One Hundred Virgins

By Jason McGathey

Three lifelong friends move to a major college campus in an even larger metropolis. Acclimation proves just about impossible. Can they figure out this hostile scene before the city eats them alive?

In this riotous though insightful co

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jason McGathey
• Release date: Dec 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9798869329790

Jason McGathey

Formerly much more inclined to meander along the eastern coast, Jason McGathey now forces himself to remain in one place and work on his next magnum opus.

Book preview

exploratory surgery  

1

The drilling of the peepholes we’ve debated from day one. Feverish with longing, it seems unjust that a mere two inches of wood should separate us from our neighbor Stephanie. Questions inevitably surround an enterprise such as this - whether illegal, or, of more importance, whether she’ll find out - renewed each time we see or hear her pass. Yet one look at that haughty countenance, that lustrous black hair, and the potential for seeing her body naked is like dynamite in the hands of a three year old.

Ultimately, this small piece of business is taken care of one winter afternoon while Stephanie’s off walking her dog. Damon drilling the holes as I play lookout, and after all this time, the days of frantic plotting and heated debate, the physical effort behind this act of perversion takes but a few seconds. Four holes in a door, and now we’re free to spend another eternity weighing this invasion.

The drilling is implemented, strategically enough, in two separate rows - one chest high, the other at our belts, four holes total. Affording us ample vantage points into every inch of her bedroom, from every angle, the placing perfect, we hope, to analyze every inch of her nubile, clothes free body. And this first afternoon, after Damon’s finished drilling and Stephanie returns with her dog, any shock over what we’ve done gives way, replaced by rampant lust. High fives all around, fellows, in celebration of our genius.

This brilliant gambit offers us our first glimpse into the private life of our mysterious downstairs neighbor. In person, Stephanie keeps a constant smirk on her face, wordlessly asserting her superiority. But watching her in this light, behind closed doors, the condescension she wears like that bulky black coat is all but gone. And armed now with this secret special knowledge, the tics and mannerisms of her interior world, it’s impossible to feel anything less than at least her equal. The three of us may very well be the only people alive aware that she talks to her dog almost incessantly, sometimes while toking on a giant water bong. Her own boyfriend might not even know this, but we do.

A halfhearted workout buff, Stephanie’s no rock solid specimen of leanness, but keeps herself in shape to the extent that she could pose nude for Hustler and emerge unscathed. Curves worth bragging about, and an engaging smile on the rare occasions she chooses to share it. She has a job waiting tables at this trendy campus restaurant called Cap City Diner, on Olentangy River Rd. She has a boring boyfriend with a boring office job and as the details bored us to tears before, such mundane data concerns us now even less. Now, any conversation initiated while passing her on the sidewalk or the front porch means stealing valuable time she might spend indoors. Disrobing for a shower, maybe even masturbating, who knows.

I SMELL THE POSSIBILITIES here. This university, this city, I know they are ripe for the taking. Shooting off in every direction, the major arteries, the minor ones too, each pulses and flows with its own peculiar rhythm. A million future histories, a million possibilities.

You move somewhere new, and the hidden volumes there escape you. Every supermarket, gas station, restaurant and tavern, every billboard and street light, encumbered with the weight of years gone past, but none of this is immediately apparent. Heartache, mirth, rage and romance, there is plenty of this and more sunk within the fissures of these buildings and sidewalks. But to the outsider, they’re anonymous places and things, as they appear to us until we peel off the skin and live inside them awhile.

Columbus comes calling, luring us into its fiery midst. We arrive the first of the year, Alan and I moving the bulk of our stuff in with the help of his wacko ex girlfriend Alexis. Sixty seven degrees in January, it’s a record setting swell of mercury, and the heat helps assuage the customary misery of making a winter move. Damon arrives a day later, with his parents and a fuckmate named Tammy, but by now the temperature has already fallen fifteen degrees. Capturing this epic moment for posterity, Damon’s mom snaps a picture of the three of us, grinning in threadbare clothes before our even less impressive homestead. Meanwhile Damon’s worrywart dad hands me a garbage sack full of used paperbacks, feeling I could use this sizeable diversion. He hassles a passing jogger, with questions about the neighborhood.

Is this a pretty safe place to live, you think?

How should I know, man? the jogger retorts, without breaking stride, I just moved here myself.

Clearly shaken by this trashy environment we’ve chosen to roost in, mom and pop Privette drive away, shaking their heads.

The fifteenth largest city in the nation, Columbus boasts the biggest college campus in the country, OSU, four blocks away from our house. But the whole metropolis, university included, seems to regard itself as a charming little village, an attitude that pervades everything from the isolated, communal feel each neighborhood possesses unto itself, to the driving habits of its residents. Everyone in this town continually cruises five miles below the posted speed limit, a senseless quirk on par with our lack of a major professional sport.

