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

  “What?”

  “Just hold me,” he somewhat demanded.

  So I wrapped my arms around his back and kind of hugged him as my confused face stared up at the crown moldings. I then looked at him and saw his mouth open, his eyes roll back into his head, and he let out a moan.

  I had no idea what had just happened, but then all of a sudden he just got off of me and stood up. He reached out his hand and helped me up and then abruptly said, “OK, I’ll walk you out.”

  Whoa. Wait. What had just happened? Then I noticed a perfect circle of wetness on his khakis just to the left of his penis. Oh my God, he just ejaculated, after only one minute of making out! He didn’t even touch one of my boobs. My bodysuit was still all snapped, secure, and tucked into my jeans. My belt was still fastened; my boots were still on.

  I know I’m hot, but not that hot.

  I was in total shock as Fred walked me down the staircase through the front door and to my car. He gave me a quick peck and I got into my car, locked my doors, put on my seat belt, started the engine, and drove off saying to myself, “What the fuck just happened? And where the fuck is the 405? Get me the fuck out of here.”

  I talked to myself the whole drive home. “Oh, so that’s it? He comes and then I’m out, asked to leave like a hooker? Then again, if being a high-class hooker was this easy, it might be worth it.”

  I was obsessed with street and high-class prostitutes since I was a little girl and saw the made-for-TV movie Dawn, starring Eve Plumb, who played Jan on The Brady Bunch. Dawn was a teenage hooker in Hollywood and walked the streets in a brown suede minidress.

  I was a hooker for Halloween for three years straight from the second through fourth grades. As I put my shiny outfit together and put on a ton of makeup, my mom never bothered to ask me—her eight-year-old daughter—what I was dressed as. One Halloween, I added roller skates to my costume and was a hooker on wheels. I guess so that I could turn more tricks quicker. Of course, I loved hooker outfits. Who doesn’t? I loved Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver For a ten-year-old hooker, she really seemed to have her shit together. Either that or girls with raspy voices just come off sounding like they have a better understanding of how the world works.

  I’ve always been fascinated that women could have sex for money. Victoria Principal played a mistress in a TV movie once, too. Her character was an actress who was kept by a wealthy married man. In one scene, she came bouncing out in a bikini to tell him that she’d booked a part in a soap opera that week, to which he replied, “But next week is my business trip to Chicago and that is our only time together.”

  As a nine-year-old watching this, I yelled at the TV: “Hey asshole! Let her film the part. It’s a soap opera. It could lead to her being a regular. Maybe even a daytime Emmy. What kind of monster are you?”

  Thankfully, my parents weren’t home to hear my tirade. I continued: “Victoria, dump him. You could be on the cover of Soap Opera Digest.”

  But Victoria’s character knew she had to go to Chicago. That was part of the deal, which also included a gorgeous condo with a pool. Later in the movie, the married man died, and since she was just his mistress, he left her nothing in his will. In the end, poor Victoria Principal had to resort to being just another high-class call girl in Beverly Hills in order to sustain her lifestyle and pay her homeowner fees.

  But I was not Victoria Principal in an ABC television movie. I was Heather McDonald, a soon-to-be college graduate.

  I thought about my options: What if I continued dating Fred and what just happened became our entire sex life? Forget ever experiencing an orgasm—I may never get to experience sex at all. It will just be him laying on me for one, maybe two minutes while I hug him and then he comes.

  Gosh, he didn’t even diddle my do. Nothing. But now it all made sense; this is why this total package of a guy was never married and never had any kids. What was the surgery he had when he was with the last girlfriend, the model? Maybe she was hoping some doctor could fix his erectile dysfunction, and until she knew he could sustain an erection for longer than ninety seconds, she wasn’t going to bother to learn how to make soup.

  Fred called me several times after that night and I never returned his calls. At the time, I didn’t tell my friends the awful truth about his pre-ejaculation problem. I just said that it didn’t work out between us. He called me again a couple months later and I answered the phone at my parents’ house. I must have given him that number at some point. He asked me what happened and he joked, “Did I have bad breath?”

