The Ballad of Dream Date Jimmy – Part One

Never Date a Writer. You Will Always be Nothing but Fodder.

I’d been working at the café for a few months when Jimmy first walked in. Tall and lanky, he walks slightly stooped when he approaches the counter, hands shaking as he hands me bills and change.  He has these full lips I find appealing and want very badly to bite down on, hard. His eyes are the perfect shade of puppy dog.  Jimmy doesn’t woo me with his stellar good looks, which are in all likelihood debatable given my penchant of falling for brains before beauty. Every day he leaves a small stack of books and magazines neatly piled on his table for me to collect – I happily ignored the fact that in his attempt to make contact with me he was also giving me more work to do. I think he’s poetic and smarter than me and that’s how a man reels me in – can I learn something from you? Can I absorb your intellect into my own? The thought of their hands on my body not repulsing me being the second factor towards total enamoration.

Jimmy is a yes to both and I spend the next few weeks poring over his little “gifts” – it wasn’t that he’s showing me things I’ve never seen before, it’s how much I love the exact same things. Adbusters and graffiti magazines mixed in with Beat poets and authors.  I’m obsessed. I start collecting things I want to pass on to him – Juxtapoz and Vonnegut, shit like that – stuff he’s probably heard of as well but humors me the way I humor him so we can surreptitiously learn things about one another without having to actually muster enough courage to engage in real conversation.

After the intellectual and sexual anticipation reaches maddening heights I finally can’t take it anymore. When I leave to drive around and smoke a joint on my lunch break I sit down breathlessly at his table, throwing all sense of caution to pot-filled wind and ask him if he smokes. “Smoke what?” which always means they do, so we jet off in my little piece of shit car to get stoned. “You do this on your lunch break every day?” he laughs. “Uh huh” – I’ve perfected how to smoke a bowl while handling my stick shift and steering the car in a calculated dance of elbows and knees – it’s why I’m one of the best drivers in our fucked up little crew. I have an inherent ability to drive with absolute clarity no matter what substance I’m on.  When it’s time to move the acid caravan to someone else’s house to squat in for a few days, I’m the leader of the pack.

We drive around for the next hour talking about poetry and writers and art. A perfect snippet of interaction when you’re charged and vibrant, basking in the attention of someone new. He sings “It’s So Easy to Fall in Love” over and over while I crank up The Misfits and lament the fate of film. He tells me a story about being served cereal for breakfast by Allen Ginsburg that probably isn’t true but had me totally nodding along in fascination anyway. We get back to the café and spend the next half of my shift exchanging giggles and glances. Before he leaves he asks me to meet him at a nearby bar that night to come out with his friends  and I tentatively agree, freaking out the whole time in my usual gnawing paranoid way at the thought of being near someone I don’t know for an extended period of time who makes me so nervous and hoping that in between now and then none of my friends show up with psychedelics or a large dose of amphetamines, a sure way to keep me from doing anything productive or being the least bit charming by nightfall.

I managed to make it to the bar on only a small amount of Dexedrine – just enough to keep me chatty and counter the sleepy effects of smoking far too much pot for my own good. He not only had brought a friend, but they proceeded to house nine beers to my two. I should’ve known then how awful the night was going to be… I should’ve guessed that nothing but horror and violence awaited me…