HOLLY
“I-18!” Roxy yells out to us, looking fierce in her black-and-white blinged-out minidress and platform heels.
“That’s what she said!” the crowd (including Joe and me) yells back to her.
Ahhh … drag queen bingo. Very few things make me so happy to live in Los Angeles.
Where else can you donate twenty dollars to a charity (tonight the charity of choice is the cat shelter Santé D’Or, and you know the pussy jokes are going to go all night) and in exchange get ten bingo cards and a drag queen with a black strap for spanking people who call false bingo. And drinks. Goblets and goblets of drinks. There is no fine wine here. I just finished off some concoction that as far as I can tell was made with hard liquor and Sprite. And it is fantastic.
Plus some nights, if you’re lucky, you get to sit next to the wall showcasing a bazillion stiletto heels. “Personally, I like the purple paisley pump,” Joe decides.
“No,” I disagree. “If you’re going to go that ridiculously high, you gotta go animal print: the zebra or the leopard.”
“You’re a good influence. That’s the second time I’ve been near something called zebra in two days. Another round?” Joe asks, signaling to our waiter.
“Yeah, but this time I want a Strawberry Tease Me,” I tell the waiter.
“I’ll switch to Coke,” Joe tells him.
“I-29,” Roxy calls.
“Yes I am … and holding!” we all yell back.
“Bingo!” someone yells out and races up to the stage, decorated with a disco ball, tons of red velvet, and a pole (because why not?).
“Okay, baby, let me check your numbers,” Roxy says. The player insists he has them, but she mocks, “I don’t know you from Adam. I gotta check your numbers.” Then she waves and yells at someone across the room. “Oh, hey, Adam!”
“This is really fun,” Joe tells me. “How come I never knew about his place?”
“Neglected youth, I presume.”
“All right, ladies, we have bingo,” Roxy announces. She hands the winner a gift basket filled with board games, then says, “Now run all the way across the bar, then back to the wall of shoes, so the losers can pelt you.”
As the winner runs around the room and back, we all crumple up our losing bingo cards and throw them at him.
He runs past, and Joe quickly crumples and throws.
“Okay, bingo whores,” Roxy calls out. “Now for this next game we’re going to pole-dance!” Her assistant slowly swings around the pole onstage. “This means you have to have your bingos going vertically.”
Joe looks up. “Huh?”
I explain. “Oh, it’s not like regular bingo, where you just have to get five in a row. There are specific patterns they play all night. Each board is different.”
“For our first number, everyone sing with me: Will you still need me…”
And the audience sings, “Will you still feed me, when I’m O-64?!”
“And next: Ladies, what’s the Bo Derek B?”
“B-10!” I yell out.
“Seriously, how do you know all these?” Joe asks.
I hand Joe a yellow sheet of paper that explains all of the bingo games and the callbacks. Soon Joe can answer Roxy when she says, “Not malignant but…”
“… B-9!”
And G-54? “The disco G!”
And some more indiscreet answers I won’t mention. Let’s just say there is an O-69, and it does have a callback.
After the first five games, neither of us has even come close to bingo. But it doesn’t matter, because I don’t remember the last time I was having so much fun. I cannot stop laughing as Roxy flirts with Joe as she walks around the room, mingling.
Joe actually wins game six, Around the World, and the prize is pretty good: two bottles of wine and a gift card to a sushi place.
“Oh. Jealous,” I tell him. “I’ve been dying to go there.”
“Well, what are you doing next Monday?” he asks.
I don’t know why, but somehow him asking me out for a week from now makes me … unsettled. “No, you should take a date. It’s supposed to be super romantic there.”
“Our next card is the ten in one box!” Roxy begins.
Joe looks around. “More romantic than this?”
“The first number’s B-11. Arms to heaven!”
As everyone in the audience puts up their arms, I say, “You know what I mean. You want kids. A boy and a girl. You should be dating, and I’m only a distraction.”
Joe puts down his arms. “I thought neither of us were dating right now.”
“I’m not, because I have nothing to offer at the moment. But you should. You’re hot, and really funny…”
“I’m hot?” he repeats almost jokingly.
“Yes. And you’re smart and interesting to listen to and you’re going to make someone a really good boyfriend, and I shouldn’t get in the way of that.”
“Sure, you should.”
“G-50,” Roxy calls out. “The Sally O Malley G!”
I take a big gulp of … “What the hell is in this?” I ask. “Seriously? I feel like I should be at a fraternity house drinking out of a red Solo cup.”
Joe looks at the menu. “Vodka, peach schnapps, Strawberry Pucker, and Sprite.”
“I can’t believe there is still such a thing as Strawberry Pucker.”
Roxy calls out a bunch of numbers, and the two of us focus on our game boards again.
But after someone at the end of game eight yells out “Bingo!” I return to the dating discussion. “I mean, I’ll admit, sure, I have thought about kissing you,” I tell Joe.
Joe makes a show of resting his chin on his left palm and imitating a gossipy housewife. “Go on.”
