Dead End Job (9 page)

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll turn it off.”

Call from SATAN
, the screen of the phone blared. Rocky saw the name and started to laugh again.

“And who exactly is Satan?” he asked me playfully.

“That’s just my personal trainer. He’s a really nice guy, but he tortures me twice a week at the gym. I’m pretty sure no one else calls him Satan.”

“Well OK, when I ask you to go on a date with me, I promise it won’t be an exercise date.”

I looked at him for a minute, smiling and blushing a bit. “You’re going to ask me on a date?” I asked. “You mean this is not a normal service provided by the Seattle PD?”

Rocky was looking left and right, waiting for traffic to clear. After a second he pulled out onto the road, and looked over at me deliberately.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I was going to ask you on a date, if that’s all right with you, and no, I am on my lunch break. Police officers are here to protect and serve, but chauffeuring witnesses around is currently not a normal service that we provide.”

“Hmm. Well, then,” I said, pretending to be surprised. “OK, I accept your offer. No exercise though.”

“Good,” He looked down at this lap, a bit shyly, then over to me. “I promise. No exercise.” We were both smiling. “How about dinner? I promise I will take you somewhere nice,” he suggested.

“Dinner sounds great, but you should know that I prefer to eat somewhere terrible.” I was in a joking mood.

“Perfect. I will happily take you to Seattle’s shittiest dining establishment. Unfortunately my schedule is a little crazy right now, so I don’t know exactly what night this will be. I hope you’ll still think I’m a gentleman when I call you to make last minute plans,” he explained. I really didn’t mind at all. In fact, it would probably be better for my psyche to have less time to spend obsessing and freaking out about a first date.

“I do think you’re a gentleman, and I will accompany you to said shit restaurant any day of the week.”

When Rocky dropped me off at my car, I was in a great mood, even though we hadn’t nailed down a specific date. I was hoping it would be sooner rather than later, but either way, I was pretty sure we were going go out, and I felt excited and optimistic. 

I put on some loud pop music and drove straight to the tanning bed, where I was up-sold into a “summer starter” package for $80 and a new lotion that promised a cooling feeling while under the burning bulbs. Tanning was one of my biggest vices, which I justified by something I had read somewhere that since I grew up in Seattle, my childhood sun exposure was so low that my chances of getting skin cancer were miniscule. This helped me justify my weekly vitamin D treatment. I keep telling myself that the minute I saw a wrinkle I would quit for good, but for now I was enjoying tan, wrinkle-free skin, and I was determined to live it up.

I left the tanning bed and went to my gym to sweat it out for exactly forty-three minutes on the elliptical, then headed home and got ready for weekly trivia night with Alex and friends in Ballard, an old waterfront-fishing-neighborhood-turned-hipster-hangout. I needed to talk about what had happened to me, strategize about my date with Rocky, have a couple of drinks, and figure out what the hell I should do next. Alex, with her no-bullshit and very-little-sympathy approach to advice, was just the girl that I wanted to see.

After a quick shower, I threw my thick hair in a messy bun then pulled on a pair of navy leggings and some tan raffia wedges and a long, loose heather-grey top. I took my hair down, dried my long bangs with a blast from my hairdryer and ran my fingers through the messy waves until it looked windblown and tousled like a Vogue model’s (I may not the thinnest gal out there, but I do have really fantastic hair). At the last minute, I added some cheap but cute bright pink square earrings that I’d found at a flea market and a dash of perfume.

When I arrived in Ballard, I found Alex outside smoking a cigarette with her lesbian friends, Lisa and Maxine. Alex had an easy, hip vibe about her. She made plenty of money selling dental equipment and was always wearing the latest fashions, which today included spiked Michael Kors heels, a white top and a pair of black, silky shorts that looked expensive and were probably by some uber-trendy designer I had never heard of. She also has several large and colorful tattoos, some visible and some not so visible and what I called a “modern mullet” of blond hair that looked fashionable, cool and effortless, like just about everything else about her. Alex was always chain smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey and was one of those people who ordered food and then never seemed to eat it. She was pin thin, adorable, smart and successful, but tended to be insecure and would shut down emotionally when it came to men and relationships, so she was perpetually single.  She had recently been dumped by Morgan, a local bartender, whom she had pined after for years. Even though he was never good enough for her, she let the breakup get her down and hadn’t been dating for the last couple of months, which was OK with me because she was one of my only single friends who I could count on not to ditch me for a date night with her husband or long-term boyfriend.

