.

“No. We just like to put a big-ass sign out front for shits and giggles and then sit around and talk to every dipshit that walks in here,” the little man said in a raspy voice that suggested he’d been smoking since birth.

Dan and I stood silently for a moment, unsure if we were supposed to laugh.

“I’m busting your balls. Here’s an application. I assume you’re applying to be a cook. I’m Bob. This is Song Su,” he added, pointing to his colleague.

Dan and I introduced ourselves, filled out the applications, and left.

For the next few days we continued to hunt for jobs, but later that week I got a call from Song Su.

“You guys got the job. Tell your tall friend that’s pretty like a girl so I don’t have to make two calls. Orientation is Monday,” he said.

“That’s awesome! Thank you!” I said.

“Don’t get excited. The job sucks and you make minimum wage. I think. I can’t remember. Whatever it is, it’s terrible pay. See you Monday,” he replied.

I didn’t care how terrible the pay was going to be. I was going to be surrounded by women eight hours a day, five days a week. For the entire summer. I would literally be forced to talk to them. Maybe, just maybe, I was going to have sex.

A couple days later, I sat alongside Dan and eight other guys in two rows of chairs in a room at the back of the recently finished Hooters, covered in fake street signs and orange, as Song Su and Bob stood before us. Bob wore a mesh tank top and sported a mustache that would make any 1970s baseball player proud. He slowly puffed at a cigarette as he addressed the male members of his newly assembled staff.

“I know what you’re all thinking. You’re going to get some stank on your dick with one of these waitresses, that’s why you took the job.”

“’Cause the job sucks,” Song Su added.

“Yep. Job sucks,” Bob nodded.

“Well, let me be the first to tell you,” Bob continued. “That’s probably going to happen. You’re probably gonna nail one of them. I nailed one. Then I married her,” he said.

“Whoa, no way,” said a guy in the front row.

“Yes way, shithead. I took one down. Married her. She had my babies, the whole deal. Anyway, just do your work and don’t piss me off, and you’ll have a good time,” Bob said, before spitting on the ground.

After his speech, he gave us a tour of the kitchen and the walk-in freezer, which he said was “an awesome place to get a hand job if you’re not in the middle of a dinner rush.” He finished up the tour by handing us black T-shirts with the Hooters logo emblazoned on the front. Then he welcomed us to the Hooters family, which transitioned into a bizarre tangent about his time in the military, where he warned us about “the kind of scum that fuck a man’s wife when he’s overseas in the shit.”

As we drove out of the parking lot an hour and a half later, Dan made a comment that was hard to ignore: “Dude. I don’t want to put any extra pressure on you, ’cause I know you’re all weird about this virginity shit. But if that Bob guy can have sex with a Hooters girl, you have to be able to.”

I agreed. I could barely contain my excitement. Sex had seemed so elusive, but now I felt like I was mere days away.

Two days later, Dan and I walked into Hooters for our first shift wearing our tan aprons and Hooters hats. We realized two things really quickly: 1) Song Su wasn’t lying: the job definitely sucked; 2) the majority of the girls working there had major emotional problems. And not cries-too-much emotional problems; more like stabs-her-boyfriend-with-a-steak-knife-then-falls-into-a-corner-and-starts-whispering-to-herself emotional problems. Even if I knew how to talk to women like that, or wanted to—neither of which I did—the work day was so jam-packed with cleaning, scrubbing, wing-battering, and Dumpster-emptying that I didn’t even have a chance.

One day I was washing dishes in the back when Bob poked his head in. “Skippy,” he said. (Bob never remembered anyone’s name. Nor did he bother to cover up this fact.) “Skippy, today is not your day. I’m going to tell you a story. Guy walks into a Hooters, gets drunk, pukes his fucking guts out up on the balcony. You clean it up, and afterward I buy you a beer and tell you you’re a swell guy. The end. What do you think?”

“I hate that story, Bob,” I said.

“Maybe it was in the telling,” he said, handing me a mop and a bucket in tow. Even though the balcony stood fifty feet from the ocean, the stench of vomit overpowered the smell of the sea. I had found the mess and started scrubbing when I heard a woman’s voice.

“I am super sorry about that. I probably shouldn’t have kept serving him beers,” she said.

I turned and saw that the voice belonged to a waitress named Sarah. She was tall and thin, with short blond hair, and her breasts were tucked into her Hooters uniform in a way that created a shelf below her chin that she could probably set her car keys on if she needed free hands. She had been fairly quiet in the month that I had worked there; my only interaction with her had been a week before, when she asked me if we were out of baked beans. But she did so politely and with a pretty smile.

“It’s no big deal,” I said, suddenly realizing how impossible it was to look cool while cleaning up vomit.

“I’ll buy you a beer afterward. Actually, I have a six-pack in my car. We can drink them at the beach if you get off soon,” she said.