The real story here isn’t the city, however, but the apartment we’re moving into. Otherwise known as 1990 ½ Summit Street, this is the physical manifestation of our long harbored bohemian dreams. We’ve heard the legends about the meat market atmosphere of this campus scene, within walking distance of its myriad bars. If the home we’re moving into is also a nightmarish dump and less than a half mile away from the crackhouse district, so be it.

Taking up floors two and three of an ancient house that has been split into four roughshod pieces - giving us two downstairs neighbors and one beside us upstairs - our living quarters are dreadfully unsanitary, but we just don’t care. Rent, at a paltry three sixty per, is the cheapest around, and our landlord, a shady campus property baron named Wayne Ault, is currently under investigation for income tax fraud. We figure he won’t be giving us too much trouble, but he’s probably not repairing a whole hell of a lot around here, either.

Our first attempts at cleaning up the pigsty are laughably ineffective, leading us to pretty much resign and rarely attempt again. But twenty one dollars spent on cleaning supplies buys us a token effort, and we begin the damn near impossible task demanding our attention. First things first, we prop up this department store mannequin in one corner of our kitchen, our version of a faithful watchdog. Damon once bought this beauty for fifty dollars, and has modified it since with a glued on rug of pubic hair, metallic robot breasts jutting out straight from Madonna’s Blonde Ambition era wardrobe, and the thick makeup job a downtown whore might wear.

The dingy green and white tile of our kitchen floor is crudded over with black, ditto the bathroom. Whoever rented the place immediately before us - a bunch of skate punks, judging from the scuffed up hardwood floors and various stickers plastered all over the refrigerator - seriously ran 1990 ½ Summit Street to seed. Inexplicably, they left a dozen bags of kitty litter behind, too, but also this intricately carved wooden floor lamp that I swiftly claim as my own.

Mushrooms are growing in the light sockets; our bathroom window is nothing but a taped up sheet of plywood, and raccoon tracks are discernible along its eastern wall, between the sink and commode. Wiring proves a joke - we blow light bulbs at a record clip as days go by - and in the master bedroom, a leak is soon discovered so severe that Alan nearly kills himself one afternoon climbing all over the roof trying to remedy it.

A sad setup we’ve willed ourselves into, though typical of the campus area. By chopping up this once beautiful, spacious house, that faceless someone from decades past has rendered these four bizarrely construed apartments. In our case this means Alan, who owns a large bed and really nice stereo and more stuff than Damon and I combined, is to be given the master second floor bedroom. In actuality, with an ornamental marble fireplace and all, this should be the living room, but we’re not concerned with such trivialities.

Along the long hall which leads from the stair landing and the filthy bathroom, filthy kitchen, in between these and Alan’s room, my own tidy corner of the galaxy lays. A snug little twelve by twelve alcove, hardwood floors but more or less warm, tucked, as it is, in the middle of our apartment. Drifting further, up a second flight of stairs which begins across the hall from my room, a third bedroom looms above, and a fourth beyond it. In the summer months this upper floor will turn unbearably hot, but for now this third floor’s a source of much welcome warmth.

Hack musicians all, the three of us compile our assorted equipment in the first of these rooms and dub it our jamming facility. Damon claims the other, in the deepest reaches of the third floor and directly above Alan’s quarters. His window, like the two in Alan’s room, looks down upon the steady roaring traffic of Summit Street, US 23, as it tears its way through campus en route to downtown.

Psychologically, mentally, physically, spiritually, a lot can be read about the individual simply from the way he’s living. Alan’s room, well furnished and well kept; Damon, paranoid about getting things lost or stolen, brings down only what he needs and leads a minimalist monk’s existence; as for me, I spend my nights in a sleeping bag and keep my room in a constant state of disarray, with boxes all over the place and papers flying everywhere, books, cassettes, you name it.

We scour our godforsaken place to the bone, but even so, there’s only so much we can hope to accomplish in this forum. Come nightfall, we kick back with a twelve pack of beer, smiling in content at the job well done. Our first brave stabs at big city life, behind us. Even Damon’s sex partner Tammy, though she never strings together more than three words at once, is visibly pleased and amused all at once.

It bothers us not that in the hustle and bustle of getting moved in, we three have collectively forgotten to place a call for electricity or heat. We shiver in the dark, tell stories while huddling around Damon’s space heater for warmth, feasting on an incredible pot of chili Alan’s father sends down with us. No amount of hardship can diminish the indescribable euphoric rush I feel, we all feel, at having made it. Swigging bottled beer in the dark, we buckle down and ride out the worst.

The three of us have been friends since junior high school, and to anyone who suggests we’ll never last living together, we offer only a dismissive laugh.

