I WAS WORKING AS a waitress at my folks’ restaurant one afternoon, just waiting on tables. This was a couple years back, before I went on the road. I was living at home, saving up money to go study in Lake Placid. Larry was playing drums in a band and picking up extra hours at our folks’ place between jobs. Which were never that plentiful for him, if you want to know the truth. That afternoon he and a couple of his friends had been hanging out at the mall, I guess. Looking at records and stuff. He comes running in the door and announces to everybody in the whole place, “That’s it. I’m in love.”
Well it turns out she’d been standing in front of some department store, giving out free perfume samples, and they got to talking. This was a woman’s perfume mind you, but Larry went over and said, “Let me have a squirt of that stuff.” Then he pretended he liked it so much he came back a couple minutes later, said, “Let me smell it again.” I guess he was so knocked out, he ends up buying the biggest size bottle she’s got. “Whoever you’re buying this for, you must be really crazy about her,” she says. “You’re right about that,” he says. And then he hands her the bottle. Right there in the middle of the store. That was my brother for you. Hopeless romantic.
“You got to meet this girl,” he tells me. “She’s the most perfect girl you’ve ever seen. And smart too. This job she’s got right now is just temporary, while she finds her niche in the media field. She’s going to be the next Barbara Walters.”
“Right,” I tell him. My brother always had a million girlfriends hanging around. A different one every week. Girls were always falling hard for Larry. It actually bothered him, because he said he hated to hurt their feelings. He liked a lot of people, but there was never anybody serious.
I was curious to see this person, of course. And not particularly impressed, to tell you the truth, when I laid eyes on her. Which I did just a couple days later when he took me over to the mall to meet her for myself.
“The little runt?” I asked him, while we were waiting for her to finish up with some customer. “Suicide Blonde,” I called her. Dyed by her own hand.
“She’s just so delicate,” he said. “So fragile. You look at her and you just want to take care of her. For the rest of your life.”
“Listen, Lar,” I told him. “I’ve known girls like her before. I can spot them a mile away. Under that soft voice and those thin lips of hers she’s hard as nails, trust me. She’s the kind that’s had guys falling all over themselves to get next to her all her life.”
“She looks so pure,” he said. “She looks like a china doll.”
“Right,” I told him. “You ever try making it with a doll? They don’t give a lot back.”
He didn’t pay any attention of course. All I know is, my brother, who was too shy to tell a person if they forgot to pay for their drink, was dialing up some florist shop in the Yellow Pages arranging for them to deliver a dozen long-stemmed roses to her that afternoon. For the message, he wanted it to say, “To my future bride. I’d die for your love.”