Life Lessons with Lola and Me
The sense of satisfaction and personal accomplishment that welled up inside me as Allison and I drunkenly stumbled up the stairs to her apartment was immeasurable. She fumbled with her keys as I persisted for yet another session of inebriated tonsil hockey in the hallway. She relented, giving me about three or four seconds of kissyface before playfully slapping me away. It seemed like ten years had passed by the time she got that fucking door unlocked but I didn’t mind waiting. In fact, I could have waited until the Second Coming. I was elated. I was in the throes of where every bachelor hopes to be when he makes an appointment to hang out with a woman. My poignant witticisms and exaggerated depth of character I displayed at the bar only a few hours earlier were deftly delivered. I reigned in my only-child narcissism and suffered through her long-winded replies when I asked her about herself because I really didn’t care that much at all. I always thought Allison was a babe, and not because of her personality or life story. My farces worked. My approach paid off. I was going home with a girl and we were going to have sex. Yeah buddy, now it’s Scott’s time to shine. Sayonara sixty-day dry spell, here comes the rain!
We spilled into her apartment and I knocked a stack of mail and her roommate’s keys to the floor as I crashed into her end table. She narrowed her eyes at me with a look that said “settle down or you’re going home” and I got my shit together. Knowing my luck, her roommate would sleepily drift into our parlay and monopolize the conversation turning me into the de facto third-wheel on my own date. In hushed tones, Allison showed me to the living room, excused herself, and I plopped myself down on her couch trying to patiently wait out her return so we could do the damn thing already.
As I played with the fringes on the blanket that hung over her couch and my senses adjusted to this new, strange place, I began to wonder what the hell was taking so long for her to come back. I looked down the hallway and saw the light from underneath the door to her room so I figured she was getting changed, charging her phone, or doing whatever it is girls do when they disappear into their bedrooms. I thought I heard what sounded like baby talk and childish giggling but I dismissed it as me being drunk and resigned myself to continue waiting for her to come back.
I yawned. A minute passed. Another minute. Two minutes. FIVE MINUTES?! I kept checking the clock on my phone and it turned out I had been sitting there for ten fucking minutes. What the hell, man? We were supposed to be naked and rolling around in her room by now. My excitement and feelings of success were slowly spiraling into despair, agitation, and maybe unsurprisingly, exhaustion. I checked the clock on my phone: 1:34 am.
This sucks. “Fuck this,” I thought. “Five more minutes and I’m getting the fucking fuck out of here.” Either she was telepathic and acted on cue, or I was really good with timing my frustrations because her door swung open and she sauntered out, still wearing the same shit she had on when I took her to the bar. Something was different, however. She was cradling something in her arms. What was it? Drugs? A bottle of fine wine? Dirty movies? She made her way into the living room slowly, the apartment was poorly lit so I couldn’t make out exactly what she was holding, but my dejection was turning back into excitement so I didn’t give a shit, it could’ve been a live hand grenade. Whatever.
“This is LOLA! She’s my baby girl,” Allison announced quietly with sing-songy, almost patronizing, absolutely cutesy fervor. A kitten. She was holding a tiny tiger-striped kitten. No hand grenades, pornography, or mind altering-substances. In my drunken attempts to recollect, I drudged up a liquid memory of her saying something about how she just got a cat. I thought nothing of it though. Cats do their own thing, but this, this was a kitten and infant animals have a way of making everyone in the room pay attention to nothing else except them, this time was no different. Might as well introduce myself so we can move on to the reason I came here in the first place.
“Hi Lola! I’m Scott!” I whispered, feigning my excitement while introducing myself to this feline. The kitten meowed and buried her head into Allison’s cardigan. I yawned again and forced a charming smile. I tried to scratch the kitten’s head but it shied away from me.
“Oh, she doesn’t like you!” Allison said, her hushed tones carrying the nascent scent of accusation and judgment. I couldn’t tell if her tone was serious or if she was being a flirt, I went with the latter but still, my senses were dulled by hops and barley and the ever-increasing sleepiness wasn’t putting any edge on my wit.
I cracked a toothy grin. “Maybe she can tell the bad ones from the good ones, ha ha,” I retorted, in a feeble attempt to be coy. I probably thought I was being real smooth, but in truth, I probably sounded like this was my first time doing this sort of back and forth.