2

PRECEDING DAMON’S ARRIVAL, Alan and I hit the streets running to secure employment here. He’s scouring the classified ads but I stick to the campus restaurants, focusing upon one place in particular, a rib joint coincidentally named Damon’s Place For Ribs. Running from a series of unfortunate mishaps that left me $10,000 in debt in addition to losing all my furniture, most of my clothes and half of my personal mementos, my final year in Mansfield was a dark and ridiculous saga. Yet in those twelve months I managed exactly two redeemable deeds, in finishing my first novel, and hooking up with this absolute goddess named Jessica. Jessica I can’t seem to reach now, in the handful of intermittent tries I’m making, but it was while working at the Mansfield Damon’s that we met, and as such I think I know a thing or two about their menu.

Come back on Tuesday. Talk to me then, I’ll know if I can use you or not.

I’m talking to Mark Stokes, a poker faced little man of few words who oversees this operation. Standing no taller than five foot eight, with a salt and pepper crew cut tapered to perfection down the back, Stokes is the general manager, a no nonsense field tactician. So stoic I can’t find a way to read him, though fortunately there are ways to circumvent an absolute reliance on his opinion. Down on your luck with enough frequency and you develop a cagey resourcefulness, honed through idiotic struggles dotting your past like those raccoon tracks against our bathroom walls.

I creep back into the restaurant on Monday, knowing damn well it’s Stokes’s day off. Hillary’s eating lunch at a table in the back of the clubhouse, a sweet, short brunette with amazing curves, a supervisor. She’s munching on a salad to retain that shapely figure and I barrel forward with my left field introduction.

Yeah, Mark told me to come in today so I could start my training.

That’s weird, she says, brow crinkling with confusion as she sets aside her fork, I wonder why he would tell you that....this is his day off....

I don’t know, I smile and shrug, and just like that, I have a job.

Hillary clocks me in, and I begin the gargantuan task of filling out their curiously voluminous paperwork. Seated across from me along this plush clubhouse booth is a blonde haired chick named Amanda, who talks so much this task takes twice as long as it should. Most of what she is I’m already certain is utter bullshit, but I listen anyway, because she’s hot, because her massive breasts are more entertaining than this instructional video broadcasting on one of our big screen TVs.

I used to work here before, she explains, doodling in her own dossier of new hire materials, "they even promoted me to manager for awhile. But I got an even better offer to manage Skyline Chili and I couldn’t hardly turn that down...."

Really? say I.

Damon and Alan are spending their own Monday in much more frivolous fashion, escorting Tammy to a Polynesian lunch buffet downtown. Jobless, Alan’s stuffing as much spare grub as he can into a knapsack, uncertain how many more days will pass before his next influx of cash. Meanwhile, Tammy’s still gushing about the scenery down here, in all probability the highlight of her year.

Oh my god! she squeals, I’ve never seen buildings this big before!

Damon doesn’t have to sweat finding a job, because he has a steady gig playing bass on the weekends for a classic rock group in Mansfield. Enrolled at the OSU branch up there ever since we left high school, he’s run out of courses to take, and alone among the three of us he has an actual point in relocating to Columbus. The position he holds with Get-A-Way Band is ideal, then, in that he’s able to bank plenty for rent and parties, while leaving his weekdays free for school and study.

He’s met this dim country bumpkin Tammy at one of their shows, skinny to a fault and with a pointed chin to match. She rarely says three words but maintains her glorious head of long brown hillbilly hair as if it’s the most prized possession in her small town universe. Which for all we know, it is. But Damon suspects she’s boffing her landlord in exchange for rent money and out of kindness or pity brings her down here for the week, to escape all that.

Touching, in some weird way, to meet someone like her. So unblemished by modern life, oblivious to the world swirling around her. Yet well versed in the bedroom, judging from what Damon tells us, a paradox that has her begging for anal sex often, for intercourse in general most of her waking hours.

In light of this information, I’m leery taking up Damon’s offer that we all crash in his room this second night here with no heat. The temperatures have fallen consistently since Thursday and hover now around zero, but though his room is the toastiest in the house, who are Alan and I to deprive them of their privacy, especially if Tammy needs laid as often as legend would have it. When it’s time to retire Damon takes his space heater upstairs, yet even though our sleeping bags provide precious little warmth we can’t bring ourselves to impose.

"Now that you mention it, though, why are we hanging out in my room every night?" Alan muses, the exhale jets of his breath visible in the frozen air.

Valid question, that, for Alan’s room is so frosty we dub it Planet Hoth. Among our home’s other charming quarks the climate veers wildly from station to station, and he’s just lucky enough to squat upon Antarctica. The running joke is that scientists will someday camp in this room, confirming the coldest locale ever documented by man.

