Popov and green beans

In late May 1992, I was a 22 year-old-college student at Wayne State University in Detroit. I lived in this big rental house with three other people and a couple of kitty cats. For some side cash, I had a part-time job delivering stacks of Orbit Magazine around Royal Oak and some surrounding cities, once a month, out of the back seat of my car. They went mainly to record stores and some specialty shops, galleries, etc. One of my stops was this hair salon where this very cute woman worked and, to my amazement, flirted with me. One time, I dropped off a stack and it was pouring rain outside, so she sat me down and towel dried my hair, making small talk. We ended up going out on a date, which was really kind of innocuous (we went to the record store and walked around, pointing out the music we liked and/or couldn’t stand; a first-date option I would recommend to anyone).

I liked this woman quite a bit. She was hairdresser and I thought that was kind of cool, for some reason I do not know. But she was funny and cute and kind of older and, more importantly, she held that timeless quality I found fleeting in so many women: she actually had an interest in me. I was studying for final exams in my bedroom one night around 9 p.m. when the phone rang. It was her and she sounded all breathy and kind of sexy. She said she was painting something and I suggested I come over to check it out, but she sounded almost obscene about the whole thing. I thought to myself, tonight I get laid. Sweet. I walked to her place all happy and joyous, stopping at the drug store to get some condoms because, you know, City Chicken’s getting some.

I get to her basement apartment, she lets me in and to my near bewilderment, I discover she is positively smashed. Potted. Boiled. Wasted. Blown out. Call it whatever, but the near empty bottle of cheap vodka was evidence. Normally, I wouldn’t think much of this but on our first date, she told me she didn’t drink, that she at one time had a problem with that and it was best she didn’t. I realized that sex probably wasn’t going to happen, that I had conjured up this scenario amid wishful thinking. Her apartment reeked. She was warming a huge saucepan full of canned green beans and it smelled like the inside of a shoe. Actually, if a dirty, worn gym shoe had a rectum, it would smell like the inside of that. She danced clumsily around her tiny kitchen, hitting shit and knocking stuff over. At one point, she fell over on the floor and missed the sharp corner of her countertop by a fraction of an inch. Get her drunk ass to bed so she can pass out and get the fuck out of Dodge was all I kept saying to myself. She eventually tuckered herself out from slurring and stumbling. There was a knock at the door and she grabbed my arm, pulling me into the shower stall, holding me very close and saying repeatedly “It’s him. It’s him. Shhh. Shhh.” Great, I thought. My luck is that “him” is some burly biker brother home from “the road.” Well, whoever he was, he left. We exited the bathroom, she tried to shovel down some green beans, before deciding it was best to start passing out. It was 10 p.m. I’d been there about 45 minutes. We went to her room and she dropped down on, of all things, a fucking waterbed. I pulled her pants off, threw a T-shirt on her and assessed the situation to make sure she wouldn’t trip over anything if she got up, leaving a couple of lights on so she can see her way around later. I was standing over her bed, kind of shaking my head, thinking what a waste of time this was and how I really need to get back home, so me and my sexless self can get back to studying. She looked up at me with an expression that says “In about 25 seconds, I’m going to start vomiting violently.” I remember looking down at her and she said “I’m … not … going to fuck YOU.” And for shame, because she looked so polished and inviting at that moment.

I say all of this because I just read that in one of our newspapers, that exact woman will be featured in a story about going on that TV show “Wife Swap.” She’s married now with a couple of kids, but I saw her picture today and froze. And then I thought about that story and had a good chuckle again. Crazy, drunk broad.