14
Single But Looking
G
race spent half of the day wrapped up in a bundle of nerves. She imagined meeting Tommy and how nicely he'd measure up to the description crafted on his Web page detailing how he was a well-groomed socialite, with an adventurousspirit and energy to spare, who loved cross-state cycling, rocky roads, and mountain climbing. When Grace arrived five minutes late to Souper Soups and More for a chat over light entrées, she scanned the restaurant praying that Tommy hadn't left thinking he'd been stood up. There were two young couples munching on healthy snacks, an elderlywoman smuggling pepperoni into her purse from the buffet, and an extremely large man wearing a paper napkin as a catchall bib while he shoveled salad into his mouth with both hands. Grace thought,
Tommy hadn't arrived yet
. Gettingstood up by him was her worst concern, that is, before she met him.
Patiently, Grace waited for another ten minutes before checking with the hostess. “Excuse me, this might sound kinda strange, but I was supposed to meet someone here, a man,” she added, behind a cloud of second thoughts. “Has anyone named Tommy called or left a message for a Grace? That's me.”
The young lady, a thin ratty brunette in a black secondhandcocktail dress and discount-store flats, put her paperbacknovel away and smiled cordially after having had her reading interrupted. She searched the hostess stand high and low, then shook her head. “No, ma'am, I'm sorry,” she informedGrace, who turned to walk away, chalking it up as a huge error in judgment. “Ma'am, oh, wait,” the hostess called out. “There was a man here about thirty minutes ago, excited about a blind date.”
“I must have missed him,” Grace sighed. “Oh, well, I was late after all. He probably thought I'd changed my mind.”
“Uh, let's take a look around,” the hostess offered. “If he decided to stick around, he should still be right over there.” The young lady pointed to the salad-shoveling dinosaur, with his head still buried in a foot-tall plate of romaine lettuce.
“Uh-uh, there must be some sort of mistake,” Grace whispered as the lady waved her over to his table.
“Sir, is this her?” yelled the hostess, like a clueless innocentdo-gooder. The soup and salad monger snapped his head upright, almost flipping the table over with his protrudingbelly. Grace was horrified as she watched his paper bib bounding up and down with each of his monstrous strides towardher.
Perhaps he'd been waiting on someone else,
she imagined,
another blind date that was fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of his double-stuffing routine and then caught the next bullet-train to Anywhere But Here.
“Sir, didn't you say that her name was Grace?” asked the annoyingly helpful hostess.
The man was nearly out of breath after wiping both hands on his khaki slacks. “Wow!” he marveled. “You're Grace Hilliard? Wow! Am I glad to meet you! Tommy Franklin's the name, but friends call me Meat.” He shoved his meaty paw toward Grace.
Somewhat startled, she recoiled. “Nice to meet you, Meat.”
“I'm sorry for getting started on dinner without you, but as you can see, I'm a big fella and need to keep my strength up.”
For what, climbing the Empire State Building and swattingat passing airplanes?
Grace thought.
Reluctantly Grace followed him back to the table he had staked out. It resembled a battlefield, where every item on the menu had put up a gruesome fight before being eaten. Grace sat with her purse on her lap. She was understandably disturbed to learn that Tommy didn't come close to resemblingthe description on the Web page, and she wasted little time calling him on it. “Tommy, uh ... Meat, I have a slight problem with the way you painted yourself on the singles site as an adventurous socialite who's into cycling in cross-stateevents over rocky roads, and mountain climbing.”
Meat grinned big and wide, with remnants of food pokingout of his mouth like an overstuffed garbage disposal. “See, a brotha's got to be creative if he wants to meet a real fly cutie like you, so I jazzed up my credentials a bit.”
“A bit?” Grace questioned, refusing to believe that he knew anything about small amounts.
“Oh, but I didn't lie exactly. See, at four hundred and eighty pounds, every time I make it out of bed and leave my house, it's an adventure for me, and I'd like to think of myselfas a socialite. I mean, I do like to get my party on ... when my hip ain't acting up.”
