Tales from my Teens: Bad Date

Photo by carolyn christine on Unsplash

I think we could all use a laugh now and then, probably more now than ever at this point in history. So I present to you one of my not-so-finer moments.

It was the late 70s. I went on a first date in high school with this girl. She was attractive, basically way out of my league, I was surprised she even agreed to go with me. When I arrived to pick her up she was pretty high on methamphetamines (aka "speed" as we called it back then). I know this because she informed me of this fact immediately.

It was supposed to be dinner but since she was speeding her ass off she said she had no appetite. One minute into the date I regretted it, she was making jokes that only she thought was funny and was talking non-stop from the speed. I decided to change restaurants from the more elaborate fine dining establishment I had picked out to the seafood fast food place I worked at - at least the food would be free.

Oh sure, that was a shitty move. Oddly, it was not the first time in my short dating life I had picked up a speeding first date - that first time the date said “pick something cheap, I’m not eating anything, so I don’t care” and we had a decent time. So this move was not without precedence.

Back to the date in question. So while she sipped on a Coke, I ate my dinner and basically listened to the worse dialogue delivered so utterly fast I barely understood any of it. Now it was winter, and my iced tea and her Coke made both of us cold, so I decided to get us a couple of mugs of hot chocolate. They had run out of miniature marshmallows and had replaced them with the large normal-sized ones, so I came back to the table with two mugs - both with a couple of large marshmallows in each.

The constant bad jokes and pointless unfunny stories continued. As I sipped, the hot chocolate was cooling enough to be nearly drinkable, and then two things happened at the exact same time. The first thing was that the two large marshmallows were basically “melty” and I was in the process of swallowing both of them with a fairly large amount of still pretty steamy hot chocolate. The second thing was she actually said something really funny.

The entire time she was saying things she thought was funny and she’d laugh and laugh. Quite loudly. I’d kind of sheepishly grin and nod, just wishing the entire night would end. But now she had said something utterly hilarious.

Sadly, at this point I don’t remember exactly what she said. I do remember it was extremely funny, and what made it even funnier is that I was pretty sure she had no idea how funny it actually was. Anyway, remember that first thing? I was swallowing a big gulp of hot chocolate with two large marshmallows.

I immediately started choking and coughing, and lo and behold - as if by magic - a large hot-chocolate-covered partially-melted marshmallow lodged itself in each nostril, each partially extending out yet fully lodged in. Both bulbous white sticky masses were dripping with hot chocolate, and the hot beverage burned inside my nasal cavity and in my nostrils. My ears also felt clogged up. For good measure my eyes were watering and probably as wide as, well, extremely large marshmallows.

Dripping with hot chocolate and shame, I said something profound like “oh my nose.” I guess this was an effort to draw even more attention to my face. Of course with my nose - and I can’t emphasize this enough - COMPLETELY clogged, it came out as “OH MA DOZE”.

My drug-addled date went into hysterics to the point of crying, and I quickly ran to the bathroom where I spent the next 5 minutes blowing and wiping my nose. During one blow into the paper towel my ears unplugged, and I could still hear her laughing in the distance. I remember looking into the mirror, listening to that laugh, as with brownish-white bits all over my face.

When I came out, she was still laughing, and I said I had a splitting headache and was going to take her home. I wasn’t lying, although I wasn’t sure what contributed to the headache more - the humiliation or the marshmallows.

I can laugh about it now, because it is funny. And I’m sure to this day she has her own version of the story: “So for dinner my cheap date took me to the fast food place where he worked to save money, I was trying to save this disaster of a date with my funniest jokes, but nothing, he barely smiled. Then he orders a hot chocolate....”