“Come on. Do you mean to tell me kissing me has not even crossed your mind?”
“Nope,” he says.
“Oh,” I say, not able to hide my disappointment.
“Wow. You can’t tell when men are lying to you,” Joe says, smiling. “No wonder you’re still single.”
“That is a false bingo!” Roxy calls out. She points to the table the girl walked over from. “Did your friends tell you you have bingo? These are not your friends.”
Everyone laughs at the way Roxy says that. Roxy tells us to uncrumple our cards so we can continue to play. She then gives the girl a spanking and sends her back to her table.
I’m too shy to continue the conversation, so I make a point of staring at my bingo card, acting immersed in the drama of the numbers.
We play the last few games and then it’s on to the “championship” cards, which are for the grand prize of the night. You have to fill out every space of every card, so it takes a while.
And damn if Joe doesn’t win the big prize of the night: an expensive gift card to a Beverly Hills restaurant and another two bottles of wine.
“So what’ll it be?” he asks. “Dinner at an amazing restaurant, or back to my place for wine?”
“I ate way too many mac and cheese balls to appreciate the Beverly Hills place tonight,” I tell Joe as he signs his credit card receipt (I let him pay. Gracious of me, no?), and we each take a gift basket and slowly walk out with the crowd.
“My place it is,” he says cheerfully. “I have nothing there to eat other than a couple of bags of Cheetos.”
“Crunchy or puffs?” I ask in all seriousness.
“Crunchy.”
“Dinner is served,” I tell him happily.
We walk to his car in silence. I think (okay, I hope) we’re both thinking about that kissing conversation we never finished earlier tonight.
“So, next Monday: sushi or California French steakhouse, whatever the hell that means.”
I don’t answer for a while. He should be taking some totally together woman who would be thrilled to have him and could actually contribute something to the relationship. “Sushi,” I finally answer.
We stop at his car. He beeps the alarm but then leans against the passenger’s side. “So, you’ve thought about kissing me.”
I sigh and look away from him. “Well, I’m not dead. Sure, I’ve thought about it. And that stupid Arctic Monkeys song you played for me…”
“Oh, good. I was hoping that would make you think of me…”
“I even put it on our women-singers-only playlist at work,” I admit. “You know that ‘constantly on the cusp of trying to kiss you’ line kind of wasn’t fair, because I swear I thought you were singing that to me. Which of course I’m sure you were just singing along…”
As I talk, Joe puts down his basket, puts his arms around my waist, pulls me into him, and kisses me. I drop my basket lightly onto the grass below, freeing up my arms to put around his neck.
But after a minute, I pull away. “I am just no good to anyone right now.”
He makes a show of a mock-serious face and nodding before pulling me in to kiss again.
Oh, my God, he’s a good kisser. I decide maybe just a few minutes of this will get it out of my system.
About five or ten minutes in, I’m thinking maybe not.
I finally force myself to unstick and breathe. But I don’t pull away so much that his arms don’t stay around my waist. “See, if you keep that up, we can’t be friends. Because now I’m not just thinking about sticking my tongue in your mouth. I’ve moved on to your ears. And maybe licking your neck. And climbing on top of you like a kitten on a scratching post.”
He grins and leans back in. “I like your thinking…”
I pull my head back so he can’t swirl my brain with his kisses again. “But it can’t work. Seriously, I have played out every scenario in my head, and they all end badly. I’m a basket case. I don’t know how to be in a relationship. I have this series of dating failures I can point to, and eventually I’ll let you down and we’ll break up and I’ll be heartbroken. And I just can’t do it again. I just can’t.”
Joe puts down his arms, and I can tell he’s suppressing a sigh. “Okay, how about this? We keep doing this…” he says, alternating his index fingers back and forth at me. “And when you start to freak out, you talk to me about it, and we deal with it. And if I start to freak out, I’ll talk to you about it, and we’ll deal with it.”
That does sound reasonable. “While I think about your plan, can we kiss for a little bit longer?”
He smiles, wraps his arms back around my waist, and brings me in again.
I’ll admit I’m mostly thinking about the kissing. At some point we sort of naturally break. So I decide to use that moment to warn him, “When we have our first fight, I’m going to assume you’re breaking up with me.”
“Okay. I’ll make sure I don’t.”
“And our second fight,” I admit grudgingly. “And our third … Actually, all of our fights. I’m the child of divorce, I always jump to ‘the guy’s leaving.’”
Joe does seem a bit surprised. “Wow.”
“But that’s probably my biggest freak flag,” I tell him quickly. “You know, that and the … well, the ashes were not my finest moment.”
Joe gives me a quick kiss. “Let’s get you home.”
Damn it! I blew it! I just talked this great guy out of dating me. What is wrong with me? I watch him pick up one of the baskets and walk around to his side of the car. “So what now?” I ask him. “You take me home and we go back to being friends? Or is this just it?”
“Not your home. My home,” Joe says. “I totally want to see that kitten thing.”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the friend-of-a-friend story of the girl who absolutely stopped dating and found a great boyfriend anyway.