I endure about half the night in my room, but through chattering teeth I cannot sleep and trudge, sleeping bag in hand, up to the convection oven of Damon’s bedroom. Dozing off around three a.m. on his floor, I’m hazily half awakened by the sound of my roommate rising for school, just a few hours later. The sun has yet to rise outside and it’s raccoon mask black in here, but I hear him groaning and cursing aloud, as he straps his shoes on in a chair beside me. Or at least what I assume to be beside me, until my eyes snap open for good much later and I find that I’m perfectly hemmed in by the chair’s four legs, just missing my sides by inches.

By pure accident I narrowly escaped an oblivious impalement, but Damon’s far more the trooper. Walking to school this ridiculous six a.m., while the rest of us rise at leisure, while I begin my first day proper at the restaurant and later, Alan and I take Tammy to lunch at a campus fast food establishment. Wordlessly, she reaches under the table and gropes Alan’s package, smirking as he recoils. Later this same night, making a ninety minute drive in each direction just to return her home, Tammy’s brother comes barreling out the door threatening to kick Damon’s ass for some reason, and just like that, she’s swiftly cast aside. But at least he has some surreptitious tapes he’s recorded of the two of them fucking, which the three of us snicker over repeatedly, particularly the high pitched squeals she makes when particularly caught up in the moment.  

PENNILESS, MY IDEA of beginning employment at the restaurant is to jump on the floor immediately. Tip money equals survival, now that we’ve killed Mr. Kline’s chili and my car’s almost out of gas, but unfortunately Stokes has other ideas. Coming from the same chain up north it’s not as if I need to learn the ropes, yet he’ll have me training for three days just the same.

It’s not really necessary, dude, I tell him, I know this menu like the back of my hand.

Mmm hmm, he nods his head, lips pursed as they always are, Sandy will be your trainer.

Following this middle aged Sandy around for three days then, an anachronism in these parts. Utterly alone among our wait staff, she’s the only one over thirty, much less forty. Rumor has it her husband’s loaded and she keeps this job just for pocket cash, but at any rate she’s the lone throwback, a lifer who’s never done anything else. With her fake smile and her canned speeches, waltzing in her shadow is a minimum wage nightmare that refuses to end. She pushes desserts as if selling cars and the overall effect of her shtick is sickening.

In addition to all this other madness, I’ve already managed to lose my wallet since moving here. No ID renders you an essential cipher in this city, and I have to wonder if I shouldn’t spend my days sitting in the middle of an empty room staring at the walls. Seems the only solution to keeping myself out of trouble, climbing over this staggering mountain of debt.

Once I reach the floor, on Thursday, they’ve got me dialed into their standard lunch wage of three thirteen an hour. Most establishments break off the least allowed by law - two thirteen, half the minimum wage - and so it is for the night shift employees here as well. But even though I’m shoved into the dismal, much reviled dining room each morning until I can climb further up the seniority ladder, they’re breaking off this extra dollar every hour for me and all the other unlucky daytime stiffs.

I figure these guys must be okay if they’re willing to fork over the extra cash. Right. Poker faced Mark Stokes is cool and so are most of the others running that place, but every restaurant I’d ever worked for seemed pervaded by incompetency, it’s in the woodwork somehow, and this place is no different.

Maybe because these managers can never get on the same page, the operation suffers. John Stella, Stokes’s right hand man, is a little ball of pizza dough, perpetuating this overly gruff front for no discernible reason. But Stella spends most of his time in the kitchen and rarely crosses my path anyway, which is fine by me. He’s the kind of guy who treats his ass kissers and best friends like gold but is a dick to everyone else, an attitude I don’t have much use for.

On the flipside, John’s brother in law, Ron, is also a member of our management team. Tall and a well scrubbed clean, his hair a neatly trimmed black hair, Ron gives the appearance of having probably played basketball in high school and never said an offensive word to anyone. Figures then that he’s a pervert on par with a par with my roommates, prefacing most of his comments with an actually, uh.... that serves as the only indicator something foul is imminent.

So Ron is an ally, a real straight shooter, but finding a management figure to befriend beyond him is iffy at best. Hillary, sure, she of the long flowing golden hair, the alluring cocktail of a curvy frame and bookworm’s sweet demeanor. She’s a wild child away from here, which only improves her standing in my ledger, and becomes a valuable comrade. Still, for every Hillary there’s a Lori, the glossy eyed banquet manager, thin and sallow and unpleasant like Michelle Pfeiffer on crack, and there is also the blight of the two Drews.

Hovering over most mornings, Drew Forster and Smith attend to each minor detail with anal retentive scrutiny. A short and wiry bespectacled geek, Forster arrives each opening shift unfailingly grumpy, though still a far sight easier to deal with than Smith. Smith, the smug, overweight bastard with thinning blonde hair and round wire rim glasses is the manager most directly involved with me and my dining room posse, a thespian in his spare time with some local theatre company. With every sentence spoken he’s offering dramatic inflection alongside all purpose condescension, yet while he believes he’s coming across as a hardass, we all pretty much assume he must be gay.

