When I was 24 and living in Chicago, I decided to treat myself to lessons. I got my manual early, studied it, highlighted it. I prepared a list of questions. I watched some you tube videos. And on the first morning of class, I listened to Blue Oyster Cult's 'Don't fear the reaper' on the way there. The first day was classroom. I was the only girl. All my fellow students were older men. We reviewed pertinent motorcycle laws and safety.
The second day was at the empty United Center parking lot. We picked out helmets. We stood by our bikes. We named the parts on the bike. We practiced getting on and off the bikes. Turning the bikes on and off. Balancing your weight on the bike. Then we did drills. Rolling forward. Gear changing. Going straight from cone to cone. Stopping. Pausing and then going forward again. I felt silly, but I felt hidden from my own silliness because I was wearing a huge black helmet. There were two instructors, both good looking men wearing leather pants and boots. They had my full attention.
I sensed flirtation when Instructor Jeff came over to specifically educate me on how women were actually better motorcycle riders than men, because our center of gravity is in our hips, and then he rocked the bike back and forth while holding onto the belt hooks of my jeans. The helmet knocked dorkily back and forth loosely on my head.
I was also glad to be hiding in the helmet when they sent an older man home because his skill level was not improving. I was sad remembering how excited he had been in the conversational ice-breaker go around about why we wanted to learn to ride motorcycles. I watched him walk away with his head down, and then turned my attention back to learning how to turn with renewed focus. I did not get sent home, I did awesome (duh). I was so good at all the curvy obstacle courses they set up for us, I got to be the Demonstration Rider from then on. I'm sure this had nothing to do with Instructor Jeff's crush on me. It was my mad skillz. After two days I took the road test and got my motorcycle license. Just as I had expected, I had learned how to ride a motorcycle. I did not expect to go on a date with the teacher, but I'm a roll with the punches kind of girl.
If a 40 year old man (you guessed it, Instructor Jeff), who happens to be a tattoo covered Chicago Fireman, an ex-Marine, and a Northwestern grad, who just taught me how to ride a motorcycle asks me out for a beer, I'm going. I'm already there. An older, smart, military/medical man with a wild side is just what I'd been looking for! He didn't have hair like Uncle Jesse, but you can't get everything you want. I was willing to make some compromises.
Throughout dinner and drinks that night Jeff kept squinting at me with his head cocked to the side and insisting that he had met me before.
"No, no I don't think so" I'd say.
"No, I'm pretty sure I know you from someplace" he'd insist.
I was pretty sure this was impossible, considering I couldn't think of a single thing we had in common besides the fact that I wanted to date someone like Uncle Jesse and he vaguely fit that description. We moved on to talking about work. For some reason, maybe the macabre sense of dark humor, nurses and firemen get along really well and like to trade stories about work. After a few go-rounds about precipitous baby deliveries, I asked, "So... where's your fire house?"
When he told me, I slammed my beer bottle on the table and shrieked, "You mean the one right next to La Pasadita Burritos!?"
10 months earlier, I had performed life saving CPR on a cook at La Pasadita late one night, after he was shot in the chest during a robbery. I recalled that it had taken 18 minutes for the police or firemen to respond, an especially long time considering they were right next door.
"That's it! That's how I know you! You're the hot nurse from the burrito place! I was there! I saw you! I talked about you all night."
Yesssss.
I sucked in my breath. I was happy to be called hot. Now the locus of power had shifted away from him, who had it first because he was old, to me, who now had it because I knew he found me attractive. I was hotter than he was old.
Besides acknowledging to myself that the power balance had shifted, I could not believe my luck. This was turning into the greatest "How We Met" story ever. Earlier in the evening over chips and salsa I had allowed myself to imagine listening to our friends toast us at our wedding for meeting at motorcycle lessons, and had a minor vision of roaring away from the front of a church on the back of a motorcycle in my wedding dress. And now this! Now he had previously desired me from afar while I was engaged in heroic, noble life saving? This was too much.
