So this happened a few years ago, but it’s the kind of thing that I was referring to in my first post. It’s absolutely ridiculous, and dangerous, and probably illegal, but man does it make a good anecdote!
Las Vegas, sixteen-year-old me. We’re on a foreign exchange students holiday and the only responsible adult in the group has entered a karaoke bar and is drunkenly singing “Like a Virgin” at the top of her lungs. Since us students are not allowed in the bar, we wander off. This other girl and I bump into a group of guys outside the hotel, and we sit and chat with them for a while. When it’s time to go home one of them asks if he can take me on a date, and because I’m sixteen and stupid I give him my number.
At 1 am the next night I get a call from the guy saying he’s outside my hotel in his car. I get in and a few minutes later we pull up at a mobile home in the outskirts of Las Vegas. When we get inside, I’m greeted by a couple of screaming toddlers, unemptied rubbish bags and so much furniture you can barely walk. Several people stare at me through half-closed eyelids.
My date tells me to make myself comfortable, he will be right back. I sit on the least dirty surface I can find, which is an upside down laundry basket, and nervously wave at the other people in the room. A middle aged man who’s all skin and bones, a woman I am 90% sure is a hooker, and a couple of twentysomethings covered in scabs and sores. I try to make conversation with the most awake-looking of them, the hooker, who turns out to be the mother of the two screaming toddlers. Her name is Chastity and she doesn’t seem to have noticed the irony. After a couple of polite remarks about how cute her screamers are, my date is back with two cushions, a box, a candle and a boombox (yes, a boombox). He arranges the cushions on the floor around the box, puts the candle on top of it and lights it, and starts blasting some sort of heavy metal hell music from the boombox. He tells me to sit down on one of the cushions so I do, and a few moments later he comes back with a selection of pop-tarts. Dinner. I think the rest of the crew must have clocked that we were in the middle of some seriously romantic shit, because they all (slowly) get up and go to another room. They leave the babies behind, but the heavy metal music has drowned their screaming, so you can barely tell they’re there.
At this point I am completely freaked out, but aware of the fact that this guy is my ride back to the hotel, so I try to play along. I eat my dinner, talk about how cool America is, ask him what movies and music he likes. By the time all the pop tarts have been consumed I have come up with a pretty good escape plan. I ask where the toilet is, am informed that it’s not working and I have to go “in the back yard” so I go out the back, stand there for a couple of minutes and come back announcing I’m on my period and I need to buy tampons. My date looks super freaked out by this fact, and he makes me sit on a towel on the way back to the Strip. He drops me off at a convenience shop and I purchase some tampons I don’t really need. When I return to the car he tells me he thinks it’s best he drops me off at the hotel since I’m not feeling well. My plan is a success. Before I get off the car, I poke him in the eye as hard as I can and I run into the safety of the hotel lobby.
On the bright side, literally any date after that would be better.
Oh man haha That’s pretty crazy, cracks me up you poked him in the eye. I just wrote about a time last summer when I translated a drug deal. Crazy stuff happens when you’re traveling and away from home.
You translated a drug deal? That’s hilarious! I’m gonna go read that right now. I actually studied translation at university but there was no class on translating drug slang haha.