  Hardly. More like bad control of sperm.

  But instead I said, “No, I just had graduation and had to move and everything.”

  He invited me to a Fourth of July party on his boat in the marina. Even though I had no plans other than eating hotdogs with my parents, sister, and her kids in our backyard in the Valley, I decided to pass and politely said, “Oh, I would love to, but my boyfriend’s family is expecting me.”

  He answered, “Your boyfriend? Well, lucky guy. Have fun and call me if he ever makes you mad. Ha, ha.”

  I replied, “Sure will.”

  Telling a guy who you are no longer interested in that you have a boyfriend or better yet that an old boyfriend and you are going to give it just one more try is the best and easiest way to end it with someone. How can anyone compete with a relationship that has such history? Sometimes I would get so into the made-up ex-boyfriend who is begging for me back story that I almost believed it myself. I would be sad when I hung up the phone and had to face the reality that yes, the guy I’m not into anymore won’t ever call me again, but neither will the ex-boyfriend who doesn’t exist.

  I didn’t find out how old Fred really was until after we stopped seeing each other. I was with some friend of my parents and I noticed an old USC yearbook in their bookcase, so I started nipping through it when I saw Fred’s face with a bunch of fraternity brothers from the early seventies. Was it entirely possible that Fred had dodged Vietnam? Disgusting! Good thing I was never hired to be an age guesser at an amusement park.

  Many years later, I was at the Jonathan Club with my friend Tara when we saw Fred. He was married to a very pretty twenty-five-year-old former flight attendant. Tara, being a member of the club, had given me all the details. Fred was playing with and was completely enthralled by his child, who appeared to be about one. They’ve since had two more children. Who knows how? Was he able to fix his problem by going to one of those doctors I hear advertised on FM radio, or did they have to do infertility treatments, or are they in fact his personal trainer’s children?

  Fred’s wife did seem completely relaxed as she lounged, thumbing through the latest issue of Cosmopolitan magazine and drinking her margarita while Fred and Maria chased after the toddler. Maybe for them this was the perfect life.

  On the bright side, Fred introduced me to blended mango margaritas, the most delicious drink ever, and taught me a very valuable dating lesson: if he seems too good to be true, he could be a pre-ejaculator.

  4 Phil Roberts

  After graduating from USC, I lived with three of my girlfriends in a big ugly pink flamingo-colored apartment building built circa pre-Heather. It had yellowish cottage cheese ceilings and a balcony overlooking a pool that could have carried the West Nile virus. But who cared? At least it was in the heart of Brentwood on the west side of LA. The four of us called it the “pink palace” because to us it was a palace for USC princesses who lived more like pigs with clothes and makeup and take-out containers hanging off ceiling fans.

  Right after college graduation I dated a guy I had briefly dated in the fourth grade and therefore believed might just be my soul mate. He knew I was a virgin and on one rainy afternoon in this very apartment when we were all alone I briefly considered losing my virginity to him but quickly changed my mind when in a moment of clarity I realized I personally knew three girls he had devirginized in high school. The first girl was in the backseat of his Mustang, the second on Zuma Beach by lifeguard st
ation 6, and the third girl was on the first girl’s bed at her seventeenth birthday party. Despite our history, mostly at roller-skating parties held on Catholic holidays, I could not let him be “the one,” out of respect for myself. I could not be #4 on his D-V’d list. So we broke up and I focused on what I thought would be my career.

  My first job out of college was as an assistant buyer for the department store Robinsons May, which was eventually bought out by Macy’s. I nailed the position because on my way to the on-campus interview, I ran into my friend, who told me every question they asked. I was able to wow them with my prepared answers about how it had always been my life’s desire since I first began removing clothes from my Barbie dolls to one day be a buyer of a major department store. “And Robinsons May is the grandest of them all...”

