The exercise:
Hindsight, the April edition.
Mine:
Serena was real classy for a Red Lobster waitress. That might seem like a mean qualifier, but it's the truth. In my experience, at least. I mean, the two other girls working that night were smoking and flipping through old issues of the National Enquirer and gabbing back and forth about how they would bag a Hemsworth if one of them would only come in for mozzarella cheesesticks.
And that's not even getting into Justina and Katrina, both of whom I dated in high school and both, as I later found out, waited tables at Red Lobster. At the same time. As I was dating both of them.
Yeah, that didn't turn out so well for me either.
Anyway. Back to Serena. Classy. All the way. She had a library card and even used it regularly. She liked watching travel shows and documentaries. She even taught me what birding was, which was a revolution for sure.
I think I did it again. One sec. I need to look that up... okay, yeah, I meant revelation.
She was the one that got me hooked on the idea of Tokyo, though it would take another year before I started working at TechMoe Bowls, the high tech company that would eventually send me to Japan to help establish a new chain of bowling alleys. Moe Mooney was the guy in charge and he paid me better than anyone ever had before. Or since, now that I...
Shoot, got distracted again. Right, Serena.
That night Dina walked out on who she thought was Curtis, Serena sat with me while I ate chicken fingers and fries and gave me so many free Cokes that I had to use the bathroom three times before I left (and then again in the bushes on the way home).
She was real sweet with me that night, and even gave me her number so that I could call her the next day. And I was smitten, there's no denying it. Why wouldn't I be with a girl like that?
I mean, how was I supposed to know about her, uh, tendency towards burning things? And no, her putting lit birthday candles on each of my chicken fingers - when it very much was not my birthday - was not a tell, okay?
4 comments:
I'm definitely liking the names of the ex-girlfriends, the theme is running through nicely :) And you've given some life to Serena who almost seems like a better match than Dina though there is this small issue with the candles I guess. I'm sure it's only a triviality though.
We have to resolve a small issue with Tokyo though: in January we established that it was two months in the past, and now it's a year in the future... but I have an idea about how we might fix that :)
Hindsight
Serena called me the day after our first date, and my roommate answered the phone because I was in the bathroom again finding out that Coke can sometimes come out as fizzy as it goes in and that it ain't a pleasant sensation. I came out, walking a bit funny and feeling a bit funny, and see him miming into the receiver while I can hear Serena on the other end asking if there's anyone there than can hear her and I try and take the receiver from him but it's greasy with oily-clown makeup and I end up dropping it in a cream pie that he's left out on the table and has been there long enough to get maggots. Which I didn't think you got in cream, and that made me wonder what the cream was covering up, and thankfully Serena started shouting at that point and I shouted back, and then I had a date again on Saturday and my roommate had vanished and the phone probably needed burning before anyone touched it again. Which might have been a touch precognitive on my part, but actually just reminded me that Dad had probably started hanging up the Wanted posters all around Thunder Bay.
In hindsight I should have confronted my roommate at that point, about the phone-call and the rubber cheques and the rotting food and the live crickets and my nagging suspicion that he was going to the toilet in the front garden and not the bathroom, but what I actually did is shake the crickets out of my clothing and go to work.
Where it turned out Dina had had me fired so the security guard (his name badge read 'Curtis' which distracted me for long enough for him to get me by the collar) escorted me to the curb and told me Dina was blacklisting me with the local Chamber of Commerce.
Job hunting did not go that well; I had four jobs in four months after that. First I got a job at the library, which burned down a month later, two days after I told Serena about how we had a dumpster round the back where the unsalvageable books went. Then I got a job at a bookbinders off the strength of the restoration work I'd been learning at the library, and that caught fire three weeks later. The fire-marshall said he thought it was probably the glues we used expiring and heating up, and Serena nodded her head because she'd picked that day to visit me at work. Then I got a job at a short-order fry-cook at the bowling alley. I got permission from the boss to let Serena in at the end of my shift so we could play a couple of games after work, and the next day I came in to discover that a fire had started in the shoe-closet and while the kitchen was still in good condition the rest of the hall was an incinerated mess. Job number four was as a junior orderly in a nursing home, and I'd barely been there a week before Serena turned up at my house early one morning and suggested we take a road trip up to Quebec City.
"You don't need to give no notice," she said with her cute little dimpled smile. "Come on, we'll do some birding on the way. It'll be nice, just us, two weeks. I'll teach you some French."
On the drive up there, in a car she said she'd borrowed from her brother, the radio started to say something about a fire in a nursing home but Serena changed the channel to a music station and I thought nothing more about it.
Greg - ah, I buggered up the timing. I knew I should have double checked that.
Yeah, that... is a very strong tendency toward burning things. I like how blissfully unaware of it all our NotCurtis is. Also: the security guard being ActuallyCurtis was a great touch :D
mark, i'm rather chuffed to see that you are still keeping up with you DWP blog. and that Greg is also still around.
i might participate one of these days as i seem to have some time on my hand but been reluctant to go back to writing.
stay safe and well, you guys.
vikki - hey! Sorry, I'm only just seeing this now. I hope you've been well, and you are totally, totally welcome to start writing with us again.
You knooooooooow you waaaaaaaaaaaaant to. Come oooooooooonnnnnnnnnnn...
:)
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