Stoner boy! he addresses me, with appropriately booming voice, "if I were casting a coming of age movie, I would seriously consider you for the lead."

Attached to the fleabag Parke University Hotel, our rib joint offers not only lunch and dinner but a breakfast buffet as well, run with an iron fist by Smith in the despicable cave of a dining room. He’s got a couple other lackeys cruising through at six in the morning to set this up, but whoever’s opening dining room lunch is stuck tearing it down. In at ten thirty, the opener has to knock this out as well as get the server station stocked and the kitchen ready by eleven, when the rest of the crew shows up and we officially open for business.

Moving up the hierarchal ladder, above Stokes, a number of other supposedly key figures are floating in occasionally to check on the operation. Two-faced Chip King, for instance, a fat little fuck who gives you high fives on his way in, before bitching to Stokes about the unkempt quality of your uniform. Or his boss, John Votino, who’s always pissed off about something, period. I respect Votino a shade more than King, however, because he never pretends to be your pal; he just flies straight to Stokes with his beefs about your sorry ass.

The particulars of who owns the place are somewhat cloudy, but this round old man named Mr. Self factors in somewhere, and the principal proprietor is none other than George Steinbrenner, who of course claims the New York Yankees among his business holdings. Steinbrenner, then, is naturally involved with the local Yankees minor league team, our beloved Columbus Clippers, and always puts his traveling players up in the Parke Hotel, another piece of his empire.

I spot him in the restaurant just once, early in my tenure here, but technically speaking he is my boss. Steinbrenner’s my boss and yes, it’s worth noting, I would wind up getting fired.  

3

OUR TWILIGHT ODYSSEY begins at the Drake Union, deep within the labyrinthine chambers of this sprawling university. An entertainment facility for students, Drake Union has live theatre, which we avoid, and a charming little bar fitted with some bowling lanes and a pair of warped pool tables. Unable to drink without ID, and not much for alcohol anyway, I watch my roommates become thoroughly soused before we drift upstairs to a third story fast food restaurant. Overlooking the smooth sable surface of our Olentangy River, the back wall of this restaurant is all windows and its view breathtaking. Thirty below zero tonight and there’s no one else out except us fools, rendering this campus an unblemished wonderland.

We’re at Ruby’s now, two doors down from our house. Driven home from the Drake and boredom leads us here, already our favorite hangout. After one week, the scowling bartender Randy knows our faces well enough not to hassle with ID, which is fortunate if I ever hope to drink in this town again. Still unaccustomed to drinking beer, though, unable to hang with Alan’s pilsner pounding Irish roots, Damon and I ask for daiquiris and Randy’s not above glowering even at us.

Gee, let me go check in the CLOSET for my BLENDER, he retorts, maybe I can DUST IT OFF.

Ordering mixed drinks here in the metropolis, the overworked barkeeps have too much on their hands as it is to piddle with this nonsense. Not so much a problem here at Ruby’s as it is those overstuffed clubs bursting at the seams on High Street, but the mentality is still geared principally toward serving beer. A quick turnover, a timely dispersion of the lines standing sometimes six deep.

A mellow dive, Ruby’s is basically your proper English pub, outfitted almost entirely with wood and a dark, smoky atmosphere that grows incrementally warmer the foggier it becomes. A creaky wooden beer stained floor and matching bar, matching tables and chairs and stage further accentuate this idyll, not to mention the mostly killer jukebox. Above it a chalkboard calendar charts the musical acts due up this month, horrendous though most of them are. Two pool tables near the front door and real darts, an elaborately stained glass window on the other half of the bar and the kind of chattering hippie clientele that unites the thread of conversation, on quiet nights like these, from one end of the building to the other. Still, thoroughly soused, my roommates are both pulling for a walk down to High Street, and I never need much incentive to join them.

Down Woodruff on foot through this freezing winter weather, the temperature swing we’ve endured this past week has to stand as some sort of record. In the space of seven days it’s gone from seventy plus to thirty below, though if it seems ridiculous at this instant our misery doubles as we round the corner south onto High. Along it, with the wall of shops on its eastern shore nearly uniformly closed at this one o’clock hour and the university lining the west side of the street a pitch black, lifeless tomb, the long straight gauntlet of road makes for a high pressure wind tunnel, blasting our bundled skin, turning our bones to ice.

The fast food Mexican restaurant we were hoping to catch is shut down for the evening, ten blocks south of Woodruff, lonely and frosted over near 9th Avenue and High. Fortunately for us a pub named Panini’s spills a beacon of warm yellow light onto the sidewalk at the corner of 10th, and they not only serve sandwiches but don’t even card at the door. We sling our thawing bodies onto stools at the second, most distant bar and stare up at its monolithic menu, while the Drew Smith clone with a name badge reading Matt openly scoffs at us.

