Have some fun if she's not the one

Sometimes it’s better when you know a date isn’t going to work out. It takes some of the pressure off. Instead of nervously trying to impress the person sitting across from you with some overeager theatrical performance, you can relax and just stuff your face with pad thai. You don’t even have to take your elbows off the table.

 

If the ultimate goal is to lock down a significant other, then sure, the whole experience falls short. Otherwise, I totally recommend it.

 

Two weeks ago this was, at a Thai restaurant on Congress Street in Portland. Since it was a beautiful evening, I waited for my date, “Lucy,” outside the eatery while watching city life unfurl before me – bicyclists cutting across lanes of traffic, cabs honking horns, panhandlers hitting up cash-rich pedestrians for beer money and pocket change. It lulled me into a kind of dreamy Zen state. Then Lucy rounded a corner and walked toward me, at which point she immediately earned a check in the minus column: Too much makeup. Subtle and tastefully applied, makeup can be alluring, a splash of color lending context to a delicate painting. This wasn’t subtle, and it wasn’t tasteful. It was like being approached by someone playing the Joker in an off-Broadway production of “The Dark Knight,” minus the weird scars and propensity for murdering investment bankers. I hoped.

 

Maybe that isn’t fair. But each of has our own interior plus and minus columns, and we use them when assessing people in these types of scenarios; at the end of the night, we tally up the scores and use them to determine whether said person deserves a second date, or will be relegated to anecdote status and column fodder. I’m sure she was doing the same with me, scoping out my bald pate and wondering silently how an earthly object can possibly emit more light than a midday sun. The answer: clean living. And turtle wax.

 

The makeup wasn’t a deal breaker. Beyond the lipstick and pinched-bottom rouge was a striking woman, beautiful in a way that weakens knees and inspires poets to write rosy verse about handholding under summer sunsets. When the restaurant hostess told us there’d be a wait, and that she’d call us when a table was ready, I thought, “Okay, it’s a gorgeous evening. Let’s kill some time with a little walk-and-talk through downtown Portland. Let’s get to know this mysterious femme. Then we can eat, and none too soon, ’cause I’m so hungry I could eat an airplane fuselage.” I could have, too.

 

So we walked, and in short order I discovered that that she had spent some time last summer living with one of her older brothers in – wait for it – Thailand!

 

Wow!

 

This is the kind of thing you want on a date – a conversational meander that has good traction to it, something you can work with. I was intrigued, figuring it might be a fruitful avenue to explore. So I asked her about Thailand, because that’s what you do.

 

If I was a different sort of guy, I may have been satisfied by her response. But I’m the sort of guy I am. I wanted to know what the culture was like, what she saw, how the architecture looked, what experiences she had there. Instead, I learned that Thailand is expensive, which means I’ll probably never go there, and that the food is awesome, which does me no good since I’ll probably never go there. And that’s the long and short of it. I didn’t even find out why her brother was living there in the first place, although I think it’s safe to assume he’s some sort of secret agent, collecting state secrets by bribing Thai officials with cheeseburgers and nudie magazines. These were the kinds of blanks I had to fill in for myself.

 

This, combined with the fact that she sought remarkably few details about my own life, portended doom. By the time we sat down to dinner – Thai food, though how authentic it was I guess I’ll never know – I knew she wasn’t for me. There’s nothing wrong with her, per se; we just weren’t compatible in the ways that mattered. I’d never be able to confide in her my burning desire to construct a working Iron Man suit so I can fly over buildings and punch bears in the face. 

 

You’d think this would disappoint me. And it did, to a degree. But I’ve been in these situations before, and this is where the fun actually begins. Because it’s like a free play at the arcade, where the pinball machines are open and nothing you do has any consequences. It’s a weird and rare freedom. 

