Disaster Date: A tackler’s hand-guide

It was a simple case of ‘fabulous’ gone ‘frumpy’. The customary Friday night dinner had followed a movie. We cabbed it to our recent favourite joint and sat snuggled under a circular overhead lamp in a cubby, which eerily resembled an interrogation room.

But that didn’t have us hindered.

The soups arrived. And a little later the dumplings. Enmeshed in conversation I wagged around my hand and he nodded his head like a vigorous little puppy. It was all quite zany and A-one.

And that was when it happened.

Midway into my third vehement speech of the night, just as I thickly dropped into a luxuriously promising bitching session about one of our mutual friends my man for the evening guffawed like a helplessly tickled little hyena and desperately squeezed onto a plastic ketchup bottle.

Looking back at it, I figure this is how it must have happened.

The plastic bottle, clogged and constipated, had given in under the gigantic pressure of the man’s exquisite little paw and burst, spitting hundreds and thousands of little blobs of Mr. Heinz onto me and my clothes.

The shock left me benumbed. Quite frankly I didn’t let what just happened sink in. it didn’t help matter that the snorting animal seating opposite me seemed blissfully oblivious.

By the time my panic button was finally hit and my internal system started ricocheting like a machine gun directly out of a Stalone movie, it was already too late. My fantastic mauve dress, embroidered and possibly the best damned piece of outfit I had ever owned looked hideous and flower power’ishly red polka dotted.

I did some quick thinking and even quicker damage control. Soaking dinner napkin after dinner napkin in gallons of water I scrubbed at every miniscule bit of red gooey stuff on the dress.

It didn’t help of course.
However, it did deflect my rage off the moronic piece of shit face sitting gorging his fried chicken on the other end of the table.

Calm. Calm. Calm.
I was chanting to myself through gritted teeth and jerkily attacking the stains.
Be an adult.
No big deal.
Happens all the time.
Just a little more scrubbing and all will be well.

MORON. IDIOT. KLUTZ. DUCK FACE. DOG SHIT. STUPID KNUCKLE HEAD.

No no no.
Calm, calm.
I patted myself desperately, trying not to look at the munching buffoon sitting there still.

‘Say fancy a smoke?’, he was asking me with a toothy grin.

If it was a fair world I would have been able to bite off his head and spit it out right then and there. Oh! How dreadfully, how VERY dreadfully I wanted to HURT that villain! But no no no..
Calm. Calm.

Dignifiedly, I nodded my head and said no. Flicking my hair off my face with a chopstick, as a faint attempt at retaining my poise. Trying not look silly despite being drenched from hemline to hemline in thick red ketchup, now reduced to red, liquidy blotchy patterns all over my bust and skirt.

‘Too bad’, he said, still referring to my refusal to smoke and NOT to the havoc he had single-handedly caused.

‘Well then, I’ll be outside, need a bit of fresh air’, he snorted his disgusting snort.

Yuck!
To think I was sparing this evil monstrosity. To think I wasn’t meeting his demand for freshness by dousing his filthy, greasy little head deep down into the fishbowl glowing on the receptionist’s desk!

When I walked out of the restaurant at last it was with a discreetly placed napkin over my face. A camouflage to keep known passers by from suddenly recognizing my present, humiliating, circumstance and thereby coming forward, either to start an otherwise unnecessary conversation (in between amused, condescending glances at my offended state of course) or worse still to ask the inevitable ‘Whoa P! WHAT Happened?

The snotty man at the root of my disastrous evening had, conveniently and predictably enough, disappeared. Not out of guilt, might I add, but out of boredom, he said. Apparently my sudden refrain from conversation had struck him as odd and a trifle rude. It was inexplicable, he said, why I would, after having invited him out myself behave in such an impolite manner.

I let the manner end at that. And spent the night washing my beloved dress and cursing men in general.
It proved therapeutic J