(Ok...hat off now.) I was looking at photos of my beautiful teenage niece on Facebook and started thinking about how scary it will be when Allie starts going to dances and on dates. Will she take my advice or listen to my opinion about the boys she likes? Hopefully, she will NOT be like me and she WILL be smart enough to listen to her mother. What time and grief that would've saved me!
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| arMy Younger Days before the Disaster Date..... back when I thought I was fat and hated my hair color.....if I could smack THAT me now, I would. Hind sight really is 20/20. Sigh. |
We will have to give her all of the lectures about what's appropriate (which Im sure she wont listen to) and we will have to say things like "We don't advertise what's not for sale! Change your skirt!" like my father did when I tried to wear inappropriate things out of the house. And then we will probably bore her with our own personal experiences. All of those dates that went well....or went very wrong.
And that's when I remembered it. The Disaster Date. UGH!!!
I'm wondering if anyone else has horror stories like this. If so, Id love to hear them. I'd like to know that I'm not alone in the Disaster category. A Bad Date is one thing but DISASTER is just cringe worthy even 21 years later. When people tell me about their "bad dates" I always listen, hoping that we will bond over a story of comparable drama.....only to be disappointed. But THEY seem to feel a lot better after I share mine. Nice.
Let me set it up for you: I was 19 and going to cosmetology school in Hackensack, NJ. I met this extremely handsome guy there named Victor (who my mother instinctually, and correctly, disliked). He was very charming and quite hot. Did I mention that he was good looking? Every girl in that school, myself included, oogled him pathetically. One day, the stars were aligned in my favor and he asked me out on a date. We decided to double date with the only other straight guy there, Curtis, and my friend, Shannon.
Shannon and I drove to Victor's apartment to pick him up. We decided to take my car to get dinner, which was a 2 door Toyota Tercel. Victor and Curtis were both really tall, so Shannon and I volunteered to sit in the back. Things were going fabulously at this point. I was having a good hair day, I was dressed in my cutest ensemble and I was particularly witty that evening. All things which worked in my favor. Conversation was great. I felt like Cinderella. My confidence level was skyrocketing.
We got food and decided to go back to Victor's place to eat. We pulled into the parking lot and that's when things went wrong.
Victor got out of the car, moved his seat up and held out his hand to help me out of the back. I was so busy swooning and thinking how dreamy things were that I failed to notice that the front seat belt had wrapped around my foot. I took his hand, went to launch myself out all gracefully and then....
BAM!
Face plant into the pavement. Face. Plant. Into. Pavement.
I kinda remember everyone running to me and the "Oh my God"s and, as most people do when they see someone wipeout, laughter. When someone untangled my foot and I realized that embarrassment had not killed me as I wished it had, I rolled over. The laughter stopped immediately and I saw three horror filled faces staring at me.
Groggily, I asked, "Is it bad? What's wrong?" No one answered. Just mouths hanging open and eyes bulging.
My ankle hurt, my jeans were ripped, my palms were sliced up from trying to catch myself on pavement and there was a lot of blood coming from somewhere. Old Prince Charming himself picked me up and carried me into his house. He sat me down on the counter in the bathroom and that's when I got to see the carnage firsthand.
I had fallen face first, as I already mentioned, with the spot between my eyebrows (just above the bridge of my nose) being the first thing to hit. All that force on that one little spot. My forehead was all cut up, and my nose was bloody and turning black and blue. By the time they finished cleaning me up and feeding me alcoholic beverages, both of my eyes were starting to turn black and blue. And I had a headache that felt like I had gone a round with Mike Tyson.
The rest of the evening was uneventful and irrelevant. Every time they looked at me, someone would laugh or try really hard to stifle the giggles. I remember being kissed but being mortified really overshadowed that. I couldn't wait until we left and Shannon drove me to my father's house.
When I walked thru the door, my father was digging around in the fridge for food. He called out cheerfully from the other side of the refrigerator door, "How was your date?"
"Okay. I think. I'm not sure. There was a problem." I sounded calm. It could've been the liquor.
Until the day I die, I will not forget the look on my father's face when he closed that door and saw me. It was terror and rage mixed together. "J*sus F*cking C*rist, Vic!! A PROBLEM???? What the f*ck happened on this date?!! Did HE do this to you??!!"
Looking back, I can see how it would've been wise to ease him into the situation. But I was 19 and dramatic and, like most teenagers, completely oblivious to how parents think in regards to their children. Being a parent now, I can imagine how upset he must have been. Earlier, I had skipped out the door looking like a million bucks on my way to a date with Don Juan... and I came home looking like I got my ass kicked by a street gang. Two black eyes, nose and forehead cut up, blood on my shirt, pants ripped and my hands wrapped in bandages.
Disaster date.
Victor and I went out a few more times. And then he got a job as an ad model for a cigarette company. His ego became inflated. I was disgusted by his attitude and he felt he could do better in the girlfriend department, so we broke up.
However, what sealed the deal was when I walked into a hair color seminar and he was telling the story about our first date to a group of friends while waiting for the seminar to begin. It was far more humiliating and embarrassing hearing it from his perspective, which had recently been infused with major assholeness. It's that version that I hear in my head now.
My mother was right. He was a total jerk. And now he's a nobody.
Flash forward 15 years and I went on the best first date of my life. My mom really liked him, so I married that guy. Mom knows best. I wonder if Allie will agree. Maybe she'll at least listen to her Nana.
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