For the record, I’m not really the one-night-stand type, nor would I know how to go about it if I wanted to. I’m also not one to brag about my sexual exploits, because, if I’m being honest, I have nothing to brag about. I’m less the Don Juan and more the Don Quixote of the bedroom, and while I’m tilting at windmills, everything around me is usually going horribly awry. This story happened a few years ago, and it’s one such example.
I met Shaila in a bar called Bathtub Gin & Co., a little speakeasy hidden away in the old boiler room of the Humphrey apartment building in Belltown. To find it, you had to walk down the alley between 1st and 2nd Avenues to a wooden door identified by a small brass placard. Once inside (no secret knock necessary), there’s a small bar counter up some steep stairs; some intimate, dimly-lit tables down some equally steep stairs; and a sitting room further back on the lower level, with couches, overstuffed chairs and coffee tables around a faded Persian rug, with rich red brick walls and some fully stocked bookshelves. Just the kind of room in which you’d want to smoke cigars and conspire. Even when the place is packed out, it has the feeling of exclusivity like one of Seattle’s best kept secrets.
This was the last stop in a nomadic bender around Seattle with the guys, beginning with Manhattans at Mike’s Martini Palace, followed by beer and pool at Temple Billiards, then bourbon and Dixieland Jazz at The New Orleans, and finally to Bathtub Gin for some rye. Casey, Curtis, Justin and I settled onto couches and chairs in the back room while Jenny, the cocktail server, brought us our drinks.
There was another group of guys and gals in the room, and Casey, the designated mouth, managed to generate a conversation between the clans. They were old friends, gathered together for a reunion of sorts in honor of another friend visiting from Boston who wasn’t yet present. Everyone was talkative and in high spirits. I had my eye on a pretty blonde girl in a little black dress and stilettos, and after determining that she wasn’t romantically connected to any of the guys in the room, started planning my attack.
I should say here that “planning my attack” involves trying to be as cool and nonchalant as possible and merely hoping for the best. I’ve got absolutely no game, I’m not a closer (or an opener, for that matter), and the phrase “getting lucky” is less a colloquialism and more a mere statement of fact when applied to any of my romantic encounters with the opposite sex. I go about it as if merely being in the right place at the right time will lead to that Lady and the Tramp moment where I’ll find myself slurping down the same spaghetti noodle as some girl and then we’ll just know that we should be running either to the bedroom or down the aisle. In case you’re wondering, this is a poor strategy.
More strangers entered the room including the long-lost Bostonian friend, an East Indian girl in a long floral dress, and those of us who had gotten acquainted shuffled seats to make space. By an amazing stroke of luck, I ended up sitting on the couch right next to the pretty blonde girl I’d been ogling, so I did the only thing I know how to do, I got chatty. Not with her specifically, but with everybody, as if I could become a star and she would just succumb to the force of my gravity. When I open my mouth, words fall out before I can wrangle them, and true to form, my choice of topics couldn’t have been worse.
“You know, I think it’s ridiculous when women wear shoes that they can’t walk in. I see women all the time who’re wearing these crazy shoes; and they look great when they’re standing still, but when they try to walk, they look like they have a palsy. Sure, high heels are sexy, they are. But, if you can’t keep up with me walking a few blocks to the next bar, forget it, I have no use for you. My ex-girlfriend would do that. She’d want to drive the five blocks from my apartment to a bar, even though we’d have to spend twenty minutes looking for parking. Seriously! I don’t want to hear a girl bitch and moan that they have to walk a quarter-mile because they chose shoes that were made for anything but walking in. Seriously, how impressive is it when you can’t function as a biped? It’s one of my litmus tests for women—you gotta keep up with me. There are places to go, things to see, and I don’t want to wait for a girl to limp along in dumb shoes. Wear high heels if you want, as long as you can move—and some women can, which is damned impressive. If you can’t, don’t. I get it, heels make a girl look taller, keeps the ass tight, and evolutionarily speaking, this is attractive to men; but evolution would also favor a woman that could run away from a tiger.”
The pretty blond girl looked down at her sparkly, silver four-inch heels, and I should have known that I’d talked my chances down to zero.
Curtis and I went outside to smoke, and when we came back the seating arrangement had changed. I sat down on the couch again, but this time, I was next to the Bostonian girl, and we began to make small talk. Her name was Shaila, and she was only in town for the weekend to see her friends. She was staying a couple of blocks away in a condo belonging to a guy-friend who was out of town for the weekend. While we chatted, I kept making furtive glances at the pretty blonde girl, who was engaged in conversation in the opposite corner and overtly not looking at me.