 

See, I prepare for dates much the same way I prepare for an interview. I come up with a list of basic questions, and if the interviewee – or date – gives me an answer that propels us into an unexpected tangent, then great, we can happily go off-script and traipse together in the wilderness. If she’s giving me nothing, then at least I have those baseline questions to fall back on, a safety net that keeps the conversation moving and prevents it from becoming too awkward. In this scenario, I cease to be Jeff Lagasse, earnest bachelor, and become David Letterman, detached talk show guy. You haven’t had fun on a date until you’ve pretended to be a late night host chatting up a movie starlet about an upcoming project.

 

“So Lucy, I hear you have four siblings! What’s that like? Great, great. Well I’m told you have a new movie out. What can you tell us about this clip we’re about to see?”

 

Sometimes you have to make your own fun.

 

In a way, evenings like this are a best case scenario. When things are awkward, a date is like a stay in a hospital waiting room, awaiting test results you just know are gonna be crappy. When they go super well, and there’s a spark, you go temporarily insane with infatuation, forget your own name, and start wearing mismatched socks all the time. People come out of electroshock with their brains less scrambled.

 

It’s that middle ground where waters are the smoothest. That does no one any good in the long run, of course, but in the short term, it makes for a great segment in the zany variety show of life.

 

Coming up next: Animal trainer Nigel Marven shows us how to feed Raisinettes to a rabid baboon! Play us into the break, Paul!

 

Vulgar display of superpower

Oh, the things I would do if I could fly.

 

There are so many items I’d check off my to-do list, a goodly amount of them illegal in many parts of the world – including the Saharan badlands, where most of the laws currently on the books pertain to the ownership of camels. First thing’s first: visit Paris, take an indulgent selfie at the top of the Eiffel Tower, and impress some sweet little mademoiselle with my ability to bypass the ticket lines at Euro Disney. Second thing’s second: reverse the rotation of the Earth so I can go back in time and pay 1950’s prices for Oreos and rock candy. Hey, it worked in the first Superman movie.

 

Such ponderances, if they can be legitimized by calling them that, are part of the great fun in envisioning a world where superpowers are possible. Which is why, on occasion, someone in my circle of friends will ask the question, “What would you do if you had the power to such-and-such? How would you behave if you could X, Y, and Z?” It should be noted that my circle of friends is comprised largely of nerds. Like I needed to tell you that.

 

What’s interesting is that a growing number of generations can ask these types of questions. Batman, powerless though he is, has been around for almost 80 years. Superman is older still. Even some of the “newer” superheroes, like Wolverine and The Incredible Hulk, made their debuts when televisions were black-and-white, beer cost a nickel, and Kenny Rogers didn’t look like he was sculpted from the meat they put in hot dogs. For decades, children – and adult shut-ins like myself – have been closing their eyes and envisioning the continents racing past far below them, faster than a speeding bullet. Which would probably be terrifying at first, but still safer than flying Jet Blue.

 

The great thing about nearly a century’s worth of comic book silliness is that, with an ever-growing preponderance of fantastical men and women, the sheer wealth of superpowers currently on the books outnumber instances of vomiting at a Justin Bieber concert. Professor X can read peoples’ minds. The mighty Storm can alter the weather, sending punishing winds and bolts of lightning crashing down upon her enemies. Mister Fantastic (my old college nickname) can bend and stretch his body like taffy. And the Invisible Woman can, well, turn herself invisible. It was probably a good idea for the folks at Marvel Comics to give the invisibility power to a woman. Judging by my own conversations, men are not to be trusted with this ability.

 

One of my favorite characters (yes, I’m still talking about this) is Mystique. She’s a villain, but she’s got one of the coolest superpowers ever conceived: She can morph her body into other peoples’ forms. It’s called “shapeshifting.” Oh, she wants to sneak undetected into the Capitol building in Washington? Poof! Now she looks like Senator John McCain. She wants to go completely incognito as someone wholly unrecognizable to the general public? Poof! Now she looks like Pauly Shore.

 

Let’s explore the possibilities of this intoxicating talent, shall we?

 

Right off the bat I’ll admit that, if I woke up one morning with this power, I would immediately set to work abusing it in the most disgusting and morally depraved ways possible. It’s at this point that I have to be vague, because if I went into it in even the most basic detail, I would soon have an editor standing over my desk with her arms crossed, slowly shaking her head until I felt the appropriate level of shame. Let’s leave it at this: Brad Pitt is hosting a party at my apartment tonight, and he’s newly unattached. Bring wine.

