You’ll Never Blue Ball in This Town Again Read online

  You’ll Never

  Blue Ball

  in This Town

  Again

  One Woman’s Painfully Funny Quest to Give It Up

  Heather

  McDonald

  A Touchstone Book

  Published by Simon & Schuster

  New York London Toronto Sydney

  Touchstone

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 2010 by Heather McDonald

  This memoir presents my recollections of twenty years of my life, filtered through the prism of memory, embarrassment, and humor. Names have been changed; characters and events combined, compressed, and reordered.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Touchstone trade paperback edition June 2010

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  Designed by Ruth Lee-Mui

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McDonald, Heather.

  You’ll never blue ball in this town again : one woman’s painfully funny quest to give it up / by Heather McDonald.

  p. cm.

  “A Touchstone book.”

  1. Women comedians—United States—Biography. 2. Sex—Humor. 3. Virginity—Social aspects—United States. 4. Television personalities—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN2287.M5455A3 2010

  792.702’8092—dc22 [B] 2010009462

  ISBN 978-1-4391-7628-3

  ISBN 978-1-4391-7630-6 (ebook)

  To my funny and fabulous parents, Bob and Pam, I love you both. Now turn the TV back on, you don’t need to read this.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. Can’t a Girl Dress Like a Hooker, Dance Like a Stripper, and Kiss Like a Porn Star and Still Be a Nineteen-Year-Old Virgin?

  2. Studs and Duds

  3. I’ll Never Geriatric Date in This Town Again

  4. Phil Roberts

  5. Video Vixen

  6. Conversations with Ben

  7. Bed, Keep It Tidy

  8. Ray

  9. LA, LA, Just Addicted to Crack

  10. The Courtship of Mackenzie’s Father

  11. The AARPs Next Door

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Finally, late one night on the phone I got up the courage to tell Kevin that I was a virgin. I absolutely hated saying the word virgin aloud because it always made me think of the Virgin Mary, who in my opinion never got enough props for giving birth without having sex or an epidural in a manger with some hay up her ass all while three strange men whom she’d never met before insisted on being there just because they brought some frankincense and myrrh. But I managed to tell him, and Kevin was the first and the last guy who thought it was a good thing. He was confident he would be my first, but he wasn’t going to rush me, which was good because I was in no rush to do it with him. The only rush that mattered was spring sorority rush.

  Kevin and I had these long dry humping make-out sessions. While fully clothed, we French kissed and I did the grind on his hard penis. One night, Kevin told me on the phone that I was blue balling him so badly that he was at risk for contracting testicular cancer. I felt terrible. The next night, I was listening to Love Line on the radio. Dr. Drew Pinsky and Adam Corolla were the cohosts while people called in to get advice on their love problems. I called in and got through to the screener.

  “Welcome to Love Line. What’s your question?” asked the screener.

  “Well, I’m a nineteen-year-old virgin and ..."

  He cut me off. “Really, a nineteen-year-old virgin?”

  I felt like he thought he had struck gold or something.

  “Yes, and my boyfriend says that I blue ball him so much he could get testicular cancer. I want to ask Dr. Drew if that is possible.”

  “OK, turn down your radio and hang on the line,” he said to me as I promptly sat on the bed and waited on the line.

  Wow, I’m going to be on the radio. I had never in my life even attempted to be the sixteenth caller on the radio to win U2 tickets.

  Dr. Drew immediately got on the line and assured me that you cannot get testicular cancer from being blue balled. But Adam was impressed that a guy had the inventiveness to guilt a girl into putting out by telling her she was causing him cancer. Well, this certainly made me feel a lot better knowing that unlike the tobacco industry, Heather McDonald was no longer on the American Cancer Society hit list. …

  1 Can’t a Girl Dress Like a Hooker, Dance Like a Stripper, and Kiss Like a Porn Star and Still Be a Nineteen-Year-Old Virgin?

  Do you ever find yourself in your office daydreaming of an old crush and wondering what your life would have been like with him, especially on the days when your husband isn’t treating you like the princess you still are? Suddenly the crush comes to mind and you decide to Internet stalk him to find out if he is still single or to see how ugly his wife is or what your kids may have looked like with him. Well, Kevin O’Sullivan is the guy I Google and search on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Classmates, and so on. When my husband is not being nice to me, he refuses to help me on the computer in my attempt to track down this old flame of mine.

  With a name like Kevin O’Sullivan, I knew he was Irish. In fact, his parents were from Ireland: the land of potatoes; four-leaf clovers; leprechauns and Lucky Charms cereal; and, of course, famine and bloodshed. He went to Arizona State, where I was visiting my friend Suzanne, but his family lived in Pasadena, which is just outside of LA, but at least an hour from my home in Woodland Hills. We went through the usual college pre-hookup-meet-and-greet of “What’s your major? Dorm? High school? What was your SAT? Is there a history of cancer in your family? How about acne?”