I didn’t notice that Casey and Justin, whom I’d been ignoring now for a while, were looming over my shoulder singing quietly—a song from The Little Mermaid.
“Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la…you wanna kiss the girl…”
Shaila, nodding in Casey’s direction, asked me, “Who’s your friend there?”
“Why, do you want his number?”
“No…”
“Because I’ll get it for you right now.”
“No, I don’t want his number. He’s kind of a jerk.”
Nobody gets to insult my friends but me. I launched into a diatribe about how she was unqualified to make such an assessment, that Casey was one of the best men I knew and the best friend a guy could have, and though he could appear a little abrasive on the surface, he would do anything to help a friend. I angrily defended Casey who needed no defense, and classified this girl Shaila as a judgmental bitch to whom it wasn’t worth devoting any more of my already half-assed attention. Though we were seated next to each other, I largely ignored her after that. I turned back to my friends, and back to my booze.
After a couple more rounds and last call, the evening was coming to a close. We all began gathering our coats and saying polite goodbyes. It was beginning to dawn on me that my chances with the pretty blond girl were narrowing in on zilch.
Shaila leaned over and whispered in my ear: “Remember how you asked me if I wanted your friend’s number?”
“Yeah, did you change your mind? I’ll get it for you right now,” I said, and turned to go make that happen.
She grabbed my arm to stop me, “No, but I wouldn’t mind having yours.”
My judgment went right out the window. All of my assessments of this girl, on every scale from attractiveness to intelligence to her terrible judgment of character were completely forgotten in that fraction of a second. I was drunk and a girl just asked for my number—what’s a guy to do? So, I wrote it down on a cocktail napkin and handed it to her—as you do—and then my friends and I climbed the stairs and spilled out of the bar into the alley.
My buddies surrounded me like they were about to have an intervention. It seemed that way, because they were about to have an intervention.
“Dude, you don’t want to do it,” Casey told me sternly, “She’s not your type. And she’s a fat chick.”
“Nah, don’t worry about it,” I said, waving him off. Fat? I didn’t think she was fat.
“Seriously, man,” Justin added, “don’t do it.”
“I don’t know what you guys are talking about,” I defended myself, “I’m just going to go home.” She had dark mysterious eyes and kind of a stately nose.
“I’ll give you a lift,” Casey said, not offering but demanding.
“Cool, thanks,” I shrugged. She was kind of exotic, and who knows, maybe we’d hit it off.
We piled into Casey’s car, and he gave me a ride to my place on Capitol Hill, depositing me on the stoop in the alley outside my apartment like a toddler into a playpen. I thanked him for the ride, we all said goodbye, and the night should have ended there.
But it didn’t.
As I entered my apartment, I got a text from Shaila: “this is shaila where r u now”
I really hate how lazy people can be when texting. Language is important, and even texts deserve capitalization, punctuation, and full words. It bothers me so much that some of my friends occasionally do it to me on purpose, just to get under my skin. But, I was drunk and apparently in a forgiving mood.
“I just got home. What are you up to?”
“oh i was hoping u were nearby”
“Ah, I live on Capitol Hill.”
“im at my friends condo u should come over 4 sum wine”
“I’ll be right there.”
I called a cab, and headed right back downtown, following her description of the building she was staying in. When I got there, a doorman in a suit and tie let me into the lobby, and waited with me there while Shaila came down the elevator to fetch me. I tried to act cool. And sober. I didn’t want him to think that this girl that technically didn’t live there was inviting some drunk delinquent into his very respectable building, because that was exactly what was happening. The elevator opened with Shaila inside, and she waved me toward her.
“There you go,” said the doorman.
As soon as the elevator door closed, Shaila swung around and pressed herself up against me, pinning me against the wall and started kissing me on the mouth. It seemed so trite—the elevator make-out—and she was all over the place like she was in a glitchy auto-pilot mode. I decided to just go with it and tried to match her pitch and roll, but it was kind of like playing whack-a-mole with lips.
The doors opened, and we stumbled down the hall to her friend’s condo, entering into the kitchen. She had been drinking a cheap, chilled bottle of Pinot Grigio out of a stemless wineglass. I eyed the wine with both repulsion and desire, but she had other things in mind.
