"Who were you planning on going over to Catalina with?" he asked as he was about to open the door to leave.
"Oh, a girlfriend of mine. We go all the time."
"Well, if you girls are in a bind, I'd be glad to give you a lift to the island. It's nothing too exciting, just me and Dr. Wheeler, but a patient in need ..."
"Oh, I'd hate to impose," I said.
"Oh, please, you might be doing us a favor. It'll be nice to have someone aboard who knows how to sail instead of me. Dr. Wheeler isn't the most gifted seaman." I wasn't sure if I wanted to make this kind of commitment, but Dr. Luke was getting sexier and the thought of seeing him in a pair of shorts with his hair blowing in the wind made me shiver.
"That would be amazing," I said. "Do you really think it would be okay?"
"Sure. It will be fun to have some young company. I'll leave my number at the front for you. Call me this week and we'll set it up."
"That's so awesome of you! Thank you!"
I couldn't believe how nice this guy was. That was so easy. Except for the part about me sailing.
I also had to figure out which girlfriend of mine was deserving enough of a weekend trip to Catalina with a doctor. Ivory would be very jealous, but she would have to lie in the bed she made for me. I got Dr. Luke's number at the front desk and hurried outside to find the nearest bookstore. I needed to pick up a copy of Sailing for Dummies fast.
My phone rang while I was driving. It was my best friend from high school, Rory. She had gone to Penn after high school, gotten an undergrad degree in psychology, and then moved to L.A. to pursue a career in acting and had instead pursued one guy after another. "I need to get out of my date Friday with that loser anesthesiologist. I asked him if he would anesthetize me the other night, and he looked at me as if I asked him to fuck me in the eye. I can't bear another dinner with this guy."
"Just tell him you're going to Catalina for the weekend with your new gynecologist boyfriend."
"I wish," she said.
"No, really. We're going to Catalina this weekend with my new gyno and his partner."
"Are you being serious?" she asked.
"Yes. On a sailboat."
"I love you."
"Thank you. I didn't actually get a look at your guy, but he is a doctor."
"Do they have access to anesthesia?"
"One would assume."
"Please tell me these arrangements were made while he was giving you a breast exam."
"I can one up that."
"You make me so happy, I'll call you right back."
Rory and I met our studs at his boat slip in the marina. Dr. Wheeler's name was Matthew. He was no Dr. Luke, but he was cute in a darker, more mysterious way. Rory immediately thought Dr. Luke was for her but I told her to step off.
The boat was beautiful. It was huge and white with massive sails. I knew for sure I couldn't pretend to sail it. I had brought plenty of booze along to give myself a good excuse, but apparently I didn't have to worry because another couple had been invited and they were "avid sailors." Dr. Luke told me that if I wanted in on any of the action I was going to have to take a stand; his friends Lori and Glen were very controlling at the helm of a boat.
"Oh, well, we'll just see about that," was my response.
An hour into our boat ride, Dr. Luke pulled out a bag full of Ecstasy. A drug-toting gynecologist! I had died and gone to heaven. When he asked us if we partied, I thought Rory may have peed in her pants a little. Matthew warned us to keep it on the down-low because Lori and Glen didn't "party."
We all popped our tabs and wandered onto the deck. The thought occurred to me that this was possibly the happiest day of my life. Rory and Matthew started an intense conversation about religion and life on other planets. Those two topics were about as interesting to me as the Louisiana Purchase, so I just bided my time and waited for an in to the conversation.
The more Matthew talked and drank, the more I got the impression that something was definitely wrong with him. I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I kept glancing at Dr. Luke for his reaction, but he was barely paying attention to me. Maybe I didn't look so good, I worried. But I knew that was impossible. I had had a facial and a haircut that morning. I'd have to be Tarzan to not look good at that point. During one of Matthew's stories, Rory leaned in and whispered, "He's hot." I was thinking the exact opposite but instead nodded encouragingly and said, "I know, see if you can get him alone."