  When the interviewer asked if I had any more questions, I did the classic interviewing trick and asked, “Yes, I’m so naturally curious. What made you decide to get into human resources? It seems like it would be just so fascinating!” The woman lit up. Sucker! She then told me her whole life story about being a flight attendant (pretty juicy story, and as I continued to ask for more details, I got them), about how she got involved with a married pilot, then took an indefinite medical leave of absence recommended by her psychiatrist. She eventually found herself in a totally new field. As I convinced her that the pilot was still in love with her and she should just continue to fly that airline in the hopes of running into him and accrue frequent flyer miles, I knew the interview could not have gone better and the job was mine.

  Within days, I realized the job was not for me. I could never admit it, even when my one friend in our thirty-person training group, Maia, pulled me aside by a stack of sample sweaters and whispered, “What do you think?” I answered with a Stepford wife smile, “It’s great.” Maia then said, “Are you kidding? This totally sucks. I’m getting my résumé together and breaking out by Christmas.”

  It did suck. Maia was right. I was stuck in a cubical all day. I was not choosing clothes and deciding in which store they would best sell. I might as well have been a bean counter on a factory assembly line. The most creative it got was when I piped up in a meeting that we should order more petite sizes for a store in a city that I personally knew had a high Philippine population. Even then, the thirty-year-old bitch I worked for took all of the credit. She was single, a little overweight, and completely passive/aggressive.

  One day, she turned to me and said in a rather snarky tone, wearing an Ann Taylor Loft reject, “This is hard for me to say, but you might want to rethink the length of your skirt. When I give you something to hand to the executives upstairs, that is the only time they see you. Their only impression of Heather McDonald is a twenty-two-year-old in a very short black skirt and heels. Unfortunately, those executives are all male and they have been talking about you. I thought you might like to know.” Thanks, Miss Bitter, for the 411. Of course, I wanted to know this information. What a major turn-on, to think that all the fat older men running the corporate retail offices thought I was this hot slutty thing. It made me feel like I had a leg up on my competition. The last thing I was going to do was start wearing longer skirts to please the bitch whose long shapeless skirt happened to be covered in cat hair every day. Why didn’t someone in upper management pull her aside and hand her a freakin’ lint brush? This was the one exciting thing that happened on the job in the four months I had been there. It was nice to talk to my boring boss about something other than how she was still on the fence about the model and color of Saturn she planned to purchase or lease. “Heather, should I go for the four door or the sportier hatchback?” Actually, I see you in something with a larger dashboard so that you can place all your Beanie Babies on it.

  As much as I enjoyed appearing in my short business suits, I hated wearing suntan nylons every day. One day I chose to wear a pantsuit so that I didn’t have to wear the terribly uncomfortable nylons. In the middle of a meeting, my boss’s boss, an older version of my boss, stopped midsentence and said, “Heather, why aren’t you wearing nylons?” I quickly came up with an excuse. “I was wearing them, but they tore on a chain-link fence I was climbing over in order to save a cat who was stuck up in a tree. So I quickly switched to slacks so as not to be late,” I said, thinking that saving a feline would score me some points. “I just looked down and saw your veiny foot sticking out and it just shook me to my core.” She seemed to visibly shiver as she said this. What was the deal with wearing nylons? I hope and pray they never come back in style unless, of course, I develop varicose veins; then I guess I’d welcome them to camouflage my blue bulges. But still they were just so damn constricting, pinching my fat roll right at my waist, and downright itchy. Sometimes during the day I’d start scratching like a dog with fleas.

  At the end of a workday, the minute I got into my car in the underground parking lot, I pulled my skirt up, rolled the tight, restricting control-top panty hose down, and then threw them in the back seat of my car and let my flower breathe. I didn’t even care that a coworker in accounting got into the car parked next to me as I wrestled with myself to pull them off.

  While working at Robinsons May, I lived for the weekend. When five p.m. on Sunday rolled around, I routinely found myself entering a deep depression, which meant either I needed to get a prescription for Valium or face the fact that this was not what I should do with my life. Still, it never occurred to me to quit. I’d never quit anything in my entire life except as a little kid when an unexpected storm blew away my lemonade stand. So I made the best of the two nights and two days before my Mondays came around again.

