How To Not Waste Your Time On A Man Who Doesn't Appreciate A Bad Restaurant

It takes a special person to understand the charm of a bad restaurant that you can’t stop going to. Oh, the bartender is a bully? So is everyone. The mozzarella sticks are still frozen? That’s probably how I ordered them. A couple of rats scurry across the linoleum? They run the city, and if they want to secede, we should support them. Hot Slice is no exception. It is a comfortable, tree-lined 5-minute walk from my apartment and most certainly a drug front. I leave each visit unmoored, yet contentedly full of cheese and bread. The wait staff consists mostly of women who are also maybe ghosts, and each time I leave, I make sure to hold prolonged eye contact with each of them. Blink twice if you’re trapped here for eternity. I have never received the beer I asked for, and once, a server didn’t know what ranch was. But the pizza is technically edible, the garden salad has yet to give me norovirus, and I fucking love it there. There’s just something about it. If you get it, you get it. If you don’t, that is honestly completely fair.

When Hank and Claire lived around the corner from me, we would often shoot the weekly “Hot Slice patio?” text back and forth. My phone would ping, and a smile would spread across my face as I typed back, “Lemme put pants on, be there in 8”. I was living the life my 13-year-old self imagined. My apartment was within walking distance of the people I loved most, and we spent our days meeting up when we could. All that was missing was the 6ft5 leather clad boyfriend that my middle school dream journal affectionately described as “sensitive, but not a little bitch” and a six-figure salary that enabled me to buy a boat.

I understand that this adoration for a real roll of the dice place to eat is lost on most people. The circle of Hot Slice heads is an intimate one, consisting of friends who live in the neighborhood and understand whatever kind of uncanny valley je ne sais quoi that Hot Slice is giving. They know that when that text goes out, we’re not meeting up for the quality of the food or the reliability of the beer or the ambiance (an abondoned Fudruckers). We’re meeting up for what Nicole Kidman and Regal Cinema so fondly call “the magic”. That sweet, unnamed agreement you and your friends telepathically make that a place is so bad that it’s charming. It’s yours, and therefore, a good place. The only good place.

Which is why, when Sean asks me to find a cool place in my neighborhood for our second date, I suggest my beloved Hot Slice. I had no expectations for our first date a few days earlier, just that I needed to get out there, and he seemed to have a nice smile. I was testing out Cool Girl Who Hooks Up, and Is Cool About It, Always, Actually! A month earlier, I had met a man at a wedding who lived in a different state than I did. I knew the reality of this meeting conflicted with the timing of life. No matter the connection and amount of texting, nothing was going to happen there, and that was ok. I took the lovely feeling of meeting someone good and used it to propel me into what I dubbed Horny Summer. I redownloaded the apps, and Sean was the first person I matched with. As far as first dates go, it was fine. My bones told me an hour in that this wasn’t anything true. But Horny Summer beckoned me with its siren song back to his apartment, where I found myself too high in a hot tub, wearing the large men’s shirt and pants that he gave me so I could “get the full experience of the tub”. I sat in the boiling water uncomfortably, laughing as the grey jersey ballooned around me. At one point, I murmured to him before he leaned in to kiss me, “I look like molten rock,” but he didn’t hear me. Before bed, I wrote in my journal, “sub par sexual encounter. Hot tub? TOO HOT”.

Color me shocked when he asked to go out again later that week.

“Two dates in one week, wowww,” Jenn texted me when I told her my plans.

“IM NOT THINKING ABOUT IT” I typed back.

Why? Because I’m a cool girl who only has cool feelings and never insane ones. Aren’t you listening?

Sean gets to Hot Slice 5 minutes before I do, which he is sure to tell me twice over text. The passing ground-level L train deters me for a moment, and as it blurs by, I can see him sitting at the table, head in his hands like he was just identified as the driver in a hit-and-run. The intuitive pang to self-eject nudges itself against my ribs, but I shake my head. I take a deep breath and cross the tracks toward him. We’re seeing what happens, baby! Cool feelings only! “Ha Ha”, right?

RIGHT?

Besides, what do I know? Maybe I’m misreading his devastation for shock and awe. Maybe he’s blown away by Hot Slice. Maybe…he gets it.

I tap Sean twice on the shoulder before he finally raises his head. He murmurs an “Oh, hey” with a weak smile that reads, everyone I’ve ever loved just died in a fire. I fight the urge to remind him that, despite the older couple seemingly unconscious in the corner, we are not at a funeral. We are at Hot Slice. I am suddenly nervous that he’s going to critique my very special place. I feel protective of the flat beer, the slight sulfur smell, and the wobbly tables. I could have suggested a hundred other spots, but I chose this one because it’s mine. When he asks what’s good to eat here, I respond enthusiastically with “Everything and nothing.” We both land on calzones.

Any charm that lingered from our first date evaporates. Halfway through our beers, I notice that he’s begun to itch his eye repetitively. When it becomes impossible to ignore, I ask him if he wants to run across the street to CVS to get eye drops. “Nah,” he says before dumping the entirety of his pint glass of water straight into his cornea. I am not exaggerating. Sixteen ounces of ice-cold water straight to the dome. Even for Hot Slice, this is wild behavior. Dare I say uncouth? To my horror, he does this two more times. Has the eye itch been cured? Certainly not. The itching and the flood that followed continue. A table next to us asks to be moved, and eventually the server stops bringing beer, water, or liquid of any kind our way.

In between the eye itching, he asks me a question about growing up in Atlanta. When I answer “Great-” he cups his wet hands around his wet face and softly yells “lettttttssss gooooooooo”. I sit in stilled silence waiting for the prolonged “goooooooo” to stop so I can finish my answer. I continue but I am encored with another half-assed “Letttttssss gooooo” and another and another. Hard to tell you what else happened on that date. It was so full of ice baths and Sigma Delta mating calls that it all blurs together in one big charlie foxtrot. What does stand out, though, is his disdain for Hot Slice. Above all else, I am left with the sick feeling that this person doesn’t get it, and never will.