“Your hip?” Grace shuddered.
“Yep, got a new one last year, but it stiffens up every now and then.”
Grace shook her head slowly, trying to take in all of her date's girth as well as his lies that well surpassed “not exactly.”“Okay Meat, I'll give you those, but come on. What about competitive cycling, rocky roads, and mountain climbing?”
Meat swallowed an entire stack of sliced ham and chased it with a glass of lemonade. Then he waggled his thick index finger at Grace until he noticed a dab of mustard on the tip of it. After he sucked the mustard off, out came the granddaddy of all contrived explanations. “Uh-huh, now, that's the truth, every word of it. I love to
watch
competitive cross-state cycling,I love rocky road ice cream, that's my favorite, and whenever I'm forced to take the stairs, I become a mountain . . . climbing 'em.” After he'd finished serving it up thick, Grace was so frustrated that she burst out laughing. “That's not quite the response I usually get, but it's way better than getting cussed out,” the mountainous eating machine chuckled.
“Meat, I can see why women go off on you after finding that you've grossly misrepresented yourself online, but this is too ridiculous to get hard-pressed over.” She thought it was better to see the irony in the way Meat saw himself, than to make a big deal and end up seeing red.
“Cool, Grace. That's a great attitude,” Meat complimented.“Does this mean you'll see me again?”
Grace put her hand on her purse. “Meat, don't make me have to cut you,” she joked. “But, seriously, unless you enjoy hurting women by building false expectations, I suggest you be more honest from now on.” She glanced at her watch to time-stamp the shortest date in history. “Wow, look at that, four minutes. It was nice meeting you, but I have to go.”
Meat's expression saddened as if another one had gotten away. “Grace, if I were all those things you thought I was, would you still be rushing off?” he asked, really wanting to know.
“Of course not,” she answered honestly, “unless that man was a liar, too.” Tommy “Meat” Franklin scooted his chair away from the table to say good-bye. When he reached out to hug Grace, she stiff-armed him in his beefy chest. “Uh-uh, it's not even like that,” she objected harshly.
“Grace, can I call you?” he shouted after her, like a jilted lover.
“Bye, Meat,” she answered, without breaking stride.
“Okay then, Grace, be that way!” He held up a lengthy dinner bill. “Well, can you help a brotha out, put a lil' somethingon this? Grace, Grace!” he bellowed, before eyeing the total. “What, how they gonna charge me for three buffets?”
If Grace's first Internet dating encounter hadn't been so utterly preposterous, she would have been beside herself. She had forty-five minutes to kill before her next appointed time to meet and greet. Sylvester Green had convinced her that an open-all-night diner near downtown was a good place to connect because it was near his office. Grace had her heart set on getting to know the financial whiz, who made a comfortable living by trading stocks, and also dabbledin real-estate investments. His online profile had received substantially more hits than any of the others she matched with on the compatibility rating scale, so it appeared that things were already looking up.
Grace sat at the diner counter drinking tea when a nice-lookingman entered through the door. He was tall enough to meet her criteria so she eased off the metal bar stool to approachhim, but before she could reach him, another woman stepped through the door and placed her hand in his. Grace picked her face up off the floor and quickly returned to the counter. Embarrassed over almost making a complete fool of herself, Grace made a valiant effort to keep a close lookout,when someone shouting from the sidewalk out in front of the diner drew her attention.
“Don't make me have to chase you for my grip next time, Pumpkin!” a white man threatened to a frightened black woman in cheap heels sprinting up the block to elude his wrath. “You better run!” he heckled loudly. “Better run. Got me out here like a bill collector. Huh, I kinda like that ... a bill collector. I think I'ma keep that one.” The man tilted the brim on his lime green felt hat, snatched up his forest greenâcheckered slacks by the belt loops, and then buttoned up his pea green sports coat.
Suddenly, Grace didn't think it was such a good idea meeting with this Sylvester guy in a seedy industrial park off the boulevard. Sure it was still light out, but pimps and prostituteswere too much to stomach for the suggested get-acquaintedsession, so she felt compelled to dash.