We made small talk for less than a minute as I stood nonchalantly in the middle of the kitchen, one ankle hooked around the other, trying to look cool and relaxed. She went on the attack again, grabbing me for a make-out session. She slipped her arms around me, pulling me toward her and pressing her pelvis into me, and wrapped one leg around me like a snake-charmer’s cobra; but since I was drunk and not planted firmly on both feet, I lost my balance as she pulled me toward her. I tried to keep us on our feet, but I couldn’t right myself in the tangle of her limbs, and we both tumbled over like Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed.
Her head hit the edge of the kitchen counter and she crumpled to the floor. I tried to grab the countertop but missed and landed next to her as she grabbed the back of her head crying “Ow, ow, ow, ow…” while trying to fight back tears. Her face was scrunched up in pain and her breathing was spastic. I got to my knees, and leaned toward her trying to assess the damage.
“Are you OK? Are you all right?!” What if she was concussed? Should I call an ambulance?
She slipped her hand around my neck, and pulled me toward her, kissing me again on the mouth. She was out of breath and still whimpering, but began kissing me anyway while trying to avoid a full-on ugly-cry. I pulled back, so she crawled over to me, straddled my lap, and started gyrating around like a goddamn porn star, sucking my ear, kissing my neck and my mouth in between sobs.
“Hold on! Take a minute…Jesus Christ!” I said, pushing her off. “Are you OK? Are you hurt? Take a minute for Christ’s sake!”
We got to our feet and she dried her eyes. There was an awkward silence, and I decided that the romance was over. I didn’t know how anyone could recover from a situation like this. She kept gingerly touching the back of her head and sniffling. I should have just left, but I didn’t want her to feel completely rejected just because we had a clumsy moment. I’m no saint, but I’m not mean. While a hookup was out of the question now, maybe we could just hang out and laugh about it.
“Hey, how about that wine?” I asked, gesturing toward the bottle.
We got to our feet and she poured me some Pinot Grigio in another stemless glass, and I decided now was not the time to tell her how dumb stemless glasses were—they weren’t hers, after all—so I suggested we move into the living room to sit on the couch.
The lighting was dim and the TV was on, in the middle of an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” I sipped my wine and tried to make small talk about the show, which I had read about but never seen. She explained the premise, and then we spent a few awkward moments in silence, sitting in the dark and staring at the television. I started to fall asleep.
Then, she moved over and straddled me again. She took a sip from her glass, and then pressed her lips to mine, forcing her mouthful of wine into my mouth.
Moving something from one mouth to another might seem kind of sexy in the movies, but let me tell you, it’s not. It’s fucking gross. And, the contrast between her big warm lips and the cold vino coming out of them was just confusing to the senses. I fell down the rabbit hole of cognitive dissonance wondering what the hell was going on. I choked on it a little, wincing in disbelief; but I didn’t want her to feel dumb, so after I managed to swallow, I just pretended it’d never happened.
Sitting there, even while making out with a girl in my lap, the booze was finally getting the best of me, and I laid my head back against the back of the couch, closed my eyes and started drifting off again. It took her a couple of minutes to realize that I was falling asleep (she was still in full auto-pilot), so she got to her feet, grabbed my hand, and led me to the bedroom.
“You should stay here,” she told me. I was agreeable.
We climbed onto the bed, my head hit the pillow and I closed my eyes, but before I knew it, Shaila was out of her clothes and massaging my groin. No girl ever worked so hard for a fuck.
I could see now why Casey had called her a fat chick. While she had a little waist, she ballooned at the hips and had legs like the cedars of Lebanon—shapely, womanly, but larger than I’m usually attracted to.The whole episode had been a disaster from the moment I’d stepped into the elevator, and I was ready to pass out from all the booze.
It was quiet for a minute before she asked, “Why am I naked and you’re not?”
“Uh…I’m trying to work a Jedi mind-trick on myself,” I told her.
“What?”
“I’m trying to say no.”
Shaila wasn’t about to let it go so easily. She pulled off my shirt, unbuckled my pants, and pushed me back onto the bed, tugging the rest of my clothes off. She was like a machine, doing everything she could to turn me on and keep me from nodding off without actually being sentient—tossing her hair, twisting and contorting like a belly-dancer, cupping her own breasts and forcing sounds out of her throat not unlike a Jack Russell Terrier. It appeared that everything she knew about sex was gleaned from bad porn and she was just going through the motions like she was following a recipe or reciting times tables without understanding the math. I just wanted to go to sleep.