  Saturdays in the fall were great, because just about every other weekend, there was a USC football game to attend. The morning of game day was very busy for me. I had to figure out an outfit that was flattering but not trying too hard, since it was a sporting event. Still, I needed to get a lot of attention once there. I needed comfortable shoes, since there was a lot of walking, but they certainly couldn’t be Rockport tennis shoes. It was usually warm in the afternoon but cooled down at night, so I needed something where I could wrap a sweater around my flat ass but not appear like my goal was to camouflage it. Also, I was going back to my alma mater, so every other Saturday was an opportunity to run into someone old or meet someone new, which I did at one particular game.

  My girlfriends and I didn’t have a lot of money. We relied on guys we’d meet at tailgate parties to provide us with free tickets. We found parking at the residence of either a Crips or Blood gang member’s home because that is who lived around the coliseum. They graciously allowed you to park on their lawn for only twenty dollars. No, this wasn’t the safest choice for four white sorority girls, but it was a helluva lot cheaper than the USC parking lots, whose extravagant cost would prevent us from having the cash to buy drinks if no guy offered to purchase us a cold beverage. Besides, when we walked around the Crips’ hood, we felt secure, as our sorority had sponsored numerous self-protection courses. We all learned how to knee someone in the balls, discovered the power of an elbow to an eyeball socket, and how to yell “No, No, and No” during confrontations. Also, we had come to the conclusion that gang members who raped USC sorority girls and took their lavaliere (a necklace with your Greek letters on it) as proof to get into the gang was just a rumor started by a whitey to promote bad public relations for the neighboring gang members.

  Once we reached the actual coliseum, we bounced around from pre-party to tailgate party, collecting our tickets and free drinks. As my Amstel Light beer buzz set in, so did the heat from the September sun. I felt unstoppable as we walked through the crowded stadium to our seats while being leered and hollered at. Most people were there to see a football game. I was there solely to party and walk the grass runway to show off my new outfit. A USC football game was by far the best singles bar around.

  At halftime, the place to go and get drinks was the stand outside of tunnel 26. That is where recent graduates hung out and that’s where I
met Phil.

  Phil and his friend Nick started talking to us as we waited in line for a pretzel. Phil was the best-looking person I’d ever flirted with and he had the “Zed card” to prove it. A Zed card was what models had that showed them in a bunch of different looks on one card for modeling auditions. Phil’s Zed card had photos of him as a young dad, as a surfer, and as a doctor holding medical records with a perplexed look on his face. But Phil wasn’t just a model for the Ford Modeling Agency; he also specialized in hand modeling. Plus he had a sales position selling industrial parts. He was thirty and had graduated six years before me, and he was even in a great frat. He continued to buy me beers and we never went back to our seats. This was fine with me. I usually held up my two fingers to make the victory sign and participated in the Trojan marching band song. Then I’d get antsy and walk around in a circle where the bathrooms and food stands were until someone else noticed me.

  Thank God, I wasn’t driving that day, because by the end of the fourth quarter, Phil and I were making out against a graffiti-stained wall outside the coliseum until my friend Tara screamed, “Heather Ann McDonald, what are you doing? We’ve been looking for you. We’re leaving.”

  “Don’t you want to go to Julie’s Bar and Grill with Phil and his friend, Nick?” I slurred.

  “No. Nick is disgusting and you are coming with us!” Tara wasn’t one for mincing words and she physically pulled me away. I managed to hand my Robinsons May assistant buyer business card to Phil. Stumbling all the way back to the hood, passing a couple of makeshift memorials of Jesus candles and empty bottles of Colt 45, was excruciating after drinking since eleven that morning. Now it was dark, but luckily we found our car and made it home safely. I laid down at 7:45 p.m. and didn’t budge until the next morning. Once, I got so excited for a party I was throwing that I started drinking way too early and passed out at ten p.m. before many of the guests had arrived. When I woke up the next morning, it was as if I had missed Christmas. I had planned this party for months, and all the old friends who came to see me got to see my butt as I slept in a grain alcohol-induced coma on my bed.