Date with the Doc

How a date could’ve been planned in the few seconds that Des, Kelley, and I had been standing there in the hospital hallway, I don’t know.  But, like I said before, I have no idea what I’d said or how long we’d been standing there.  It could’ve been a few seconds, it could’ve been a few minutes.  Being that close to beauty is like orbiting a massive, shimmering star.  Time is warped, distorted, like the before, during, and after of a dream, where in one moment, you’re lying awake in the dark, and then, in what feels like the immediate next, you realize you’re lying awake again, only this time in the daylight, with no clear memory of how you’d gotten there, of what all had passed aside from brief snippets that dissipate too quickly to be examined or remembered, but, clearly, something happens, just as something had happened in that hospital hallway—sure, how else could I have found myself a couple days later on a date with the beautiful Dr. Kelley Tablebottom at Diego Rabinowitz’s Irish Pub?

Diego Rabinowitz’s Irish Pub—or DRIP, as Kelley and the other regulars call it—is a hole-in-the-wall pub and a confounding fusion of cultures and tastes, where patrons can stuff themselves silly with delicious blintzes and knishes and suck down the best jumbo frozen margarita in town, all while tapping their feet and nodding their heads to a seemingly endless session of jig-to-reel and reel-to-jig transitions—all of which lends to a unique and flavorful ambiance that the current proprietor, an ancient woman by the name of Stella No-Shoes—who is by no means any percent Jewish, Irish, or Mexican—has termed Jewrixican.  Well, immediately upon our arrival, Kelley had taken the reins and stopped by the bar where she proceeded to order a jumbo frozen margarita.  Following her lead, I was ready to do the same when she stopped me and grabbed a second straw and poked it into the slush, saying—declaring, really—that we were sharing this one.  She then snatched my wrist with her free hand and led me away to a place where time stood still.  See for yourself the lovely couple: the two of us sitting mere inches across from one another, tucked away into a dim, moody corner where we were sucking down our third jumbo frozen margarita, mercifully protected from the erratic flight patterns of the cicadas outside (this particular brood more suicidal and dangerous than those in previous years’, as if they were on a collective kamikaze mission, some unseen insectile emperor having given them the orders to swarm and fly directly into your face) but not protected from their pulsing drone. 

So, I wasn’t sure if it was the booze or the cicadas, probably a combination of the two, behind the buzzing giddiness that I felt, like that feeling when you step off of a wild roller coaster back onto solid ground, your perception of your own self and the surrounding world all twisted and turned around from the vertiginous drops and corkscrewed loop-de-loops, a feeling that eventually lifts and you return to your normal self—but returning to that place was the last thing I wanted to do.  Rather, I wanted the floral print on Kelley’s green and sleeveless jumpsuit to keep jumping out at me, as if I’d be able to smell the flowers if I buried my head in the small space between the temptingly deep V of the collar and the knotted sash below it; I wanted to continue to pretend like I could count the countless goosebumps that appeared on her naked arms each time she took a sip from her straw, pretending also that doing so was the only way I could ignore the brain freeze that was pounding on the front door of my skull like an irate cop executing a warrant; I wanted Stella No-Shoes to shuffle her way over to us again, her bare feet softly slapping the floor, and ask if we were ready for another, our fourth, margarita so that Kelley would again eye me with that mischievous intensity and flash me with that bright smile, like a mouthful of high-beam headlights the brilliance of which was made bearable only by the fact it was confined within and contrasted by the ruby red of her lips, before responding yes, Stella, Sterling and I will gladly have another, thank you.  And look, although I was feeling confident and comfortable, I don’t want to give you the impression that I was doing anything special, because I really wasn’t doing much of anything except sucking away through my own straw and staring at Kelley in a spellbound lunacy.  But there was no denying that we were hitting it off, which was in large part due to Kelley’s having a seemingly endless supply of things to say, which meant I didn’t have to talk much myself.  From the scarcity of second dates, or, hell, from the countless no-shows on the firsts, I’d learned the hard way that the less you open your mouth, the less opportunity you have to come across as a lowbrow moron.  So, that was my game plan going in, and Kelley, thankfully, was making it easy on me. 