Between the Whiskey Dick Syndrome and the sheer absurdity of the evening so far, it was nearly an impossible task, but Shaila managed to get me partially aroused—just enough to get a condom on me that she found in her friend’s nightstand. She climbed on top of me, and started doing the porn star tango again, twisting and contorting around while making far more noise than could possibly have been genuine pleasure. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that you are what you pretend to be, and maybe she thought if she pretended to be having passionate sex, then she actually would be having passionate sex. Or maybe she followed the “fake it ’till you make it” philosophy. Or maybe this was a sultry Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.” Whatever the case, it was about as sexy as being run through the dough machine at a Wonderbread factory. It was so distracting that I lost what little libido I had. She got off of me and asked me what was wrong as I pulled the loose prophylactic off.
“Let’s just go to sleep,” I said, “I’m drunk and exhausted.”
She laid down next to me, pressing her body up against mine. “OK,” she said, though quietly trying to coax my nether region back to attention. I closed my eyes and tried to ignore her, but she was blind to the Law of Diminishing Returns and kept at it, softly moaning until she partially roused my sleeping soldier. I gave in.
If I was going to do this, I needed to do it in a hurry. There was no graceful way of getting out of it, because she wouldn’t be deterred. So I took the plunge. It was a race against the clock. It was not sensual. It was not passionate. I was like a piston in a 1949 International that—judging from the banging noises—needed a tune-up. It couldn’t have been that enjoyable for her either since my man-parts almost immediately decided there was no point in trying and gave up, but Shaila acted like it was the fuck of her life.
“Use the Force, Doug,” she panted.
Record scratch. Full stop. Long pause.
“What?!”
“Use the Force!”
“What the hell?”
I realized that she was riffing on my earlier comment about a Jedi mind trick, and while it might have been just a bit geeky, the phrase had become so culturally ubiquitous, I wasn’t really exposing some fanatical niche interest. I like Star Wars as much as the next guy, but I’m not going to go stand in line in costume at a showing, and I certainly wouldn’t expect to hear “use the Force” while fucking a girl.
“Don’t stop. Fuck me. Fuck me hard,” she said, still moaning like she was mid-orgasm. It seemed she was having a completely different experience than I was, and it barely mattered if or how well I was able to perform as long as she was able to maintain the idea of sex. She was in full Matrix mode.
“Um…OK.”
I soldiered on, but couldn’t help but think of the guy whose bed were were defiling. I wondered if he’d be OK with Shaila bringing some dude over to soil his sheets with sweat and jiz while he was away. I don’t think I’d be cool with it at all if I were him. Furiously, I brought myself to completion. I sat back, just relieved that it was over now. She got to pretend that I gave her the Big O, and I had physical proof that I was done. We could finally stop this maddening charade.
“Hold still. Don’t move,” she told me. She carefully crawled off the bed and went gingerly into the bathroom, returning a minute later with a towel. “Here,” she said, handing it over to me, “This will be easier to clean than the sheets.” My sympathy for her friend found solid ground, and it was finally all the weirdness I could stand. (Apparently I have a really high tolerance for weirdness.)
I used the towel, and then began putting my clothes back on.
“Where are you going? You’re not going to stay?”
“Nah, I’m going home,” I told her, tying my shoes, “Thanks for hanging out.”
I grabbed my coat, and let myself out without much as a goodbye. When I passed through the lobby, the doorman gave me a knowing “atta-boy” nod, and I shook my head. If you only knew, brother, if you only knew.
I flagged down a cab, and dozed off on the way home. It was nearly four o’clock in the morning when I walked through my door, and I hopped into bed, passing the fuck out.
When I got up a few hours later and went into the bathroom to take a shower before work, I looked at myself in the mirror. I had a large scabbed-over gash above my right eye that I wouldn’t be able to hide. My staff would inevitably ask about it, so how was I going to explain it? I hadn’t even realized that my forehead had hit the counter when we fell in Shaila’s kitchen. I had been that drunk. And, when I thought about how she had had to look at a bloody cut on my forehead all night while she continued to make out with me and seduce me, I shuddered. Intoxicated, desperate or both, nothing was going to prevent that girl from getting laid. You kind of have to admire that kind of tenacity.
I felt like you would imagine Luke Skywalker felt in the last few frames of The Empire Strikes Back as he stared out the window into space after narrowly escaping with his life from an encounter with Darth Vader. Wounded, fatigued and heavy with the knowledge of his recent experience, but alive to fight another day. Maybe I really am a Jedi.
But, unlike Skywalker, who went on to battle and then mend things with Vader, I never heard from Shaila again.
