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

  “Mom,” I yelled. “Tell me about Kevin—and how could you have not told me sooner?”

  “Well, he made Bob and I swear we wouldn’t say anything.”

  “Dad, you were here and didn’t tell me, either?” I questioned.

  “Well, I walked in and I thought, Why is the Sub-Zero guy crying and pouring his heart out to Pam? How much is it going to cost to fix this refrigerator?”

  “How could both of you not recognize him? You met him like on five different occasions, two of which were full meals.” They obviously didn’t think he was the one; otherwise, I think they would have paid more attention.

  “Well, Heather, you don’t know what we had been through with this Sub-Zero. It was five thousand dollars and we hadn’t had ice cubes for three days,” my mom said.

  “Mom, enough with the fridge. What did he say?”

  “Well, he was just heartbroken, and I said to him, ‘You’re a nice, tall guy. You’ll find someone else.’ And he said, ‘Why bother when I already found the greatest girl and she was a virgin,’ ” my mother explained.

  I thought, Ugh, gross, why is he telling that to my parents? Well, of course, the virgin statement made both my parents’ afternoon even though the actual Sub-Zero guy failed to show up that day.

  One afternoon I went into my dad’s Trans Am looking for a book I thought I had left in there and as I searched under the seat I found something I had never seen before. It was wrapped like a candy. I brought it into the house and opened it. It was round and slimy and looked like a balloon. I said to my mom, “What is this?” And just as I asked the question I realized it was a condom. “Ew, disgusting,” I screamed. We soon put two and two together that it was my brother Jim’s—he had borrowed my dad’s muscle car the night before—and everyone had a good laugh about it, especially my parents, which I felt was so hypocritical.

  From the time I started stripping off my diaper and wearing my mom’s high heels around the house, she told my two sisters and me that we “must” remain virgins until we were married. She herself was such a virgin that two weeks after her wedding night, she had to have her hymen surgically removed by a doctor. She and my dad had honeymooned in the Bermuda Triangle, but my mom’s hymen didn’t disappear. Yet when it’s her son who is having the premarital sex, it’s funny and cool and completely OK? What a double standard. Yes, she should be happy that he was smart enough to be using condoms, but if only for the sake of her daughters, she should have pretended to be just a little mortified at my brother’s behavior. Wasn’t it a sin for him, or is it only a sin for the woman?

  “Look, Heather, you did the right thing, and Kevin did have rather narrow shoulders for his stature,” my mom added for good measure.

  “He never looked me in the eye the whole time he was crying to your mother. What am I, a potted plant, just sitting there like an asshole sprouting leaves?” My dad has always been quite sensitive and requires a lot of attention.

  “Well, I’m glad you finally told me,” I said. How weird if my ex-boyfriend would have had a pinky-swear-secret with my parents, who still associate him with the Sub-Zero man who never showed up.

  It made me feel bad, but at the same time the whole Kevin experience gave me a lot of confidence. He was really my first boyfriend, and I knew I was capable of being loved by a man without having to have sex with him. So now I could just continue on with my life until I found a guy who I wanted to be my boyfriend and could still enjoy being the blue ballee as much as I enjoyed being the blue baller.

  2 Studs and Duds

  The summer before my senior year at USC, I lived at my parents’ house in Woodland Hills. I helped them with their real estate business as I had the three previous summers. After I turned eighteen, I got my real estate license so that I could hold open houses and show property. This was a major improvement over the summers during high school when my real estate responsibilities included manual labor. My parents had more than forty bus benches up and down Ventura Boulevard and throughout the West San Fernando Valley prominently featuring both their faces. The ads said: “Bob and Pam McDonald of Country Club Realtors Welcome You to Woodland Hills.” The bus benches cost quite a bit of money each month, and one hot summer afternoon my dad decided if the bus bench company wasn’t going to clean the dirt and graffiti on them, then my sister and I would.

