Jinx (3) A pause. “Now what was I saying?” “Decent.” I mumbled at her. Traffic was moving about as fast as a sloth in slow motion. The police were moving between cars, talking to people, hoping to smell alcohol on their breaths so they could shorten their vacation before it started. It was indiscriminant too. If you were playing loud music or talking animatedly in the car (or just looked scared) you got questioned. I had a sour look on my face, but it wasn’t because of the traffic. “--I mean, I would think you’d be really charming and shit like that. I mean, like I said, you’re a decent looking guy, and funny and sweet.” “Sweet?” “Yeah, like when I got in the car, you opened the door for me. I never had a guy do that before. It was sweet. Like out of a fucking movie from the 50’s or something.” “Ah. That’s just something I do. And you’re right. I try to be a nice guy.” “So why aren’t you dating anyone?” she asked. I sighed. “Do you want the long version or the short version?” Here we go. “What’s that supposed to mean?” “It means pretty girls like yourself, or most girls for that matter don’t want to go out with guys like me. They say they do, they do not.” Madison looked shocked. “That’s fucking bullshit! How can you say that?! It’s bullshit!” “Ok.” I challenged. “Is KC a nice guy? Does he open doors, notice new haircuts, doesn’t look at other girls in public while he’s with you? That sort of thing?” Madison turned to look out the window for a minute while she paused. “Sometimes,” she said finally without looking at me. “That’s just basic stuff, Madison. There’s other stuff like paying for dates and not expecting sex or a make-out session in return. There’s thinking up sweet things to do for anniversaries. Things that I think are normal but that a lot of guys won’t do because they’re assholes.” “SO HOW COME YOU DON’T HAVE A GIRLFRIEND?!” she asked incredulously. I waited a second before I said it: “Because girls are bigger assholes than guys. Most of them even cause guys to be assholes. I mean—nice guys like me are something girls say that they want eventually. So they date a bunch of assholes between now and then. And they pigeonhole the nice guy into this non-threatening, non-sexual being who they come to bitch about their boyfriend, stripping them of their masculinity until they need it to understand their asshole boyfriends. Finally, the nice guy gives up. The only win is to be an asshole, because girls never want to *really* date em. They really prefer to try and change the assholes they’ve become accustomed to dating! And all for superficial dumb ass reasons that they can somehow attach emotions to like: he’s really hot, or he’s got killer abs, or have you seen his car?! It’s ridiculous! Because then they go back to the nice guy and go ‘He’d be perfect if he’d just be nice to me! Why can’t he treat me right?’ And the answer is because if he did, they wouldn’t be interested in him in the first place. And that, makes them bigger assholes than guys.” A pause. A really long pause. I hadn’t meant to rant like that, but she’d asked for it by attacking my pet peeve. Traffic continued to stand still, and so did things in the car. Until she said, “Been saving that up for a while?” “Kinda.” Hell yeah I’d been saving it. “I figured.” She had a strange look on her face that I hadn’t seen her wear before. When she caught me staring, she turned to look out the window again. Then, miraculously, the unthinkable happened: the car ahead of us moved forward and inch. Then another, and then half a foot and still going strong. Merciful Heavens we were moving again! I switched the CD to Weezer, The Blue Album, (which also happens to be my joy CD) before we started moving too fast for me to do so. By the time “My Name is Jonas” was wrapping up, my Camry was clipping along at a good 50 mph again down route 50. It was 12:30 and we still had an hour and a half before we got to Ocean City. Though it could’ve been worse, we could’ve gotten searched. The worst thing about driving though, is that you can’t air guitar to the music. So I satisfied myself by sing mumbling to all the lyrics so as not to disturb whatever was going on in Madison’s head. 15 minutes later she ended the silent treatment with: “So you think I’m pretty?” It caught me off guard. My first and second thoughts were, what the hell? But for different reasons. “Uh yeah—I mean, of course I do.” “And you really believe all that stuff you said about girls?” “Definitely.” She started tracing her finger up my arm. “Then I guess we girls have a lot to make up for, huh?” The phone sex voice was back with a vengeance, and if she kept up with the arm thing, I’d have an orgasm and kill us both. “Not necessarily,” I breathed. I swallowed, “Just be more careful.” “I will.” She continued the arm thing, only way more slowly than before. Where the fuck is God when you need him?! “Madison, the arm thing, with the thing—it’s…distracting.” I did my best not to whine. “Oh come on, Mack, I’m only playing around.” She didn’t stop. And she was slowly adding the you-know-you-wanna-fuck-me look that she was famous for at Record and Tape. I stared hard at the road, but I could feel it on me all the same. My pulse raced, I was breathing heavy, and I was starting to sweat at the corners of my temple. I needed a subject changer, but Madison wasn’t a big Weezer fan, so I had to think fast, but with all the blood rushing to another part of my anatomy, it wasn’t an easy task. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have sex with Madison. Quite the opposite. I mean I’ll be honest about it, I *did* want to fuck her. But that was all it was going to be, a fuck. A good fuck (I think), but a simple fuck nonetheless. And call me old fashioned, call me crazy, call me a fucking idiot, but I didn’t want to “do it” just to “do it.” That’s an asshole thing to do. And besides, when you have sex with someone you care about, you get to do it a bunch more times after that. It’s simple mathematics really: 1 fuck – emotional attachment = lots of awkward bullshit. Whereas, 1 fuck + emotional attachment = whole lotta fucking. And that, my friends--that represents four years of High School math. “Y’know I think I wrote a song about you once.” I told Madison. She stopped rubbing my arm. Finally! “Really? Do you have it with you?” “Yeah I do, in my song notebook, it’s in the trunk.” Mission accomplished. “You gotta let me see it when we get to the hotel. I wanna read it. No one’s ever written a song about me before!” “Well I don’t mention you by name, but the girl I describe in the song I based on you while I was writing it.” “I didn’t know you wrote songs.” Madison said. “Well, I am in a band.” I gave her the sardonic look to match my tone. “I know that, but y’know, I didn’t know you were creative like that.” Ouch. “What’s the name of the song?” she asked me. “Victoria’s Secret.” She laughed. “Only you, Mack. Only you.” And that’s how I made it into Ocean City unmolested (mostly). But what happened next—well that was all Randy’s fault. Goddamn Randy. I still owe him a beating for what happened next. * * * “What do you mean, I’m not on the list?!” I asked the attendant. “My friend checked in yesterday, we should be on the list.” We were standing inside The Sandy Beach motel’s management office. My hands were beginning to ball up into fists, and my right eye was twitching. “That’s just what I mean sir, you’re not on the list. I can’t give you a key to the room if you’re not on the list.” Leave it to Randy to screw me over. Here it was 2:00 in the morning and I was devoid of a place to sleep tonight except my car. And worse, I’d have to share it with Madison, heaven forbid it should be a chilly night. “Look man, the name is Donaldson, Randy Donaldson. D-O-N-A-L-D-S-O-N.” I was getting more pissed by the minute, and I knew that it was registering on my face cause the attendant was giving me a weird look. He was about 5’7, and looked Middle Eastern. Very skinny, wire frame glasses. Chicken legs. I could take him. “Yes, Randy Donaldson, Aurora James, Tom Jenkins, had a reservation, signed in yesterday. It’s right here.” He was gesturing toward the stapled packet of paperwork for the room (my room!) that he was holding. “So what’s the problem? You can see I’m not making this up. ” I spoke to him as if he were small child. “Well sir,” he started in an even more condescending tone, “The problem is that they signed in but they didn’t leave any names of people that would be checking in later on. Otherwise, you’d be on the list.” Well in that case… “LISTEN, MAN--” “Look, we’re really kinda tired.” Madison spoke up and pushed me out of the way. “And we understand that our friends didn’t leave our names on the list, but we paid our money too--” “Several hundred dollars—” I interrupted. “—is there anyway we could contact our friends in the room and get them to come straighten this out?” “There are no phones in the rooms,” the attendant smiled smugly at us. Madison quickly placed a hand on my stomach to restrain me when she saw me beginning to lunge forward. “Can you take us over to the room so we can knock on the door and get one of them to come out and identify us?” “I’m not allowed to give out that...information.” He hesitated as he spoke. What the hell? Then I saw it. Madison was pulling out all the stops. Her eyes had the innocent glow to them and she was chewing on a hangnail. Now I felt sorry for the poor bastard. He was going to get the full treatment. I allowed myself to relax, because with Madison handling things, I’d be kicking Randy’s ass in no time at all. “I know, but c’mon, you can take us over to the room yourself and let us knock on the door, and then we can get everything worked out.” “It’s…against the rules.” He was done for. She was going to make her move. I shut my eyes tight and awaited the carnage. “Please?” I didn’t have to have my eyes open to see what happened. I felt the flash of light from the light reflecting off her tongue ring stud pierce my eyelids as it peeked through her teeth in that damned little smile. She would thrust out her chest, and in her black v-neck “Bad Grrl” blouse (from Hot Topic), that would cause one of four reactions: 1. The synapses in his brain would burst into flame. 2. He would have a spontaneous orgasm. 