I had met both Alex and Amanda years ago when we were cocktailing at that horrible nightclub in Seattle’s Belltown area. Even though initially I didn’t have much in common with the two, we bonded over being fondled by gross men and secretly taking tequila shots in the bathroom during work. Years later, I count them, after Beverly and Elin, as my best friends.

“Hey, girls!” I called out to the group.

They greeted me with their normal, hipster-y lack of enthusiasm. Apparently, sorority bubbly went out of fashion in Seattle at the same time Starbucks did.

“Hey, bitch,” said Lisa, noncommittally. She was a tall and strong woman, who currently worked as a bartender/comedian /woman arm wrestler. She was also a total brain, and the reason why we didn’t come in absolute last place every week at trivia. Today, Lisa was wearing a red and black buttoned-up flannel shirt, red heels, red lipstick and tight black skinny jeans. Her dirty-blond hair was pulled back into a neat pony tail, and her bangs had been carefully curled back in 1950s pin-up style. Her tattooed biceps were bulging out of the rolled up sleeves of her top as she smoked.

Maxine, standing next to Lisa, just nodded her head. She was of medium height and build with the kind of olive skin that you would never need to put a speck of foundation on. Where Lisa was loud and boisterous, Maxine was quiet and brooding. Though she didn’t often complain, she unfortunately had one of those faces that make her look like she always either mildly upset or had a serious case of gas.

“Hi, Poops,” said Alex. Then, after taking a drag of her cigarette, “Sorry I never got back to you on Tuesday night, I was on a bike ride. How did your date go? Did you sleep with him?”

“Oh God. What? No!” I replied, confused. I had completely forgotten about the text message I sent to Alex during that my lame ass-date. I looked at her, brushing aside her question impatiently. “That seriously is not even relevant right now. I have something way more important to talk to you about,” I said. “Listen, some lady that I work with got killed in my office Tuesday night, and the messed up part is that
I
was the one who found her body on Wednesday morning when I came into work. I think she was stabbed or something. Blood everywhere. Plus, the police questioned me, and I have a date with one of them. Well, not exactly. I mean, he asked me on a date, but there is nothing on the books yet. You know how it is…” my voice sped up and trailed off, as it tends to do when I am stressed out.  I shrugged my shoulders and looked around at the girls for reaction.

The whole group took a break from their cigarettes and now Alex, Lisa and Maxine were all staring at me, open mouthed and completely dumbfounded.

“Ah - what?” Alex spoke first. “Lu, what the hell are you even talking about?” I just shook my head and stared at her. She dropped her cigarette on the ground and stared at me for a split-second before grabbing me by the arm, turning towards the building and declaring: “Fuck me. Let’s get a drink,” which seemed to me the proper response for the moment.

We all walked in together and sat at our usual tall table in the corner by the bar. The Loft was a newish bar and restaurant in Ballard that catered to the hipster crowd with PBR on tap, quiz night, and a game room upstairs with the must-have hipster games:
Big Buck Hunter
, darts and Foosball.

Being a regular had its perks, and upon seeing us walk in, the bartender, Aaron came over and handed us our usual drinks before we even ordered anything. A shot of Jameson and a beer for Alex, a gin martini for Lisa, a vodka tonic for Maxine and a glass of pinot grigio for me. 

Once we all had our drinks in front of us and got settled in, the trivia started. Just like every Thursday at 8:00 PM, the bar tables were completely full of teams. The quizmaster went through the rules (no yelling out answers, no looking at smart phones, no pretending to go take a piss and secretly looking and cheating off of anyone else’s table and no being a dick) then collected $2 from each player for the pot, from which the quizmaster took his fee. The rest of the money was then left for the winning team to claim at the end of the night.

To my knowledge, our team had never won. It didn’t help that I normally didn’t pay any attention to the game, generally got a bit too drunk and usually left early. I knew, and the rest of the team knew as well, that I was just there to drink, eat fried pickles and look at boys, then not find anyone remotely interesting to date, bum cigarettes from Alex, go into work extremely late and extremely hung-over on Friday, regret my last two glasses of wine and all of the fried pickles drenched in ranch dressing, swear off Thursday night trivia, promise to spend the next Thursday at the gym, and inevitably find myself doing it all over again the next week. There was an unspoken agreement in our group about my behavior, so every week we pretended this was not the case, and I tried to care about the questions and winning the game, which usually lasted about forty-five minutes, or until I got bored.