  With Kevin the conversation was really easy, and the alcohol helped. I don’t think I ever saw the bottom of my red plastic cup. Fraternity guys are trained to never allow a sorority sister’s drink to run out. They’re such gentlemen in that way.

  At about one a.m., it was time for us to leave. Suzanne was from Arizona and we were crashing at her parents’ house, so we couldn’t be too late. Kevin asked for my number and I asked for his. I loved having the guy’s number. At the time, my Heather philosophy was that these guys always lose the little pieces of paper with the numbers scribbled on them; they must lose them, or what other explanation is there for them not calling? I couldn’t risk the possibility that my precious phone number might be held hostage in the crevice of a futon for months and by the time it was rescued the guy would have no recollection of who I was.

  If you can believe it, in the nineties there were no Black-Berrys or iPhones or Palm Pilots, so the potential boyfriend could not program my digits in his telecommunicative device. By getting his number I had control if I chose to call him. He said he’d be back in Pasadena over Thanksgiving and we should go o
ut then. I was going to hold him to it and that’s why I kept his number safe in my Velcro Louis Vuitton knockoff wallet. I also transcribed it into two different notebooks in two different locations just in case I was approached by a mugger while walking to my car and I couldn’t reach my mace or kick him in the groin while yelling “fire” (I was told “fire” gets more of a response than “rape”) and he successfully grabbed my purse.

  Like Oprah says, “Never go to the second crime location,” even if it means a potential boyfriend’s phone number might be lost forever. I also decided to always keep a bottled water and granola bar in my car so that when the big earthquake strikes and a freeway collapses on my car, I can eventually tell Oprah, “And even though there was only a small pocket of air, I managed to reach down and get that water and granola bar until help arrived.” Oprah always tears up at a good story about survival and rationing one granola bar over a period of ten days.

  Thanksgiving weekend rolled around and I left USC, where I was in my sophomore year, for the long forty-six-minute drive home to the Valley. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving Day is always a great party night. People don’t have to work the next day, and some are staying, like me, at their parents’ house. I loved flopping into my double bed with its pink ruffled canapé top, which, by the way, does not work like a bunk bed. My sister and I learned this the hard way. I would lie among my stuffed elephants and panda bears, which were impossible to cuddle because they were all won by my dad from various trips to Six Flags and therefore synthetic, and watch my junior varsity cheer-leading ribbons spinning around my room before I passed out. This memory repeated itself every Thanksgiving. It just always screamed “autumn” to me.

  Around six p.m. on Thanksgiving, with some Blue Nun wine and tryptophan in my bloodstream, I decided to call Kevin O’Sullivan and see if he still wanted to take me out that weekend. Needless to say, he hadn’t called me. I retrieved the number from my wallet and dialed. It was his home number and an Irish woman answered, which freaked me out because any Irish woman sounds like a nun to me. My heart was already beating because I was calling a boy, and now I was having flashbacks of my fourth-grade math teacher, Sister Therese.

  “Yes, is Kevin there please?” I asked as politely as I could, thinking she could ask me to solve a long division problem at any moment.

  “One moment dear,” she replied.

  “Hello?” Kevin said.

  “Oh, hi. This is Heather. I met you at the ATO party a while back. I go to USC and ...” He cut me off.

  “Of course. How are you, Heather?” he asked. The rest of the conversation was easy, yet my heart still managed to beat at an excessive rate. Whenever I was on the phone at my parents’ house I never knew when my dad would start yelling about something so loud that the person on the other end would hear, “Don’t get your tit in a wringer about the blood. Just get me the goddamn Band-Aids!” When that happened, I would immediately hang up, and then when the house was quiet again I’d call back and say, “What’s up with your phone, we just got disconnected, that’s so weird, you should have that checked out.” We made plans for Kevin to pick me up on Friday night at my parents’ house and decided we would go out in Woodland Hills.

  The next day, my sister Shannon and I went shopping. I love when you shop for a new outfit and then have plans to wear it that very night, provided the idiotic salesgirl doesn’t forget to remove the security tag. When that happened to me, I called the store in a panic demanding that they send someone from Forever 21 immediately to my home with the security removal gun and take care of the situation or I would file a lawsuit on the grounds of intentional infliction of emotional distress. When the salesgirl made a sarcastic remark about how they don’t make house calls for purchases under twenty-nine dollars, I attempted to remove the tag myself and went out that night looking like I’d been shot by a blue paintball gun.

  Being a virgin never conflicted with the way I dressed. My philosophy at the time was: If I don’t show it, how will people know I have it? So the shorter and tighter the outfit the better. Shannon was not as risqué and didn’t always agree with my clothing. I was so confident with my Forever 21 purchases that even as an aspiring attorney she wasn’t able to convince me that cleavage and upper thigh should not both be the focal points of a dress made out of 100 percent hot pink spandex.

  When Kevin met me at Arizona State University, I was wearing a salmon-colored mesh tank-style minidress with white cowboy boots and big white hoop earrings. Obviously, that look worked for Kevin.