3. He’d pass out. 4. All of the above. When I smelled the familiar odor of burning gray matter, I figured he’d gone for reaction number one. It took him a full 30 seconds to recover, but finally he blinked twice and his faculties began their normal functions again. “Come with me.” He said. So we did. The Sandy Beach motel was a motel/condo place on 25th street in OC. Across the street was Aunt Sarah’s, my favorite pancake house in the world, and one of those typical Beach superstores that sold funny T-shirts, crappy sunglasses, crappy jewelry, beach towels and other assorted accessories and crap that people bought at the beach. Sunsations it was called. The motel itself had your typical motel rooms out front in a two-story, aqua blue horizontal building complex. There was also an outdoor pool at the edge of the parking lot, in front of the management office. Behind the motel complex though were a series of three-story condo buildings separated by individual gravel/pebble/rock lined parking lots for each individual building. Each building had four condos room type things in it. Two on the bottom floor and two on the top. There were wooden stairwells on the porches to lead you to the above ground rooms. The condo houses/buildings were also painted the same light aqua blue color of the motel rooms that made you feel sick. Light, pukey green-blue. The buildings were in decent repair, everything looked on the up and up. But for the 600$ I’d paid for it, it should have been. Randy and Co. still weren’t answering after the third set of knocks. I peeked in through the window on the porch. The light was on in the living room, but it looked like no one was home. The rest of the condo was dark. “OPEN UP RANDY!” I screamed at through the window, beginning to loose my temper again. “Please don’t do that sir,” the attendant asked me in the condescending voice again. “They may be sleeping in there.” “THAT’S WHY I’m trying to wake them UP!” I banged on the window and Madison came up and put her hand on mine to stop me. “Maybe we should knock,” Madison suggested to the attendant. “They won’t get mad at us.” The attendant had been knocking way too gently to wake Randy, who could sleep through an H-bomb. The attendant looked away, attempting to break Madison’s hold on him. He learned quickly. “I can’t let you do that.” He said. It didn’t make any sense, but I didn’t expect him to. He was no longer in the right frame of mind. He tried another set of knocks but still, no answer. “I’m sorry,” he said as we moved off the porch. “I can get you a room in the motel at half-price and you can settle it in the morning, but other than that, I’m really sorry.” “That’s ok.” Madison said. The attendant left us to our own devices and returned to the management office. I waited till he was out of sight to start cursing and freaking out. “Fuckin Randy,” I spat. “I am going to kick his big white ass the next time I see him.” Madison laughed. “Jesus Mack, calm down. It’s not the end of the world. We’ll get a motel room and get our money back tomorrow morning.” I sighed. She was right; it wasn’t that big of a deal. Still, it pissed me off to not be able to sleep in a room and a bed I had rightfully paid for. Damn Randy. We were standing by my car, Madison smoking a cigarette and siting in the edge of my trunk, and me leaning against the back window. “So,” she said, taking a drag from the cancer stick (not that I mind), “Do you wanna get a room?” Oh lord, here we go again. It just wasn’t my night. It really wasn’t. One thing after another. I looked at Madison, and the smoldering gaze was back. How does one make decisions like these? It’s just not fair. And that’s when it happened. Before I could answer Madison the first of many audible animalistic groans was projected across the parking lot. The first voice was female, and the second was definitely male, and there was no mistaking the sounds of ecstasy and lust. The little red Jetta was about 100 feet away, rocking back and forth on its shocks, the windows fogged up beyond belief. The groans got louder and more primal, and despite myself, I could feel a boner coming on. It was just going to be one of those nights. The noises lasted for another 10 minutes while Madison and I watched in voyeuristic fascination, not saying anything to one another. Finally, they stopped and there was some rustling, and the two occupants came out of the car rumpled and disheveled two minutes later. Walking funny and avoiding eye contact with us, they power-walked across the parking lot and went into one of the rooms on the first floor of the motel. I shook my head and looked at the ground. Madison finished her cigarette. “So how bout that room?” I answered, “Sure, why not.” Don’t do anything stupid. It echoed in my head. Well screw that. This is senior week. If I hadn’t wanted to do anything stupid, I would have never stepped off that stupid porch with the old folks. * * * Time to go though, arcade time. Randy’s hollering for me so I better stop writing before he and Bobby get into another stupid argument and try to kill each other. (Jesus Christ they almost got into a fistfight once over the meaning of APR financing the other day) I’d like to stay here and bring you up to speed on the rest of the events of the week but that’ll have to wait till after Laser Tag tonight. Cause I know I won’t get any writing done tomorrow with practice for the concert/gig going on and all. Plus, Rosey is supposed to call. Right. Well, write ya later. Whatever.
Copyright © 2001 MacKenzie Morgan |