Why don’t you get a haircut consistent with the century you live in? he challenges Damon.

Damon has a clean cut past to call upon, but cast it aside somewhere a year or two earlier. Now sporting decidedly unfashionable Buddy Holly hornrimmed glasses and a shaggy mop of hair, he’s doing all he can to look the part of an eccentric rock star. He loathes taking showers - once a week, tops - and the camouflage jacket he wears like skin probably isn’t helping the cause when it comes to these campus ladies. But he expects little else outside of banging those hillbilly broads up north, hopefully walking away with a diploma a year and some change from now. Anything else is just gravy, including the two hundred bucks a week he makes playing bass, for that cheesy rock band on the weekends.

Panini’s is a moderately upscale joint near the southern tip of campus, and on a weeknight such as this it resembles a New York City deli more than anything else. Heaping subs and sandwiches, a smattering of business boosted by half upon our arrival. When the weekend comes all those tables in the center will find themselves jostled against the wall and a DJ’s bound to arrive, as this joint magically morphs into a dance club. An overly crowded one at that, with pisspoor music and too little ventilation.

Waiting for our sandwiches to exit the oven, I yawn and risk a look around. Scarcely populated on a frosty eve such as this, but the ratio’s decent. This skinny brunette in the corner with giant breasts is sitting at a table with some other girl, and we can’t resist craning our necks back at them whenever the spirit moves us. Damon and Alan are pounding mugs of ale but from where I sit ogling them offers the only source of entertainment.

Where you guys live? Matt asks, bored, the three of us his lone patrons.

Summit and Woodruff, I tell him.

Yeah, we walked, Alan says.

You walked? he scoffs.

Yeah.

From Summit and Woodruff?

Yeah.

Bullshit, he says, it’s thirty below.

We walked, I insist.

Bullshit.

Beyond this point he loses interest in speaking to any of us, figuring we’re either escaped mental patients or habitual liars. Then the brunette with giant breasts and her friend are joined by these Italian guys who keep shooting us evil glares for checking out their girlfriends, at which juncture we figure it’s probably a good idea to finish our sandwiches and get the hell out of here. Halfway home, frozen to the bone, we stop at the all night Buckeye Donuts, we defrost our fingers playing a 1980s video game in the corner before wrapping up this senseless journey.

ALWAYS FLAKY, ALEXIS once dressed well and exhibited a modicum of normalcy. But through a series of breakups with Alan - by turns both cause and effect of her progressive idiosyncracy - she’s flipped her past upside down. She begins associating with this drugged out bisexual chick named Sara who systematically converts Alexis into a total weirdo, a path she’d already begun mapping out on her own. These days, following the ebb and flow of Alexis’s loopy conversation is a fragmented nightmare and among other charming personality developments, she too is experimenting lesbianism with many of her longtime friends.

Just to freak guys out, she explains, we like to french kiss each other sometimes.

She waits tables at the Applebee’s on Olentangy, which is where we meet for drinks. Located in the same strip mall as my restaurant, hers is a bustling establishment, a swarm of dense bodies crammed necktie to elbow in one warm, raucous room. Now that he’s caught on with a temp service, Alan can party with impunity again, and rounding out our quaint quartet is the recently relieved hostess, Marion. With swelling bosom and sleek black hair, Marion is among the more normal of Alexis’s colleagues, though at this moment they speak of making out at some party recently - again, just to psyche out some boys.

Hard to reconcile Alexis’s prim and proper past against the image she now portrays, and it is equally impossible to believe she and Alan were ever compatible. Clean cut and muscular, his copper colored hair trimmed to regulation, Alan spends one weekend a month in the arms of the national guard. He’s a weekend warrior doing his part for some padding on the paycheck and tuition assistance should he choose a return to school. By contrast, while Alexis has always held a deep seated penchant for funky, mismatched and outdated clothes, she’s tweaked this fetish to the extreme. By day she’s also attending beautician school, and the havoc this education has wreaked on her ever changing hairstyle is staggering.

You still seeing that Rikki-Tikki-Tavi guy? Alan asks, always handy with the racist jokes.

Rakesh, Alexis corrects, spelling out the name of her med student boyfriend for the thousandth time.

Maybe not for long, Marion says, with a knowing smirk.

I don’t know what happens, Alexis sighs, he always has an erection when we’re making out....but every time we start to have sex he shrivels.

Hmm, Alan muses, maybe I should call him Limpy-Dicky-Tavi.

Boredom leads us to Alexis’s apartment, in the University Village complex immediately behind this strip mall. Flipping on her old school Nintendo, we become one with Mario in flattening dog faced mushrooms, all to the tune of that corny music we’ve memorized better than our birthdates. When it’s not my turn I’m flipping through a stack of music magazines Alexis has just given me, old rags from a year or two prior. Cheap amusement, but no worse than the kind Alan found on the way here, hollering out his truck’s window at a young chick strolling up the sidewalk.