  My sister Shannon and I were scared of my dad and to this day we have never talked back. Our summer days were usually spent stuffing envelopes for their big mailings. Besides the occasional paper cut and dehydration caused from licking envelopes, it was pretty pleasant as we sat in an air-conditioned house watching The Young and the Restless. Then my dad said, “The bus benches are a wreck! Take a bucket of water, sponges, and rags and wash them down.” He handed us a map of the Valley with red Xs marking each of the benches. Shannon and I obediently gathered up our cleaning supplies, placed them in her car, and whispered to each other, “Is he serious? This is going to suck!”

  Our entire livelihood and college tuitions depended on how many houses my parents sold each year. So if dad felt this was necessary, we did as we were told. He even seemed fine about putting us in harm’s way for the sake of this business. One time he had us pass out goody bags to all the neighbors that included little refrigerator magnets in the shape of houses, pens bearing their names and number, and scratch pads with their faces, so there were more than fifty pages of opportunity to draw glasses and mustaches on my parents. My dad insisted that we not just drop the goody bag off at the mailbox, because that’s lazy, and Bob and Pam go the extra mile—well, they don’t, but their kids do—and by mile I mean mile-long driveways up hills to drop this crap off at the doorstep. Sometimes the owner would come out and we’d have to say, “Oh hello. Here is a goody bag with information about the current real estate market and household gifts compliments of Bob and Pam!”

  Our primary fear—way greater than the unfriendly owners we encountered—was vicious dogs. When we first started handing these bags out, we were able to get our friends to do it with us and my dad paid them by the hour. After a few days, everyone had quit, the initial excitement of making money in real estate had worn off, and my upper-middle-class friends didn’t need the money that bad. But Shannon and I still had eleven hundred bags left to deliver.

  I don’t blame my friends for quitting, especially after we all witnessed my friend Liz screaming at the top of her lungs, “Dogs, dogs! Save yourself!” while running for her life down a steep driveway as two Doberman pinschers chased her, barking incessantly. Liz ran so fast she fell with all the goody bags. Pens popped open with their springs exposed as the ink stained her along with her own blood. Shannon and I wiped Liz’s blood off the pens and put them back together to use in another goody bag. Hey, they were twenty-five cents a pen. Luckily, people don’t sue like they do today, and Liz has a nice scar to remember her last day in the real estate business.

  I know you’re probably thinking, why didn’t they just get some Mexicans. But my parents’ philosophy was why go Mexican when you can go offspring.

  So there Shannon and I were on the corner of Winnetka and Ventura Boulevard with our buckets and sponges ready to wash some commercial bus benches. First, we had to ask the people waiting for the bus to please get up so that we could wash the “Fuck You” off our mother’s face. They were confused about what was happening, but I didn’t have time to explain how marketing worked by blanketing an area with the same message. As Shannon and I started to squirt the 409 and industrial cleansers, we were whistled at by a bunch of day workers in the back of a pickup truck. “Hey mamacita,” they yelled while licking their lips, wetting their fingers, then wiping down their mustaches. “Why don’t you wash my dickita next?”

  I could tell the people now standing for the bus felt sorry for us but were also relieved when the bus eventually arrived. I had to admit the bus bench appeared more professional, and now it looked more like “uck Y” on my mom’s face. The next bench was farther down the boule
vard and really needed our help, since it had my dad saying in a drawn bubble, “I sell cock.” It was done in permanent marker. After scrubbing for fifteen minutes in the 104-degree Valley heat, constantly wiping away the sweat dripping down from my forehead, I began contemplating if we should just attempt to make “cock” look like “condos.” It would read “I sell condos,” which they sometimes did, so it would be truthful advertising. Then a carload of Crespi boys stopped at the red light across from us. We went to an all-girl Catholic high school and Crespi was our brother school.

  “Oh my God, Shannon. It’s a carload of Crespi Critters” (their nickname). “Shannon, duck! Get down!” I screamed as if it was a drive-by in Compton. The light changed, and as they made their left turn, passing us, I heard squeals and laughter. “Nice ass and bus bench,” one of them yelled.

  “This is awful. Those guys are on the football team. They’re going to tell everyone!” Shannon said as she got up, dusted off her knees, and tended to the graffiti again.

  “Don’t worry, Shannon. They don’t even know us,” I assured her.