But Kelley herself, in complete contravention of the whole opening your mouth thing, was fucking brilliant, and the more she talked, the more beautiful, more intelligent, more interesting she became.  She told me that the surname Tablebottom was a misguided attempt at assimilation by her great-great-great grandparents, Eustace and Hildegard Applebottom, who, according to family lore, had been convinced by a vexatious neighbor, jealous that the couple had saved enough money for their steerage tickets to the United States, that apples did not grow in America and that, consequently, the term was akin to the most abhorrent and shocking of curse words.  So, as poor immigrants who understood all too well that they would already be playing catchup as soon as they’d disembarked at Ellis Island, the Applebottoms made a proactive and phonetic tweak to their surname.  Then, speaking of names, Kelley told me she owned a French bulldog that, despite its status as the cutest little pup in the whole wide world, was stuck with the unfortunate name of McNut, the story being that when she and her ex-boyfriend adopted the furry nugget, the foster had already named it Macadamia, and the two of them, not wishing to upend every single aspect of the poor pup’s life, decided not to rename it; however, five syllables was simply too much—can you imagine? like Stay, Macadamia! and No, Macadamia! or Get off her fucking leg, Macadamia!—so they proposed nicknames, the ex-boyfriend with Mac, Kelley with Nut, and, shocker, neither ever agreed on the other’s, but then, one day, when Kelley had returned home from a friend’s bachelorette party—a four-day trip to Denver—she realized, to her horror, that the dog would only respond to McNut, as if it were an all-in-one fast food strip club menu item, like, uh, yeah, ‘sup, I’ll have two pounds of the bone-in wings, a tall boy, and then a private dance with a small, no make it a medium, McNut, but hold the whipping and hold the cream, please.  In feigned incredulity, I agreed with her, the ex-boyfriend was an idiot.  Sure, I’d already scaled the trenches of tipsiness and wandered my ass out into the no man’s land of drunkenness, but I still knew better than to tell her the truth—that of all four of them, Mac, the ex-boyfriend’s suggestion, was by far and away the only acceptable name.

Anyway, this went on for another jumbo frozen margarita or two (a tried-and-true practice for knowing you’ve had too much is when you can no longer remember how much you’ve had) until Kelley and I both decided it was time to go.  We scooped into our noodle arms the glasses that had accumulated on the table, and, in an absolute masterclass of wit and suaveness, I exhumed the topic of names and I joked that Stella No-Shoes should rename herself Stella No-Hands, considering there must’ve been four, five, six, glasses we’d been left with and had found ourselves juggling back to the bar.  Kelley shrieked, and I nearly paused to congratulate myself.  I mean, the joke was pretty mediocre, but you would’ve thought I hadn’t just hit but rather totally annihilated her funny bone.  For a few seconds, my dumb ass wrestled for a decent follow-up when I realized that Kelley wasn’t howling with laughter but with terror.  She wriggled and writhed and danced around like some demented jazzercise instructor and screamed that there “was something in here” and when I asked what was in where she simply squealed OH MY GOD! about a hundred times.  She began shaking her legs and stretching her arms across her chest and around her back in frenzied desperation, having gone from a jazzercise instructor to an oxygen-deprived and straitjacketed Harry Houdini during an underwater escape stunt gone horribly awry, which is when I finally decoded the message that the “where” was her jumpsuit.  She begged me to help, and I don’t want to use the word “hero” or anything, but, looking back, I’m beyond befuddled by the conviction with which I set down the glasses and jumped into action, like a trained first responder or, dare I say, a knight in shining armor, as I thrust my arm down the opening in the back of her jumpsuit.  Armed with the genuine excuse that I had no earthly idea what I was looking for, my hand groped around for a few precious seconds, a free yet temporary ticket to paradise, until I felt the aberration, a thing that so clearly was not supposed to be found on the perfectly round and smooth bottom of a goddess, like a chink on a marble statue, and I knew exactly what it was as I pulled it out.  Suddenly, staring back at me were the beady, red eyes of a cicada, as it wiggled its black thorax and flapped its diaphanous, orange-rimmed wings, making agitated attempts to grab onto my fingers with its alien legs.  It unleashed an elongated and high-pitched croak, like a sleep-deprived and cantankerous toad, which only got louder and louder, merging with the other parts of the mad ensemble, the wiggling and the flapping and the vibrating, and I must’ve thought I could feel the slight tingling between my fingers begin to travel farther and farther up my arm and, in an attempt to fight off and break free from this advancing, hypnotic invasion—lest I be metamorphosized into a giant cicada myself—I began squeezing my fingers until the next thing I knew—schplop!—the little fucker’s head popped off in a wetter-than-expected detonation, immediately followed by a heavy thud and the sharp, tinkling explosions of shattered glass, which, unfortunately, had been the sound of Kelley fainting and collapsing to the floor.