Usually, trivia ran in four rounds, with topics that were announced at the moment the game started.  Tonight was no different, so the first topic of the evening was announced (famous women in film) and the quizmaster started rattling off the questions. 

Lisa and Maxine got down to business at one end of our table: heads down, writing pads in hand, whispering answers to each other when they were in need of consultation, writing silently, then showing each other the answers and nodding or shaking heads in agreement when they thought they knew.

On the other side of the table, Alex and I settled down into gossip—blatantly ignoring the quiz and garnering dirty looks from the nearby tables whose members were all being quiet and serious. As I caught her up on the past couple of days I got several reactions ranging from “What the fuck?” to “Holy shitballs!” then “I don’t even know,” to “Hot” when I told her about Rocky.

We glugged down our cocktails and flagged down the bartender for another round. We were interrupted by the end of the first round and the quizmaster reading off the scores:

“In the lead we have
Sodomy in the Bottomy
with a perfect 10 points,” he announced. Then he rattled through the rest of the night’s teams in descending order of quiz skill:

Nevernudes
, 9 points

We suck at self-deprecation
, 9 points

There went my nipples again
, 8 points

Five dollars? Get out of here
, 8 points

Dopple gang bang
, 7 points

Fat Kids are harder to kidnap,
7 points,

Neil Diamond in the rough,
6 points,

Grand Theft Avocado!
6 points

I’m not a gynecologist but I’ll take a look anyway,
6 points (our team’s name, chosen by Lisa). I could’ve cared less that we weren’t winning, but the loud groans of disapproval from Lisa and Maxine almost drowned out the reading of the few last place teams.

Dickle’s Fickle Pickles,
5 points

God hates the economy
, 4 points. And so on.

Because our conversation had been so rudely interrupted by the quizmaster, Alex and I were just in time to hear Lisa and Maxine begin to argue about one of the more controversial answers. “I told you it was Betty Boop, not Shirley Temple, Maxine! Duh,” said Lisa, who then turned to her arch rival team Sodomy in the Bottomy, a table full of cute and trendy boys, and glared.

“Fucking queens,” she muttered under her breath.  The ongoing rivalry between Lisa and the gays, real or imagined, was a weekly thing. Maxine looked at Alex and me and rolled her eyes.

As I peered over at the table of cute boys towards the back of the bar, amused at Lisa’s distress, my eyes paused on the table directly behind them. I squinted, leaning forward and staring intensely at a certain smooth, mocha-colored head that looked very familiar. My heart skipped a beat when the pair of striking blue eyes belonging to that head locked into mine: it was Clark, my eternal office crush. Seeing him outside of the office was so unnerving that instead of playing it cool and casually waving or smiling, I totally panicked, my eyes darting away as I tried to pretend like I hadn’t just been caught staring at him like some kind of crazed stalker. “Oh, my God, Alex!” I whispered, looking down at the table, panicking more as I realized that my initial panic had probably made me look either A) extremely rude or B) extremely imbalanced.

“Uh, what, weirdo?” she replied loudly, craning her neck to look behind her shoulder in Clark’s direction, trying to figure out what I’d been looking at. “Why are you whispering?”

“Shhh! Jesus, you are loud. That’s the hot guy I work with— wearing the blue cardigan over there behind the gays. Quick, is he still looking at me? He just completely caught me staring at him like some kind lunatic.”

“OK, well, he
is
still staring over here, and he’s definitely hot. And…so is the girl he’s with. Are those fake boobs?” Alex craned her neck farther, enjoying the fact that she was freaking me out even more with her blatant staring. I looked up quickly to give Clark’s date the once-over. She was tiny and beautiful, with long, shiny black hair and did indeed have a pair of suspiciously humongous bazooms. “They have to be fake. I’m telling you, that shape does not exist in nature,” Alex continued, gallantly trying to make me feel better about myself by putting the girl down. “And, I can tell she’s totally skinny-fat. She looks like a fleshy, washed up porn star.” Alex was being very serious, but her description was so hilarious that I almost spit wine out of my nose.