Getting him alone, however, seemed impossible. Matthew was going on and on about how sometimes he can see his dead relatives, not really leaving much room for me and Dr. Luke to get to know each other any better. I needed to talk to Dr. Luke and charm him, so he would start paying more attention to me, but he didn't seem interested at all.
We were on our third bottle of Veuve Clicquot when Matthew said he had to "hit the head." Finally, I would get some stage time. I could talk about my theory of dwarfism and how I think there is an undeniable connection between them and the Little Dipper. It wouldn't be long before Dr. Luke realized that I was more than just a pretty face.
"I'm going down below to get us some cheese and crackers," Dr. Luke said and left. Two seconds later, Rory stood up. "I'm going downstairs to have sex with Matthew," she said.
The Ecstasy was starting to kick in, but unlike the rest of the human race, Ecstasy doesn't make me horny. Sure, I may want to kiss someone, but the sudden and rabid need for sex doesn't happen. I much prefer to sit outside, look at the stars, and daydream about what life would have been like had I become a professional women's basketball player.
I told Rory I didn't care what she did as long as she left me alone, because I was starting to feel really good. About five minutes later, she came back and grabbed my arm, a flurry of delight on her face.
"You're flying," I said.
"Yeah, and I'm not the only one. Come with me."
"Leave me here, go, you can have him," I mumbled. I would have been perfectly happy if I never saw another person again in my life. I felt amazing.
"The guys are waiting for us," Rory said.
"Where?" I asked.
"Downstairs. Come on, Chelsea!"
"Okay."
I got up and walked downstairs with her. As we approached the bedroom, I heard a very recognizable sound coming from behind the door--only to be followed by seeing a very shocking thing when Rory pushed open the door. Matthew was inside Dr. Luke. He was doing him doggie style, holding down his head and smacking his ass. What was happening? I wanted to run over and protect Dr. Luke's honor, but he seemed to be enjoying himself. Also, I was a little thrown. I had never seen two men having sex before in real life. Rory just stood beside me with a huge grin on her face. She loved controversy.
I had so many different emotions running through me that I was frozen in place. The only thing I could do was to shout, "Stop that!"
Matthew and Dr. Luke both looked over at me with huge Ecstasy smiles on their faces and kept going.
"What is going on here?" I demanded. I sounded like my father.
Rory was enjoying every minute of my mortification. She didn't even lower her voice to say, "Turns out they're both gay."
"No, he's his partner,'" I said.
"Yes, Chelsea ... get it?"
"Oh, shit." I finally realized what kind of partner he was talking about. I couldn't believe it. I was too high to deal with this. I told Rory we needed to swim to shore.
We ran up onto the deck and asked Lori and Glen where the life jackets were. Rory asked them how long before we got to Catalina. They said we'd be there in about twenty minutes. Great. No problem. We'd rent a hotel room and take a boat back tomorrow.
I told Rory not to blow our high and we'd have fun no matter what. The important thing was not to think about what was happening or what I had just seen. I had to focus on the positive--whatever that was. Rory grabbed four more tabs of Ecstasy and shoved them in her purse.
"Good thinking," I said.
Dr. Luke an
d Matthew came upstairs just as we were docking. They were all over each other. It was painful to watch, like seeing your boyfriend cheat on you but with a man. Rory, however, couldn't stop laughing, and eventually I started laughing too, and then they both started laughing. Then they headed toward us with very lascivious looks in their eyes. Dr. Luke reached for my boob and asked if I wanted to get it from two guys at once. "That was sooo five years ago," I thought about saying. Instead I said, "Look at the stars."
Rory told them that she wasn't into getting it in the ass and that we were leaving once the boat docked.
"We didn't ask you," Dr. Luke said.
"Excuse me?" asked Rory, offended.
Quickly, I told them we'd love to hang out more, but we were meeting friends and had to fly. No pun intended.
