A Friend Comes to Town
When Rachel actually confronted me about how mad she was at Gina for coming on to me, it actually got me annoyed with Rachel. Rachel said she was jealous and wanted her to leave me alone for my sake. I knew that wasn’t true. She didn’t want me, but she didn’t want anyone else to have me either. It was like she wanted me to wait around and be at her beck and call while she continues on and has a boyfriend that she was fighting with half the time anyway. The guy was always working with the promise that ‘soon, it will pay off and he’ll be bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.’
It made me wonder… Is that why she was staying with him? Because he may become rich soon? I was not interested in the kind of crazy Gina had to offer, but I was quickly becoming disillusioned with who Rachel was too. Soon, the things I found adorable about Rachel were just getting annoying.
When she had an issue with a relative who asked her for advice and she didn’t want to offend her, I told her to “be diplomatic about it, you don’t want to sound accusatory”. She asked me what diplomatic meant. She wasn’t cute… She was dumb. This was also around the time she cut her long black hair off and dyed it a different color because her boyfriend thought she should change her look.
Shortly afterwards, my friend Mark was passing through town. By now he had been in the Marines for six or seven years. He had already served a tour or two in Iraq and now they were transferring him from the East Coast to California…
The one thing with Mark was he didn’t just want to sit around. He stayed with us for about a week. When he arrived, Melissa Mark and myself went for dinner at a Japanese restaurant. After that, we went to a local bar and just caught up.
The following day was Friday. After work, Gina, Claudia, Annette and possibly Rachel came back home with me and we all decided to go to a nice Italian restaurant I knew. We ordered some wine and almost immediately Gina was behaving oddly. She may have been on a medication that didn’t mix well with the wine, but she acted as if she was drunk with half a glass of wine. Not just drunk, but totally making a scene. It was downright embarrassing. Claudia and I were visible annoyed, and Annette, whom normally would have no tolerance for this took her into the restroom. Mark was trying to defend her but neither Claudia nor I were having any of it.
By the time dinner was over, I for one was furious. We went back to my apartment and Gina announced she had to go home, and I was more than happy to see her go. Mark insisted we couldn’t let her drive in this condition as she might kill herself in an accident. She had one friggin’ glass of wine!
“Mark, you have yet to give me a reason to NOT let her drive home,” was my response. “Just because she has big boobs, it’s no reason to enable her ‘poor me’ antics…’ Mark kept her company in her car while the rest of us went inside and told Melissa about our adventure in the Italian restaurant.
After Mark came back inside and Gina had gone home, we all had a great time. Mark informed us after a little bit of prying that they made out in the car. Of course they did… By 11PM it was only Claudia, Melissa, Mark and myself. Mark half-jokingly kept bringing up going to a strip club, which had made me a little embarrassed, but Melissa and Claudia both said “We should go!”
I knew of the one place that had both male and female dances, but Claudia suggested the famous one that all the Denver Broncos went to. A place called Shotgun Willie’s. Mark must have spent a small fortune there as he paid everyone’s cover and bought everyone drinks. He even went so far as to buy me a lap dance from a girl despite my protests. Through the whole dance, all I would do was make the girl laugh. She told me it was hard for her to ‘be sexy’ if I kept talking, but I get that way when I’m nervous…
The worst part was because Mark had been paying for everything, I had no smaller bills to tip her. I felt really bad, but I knew I would tip her when I got change. It took a little while to find her again and when I did, I couldn’t reach her before she entered the ladies room. Luckily, Melissa came by and I told her the situation. She was going there anyway, so she went in, found her and gave her the money saying it was from her roommate whom she had given a dance to earlier. She told Melissa that she was lucky to know me. I was such a sweetheart. I don’t know how much clout a compliment from an exotic dancer is, but if she’s saying it to another girl it’s worth more, so I’ll take it.