I’m sure this is where you assume the date is over. That we went our separate ways. Me to my home, and Sean, to a hospital. But no, my dear friend. No, no, no. It is my great dishonor to tell you that the date did not end. Not even close. Have we forgotten the siren song of Horny Summer? I wish I had. Hindsight is horny/horny.

I’ll spare you the long-winded details (that’s for later when we meet up for bath water beers on the Hot Slice patio, silly!) and instead give this run-on sentence da da monologue:

Sex was cool (cool!) even though Sean mentioned 3-7 times that he was “feeling sorta anxious lately” to which I replied, “Yeah, for sure dude” then he went to the bathroom for what seemed like an hour but was probably 34 minutes which we have to admit is still very long and when he came back he flipped on the overhead lights interrogation style and I suddenly became aware of how naked we both were like two wax figures come to life naked but I stifled the urge to laugh and let him pace around the room (anxious) and try to explain to me that NO the condom didn’t break but something ELSE had happened something more SINISTER and NO he was SURE it didn’t break and the REASON he was sure was because he more or less made baloon animals out of the condom to make sure there wasn’t a hole in it in thats right he essentially played with the condom like a cat with a mouse so YAH he was sure there was no hole and while I tried to follow his logic he continued to pace and pace and pace (anxious) and I thought to myself put a shirt on Layne Jesus Christ so I did, awkwardly, and eventually he came to the conclusion that maybe actually PROBABLY the condom overlfowed (anxious) which did in fact make me laugh because we all know that’s not a thing but he didn’t hear because he was too busy spiraling and finding the right (wrong) way to ask me:

“So….if it did overflow….and like….get inside of you. Would you….keep it?

And suddenly I felt bad for him. Not in a real, lasting way. And not in a way that trumped how bad I felt for me, but I did feel bad for him, a little. Enough to pat him on the shoulder to help his heart beat slow so I could say

“I do not want to have a baby with you. Not at all.”

I don’t feel the need to explain the ins and outs of sex and the different array of fluids that come from two bodies colliding. The failure of the American Sex Ed system is not my burden to bear. But I do send him on his way and mentally wish him Godspeed. Godspeed away from me and into some self-reflection.

The next morning, I walk myself to CVS to buy Plan B. The sun was shining, and I could smell the peonies that lined the neighborhood route that I took. They hung over fences, and I walked close to the railing so they could brush the top of my head as I passed by. I tried to take my time. I wanted to pay attention to the clues of spring turning into summer, but I felt slightly out of body. Like the evervescent me was an inch outside, trailing close behind in tandem. A two-person paper doll of Layne and Other Layne.

The last time I bought Plan B, I was a senior in college. My partner and I saddled up the register at CVS with the purple and white box paired with a bottle of Yellow Tail. I remember my anxiety bumping up against a saccharine pride of adulthood. Not only was I legally buying a bottle of wine, something that adults who read books more than 100 pages do, but I was also buying pills that people who have SEX buy. With my partner. Who I liked and loved. But this time, it was just some guy whose anxiety had bled into mine. 50 bucks of my own hard-earned cash because I refused to text him again, even if I did deserve a Venmo for the pill plus tax for the emotional labor.

My mind wandered, and my fingers rolled an old gum wrapper around in my jacket pocket while I waited to cross the crosswalk. As the light turned green, I looked up to see Christine and Andrew, who were also looking up to see me, two iced coffees in their hands. We all did the thing you do when you see a close friend unplanned out in the wild. Our mouths shot open, our hands waved in the air, we threw “Oh my god” and '“No way!” at each other. Like we all don’t live in the same neighborhood, like I don’t see them all the time. I skipped across the street and into their arms. As our bodies collided, the paper doll trailing behind me was gently thrust back into the real me, and I felt my one dumb, silly human body being held tightly by theirs. We laughed into each other’s necks, and I poured my experience from the night before onto the sidewalk in front of them.

“Well, we’re going to get Plan B with you, no question,” Christine said, her arm on my back.

“Hell yeah,” Andrew said, slurping his coffee with his sunglasses halfway down his nose.

I walked between them towards CVS, buffered by laughter and flowers. They scoured the candy aisle while I stood in line at the pharmacy, and then we checked out and exited. As we stood outside of the CVS, Christine rubbed the base of my neck.

“You good?” she asked.

“I am” I responded, because I was. We all grasped each other in a group hug and I resisted the urge to start a Plan B huddle chant. Instead I thanked them for buying the pills with me, a petite tear in my eye.

“It’s an honor” Andrew replied. And then we all went on our ways.

Simple as that. The memory of taking the Plan B has dissolved into the folds of my life, granular against every other small moment. I don’t remember it. What I do remember is how I felt on the walk home, buyoued by the love of my pals and the poetry of a sunny Chicago day.

Walking back, I pass by Hot Slice. The patio is too good to pass up on a day like this. I seat myself at the same hightop I was at the night before, I feel a sense of reclamation. I take a selfie of myself with the sun on my face and send it to Claire and Hank with a “wish you were here”. Claire immediately FaceTimes me, and I recount the details of my near-cum-encounter while I sip a beer that, at most establishments, would be considered room temp water. Cars honk, a shirtless man sprints by screaming, and my salad arrives with 2 grey hairs wrapped around an olive. The server tells me that she likes my red lipstick. I smile and tell her thank you, even though I’m not wearing any. For dessert, I order a cannoli, which never arrives. The server circles back and asks if I’d like anything else. I tell her no, that this is perfect. Because it is. I’m exactly where I need to be.