Once we got off the boat we took another tab and had a blast trying to find a hotel. We kept getting distracted by the sky. After a while, I needed water badly so we stopped at a bar--only to find about 150 swing dancers in mid-prance. The bartender told us that Catalina was having its annual swing-dancing convention. I couldn't believe there was such a thing. He warned us that every hotel was booked. We had only one option at that point, and that was to get in on the fun. So we swing danced well into the wee hours of the morning, with the help of our additional Ecstasy tabs, and when the lights were shut off, we went to the beach and watched the sun come up. We hadn't done that since prom. We caught the first ferry back to Long Beach and took a taxi to Santa Monica. In the cab, Rory told me I had lost my touch since high school. I reminded her that I was their first pick for a gang bang. That shut her up.
Ivory was very disappointed when I gave her the bad news. She went back to her old gynecologist and so did I. But a few months later, I ran into Dr. Luke at Jerry's Famous Deli in the marina. I was with a guy I was dating, and Dr. Luke was with the biggest black man I had ever seen. Just the sight of the two of them together made my anus tighten. I noticed Dr. Luke making his way over to my table, so I got up and walked in the other direction, straight to my car. I couldn't afford a run-in with this guy in front of my new suitor. There were only three things he could bring up: my vagina, his anus, and his Ecstasy that I stole.
I called my date on his cell phone and asked him to meet me outside. I explained that this guy was a lunatic and he was always harassing me and I couldn't bear to have a conversation with him.
"He seemed pretty normal," my guy said. "He asked if your boat was out of the shop yet. I didn't know you had a boat."
OH, SHUT UP ALREADY!
ONE OF MY best friends in the world is Shoniqua. She is black. She's also six feet tall and has an ass the size of a medicine ball. I call her "Hammer Toes."
Shoniqua is the only person I know who can actually make me look shy. She has a huge personality. She can walk into a room full of people and within seconds take over. When I'm with her I just sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.
We've been friends for ten years, and all the while she has been with the same man--married to him for the last five. He is a true African, from Nigeria, who I'm pretty sure is capable of Voodoo. He'll take one look at someone and before even speaking to them decide that they are no good for Shoniqua. I was scared when I met him because I knew my insides were flooded with alcohol and I was sure he would take that as a bad sign. Fortunately for me he thought I was a good seed, just confused about where my life was headed. His analysis sounded a lot better than being a "slut," so we grew to be fast friends too.
I met Shoniqua while I was performing stand-up comedy at some hole-in-the-wall coffee shop in Alta Dena. She ran a comedy room filled with only black performers and black audiences. She wasn't opposed to whiteys coming to patronize or perform, but this wasn't a section of town with a surplus of Caucasians.
I knew that Shoniqua's place was the perfect platform for my comedy. Black audiences always seemed to have a better sense of humor than white ones. Their laughter is hard to get, but once you have it, they really let go. I enjoy challenges, and so the next step in my comedy career was to ingratiate myself with the brotherhood.
The first person I met at the club was Shoniqua's mother, who also happened to be black. When her mother questioned why a blonde, blue-eyed Jewish girl would make her way to that part of town, I wrote her a check for one hundred dollars and asked her to please be nice to me. She took the check and told me to buy her a Corona. Why they sold Corona at a coffee shop was unclear to me, but as the person behind the counter pulled an ice-cold Corona from a portable beach cooler, I realized businesses in this neighborhood were clearly subject to different regulations.
I was extremely nervous before going onstage but the set ended up going well, thanks to a 350-pound black woman who hooted and hollered at every joke I told. There weren't many people in the audience, and I couldn't hear anyone laugh over this woman, but I decided it had been a positive experience and asked Shoniqua if I was allowed to come back. She told me that she liked white people but didn't have any close white friends and asked if I was interested in cross-pollinating. I told her we would see how things went but not to put the chicken wing before the egg.
We grew to be fast friends, and a couple years later we made plans for a weekend getaway to the Big Apple.