After Sarah went back to work, I ran downstairs to Dan, who was up to his elbows in batter, lathering up raw chicken wings.

“Guess who asked me to drink beers with her after work?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But Bob just handed me my paycheck. Eighty-three hours, after taxes, guess how much? Two hundred and forty-two dollars. For eighty-three fucking hours, dude. I almost cried. I seriously almost cried. I hate this fucking job. I blame you,” he said, pulling a chicken wing out of the batter and hurling it against the wall.

“Are you still mad, or can I talk now?” I asked.

“I’m done. So which girl asked you to have beers?”

“Guess.”

“I don’t know. Sarah?”

“How’d you know that?”

“’Cause they’re all named Sarah.”

I described which Sarah I meant, and how the conversation had gone down, as he battered the wings.

“Well, I’m actually not able to be happy right now, but if I were, I’d be happy for you,” he said.

I couldn’t wait for work to end. I was so excited that I didn’t even mind it when Bob made me clean the Dumpster outside filled with rancid chicken wings.

Around midnight, after I finished cleaning out the oil in the fryers, Sarah and I made our way down to her Honda Civic and grabbed the six cans of warm Natty Ice she had rolling around in her backseat. We sat on the cement wall of the boardwalk looking out at the ocean and cracked the beers open and began drinking. I smelled like raw chicken, flour, and vomit. After a few moments of silence, though, I began to panic: here I was again, sitting next to a woman, with no idea how to talk to her.

“That guy really threw up everywhere,” I said as an opener.

“Yeah, that was really gross. I’d rather not talk about it,” she replied.

“Totally,” I said.

I decided my only chance at this going well was to stop talking and just go in for a kiss. So I did—until I realized she had a mouthful of beer, and my surprise kiss caused her to cough it up in my face.

“Oh my God, I’m really, really sorry,” I said, patting her on the back as she coughed.

“Wrong pipe,” she said between coughs. Finally she caught her breath. “Let me finish a couple more beers and then we’ll make out, okay?”

She did, and we did. And then we did the same thing the next night, and the night after that. Then make-outs at night turned into hang-outs during the day, and before I knew it we’d been hanging out and making out for about a month. I’d made out with a few girls before her, but I’d never had a consistent make-out partner. I felt like an athlete in the midst of a winning streak; I wasn’t sure why everything was working, but it was and I didn’t want to screw it up.

“You think she thinks you’re her boyfriend?” asked Dan one day at work while we cleaned the stainless-steel prep station in the back of the kitchen.

“I’m not sure. We just kind of only make out, and rent movies and watch them and don’t really talk a bunch. I like her, though. She’s cool,” I said.

“You’ve been hanging out with her a lot, dude. If you like her, you should just ask her if she’s your girlfriend, because if she is, you guys should be having sex, not making out,” Dan said.

“Get some stank on your hang low,” Bob yelled out from the manager’s office, where, evidently, he’d been eavesdropping.

Dan was right. I did like Sarah. She was quiet but very sweet and cute, and we had the same taste in rental movies. And if I liked her, and she liked me, why weren’t we having sex?

That night, when I was at Sarah’s little one-bedroom stucco apartment in Rancho Bernardo, we were making out on her fake leather couch the way we usually did. At one point she got up to get a glass of water and I followed her to the kitchen.

“This is a super-weird question to ask, but do you tell people I’m your boyfriend?” I asked.

She lit up a cigarette and took a few puffs.

“No one has really asked me. But, I mean, I like hanging out with you, so I guess you kind of are,” she said. “We haven’t had sex, though,” she added.

“Yeah, that’s why I thought maybe we weren’t,” I said.

“Well, we can. I just hadn’t ’cause we’d just been hanging out for a couple weeks, and then I’ve been on my period. But why don’t you rent a movie and come over Friday night?”

I could barely sleep the next two nights, I was so excited. I’d spent most of my adolescence fantasizing about sex, and now it was about to happen. I thought about how it might go down. Maybe I’d take off her bra with one hand while saying something cool, but not douchey. Then we’d turn off a couple lights, and go at it for forty-five minutes to an hour, and I’d give her two to three orgasms. The anticipation was killing me. I had struggled with women my whole life; I’d never been comfortable in my own skin, never felt like a man. I just felt like a boy who got older. And, while I didn’t know what the steps were to start to feel like a man, I was sure that having sex must be one of them.

The next day I bounded into work, tossed on my apron, and found Dan cutting limes in the kitchen.

“You didn’t come home last night. You guys do it?” Dan asked.

“No. But she says I’m her boyfriend, and the only reason we haven’t done it is because she’s on her period,” I said proudly.

“That’s why God made the butthole, my friend. One door closes, the other one opens,” Bob chimed in from a few feet away.

That Friday evening, a couple hours before my shift ended, Bob came into the kitchen to let me off early for the night.