  Just then I felt a splash of wetness hit my face and bubbles enter my nostrils as I realized the car had come back around and the boys were spraying us with shaken-up cans of 7UP. One of them screamed, “Hey McDonald whores, is it true over one billion have been served?” And then they sped away. Having McDonald as a last name was not one of the joys of growing up.

  In grammar school, my mom told me to tell the teasers that our dad owned McDonald’s, which worked beautifully and made me popular for about a week until a smart-ass kid started talking about franchising and how it’s not possible to own all the McDonald’s. At that point of utter humiliation, we decided to gather up our janitorial supplies with a staggering thirty-eight more bus benches left and simply drive home. Shannon, who was always more sensitive than me, began crying. This really helped our cause when I explained to my dad what had happened and that it simply wasn’t safe for us to be out there, besides being unfair to the people who actually use the rapid transit system. For once, my dad admitted he was wrong and never asked us to do it again. (Actually, once there was a shooting and my parents’ bus bench was shown on the local news stations several times with the blood spatter on it. My mom said it was the best free advertising they ever got.)

  At twenty-one, I enjoyed getting dressed up and showing nice houses. My parents put my face in their ads promoting their properties. My mom received calls asking specifically for me and she loved it. I remember hearing her on the phone: “Yes, she is gorgeous. Well, she’s my daughter. Ha, ha. You know, I was Badger Beauty at the University of Wisconsin. Yes, Gena Rowlands was one a few years before me, except that I was the only woman in the history of the university to be a Badger Beauty and military ball queen in the same year. Ha, ha. Well, you should see Heather in person. She’s tall and willowy. ... Of course, she can wear a skirt to the showing. Do you prefer hair worn up or down? Great. She’ll meet you at the house—it’s more of a mansion really—at three p.m. today. OK. It was so great speaking to you, Houshang.” And only then did my mom hang up the phone.

  “Mom, what are you doing? You just completely pimped me out. You sound like Heidi Fleiss on the phone, describing me and insisting I wear a skirt,” I said.

  “Oh come on. He thought you were beautiful in the Los Angeles Times homes section ad, and I’m proud that you came from my loins. Now just go to that vacant house on the top of Mulholland and meet him. He’s a Persian Jew, so you know he’s got money. The only person who is going to buy that monstrosity with its marble and pillars is a Persian. Why did they add all those little rooms that lead to nowhere? It’s just a total abortion.”

  “Mom, can you please not refer to an abortion as additions that were done without permits? It’s really an insult to abortions,” I argued.

  “You know what I mean. Anyway, if you want your tuition paid for next year, you better try to sell this house. So bring an offer form and put on some heels. He’s a leg man.”

  At least I had my summer evenings to look forward to. Many were spent in Manhattan Beach, where a lot of my sorority sisters were living for the summer. One night, we were at a dance club called 12th Street. This hot spot rocked, because it was full of volleyball players, and I loved looking out at the sea of tall babeness. The only negative was that the dance floor had these lights that did not mix well with my two porcelain veneers. My girlfriend screamed in horror and told me to shut my mouth. She said it looked like my two teeth on either side of my two front teeth looked black. I always had to remember as I danced to “I Like Big Butts” not to smile with teeth, which was a total challenge, because that song just makes you so happy.

  On this particular night, a cute girl approached me and asked, “Would you like to be on a new dating show?” Now, I had always dreamed of being on a show called Love Connection, but this show was called Studs. It hadn’t come out yet. It was described as two guys who were known as the Studs who go on three individual dates with three women. So the women end up going on two dates, one with each guy. Then the guys guess which girl said what about them. In the end, each guy reveals who he liked most before the taping began, and so do the girls. If the guy chooses the girl who also chose him and he had the most correct answers, then they get to go on a free trip together to some place exotic like Baja California. My friends all encouraged me to do it, thinking I’d be so funny on it.

  The next day, I called the office of Studs and they asked me to come right in. They interviewed me about the kind of guy I was looking for. I said, “He has to be tall, dark, professional, and someone who carries a briefcase.” Well, I guess they loved that briefcase line, because I had two dates set up for later in the week and a taping set for the following Monday.