Hey! We can buy beer! he calls out to her. Enthralled to no end by her mystified expression, he chortles for the remainder of our drive.

Marion bails moments after impact, and for this I feel to blame. Though she has a boyfriend, the dynamic demands I provide some small measure of excitement, and yet I fare, as is far too often the case, miserably short. Fifteen seconds after meeting me a shield comes up and nothing I can say or do will penetrate this, I don’t exist. An isolated incident I could pin on her, but this reaction is nothing new and the best I can ascertain the general impression these chicks form is not one of hatred, or dislike, but that they find me trifling and ridiculous for some reason or reasons I’ve yet to learn. Alan’s regaled me with tales of how the three of them will wrestle around on the floor as he cops cheap feels of Marion’s contour, but with me around it’s this, video games and magazines, a somber atmosphere. Alexis puffing on a one hitter bowl of weed and working the telephone to score some stronger drugs, as Marion sits twiddling her thumbs.

....yeah, so anyway, Alan’s continuing a story I already know and scarcely pay attention to, these Italian guys noticed we were checking out their girlfriends, so they started giving us the evil eye.

They were probably mobsters! Alexis gushes, "don’t you guys know the mob runs that place?! You shouldn’t even hang out there!"

Oh whatever! Alan scoffs, the mob....quit being stupid.

Upon Marion’s departure, miffed by her inability to touch base with any connections, Alexis shepherds a mission back to the strip mall, as we walk to its indigenous pool hall, Chalkie’s. A giant room with searing overhead lights, Chalkie’s boasts about thirty tables and wall to wall students, or at least those of a corresponding age. Grabbing one of the few remaining felts, Alan secures us a pitcher of beer and we jump into a game of cutthroat pool. Alexis paces around and fidgets, she slinks off to the foyer payphone, as we soon dismiss her and finish our game head to head.

I can understand Alan’s interest in establishing this carryover pussy, to get him over the hump until we meet some girls down here. But though my own skills dim next to his and Damon’s, I wonder if this inability to maintain any connections from the old days is much hindrance at all. With no number to reach my last Mansfield fling Jessica, the lonely nights fan out like flames and yet they might be a blessing in disguise. I have no choice but to sink my teeth into this college scene until something snaps, and the threat of an Alexis-like distraction doesn’t factor in the least. The legends surrounding this magical town have led us down here, and there’s no sense wasting time digging through the past.

Our focus lands upon a blonde shooting pool nearby, easily the hottest chick we’ve seen since moving here. She has a young Debbie Harry’s face fused to the figure of a porn star. Dolled up to the nines, her radiant lipstick and dazzling eyeliner a vortex drawing every eye and light in the room, she keeps looking over at us with a smile, fully aware we can’t keep our eyes away from the magnetic pulse of her appearance. Skinny, with large breasts and a perfect behind, she’s chosen some skinny nerd in Coke bottle glasses as her companion for the evening.

I don’t get it, dude, I moan, citing this troubling theme we’ve seen around campus, the knockout babe coupling with some dork.

They don’t feel threatened by the math geek, Alan explains, she doesn’t have to worry about him putting the moves on her.

Alexis disappears entirely, off on an unnamed mission. We finish our pitcher and pool game without the interruption of her frequent senseless stories, until she returns a half hour later acting even wackier than before. All the while Blondie taunts us with her maddening smile, her doughy ass in flimsy slacks bent over the table. Alexis paces around talking about some pills she just scored but we’re bored with this scene, as she’s finally grating on Alan’s nerves just as bad as mine and we politely excuse ourselves. Crossing the river home, back into the heart of university, Alan laments his reunion gone awry.

I don’t mind a couple chicks dyking it out, but what the fuck, he curses, you don’t see me kissing dudes just for shits and giggles.

4

I JUST MOVED HERE A little over a year ago from New York City, Amanda’s telling me, see I was really bad into drugs, I was drinking all the time and hooked on crack and I had to get away.

Amanda stands maybe five foot four, with a soft luxurious banner of curly blonde hair, those giant breasts and an ample ass. When she smiles the creases form a pair of twin parentheses, two on each cheek, and her blue eyes embed a thinly veiled mischief. Her appearance brings to mind a more pornographic version of the mom from Growing Pains, and yet looking past that nonstop bluster, her purported hardcore past, she too comes across as a doting housewife. It’s hard to equate these stories she’s laying on me as even remotely factual, yet it’s obvious she believes them, if no one else.

Most everyone else finds Amanda a cloying nuisance, but I beg to differ, or maybe it’s just that I’m desperate for trim. I know her type well, and in fact her type is always attracted to guys like me, because I’m a blank slate. I’m an ear which always listens, without ever offering any judgement, or interrupting with any stories of my own. She asserts she ascended to management in her earlier incarnation here, and who am I to say otherwise, even as all the other employees roll their eyes at this claim. Even as I’m standing there when Mark Stokes spots her name on the bottom of our schedule, posted in the server station hallway.