  Driving home from the mall, I anticipated my first date with Kevin and I imagined myself in my new purchase: a rust-colored minidress paired with brown go-go boots, gold hoop earrings, and bangles. Madonna’s Like a Prayer provided the soundtrack. What a perfect fall-colored palette to wear tonight, I thought. I looked at the clock and it was already 5:17 p.m. I would be ready just in time for an eight o’clock pickup, since I was starting from scratch—that meant washing my hair and conditioning it with Vidal Sassoon hot oil treatment, blow-drying it, setting it with hot rollers, and putting enough Sebastian Shaper hair spray in it to do significant damage to the ozone layer.

  I feared the moment Kevin would meet my parents because of my dad’s temper. More often than not, my dad flew off the handle because of a simple miscommunication. My parents had a few poorly matched ailments. My dad couldn’t hear and my mom only had one vocal cord. Dad, a former Marine, lost his hearing in one ear during combat. He refused to get a hearing aid because of vanity and the related fear of looking old. And once, when my mom was screaming at one of her five kids for making a mess, “right after the goddamn maid had just left,” one of her vocal chords suddenly became paralyzed. So she can be heard, but she has trouble yelling or really projecting her yell.

  What usually happened was my dad misunderstood my mom and thought she had said something other than what she actually said. Whatever he thought she said would piss him off and then he’d start to yell. We would try to correct the situation by saying, “But Dad, wait, that’s not what she said!” He would yell back, “Don’t interrupt! Let me finish my goddamn sentence.” Afterward, we suffered through an agonizing ten minutes of his ranting.

  For example, my mom might say, “Please pass the bread.” And my dad would respond, “Fred? You’re still dealing with that asshole? I told you to dump him as a client. He’s never going to buy a house and we don’t need his business. He’s a patronizing little fuck with his goddamn Jaguar and the way he pronounces it ‘Jag-u-r.’” My mom would try to interject, “But Bob, wait...” That only made my dad more angry. “Don’t tell me to wait. I’ve been in the corporate business for twenty-five years. I thought we were partners in real estate. If you don’t want my opinion, you can take my name off the twenty-five bus benches now and it will just read ‘Pam McDonald welcomes you to Woodland Hills.’” At this point, my mom and I would fight back laughter as she struggled to get the words out. But in no way could she reach his level of volume, causing him to be even more irate.

  Before Kevin arrived, I remembered one time when my sister Kathi was waiting for her date, a concrete salesman, to pick her up. Some argument began to escalate to the point where my dad raged about everything and anything. He was mad that he was just hearing (if you can technically call it that) that Kathi was going on a date that night. My mom, in contrast, was happy that Kathi’s date sold concrete for a living and was not a roadie for Poison or a Rick James celebrity impersonator. She managed to screech, “But Bob, this guy is into concrete.” My dad got even louder and said, “I’m supposed to be impressed that he’s into Kathi’s feet. What a sick fuck. Just because he’s the first guy whose eyes won’t be glued to her boobs, we’re supposed to jump for joy like a bunch of assholes? Well, unless he’s a podiatrist, he’s a pervert and he’s not going out with my daughter.”

  About five minutes later, my sister’s private line in her bedroom rang and she picked it up. When she returned, she told us it was the concrete salesman and
that he was on the walkway when he heard Dad screaming about him and his foot fetish, so he decided it was best he didn’t ring the bell. She told him everything was fine and to come back, which he did. My dad felt terrible and actually was impressed that the guy sold concrete. He made conversation and asked where he was from and what college he went to. When the concrete salesman said the University of Michigan, my dad immediately brought up their mascot and said, “Oh you’re a Wolverine, are ya?” He then talked sports for a few uncomfortable minutes. Though my dad’s outburst didn’t help the date, he couldn’t be entirely blamed. My sister did admit to yawning several times at Red Lobster when he explained the intricacies of a concrete convention, and they never went out again.

  But my dad wasn’t a bit embarrassed. He never altered his mood, activity, or volume for anything. It didn’t occur to him that I was having eight friends over for a slumber party and that might be the day to forgo his usual routine of swimming naked in our pool except for a pair of goggles and flippers. His daily routine included twenty-five laps of free style with flip turns and ten of the butterfly stroke. No, he never worried that one if not all of my eight friends from the fifth grade might at one point look out the living room window and witness him.

  Luckily for me, the night Kevin came, everyone was calm and the meet-and-greet was quick and painless. My parents trusted me and it was understood that I’d be back around one a.m. or so. One good thing about being the youngest of five kids is that by the time you’re a young adult, the parents are too old and exhausted to bother to check up on you. With my older brothers and sisters, I’d often wake up to the sound of my parents having been up all night because someone never made it home. They were calling hospitals only to have one of their children walk in at eight a.m. claiming to have fallen asleep at a friend’s house while listening to an eight-track tape. When my turn came, they simply took two Tylenol PMs, said an “Our Father,” and called it a night.