cakewalk

I love gay guys. Usually, if I see an attractive man, I instinctively know that he must be gay, because I am like Grace and there is no escaping that passion. But unlike Grace, I don’t have a Will. I want a Will, but there aren’t any available. A story for another day.

The thing is, I love to watch gay men on dates. There’s just something unjustly cute about it. If I see a straight couple, I think, “Great! Another frikin’ one! What about me?” I get jealous. I whine. People want to hit me.

But a gay couple is adorable, like puppies in a window.

While visiting my hometown, I stop for a bite at a local restaurant with my best friend and her mother. I order a water, which chills and refreshes my soul. I order pasta and randomly acquire an allergy to mushrooms. I am poking a burnt piece of French bread when I see it:

A table. A table with a sexy twenty-something in glasses and a white button-down shirt.

His perfectly-preened hair makes me feel guilty for the whole fifteen seconds I spent on mine this morning with a $5 brush and an old hair tie.

‘He’s the one,’ I think. ‘I am going to marry this sexy man with emo glasses!’ I affectionately name him Charles and decide that we will have three children named Vladimir, Patricia Josephine T., and Queen Elizabeth. We are going to live next to a river and eat out every night because we both hate to cook. Our life together will be romantic and beautiful.

I watch in horror as an athletic man in slacks enters my field of vision and gives Charles a sensual hug.

No! No! No! …And then, two blinks and I’ve accepted it. ‘Ah,’ I chuckle inwardly, ‘Should have seen that coming. Duh.’

I continue to watch, taking occassional sips of water. Their body language flirts with each other as they make shy conversation. I am enjoying the show; it’s just so darn cute.

They both turn at the same time.

‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’ I think as I hastily look away. I peek at them from the corner of my eye. Neither has looked away. In fact, if I had not been the first culprit, their stares would be quite rude. As I mull this over, I start to get annoyed with their rudenss, and in my annoyance I viciously stir my glass of water with my straw. I am anxious, annoyed, and now my hand is getting sloshed with water.

Woofsh-clang. An icecube shoots out and lands on my spoon.

…

I stare at it.

“I saw that!” our waitress proclaims. “That was pretty cool!”

I give a nervous laugh and reply, “No, you didn’t see anything! Really!”

She laughs at my meager humor and delivers either our meals or the bill. It doesn’t really matter; I’m frazzled enough to eat either.

I lock eyes with her. She has soft brown hair and freckles. She floats as she comes towards me…in a black SUV. A black SUV barreling around the corner as I drudge to my 8AM math class. The vehicle narrowly misses my nose.

Naturally, my first thought is, ‘Bitch.’ My second thought is, ‘Fucking bitch.’

“Nice!” I yell after her. “Thanks a lot!”

Shaking my head, I continue a few paces and reach the crosswalk. Notice, here, that I say I am at a crosswalk. Yes, doll, I use the frikin’ crosswalk! Cross-walk. Break the word up.

A white car speeds past me. I stumble backwards. All I see is that the driver is female and wearing a ponytail. I can’t hunt her down with that kind of vague detail. Drat.

“Also nice! But you hesitated, so you lose ten points!”

Aw, what the heck, she can lose 9.8 points. I’m in a giving mood. But, next time, I’m hurling a grenade through the back window. Match and set.

Now, I’ve pretty much accepted that cars like to run me over. It’s not that I’m a particularly interesting target. My clothes and hair are disheveled. My book-bag is an ordinary, cancerous growth on my hip. There is nothing spectacular about the items I yield at death. In fact, running me over is like beating a boss in super easy mode – you don’t tell your friends about it. Perhaps this is why I would make good roadkill.

Like a possum or a skunk.

It is now roughly noon and I am making my way back across campus. A green something-or-other faces me. The sportsman behind the wheel sizes me up, determines me easy pickings, and speeds up just enough to set me off balance as I jump onto a curb in terror. Arms crossed, I watch him drive away. He reaches the nearby stop sign and half turns to look at me. I glare. He bolts from the scene. ‘Okay,’ I think, ‘I am asking for a machete this Christmas.’

I look at the woman behind the counter. She has black, purposefully poofy hair and I think, “Your hair sucks. What were you thinking?” She tucks a loose strand behind her ear.

“Have you applied for residence hall access with us yet?”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I have. Several times.”

The woman asks for my last name and flips through a wad of papers. “Well, looks like you’re on my big list. So…we’re looking at access maybe later today.”

“That’s what I was told on Thursday.”

“Well, yes, and it hasn’t changed. There are three hundred people on this list and he has to manually input all of them.”

“I meant, I was supposed to have access on Thursday. And there were three hundred people then too.”

“That isn’t to say none of them have been helped yet. Trust me, there are a lot of people coming in here about the same thing.”

So?

“Do you have the number for your on-duty RA?”

“No.”

“Do you have the number for your service desk?”

“No.”

You were supposed to give me those when I moved in, I seethe.

As she scrounges in a closet for a new pad of post-its, I stare at the betta fish on the counter. He is quietly floating around the bottom of the lonely plastic tank. A sticker on the side proclaims, “Hi! My name is ‘Dude’!” Dude, I think, you poor, sick bastard.

Finally, after answering two telephone calls, the woman finds the post-its, carefully opens the package, and writes down the telephone numbers.

“If you knock on the door before 10PM, there should be someone right there,” she adds.

You have never been inside the halls have you?

I thank her without a smile. I slam my body against the door and exit.

My best friend waves a yellow piece of paper at me as I rant.

“That’s cool,” I say. I don’t really look.

“What!? It’s a $25 ticket!”

“Fuck.”

“$25!!!“

“Bastards.”