Who hired her back!? he irritably demands, of a couple other managers clustered nearby.

I force myself to suppress a laugh. Apparently, Amanda has slipped through the cracks much the same as I.

Though countless faceless others pull night shifts here, and a whole mob clamors over tables each morning in the clubhouse, our daytime dining room crew numbers exactly one half dozen. Seasoned veterans, whether hardcore party animals scraping by for rent money or pampered brats seeking a cushion atop their trust fund reserves, unite alike in their disdain for this half of the restaurant. Left alone as the dominion of new hires and fuckups, this detestable pit with balding brown carpet and tacky Tudor decor finds Mike and Kip and Akash and me meeting one or both of those criteria completely. Aside from Amanda, Brandy is the only other female peopling our crew, but for starters this is feast aplenty.

Postcard cute, with dimpled smile and a wave of long light hair, Brandy has a figure more fully fleshed out than someone of her modest height and weight rightfully should. Pleasant and unassuming as a dislocated farmgirl, an image nailed home with heart stopping precision the first time I spot her in a pair of jeans. These girls you just can’t get a handle on until they parade past you wearing street clothes, and the way her behind fills out those pants is an eyepopping joy compared to those black dress slacks and electric pink shirts they force us into.

Hideous though these shirts are, they represent rhythm and routine, patterns I’ve known nothing about for the months preceding this one. Inevitably bound to bore me, for now there is comfort in rising at the same time each day, throwing on the same clothes, driving in and seeing the same faces. Not just our six man team but the satellites swirling around us, the interactions of our fragile ecosystem. Drew Smith adjusting his glasses as he condemns some trivial detail of our work, or the dreadlocked, wisecracking black man Gary Russell cranking his hiphop tunes and lunches from the dining room kitchen Wednesday through Sunday every week. Jenny Hughes at the lobby podium, soft spoken and smiling, the rare veteran chick who avoids most of the others, and Stacey Edwards slinging drinks and her own peculiar wit behind the clubhouse bar.

Jenny mans the hostess stand each weekday morning with plump, pouting lips, or, as they’re known in some circles, DSL’s. Her chestnut hair cascades halfway down her back and shimmers even in the dim lighting of the lobby, as does her flawless countenance. She never wears makeup, nor has any reason to, and with a demeanor as sugar sweet as Brandy’s it’s mystifying why she consistently dates such losers. I’m unaware of her history but the blanks are filled in by everyone else, her past, the jackass cook named Steve she’s currently seeing. That she’s already caught him cheating on her once but stands by her man nonetheless.

Though Drew Smith continually stands behind our dining room bar, polishing both his glasses and the ones we use to serve drinks, if we actually need any alcohol during these a.m. shifts it’s to the clubhouse we’re forced to travel. Behind its bar, which has more the feel of a smoky tavern and does twice the business of our bright, stuffy dining room, the vaguely Oriental looking Stacey Edwards holds court with the most sensually seductive currently found on our payroll. Big city glamorous like I’d hoped more of these girls would be, her coarse black hair looks as though it were trimmed with a pocket knife, and in sharp contrast to Jenny Hughes she wears glittering eyeliner and the occasional dab of exotic lipstick.

Stacey’s quick to dispense highly illustrious tales concerning her and sidekick Hillary and another clubhouse chick, Amy A, dropping acid and wandering around the artsy Short North district, and I wonder if she’s the physical embodiment of these wild times we’ve moved here to find. For the most part, at least while working, she comes across as a dreamily stoned pothead, though I’ve seen her in that black leather jacket and those hole riddled jeans, and I know there’s more to the story. She might not have the most outrageous frame but I’m sure there’s something under those clothes worth exploring, and I hope she grants the chance.

"God, I hate people!" Mike Short seethes, bursting into the shadowy cavern of our server station, as we’re treated to venomous verbal reenactment of his current crisis.

His common mantra, he mutters this one at least three or four times a day, dead serious and on the verge of bursting a blood vessel in his forehead each time. Standing a few inches lower than me, Short fits the name well and walks around with jet black hair neatly parted down one side, a goatee to match. He stomps around with clenched teeth continually threatening to quit, oblivious to the comic value inherent in his runaway rage.

Furthering our wide sweeping study in incompetence, Kip shares not only the same job as Mike but the same apartment as well, in the University Village complex just behind our restaurant. Joined most days by Akash, the three of them leave here bound for that humble abode, eating up their afternoons with video games and bong loads. With his hair extending just shy of Damon’s length, though tucked behind his ears while working, Kip exudes a stoned aura on par with Stacey’s, far more subdued than his passive aggressive roommate.