We set out to Dave and Busters tonight as a family. Jenna loves the place--nothing but loud music and a thousand games, some better than what her imagination could conjur, and great prizes at the end when you turn in your cup full of tickets. For the adults, it's even better. Alcohol, smoking, and decent food--nice hot wings, pretty good salads, and did I mention drinks and smoking?
There's always a million people (give or take 999,000) running around the place, playing this game and that, and on Friday I knew it would take a team effort to get a table. George kept Jenna busy with the games while I scoped out the booths, waiting for someone to slap the tip on the table and stand up--and there I am, grabbing that red plastic booth seat before you could say daily double.
I'm feeling pretty good--it's 9:00, we just came from Mars where George had to say hello to a bass he's been eyeing for six months, and I haven't heard him play since before he left, and he tries this fretless out and I'm bowled over, because when he told me his hands were back, I didn't realize he meant all the way back, but yes, they are.
And when we're leaving (sans bass because they wouldn't meet his price) we're loading Jenna into the minivan from hell and we hear some crazy motherfucker singing across the parking lot only to find out it's Nathaniel, one of the guys George was playing with in Hong Kong, who'd just arrived back in Atlanta two weeks prior--and Nathaniel doesn't even live here; he lives in Tennessee, so you see, the thrill of watching these two guys laugh and embrace and share war stories with the look of survivors of a long fought battle, the thrill was quite nice.
So I'm sitting in the booth rethinking the night that was, rather minding my own business as I have a smart tendency to do, when this amazing looking blonde woman at the booth next to me strkes up a conversation. "I'm from Nebraska," she tells me, and she's smoking, so I figure she can't be all bad, though the makeup was kind of killing me by then--plastic perfection wears on me after like five seconds. "Oh, wow," I say. (I don't talk like I blog.)
And from there I was sucked into the whirlwind that is Sharlene, who glommed onto me I think because her boyfriend is black, and that's not the half of it.
Because over the next two hours, George and I in varying degrees and of alternating stamina, heard so much more. More than we ever wanted to know about Sharlene and Ron.
She starts crying pretty much right away, and she's in my lap--well she might as well have been--in our booth within the first half hour. She's needing some loving. She's had a hard day.
You see, this morning while Ron, who lives here, not in Idaho, went someplace--might have been church since she says he goes to church a lot and has Bibles all through his house--and Sharlene was left at his house with time on her hands. So what does she do? Gets on his computer. And what does she find? Porn. Plenty of it. And more. Guys, let this be a warning: Platinum blondes with really large breasts CAN figure out your passwords.
And when she figures them out, she finds...
conversations...
lots of them....
of her man with a woman from another state, offering to make a visit and show her, as Sharlene says, "His Big Black Cock." By now our daughter is off playing on a game with Sharlene's five year old girl (from another man, another time). I am quite literally thanking my lucky stars. George and I are wide eyed, smiling, laughing at the absurdity that's playing out across the table.
"And there were pictures," she tells us. "Lots of them! Pussy--all this pussy with stretch marks and right up in my face. I was SO angry, and hurt," and I'm pretty much stuck in the booth, and Sharlene who it now appears is pretty much wasted, is now my best friend. At once point I'm pretty sure she's grabbed my boob instead of my arm by mistake, but I'm still not completely sure, and George and I are exchanging looks like, "How do we get out of this?" since Ron is now entertaining our daughter and hers at a nearby game.
"Now I had a webcam, sure," she tells us. George's eyes perk up. "But that was BEFORE I met Ron. I can't have my daughter exposed to all this--I can't trust him; he says he's going up there to stick his-----(you get it)----into her, and what, now I'm supposed to believe him when he tells me it's just 'entertainment.'?"
George and I have a code phrase now. It's "A-B"
[CONTINUED HERE.]
