“You call this spaghetti?” I said, running my fingers through the wet hot strands in the pot, balling it in my fists. “I call it crap!” And I began to throw pasta around the room like a monkey throws poop.
A waiter told me to get out of the kitchen. The chef threatened me with a knife. But too much was at stake. This night had to be perfect, absolutely perfect in every way possible, or I was going to kill myself. I promised this to myself that very morning, as I stared at my disgusting naked body in the bathroom mirror. “You’re disgusting,” I said to myself. “Fuck you.”
Somehow I’d found a woman with dangerously low self-esteem, and frankly it was well earned; she was a beast. But I hadn’t had a date in fifteen years. I don’t remember why. Something to do with a registry? Anyway, the point is a woman agreed to go on a date with me, and she seemed pretty desperate about it. Honestly I don’t even think I needed the gun.
I ran around the kitchen smacking pots and pans from their shelves in a courageous tantrum. “My lady shall have splendor! Splendor, I say!”
“At the very least,” the waiter said, “if you’re going to be back here you should put on pants.”
“I told you, I don’t want to wrinkle them before the big date. It’s a little trick I learned on a show about Seinfeld.”
The dishwasher, a fat man named Reggie, came at me with a spoon. I wrestled him to the ground and bit his ear. He yelped like a doggy in the classic sign of submission and I broke a plate over his head. Blood spurted up and all over my nice blue polo. “Goddamn it!” I said. “Well, that’s it. This shirt is ruined!” I peeled it from my body and walked it over to the nearest boiling pot. The chef didn’t even try to stop me. He was thinking about quitting anyway.
“Do you understand what’s at stake here?” I asked the bewildered staff. I said right into their dumb faces, “This is Martha McNally we’re talking about here… as in recent divorcée, Martha McNally? Stringy hair? About forty-two? She always wears those cat sweaters? I know she’s been in here, guys.”
The kitchen staff duly chastened and made fully aware of the severity of this evening, I headed out to my table.
I waited, and waited, eagerly watching each and every new face that walked in through those glass doors, half wondering if I’d been stood up or if the woman had suffered some horrible automobile accident. “It better be the latter,” I muttered, pouting.
Turns out it was an auto accident, but not the fatal kind. The woman appeared about five minutes later, soaking wet from rain and covered in oil stains. “Sorry I’m late,” Martha said. “I ran into a series of deer.”
“It’s deers,” I corrected her, making like I was going to strike her, but in a really cute playful way. She recoiled only slightly, and then I think she got the joke.
I’ll be honest with you: things began poorly.
The first thing I did was to take the fair lady’s hand, give it a kiss, and then compliment her goodly tits. “You got nice tits,” I said.
But Martha must have had some sort of a complex about her tits, because she took this compliment completely the wrong way. “God,” she said. “The appetizers better be good here.”
“Appetizers?” I said. “What am I, Scrooge McDuck? You’ll be lucky to get a few chicken nuggets out of me.”
Martha turned for the door. I belted out a quick apology, and a reminder of my desperation. “Don’t mind me,” I said. “I’m just nervous. I haven’t had sex in many moons. Please do not judge me by my candor.” For some reason this actually got through to her, and she agreed to stay, provided I sprang for some potato skins. With a dour grimace and tightened lips I nodded my head in the affirmative, and we were off to the races.
The same waiter who’d witnessed my valiant tirade earlier in the kitchen escorted us to our table. He handed us our menus, eyeing with great suspicion the woman sat across from me.
“Excuse me,” I said to the waiter. “Are you staring at her tits? Because the lady doesn’t like people staring at her tits.” I was learning all kinds of things about the opposite sex.
Over the course of a few white wine spritzers I discovered that in fact Martha McNally was not a divorcée; her husband had been murdered.
I tilted my head in concern, my chin resting on my fist. “Was it a really bad murder?”
“Nah,” she said. “It was a pretty regular murder.”
“Well, there’s that at least.”
The waiter brought over two steaming plates of rigatoni and meatballs. I picked up a meatball in my fist and squeezed it, in order to display my strength. I expected Martha to stand up and flash me then and there, but the dame was playing hard to get.
“Would you like some more napkins, sir?” the waiter asked.
“The napkins we have are sufficient,” I said, establishing dominance. The man nodded and walked away.
I did my impression of the waiter for Martha then, which I think the woman found both amusing and keenly insightful. “DUUHHHHHH!” I said with my eyes crossed. “I’M THE WAITER!” Then I made Martha drink more so that she could see how funny I was.
And it worked. My impression of a blowfish started her rolling and my giraffe made her blow snot right out of her nose. By the time I did my kitty cat Martha laughed so hard she farted. For a moment the poor woman looked terribly embarrassed, her face gone red with flush. So I, being a gentleman, farted too.
And suddenly Martha didn’t seem so frightened, or ashamed. For a moment we locked eyes. Martha tilted her head just so, smiled, and farted again.
I nodded, smiled back, and farted once more.
Then we farted in unison. For a moment it was like our own secret language, every sloppy new tone saying more than either of us ever could have hoped to convey in words. In a cloud of noxious vapor we came to know everything about each other, our loves, our hates, and our hopes for the future.
Then we tried to order dessert but the waiter told us that all of the ice cream had melted. By now Martha and I were good and liquored up so we didn’t much care.
With passionate abandon we humped like drunken flounder on the salad bar. I knew this was as good as I was ever going to get so I gave it my all. Full thrust. Divide and conquer. Avast, ye matey…
All around us men and women stared in awe, and children wept. Over the sound of our hairy bellies slapping together I told the onlookers, “What you are seeing is rare and beautiful, like one of those flowers that blooms but once a century.” I finished loudly and Martha ate some lettuce.
In court my lawyers managed to pin the whole thing on Martha. We convinced a jury, fairly easily, that she had used some sort of witchcraft on me.
They gave her the electric chair pretty soon after.
I don’t know what happened to her kids.
I like meatballs.
They are balls of meat.