 

As with many of these outlandish skills, though, the possibilities of shapeshifting are virtually endless, and aren’t just confined to bamboozling people for creepy purposes. Figuring out a Halloween costume, for example, would be a cinch. Forget the clichéd rubber Nixon mask; in two seconds flat you could actually become Nixon. On a day-to-day basis, the changes wouldn’t have to be that dramatic. You could keep your face, which most people consider central to their identities, and simply use the shapeshifting power as a weight loss tool, shaving inches off your waistline even as you inhale buckets of ice cream and chase it with cake frosting. That’s where things start getting dangerous, though. Personally, I’d eat like I had a week left to live, until I got super sick, at which point a doctor would tell me I had a week left to live. Then I’d shapeshift into his boss and fire him.

 

Telepathy, pyrokinesis, X-ray vision, super strength; either the creative divisions of the major comic book companies reek heavily of reefer, or the artists who work on these demigods never quite let go of their childhood imaginations – preferring laser-beam shooting, fire-breathing, car-throwing absurdities to anything even approaching adult maturity. I used to be closeted in my geeky appreciation for this stuff. Then technology made it possible for movie studios to crank out hero flicks that, amazingly, aren’t embarrassing. That’s when I found out I’m not alone; that there are plenty of grown men and women who are still endlessly adjusting their inner glasses. Suddenly it’s okay to be childish. And why not? Adult life is hard. Talking to friends about how cool it’d be if I could shoot dragon flames out of my butt serves as a nice escape.

 

One more thing I’d do if I could fly: Speed beside an airborne commercial plane and moon all the passengers. Bet Superman never thought of that one.

 

For whom the booth tolls

Toll booth workers are such a mystery. Has anyone ever met one in a non-turnpike context? I’ve a sneaking suspicion that they don’t actually exist in tangible society; that they self-generate inside their little booths like a video game solder re-spawning after stepping on a digital grenade. Grown in a fashion similar to plants, the highway equivalent of wild carrots.

 

That isn’t meant to be a general dig at these denizens of the roadways, or any kind of insult at all, in fact. Rather, it’s an expression of puzzlement over these curious creatures. Typically, they seem perfectly nice, or at least disposition-neutral, silently accepting their fares in a workmanlike clockwork of collect-and-make-change-, collect-and-make-change. Our interactions with them are usually limited to mumbled thank-yous as we hand over our fistfulls of quarters, paying our way to whichever exit has a working bathroom and a doughnut shop that sells sesame seed bagels. Not that they ever have sesame seed anymore. Jerks.

 

Once in a while, though, we have an extended interaction with one of these toll booth people. Everybody’s experience with this is different, I’m sure, but for some reason my conversations with them are always surreal, playing out as a kind of weird philosophical lesson from a wise old sage. I’ve got this knack for meeting “boothers” – my little word for them – who dispense advice as though they’re hermetic Jedi masters, patiently instructing motorists in the ways of The Force.

 

I’ll give you an example.

 

Two weeks ago, this was. I’m driving through the toll booth in Gray, and, lacking one of those EZ Pass doohickeys, I naturally stop at the booth to hand over a sum of money that could feed an Ugandan orphan for a month. Because I lack the motivation to set up the EZ Pass, the cup holder in my car has transformed into a tangled thicket of quarters and mashed dollar bills. As the line of cars in front of me inched forward, I reached into this maelstrom of loose cash, selected what felt like three singles – for the tax into Sherwood Forest is a might high, yar, so it is – and readied them in my hand. When my turn came, I handed the bills over to the boother and awaited my change.

 

Almost immediately, and with a flourish, the boother ripped loose one of the singles from the pile I’d handed him and held it about two inches from my face, waggling it as if he were trying to hypnotize a dog with a chew toy. He regarded me sternly, not speaking. I took the dollar bill from him – I’d given him an extra one, obviously – and stuffed it back into my cup holder.

