Ronson

At first I thought I had hit the jackpot, but then my friend pointed out that we showed up on totally the wrong night, that it was lesbian speed dating night. I could have and should have gone home right then and there, but thirty non-refundable dollars is a lot to piss away in this economy and I figured getting some practice in before doing it for real next time couldn’t hurt.

So I walked in. The needle on the imaginary record player screeched to a halt, the room fell silent. The whispering began. My friend darted out of there, while I took a seat at an empty table and waved hello to some of the gawking women around me. Most of them responded by smiling warmly, but I swear a few of them smiled lustily at me, and that was really kind of upsetting, because did they think I looked like an attractive woman or something?

Then someone hit a gong and we were all off to the races. Although most of them looked like leggy runway models, the first chick I talked to, I’ll call her “Samantha,” or “Sam,” stuck out in the crowd as much as I did. She looked like a skater version of Kate Gosselin, wearing chucks, a bad haircut, too much flannel with too little remorse. She was pleasant to talk to at first, until getting visibly irritated by my constant prying for an explanation for the huge scar on the palm of her hand. “If you’re putting out cigarettes on your hand, just tell me, because I think that’s really bad-ass!” I said. And then she sighed and finally told me about how one morning during her high school chemistry lab she was trying to shove a glass stirrer into a cork stopper and the stirrer broke and somehow went through her hand. Blood was everywhere and they had to yank it out at the hospital, leaving a nasty gash that would stay with her for the rest of her life. Weeks later her handsome prom date would ditch her for an upgrade, but she told me all that pain she went through turned out to be a blessing in disguise because it helped her figure out that she liked girls. She gently rubbed the huge scar on her palm as she talked about this. I called it a “chem lab stigmata.” The gong sounded.