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Before I gave him scabies, Steven was just some dude I met in the Marigny. It was around Valentine's Day, and the same day I attended Eve Ensler's V-Day celebration at the Superdome, which instilled in me a fear of both clitoral circumcision and people in vagina costumes. Naturally, I needed a drink to mellow out my man-hate, maybe find some frat boy to knee in the balls. I found Steven instead.
I knew from my previous mistakes that bar relationships tend to go up in flames. That didn't stop me from returning the stare coming from the end of the tapas bar and sending over my half-eaten salmon canapé with instructions for my bartender.
"Tell him to eat my pussy," I ordered, and the creep ate it, licked the plate clean, never taking his eyes off me.
Minutes later he wandered over with a large cucumber shoved on the end of a knife.
Finally, I thought, a guy who really gets me.
"For your Pimm's Cup," he said, handing it over.
I told Steven he could sit down as long as he promised not to talk about Bukowski like every other bar dude who wants to create the illusion he actually reads. I noticed then that he was not in his late-twenties. More like late-thirties.
"Forty-one, actually," he said. "I'm a musician."
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After spilling his pre-dinner cocktail on me, he said, "It's been a long weekend. I need cocaine if I'm going to make it through this date."
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When he asked for my number, I ordered him to carve the cucumber into a squirrel. Then I bit the head off the squirrel and promised to do the same to him soon.
I didn't know I would ruin his life in record time. I hadn't ruined anyone's life in a while, not since leaving my ex in North Carolina. He'd already abandoned me — and reality — to live online as a Star Wars Galaxies Jedi Master. Since moving to New Orleans, I'd only had time to ruin my own life, rooming with a gay dancer obsessed with the Spice Girls, and taking a job at a cheese shop so that I could smell like ass, as well as look like it, thanks to the acne-causing power of birth-control pills. Abstinence through ugliness.
I'd only been on one date in a year, with a Jack White doppelgänger: an unpublished novelist who wore black electrical tape over his staph-infected finger. We went to a touristy seafood restaurant in the Quarter. After spilling his pre-dinner cocktail on me, he said, "It's been a long weekend. I need cocaine if I'm going to make it through this date." It was only Saturday.
While he met his dealer on Decatur, I sat alone, downing our scallop appetizer. I'm not one to judge. Not even after he told me he was from Georgia and couldn't swim. I suggested we go for a dip in the Mississippi. Instead, we wound up drowning in a dive bar, where he took my hand in his, rubbing my palm with his rotten finger, and recited from memory whole stanzas of Evangeline.
We took a cab to his house. Thankfully his power had been turned off, so I couldn't see the sea of trash we waded through to get to his bed. When I peeled myself from his mattress the next morning, I resembled a well-used Swiffer pad. I was pretty sure this counted as sex about as much as the time an elderly couple at Mardi Gras handed me a playing card of a naked man masturbating.
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