 

“That’s why you always count them out,” he said condescendingly, as though I were new to the concept of monetary exchanges. Then he hit the switch to trigger the green light, disgustedly turning his head back to whatever he had been doing, which I’m pretty sure was watching “Days of Our Lives” on a transistor television.

 

An off-putting incident, sure, but not something that would necessarily make me wary of boother ways. 

 

Like I said, though, this is a pattern.

 

An almost identical incident occurred in 2006. (Yes, I know the exact year. I am a wizard.) I was driving back home from Portland and handed some cash over to the boother by the Turnpike entrance, as is custom – only this time, thinking it was a single, I handed him a crisp ten dollar bill.

 

Part of what made his reaction scary was the look of the man: Weathered, with gnarled, angular bones, he looked like he’d been carved out of a tree and infused with life by an evil warlock. Like the dude in Gray, he waved around the excess money in menacing fashion; only, to be extra creepy, he whirled on me with a dark and leering grin, the kind that, in horror movies, is usually accompanied by a flash of lightning and the high-pitched shriek of a soon-to-be murder victim. Inexplicably, he seemed genuinely angry.

 

“You gave me too much money!” he wailed, accenting each syllable with a wave of my bills. He was still holding them too far away for me to take them back. He seemed to expect some sort of reply. 

 

“Um ... sorry?” was my meek and confused response.

 

He huffed and shoved the bills in my face. “You need to be more careful!” he yelled, and thrusted the crumpled wad forward. When I took it, he added punctuation to the end of this strange encounter by shuttering the window of his booth completely, where, I assume, he later turned back into a bat.

 

Obviously, this man has succumbed to the Dark Side of the Force. 

 

“But Jeff,” you say. “These are isolated incidents that took place years apart. How is this enough to make you wary of these so-called ‘boothers?’”

 

 There’s one more.

 

A cold night this past December. I was about to enter I-295 through Portland when I inched up to the booth and did something risky: I asked for directions.

 

The boother, a bookish lady of perhaps 40, gave me directions which I knew to be circuitous; in a bit of a hurry, I was hoping for more of a direct route, like a top-secret auxiliary highway, or a wormhole through time and space. I asked her, “Is there anything a little quicker?”

 

“The quick route is more complicated,” she replied. “The simple way is better.” Now she was regarding me with something like cold steel in her eyes.

 

I nodded, disappointed, and started to ease my car forward again ... when she stopped me.

 

“You really shouldn’t be in such a hurry,” she said.

 

Expecting her to say more, I waited. After an awkward beat of silence, I cautiously started creeping forward once more.

 

She stopped me again.

 

“We all have choices to make in life,” she said.  

 

Another beat. Then: “You’re holding up the line.”

 

Open palm, insert forehead.

 

At a loss to explain why these encounters are always so surreal, the best I can offer is a wild hypothesis: that boothers are born into a secret society of irascible, would-be sages, cursed to dispense their wisdom from Plexiglas cubes in the middle of a four-lane blacktop. That seems about as likely an explanation as anything else.

 

Unless of course I just happened to catch people on bad days, with years and weeks separating totally unrelated incidents. But c’mon. Let’s not get farfetched, here.

 

The cat's me-ow

It began with a loud crash in the middle of the night, the sound of broken glass. Naturally, when you hear a noise like that, your mind cycles through all the possibilities: A renegade ostrich escaped from the zoo, drank our Heineken, and is dropping-kicking all the glassware! A Jewish couple broke into the house, got married in our living room, and is smashing wine glasses underfoot! Pauly Shore is drunk and on the rampage!

 

Then you shake out the cobwebs and start envisioning scenarios that could actually happen: A burglar! A thief! Pauly Shore is drunk and on the rampage!

 

I was 10, and scared out of my Batman-smattered trousers. If I was a different kind of kid, I would have grabbed my Louisville Slugger from the closet and creeped out of my bedroom to ascertain the cause of all the ruckus. But I was the kind of kid I was, and that meant pulling the covers over my head and waiting for mom and dad to make the bad stuff go away. And possibly wetting myself.