We booked separate rooms at the Peninsula Hotel because Shoniqua didn't like sharing a room. I, on the other hand, love sharing rooms with anyone, especially girls. It reminds me of childhood sleepovers, where you would talk into the wee hours of the morning and put the fingers of the girl who fell asleep first into hot water to make her pee in her sleep. I did this once to Shoniqua, but it wasn't as much fun without anyone else there to witness it. The next morning, when she realized what had happened, Shoniqua came very close to bitch slapping me. She was physically superior to me in strength and I had to outmaneuver her for almost thirty minutes. With her long arms and legs coming at me from every direction, it felt like I was fending off a real live octopus. It took a while before she would speak to me again after that. Reluctantly, I agreed that all future trips together would be in separate rooms. I was not happy about it, but I was working my way back into her circle of trust.
On the second night of our trip to Manhattan, the concierge told us about a great new restaurant called Tao. He tried to make us a reservation but it was completely booked, so Shoniqua took over.
She called the restaurant and informed the hostess that we were the executive producers of the television show Friends and that there was a possibility Monica and Chandler would be joining us. I reminded her that those were not their actual names, but she was already hanging up the phone. "We're in," she said.
"Oh, really?" I asked. "And where do you suppose we're going to find Monica and Chandler?"
"Listen, bitch. They're not gonna fuckin' care when we get there."
She was right. They didn't care. But they did take a long hard look at two twenty-seven-year-olds, wondering how it was possible we were the executive producers of anything beyond a half-hour segment on the Nickelodeon channel. I kept my head down and avoided eye contact with anyone. Shoniqua, however, milked it for all it was worth.
"Hello, nice to see you this evening. Is our table ready?" she said with a big cheesy grin that reminded me of a billy goat in heat.
When we were seated, she told the hostess, "Please make sure we get a complimentary round of drinks. We had a long flight. I'd love something sweet."
"That's okay," I told the hostess. "Just ignore her."
"Fuck off, ho!" Shoniqua snapped at me, then looked up at the hostess and sternly commanded, "Just ignore her."
The hostess gave us an uncomfortable smile and walked off.
"Cut the shit," I said. "Why do you have to be so embarrassing?"
"Listen, bitch, they don't know who the fuck we are, let's get some free shit. I'm not a Jew like you, okay." Shoniqua thought being a Jew meant that I was born with a trust fund and received direct deposits into my account from the Bank of Abraham. I explained to her, on m
any occasions, that my family was the Sanford and Son of our neighborhood and the only trust fund my father had in store for me was a 1985 Yugo with a missing radiator. She chose to ignore this information and instead focus on the fact that we had a summer home.
The dinner was fantastic. I introduced her to foie gras, along with Kobe steak and yellowtail sashimi. Shoniqua was a walking oxymoron: She never bought a handbag or a pair of sunglasses that wasn't Prada, Gucci, or Chanel, but she couldn't pronounce filet mignon or, for that matter, pick it up with a pair of chopsticks. I'm not the most sophisticated girl in the world, but my brother Ray is a chef, and it didn't take me long to figure out what was worth eating and what was worth skipping for more alcohol.
Shoniqua and I always had a great time when we went out, and this night was no different. She was regaling me with a story about one of the 107 children her mother fostered when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted my hot piece of Peruvian ass.
He was at the bar, leaning up against a glass partition, watching us. He was tall, with olive skin and wavy black hair. His nose was a little crooked but not enough to ruin his face.
I told Shoniqua that there was a beautiful specimen right behind her but not to look right away. "Heeeeeeeeeeeey!" she screamed in what she thought was a flirty tone and knocked on the glass like we had been dropped onto the wrong side of an aquarium. The billy goat was back.
Every person within twenty feet of our table was now staring in our direction. "Hey there!" she shouted, rapping on the glass again. I slid lower in my seat and contemplated using my dirty napkin as a burka. Shoniqua is great for introductions to new men since she is married and doesn't give a shit what anyone of the opposite sex thinks. "I got a husband," she would tell me if I ever asked her to tone it down. "I'm fucking trying to get one for your ass too." Shoniqua and her husband have the greatest relationship I know of; I can only assume it's because they don't have kids. They're constantly surprising each other with weekend get-aways and showering each other with gifts. They talk on the phone close to ten times a day. Lately I've realized I need a man just like him for myself. Except white.