  The first date was with a twenty-seven-year-old real estate investor, perfect with my vast knowledge of real estate. His name was David Feld. He called me, and since he had an accent, I asked where he was from, and he said Israel. That meant he was Jewish, and I’m, of course, Catholic, but this was just one date for a Fox TV show. He was funny and sophisticated. He picked me up at my parents’ house and was well dressed in a nice suit. He took me to Maple Drive, a restaurant in Beverly Hills.

  Studs did not follow us with cameras on our date. We told the producers about it afterward, and they wrote the statements and questions for the live taping. David was total Ricco Suave. He was good-looking, and since he came to the United States when he was twelve, his accent was just strong enough to be sexy. He seemed impressed that I already had my real estate license. David told me that he had had one date already with the other contestant, Jan, and it was fine. But we were given stern instructions from the producers not to talk about our other dates. He walked me to the door and I gave him a big hug, though I really “wanted to mall him.” This was a quote I told the producer, and it was used in the live taping of the episode.

  My second and final date was with Brad. He was an aspiring actor from Texas who worked as a tour guide for Universal Studios. On the phone, Brad told me to wear a really nice dress because after dinner he was taking me to a very special surprise destination. When he came to pick me up, he was wearing a suit, but the suit was light beige, which seemed to fit his personality quite well. He was “light beige,” and that was another quote of mine that was used in the taping. I was wearing an off-the-shoulder black cocktail dress with nylons, black pumps, and pearls when we arrived at a pizza and pasta place in a mini-mall. I felt like such an ass eating my fettuccine Alfredo when a baby in a high chair slinging spaghetti narrowly missed my well-coiffed hair. Brad was beige and boring and so straight-laced. After dinner, which could not have cost more than thirty dollars for the both of us and included “two glasses of white zin” (that was how he described white zinfandel when he took the liberty of ordering it for us, even though I hate white zinfandel because it is too sweet), he took me to the big surprise: the Magic Castle. He said that the only way to get into the exclusive Magic Castle is b
y invitation, and he used his Universal Studios connections to get us in, so it was free to enter. This annoyed me because I knew the Studs’ producer gave the guys seventy-five dollars toward each date, so he actually made a profit of roughly forty dollars on me!

  I’ve never been into magic and I had to suffer through several shows of “where did the card go” in a state of ennui. Brad really felt that being a tour guide at Universal Studios was his best chance of running into Spielberg and ending up in one of his films. I tried to joke, saying, “Yes, especially if he sees your amazing acting chops when the tour bus goes by the Jaws set and you say to the statue of the man fishing, ‘Sir, sir, get out of the water. Sir, sir, something is coming your way, sir.’” He wasn’t even impressed that I knew the tour guide script verbatim. Universal Studios happened to be where we took every visiting relative because it was so much closer than Disneyland. In the end, he got a hug at the door, too.

  When the producer called the next day for our phone interview, I tried to be nice. I said things like “My parents liked him. He was very polite.” But then the producer said, “Click, click. You know what that is Heather?” “No,” I answered. “That’s people turning off their television sets because you are so freaking boring.” I warmed up and started to get more honest and TV-friendly. I added, “I thought I was a good girl, but this guy made me look like Madonna.” This was also a quote the host pitched to Brad when he asked him which date might have said what. Brad kept guessing the other two girls, but for any complimentary quotes he’d guess me. I’d have to tell him on national TV with a smile, “No, I said you had a face only a mother could love.” I felt terrible.

  Meanwhile, during the taping it became more and more clear that Jan, a twenty-eight-year-old nurse with frizzy blonde hair, was in love with David Feld and that they clearly had sex. When the moment came for the Studs to make their choice, David chose me and I chose David. Since he had the most correct answers, we won the trip to Cabo San Lucas. All five of us stood up and shook hands and hugged one another as the credits rolled. Jan came over to me with a tear in her eye and said, “Congratulations.” I really felt for her. Being a virgin, I could not even imagine how I would feel if I had sex with someone and he did not pick me. Why didn’t he pick Jan? She was a sure thing, but men like challenges, and he’d already conquered her.