 

The sound of my parents’ bedroom door opening. Footsteps inching down the hall. Then my mother, stomping her foot and screaming at the top of her lungs, “Garfield!”

 

“Oh,” I thought. “The cat.”

 

Sure enough, when I inched open my door and peeked around the corner, there was the Christmas tree lying flat on the floor, branches splayed, goofy Santa ornaments squished under its woodsy girth. In the corner of the room hunched Garfield, shielded by the China cabinet. With his face fixed in an expression of mingled confusion and fear, his eyes shone nervously in the room’s ambient light, silently conveying the wish that whatever transgression he’d committed wouldn’t be met with the swipe of a broom across his orange, tabby face.

 

He needn’t have worried. He was a pain in butt, but we loved him.

 

If you want to commit minor crimes and always get away with them, the two best things to be are a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader or a fluffy pet. Garfield, mischievous in his youth in an eerie imitation of his comic-strip namesake, is the poster child for how cuteness can help a creature avoid premature death. If he had looked like Ed Asner, or the quarry foreman on “The Flintstones,” he would have been history before his first birthday, and the only furry friend left in the house would have been the armadillo-shaped Chia Pet on the television stand. Ever try to snuggle with a Chia Pet? There’s no way to do it and maintain any semblance of self-esteem. Or so I’m told.

 

It was his eyes, I think. Those innocent, half-pleading eyes. Most cats are renowned for a kind of detachment that borders on coldness; Joseph Stalin, watching an enemy meet his end at the hands of Bolshevik justice, wouldn’t have been able to match the icy stare emanating from a feline deprived of his canned food. Garfield was different. There was something soft, almost ingratiating, in his face, in his whole manner, as though he were always about to shine your shoes.

 

But see, that’s how they do it. Pets can be adorably devious. They ply you with heart rending squeals and sandpaper licks on your fingers, then in the next instant they’re pooping in the entryway and knocking priceless valuables onto the floor. The smart ones sense that their owners are morally opposed to striking a defenseless animal, and take advantage by sweeping through living rooms with the destructive force of a small hurricane, or a miniature army of scorched-earth freedom fighters. Union General William Sherman, notorious for burning Southern villages to the ground during the Civil War, would stand in awe at Garfield’s body of work. And Sherman never got his ears scratched lovingly after a campaign. Well, probably. Who knows what happened in those tents.

 

It’s a good things pets are awesome. I mean, it’s not like we put up with occasional mischief for no good reason. They’re cuddly and loyal and a source of love in a world with far too little of it. Plus, there are certain dogs that can be trained to fetch beer from the fridge. That alone is worth the price of admission. 

 

Man, though, what a cost sometimes. I think successful pet ownership often comes down to knowing your susceptibility to cuteness is being taken advantage of, and just being okay with that.

 

I’ve written before about my neighbor’s cat, Schmucky. My neighbor and I share access to a giant shed-like structure attached to the rear of our building – the kind of place you use to store broken toasters and neglected workout machines – and every so often, when I walk inside, there’s his tabby cat, being a putz in some way; hissing at me, usually, or otherwise acting unfriendly. He’s a bad dude, Schmucky. If he were a man, he’d be one of the dancing gang members in “West Side Story,” tattooed and switchblade-wielding and sucking on an unfiltered Lucky Strike. To look into his eyes, you’d think he’d killed members of the Viet Cong with his bare hands.

 

As shady as this character is, I’ve developed a grudging respect for him. Because at least he’s honest. He’s not trying to ply me with cuteness; he couldn’t give a crap about all that. He’s a badass mofo, and he’ll act like one if he dang well pleases. 

 

I’d rather he be cute and lovey, of course; I’m not insane, at least not yet. But there’s a certain kind of integrity there. So. Well played, Schmucky. When I wake in the night to hear boxes crashing in the weird shed area, I’ll know it’s just you.

 

Unless it’s Pauly Shore. Seriously, does anyone know what that dude’s up to nowadays? Lock up your liquor, folks.