“Hmmmm, maybe.” There was no playfulness in her tone. Actually, it was “deadpan” personified. A swing and a miss from Signorino! Ugh. I plopped down on the far end of the couch and expected Allison to sit down next to me. Instead, she took up residence in the recliner on the far side of the room with her eyes fixated squarely on the kitten. Jesus Christ. Am I really sitting by myself on this couch in this girl’s living room while this girl fusses over this kitten after we made out, aggressively, like a half-hour ago? Does this cat have any idea how much fucking money I spent on this date? The kitten mewed and Allison went from quirky girl from the record store to full blown insane:
“Yes Lola, Scott’s no good. Scott’s creepy, isn’t he? Scott’s blazer looks stupid, doesn’t it? Scott’s overdressed” and on and on and on it went. The kitten mewed again, I yawned, and the feelings of hopelessness crept back in mixed with full blown frustration. I tried to keep up some idle conversation but Lola was the apple of Allison’s eye. My efforts were futile and my eyes started to get heavy with sleep and it was all I could do to fight passing out. I wanted to sleep, ideally with Allison, but I resigned myself to that not happening. Allison rocked the cat back and forth, coddling it with more baby talk, and I was pissed. I didn’t understand why this chick invited me up to her apartment after copiously making out with me at the bar, on the way home from the bar and in her hallway if all she was going to do with dick around with this minx. Look, at the time I wasn’t one of those people that just “…wasn’t a cat person,” or whatever. I was an avid animal person, and to this day, I still don’t eat the fucking things. However, this night slowly turned from me quenching a drought, to me getting cockblocked by a goddamn kitten. It’s not like I was a stranger to being cockblocked, sure, I’ve had the more attractive and exponentially more charming friend ruin one or two chances with the ladies in my day; I’ve been put on hold so the girl I was courting could tend to her crying and vomiting roommate and sent home as a result of such because it just “…wasn’t a good time for me to stay over.” But, JESUS CHRIST DUDE, I’ve never been bested by a kitten before. Why am I still sitting here, yawning incessantly listening to this girl tell me about Lola’s first time at the vet? This was not the night I had envisioned; about forty five minutes earlier I was certain I had it in the bag and that there was no way I was going home without at least getting my dic-…
…I awoke several hours later sitting upright, fully clothed and very much alone. The blanket that was once draped over the couch now wrapped around my person. I stood up and that’s when the hangover took hold: the inside of my skull screaming as a result of the alcohol borne dehydration I had inflicted upon myself just a few hours earlier, my stomach churning from doing somersaults, barrel rolls, and corkscrew spirals as my liver worked overtime to purge the toxins from my body, the inside of my mouth drier than the Gobi desert bedecked with the taste of personal failure. Allison was gone, retired to her bedroom most likely, and apart from the whir of the heater, her apartment was darker and more silent than a tomb. Bleary-eyed, I checked the clock on my phone: 5:27 am. I heard the sounds of rain and early-morning Philadelphia commuter traffic seep through the window. I stumbled to her sink, grabbed a glass from the dish rack, swished some water around in my mouth, splashed some on my face, took a gander down the hallway – no signs of life. All the better. I got the fuck out of there as quietly and as quickly as I could so I wouldn’t wake either Allison or her roommate, sparing myself any morning-after awkwardness. Similarly, I quickly suppressed any urge to take Lola from Allison and let her loose in a heavily wooded section of Fairmount Park as retribution.
After a physically painful and mentally tortuous drive across town, I got back to my apartment and called myself out of work. I climbed into bed reflecting on the lessons I learned from the previous night:
1) Clearly I’m far less interesting than a new kitten
2) Staying up all night partying isn’t a skill that hones itself with age I really lost any ability to do so with the real world responsibilities that take hold after college
and
3) Maybe I had this night and Allison’s intentions pegged all wrong. Sure we got drunk, sure we made out. Sure, to me this seemed like a sealed deal. However, I rationalized that really any disappointment I felt was on me and me alone. Just because you take a girl out and spend some money and then she subsequently invites you over afterward doesn’t automatically mean she’s going to sleep with you.
My feelings of “Shame on you Lola for diverting my date’s attention from me to you. Shame on you Allison for your crazy cat lady bait and switch.” were quickly replaced with “Shame on you, Scott Signorino. Shame on you for taking for granted a solid date with someone who gave up their Thursday night to spend it with you. Shame on you for your feigned interest and your exaggerated stories about yourself just so you could have some sort of sexual validation to remind yourself that you were worth a salt.”
Shame on me indeed.