Her date would surely understand once she'd sent him an e-mail apologyexplaining her trepidation,
Grace reasoned. Unfortunately, fate had other ideas. Sylvester Green was already on the scene and resting his behind on the trunk of a classic 1975 kitted-out gangster white-walled Cordova.
As Grace jotted a note to be left with the head waitress, the loud-mouthed pimp plopped down at the counter next to her. “Hey Brown Sugar, slow down so's I can say something good to ya,” he heralded, as Grace looked up from scribbling on the small notepad. “Ahh, so you just gonna ignore me? Be that way, with yo fine self. I gots business too.” The nuisance continued leering over her shoulder to see just what she was up to, figuring to utilize that information to strike up another conversation. Without notice, he let out a loud cackle. “Haah! Uh-uh, fine brown, you ain't got to write another word down. Your Prince Charmin' has arrived, and I'm glad to be alive,” he added, sucking on a gold-rimmed decaying tooth.
“I don't know who you think I am, but I'm not one of your girls,” Grace spat harshly, trying to appear tougher than she was.
“You could be, though,” the pimp offered, with diamonds in his eyes. “I could put you on the stroll, and we could both get paid. If you wanna be a freak and pop it on the weekend, ain't none of my business unless we go fifty-fifty. If needs be, I can get mine on the back end,” he suggested with a devilishleer.
Grace grabbed her purse. “Whatever!” she answered, starting toward the wait stand to hand off the note and beat it out of there before the sun went down.
“Come on, brown skin, don't be like that,” the hustler insisted,hot on her heels. “I know you're digging me, or you wouldn't have agreed to bump gums together.”
“Man, you need to back off me before I call the law,” she warned. “I don't dig you. I don't know you, and I don't want to, so step!”
“Whoopty-whoop?” he yelped, as if to question her demeanor.“If it's like that, don't bother to be e-mailing me no more then, Grace.”
The fact that he knew Grace's name stopped her dead in her tracks. “Hold on, what do you mean, e-mailing you, and how do you know my name?”
“Ahh, snap, I guess the work clothes threw you? I'm Sly Green, your Christian single ready to mingle.”
Frozen, Grace stared into his eyes like a snake being charmed for the first time. “Show me some ID,” she demandedimmediately. Reluctantly, he slid his hand inside an alligator man-purse, then begrudgingly presented Grace with his driver's license. “Sylvester Greenberg?” she read aloud. “You're a Jewish pimp!”
“Nah, not really,” he countered, as if it didn't matter. “Well, only on my father's side, but, hey, that shouldn't stop us from hooking up like a Reese's peanut butter cup. You and me could fit together quite nicely. Chocolate don't break me out, baby.”
Grace was so angry that she was shaking all the way down to the floor. “Let me get this straight, Sylvester!”
“Hey, you need to stall all that,” he argued. “Don't nobodycall me Sylvester no more. I go by Sly when I'm puttin' in work, like Sly Stallone, the Italian Stallion.”
“Yeah, you've got rocks in your head if you think I'm not reporting you to the singles Web site. You're dishonest, a thug and ...” Grace paused to look him over thoroughly. His throwback platform shoes caught her attention. “And you're not black or even six feet.”
“Mere technicalities,” Sly debated patiently. “Blackness is only a state of mind. Don't hate on me 'cause I feel like a brotha ... oppressed, depressed, distressed, with the man's boot against my chest.”
“Sylvester, you
are
the man!” Grace informed him, as if he were unaware.
“So says you.” Sly turned his nose up in opposition to Grace's low opinion of him. “Regardless of what you might think of me, you can't interfere with my First Amendment right to freedom of speech. I can say what I want on the Internet.”
“Free speech? Don't you mean the lies you tell on your Web page? Show me a financial whiz, making a comfortable living in the trading industry. And on top of that, what's up with the part about dabbling in real-estate investments? Huh? What now, playa?” Grace had reverted back to the days when she grew up fending for herself with knuckleheadslike Sly Green, both verbally and otherwise.