I went to the bathroom and looked at my face in my mirror. Was this the face of someone who marries a 40 year old? 'Maybe,' I thought as I started to see it, 'yes, I think I could do it.'
Despite all this opening promise, our second date turned out to be our last. It started innocently enough. He picked me up on his motorcycle. At the time I did not see the irony of how getting my motorcycle license had led to me being the bitch on the back of the bike, yet again.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"It's a surprise," he said, as he helped me buckle his helmet onto my head.
"How romantic!" I thought, as I placed my arms around his middle and snuggled my helmet face into his leather jacket. It was a perfect October Indian Summer fall day, and we went for a long, windy ride. I was eager to see what the surprise destination would be. I imagined we might be going to the Indiana Dunes lakeshore for a picnic, and squeezed the saddle bags with my shins to see if I could feel a blanket and bottles of wine.
Or maybe we were going to get ice cream at a small diner in rural Illinois, or maybe to a fancy store and he's going to buy me a dress. All these things would have led positively in his favor to me sleeping with him. I thought sophisticated dates as aphrodisiac's were one of the potential perks of dating an older man. Thank you, Tom Selleck cameo on Friends.
My reverie was interrupted by all the pot holes we were driving over, as we turned and slowed in the warehouse district west of Damen Ave. He zig zagged with the bike to avoid the large shards of broken glass in the street. I frowned inside the helmet. This did not look good.
What could we be doing in this part of town?
'Oh no, I'm probably going to be killed,' I thought to myself dully.
Optimism kicked in...
Or maybe he's going to show me a large artist loft he bought for dirt cheap and reveal that even though he's only known me a week, he can't live another day unless I consent to quit my job and devote my life to decorating it? This had been another potential perk of dating an older man that I'd considered.
We slowed and stopped outside a large, nondescript building. There was the faint smell of animal in the air. Maybe we were going to one of these abandoned warehouses to watch the circus rehearse, I thought with a renewed flame of hope in my chest. He remembers that I said my greatest dream is to run off and join the circus!
I shook my long hair out of the helmet as sexily as possible, like I knew I was supposed to do, and asked, "What are we doing here?" with a ridiculous flirty smile beaming across my face, still holding out for a dream date and glad this wasn't all being filmed for The Bachelorette, which was increasingly being suggested to me as possible way to meet someone.
Jeff: "I've gotta talk to this guy about my new parrot."
Maux: "The surprise is you are getting a parrot?"
Jeff: "Yeah."
Maux: "Oh, okay."
Like I said, I'm a roll with the punches kind of gal. Albeit, one with an active imagination. As we entered the warehouse through a somewhat secretive door, I had visions of having to ride home with the parrot perched on one of our shoulders, like pirates.
Maux: "Like today, now, you are getting a parrot?"
Jeff: "Well, I don't think it's here yet. I've got to check in with the guy."
Thus began my foray into the illicit underground world of parrot smuggling.
The inside of the warehouse was filled with large cages of squawking birds in vibrant colors. I wandered around picking out my favorites while Jeff talked to the Parrot Guy about cages, food, toys, blah blah blah. It should probably be mentioned here that the Parrot Guy did in fact have birds perched on his shoulders.
(this is not the Parrot Guy, but the imagery is correct)
Eventually Jeff came and found me looking at the parakeets.
Maux, making Awkward Date Conversation: "So, do you have any other pets?"
Jeff: "Yeah, two dogs, a cat, I used to have some other smaller birds, also I've got (....wait for it....wait for it.....) a 12 foot boa."
Maux: "You mean, like, a boa constrictor snake?"
Jeff: "Yeah."
Maux: "A 12 foot boa?"
Jeff: "Yeah, Mom."
Maux: "Your boa is named Mom?"
Jeff: "Yeah."
Still rolling with the punches, I say, "Oh, so you like animals."
Jeff: "Yeah, and I also breed tarantulas."
This is the first moment the word "WARNING" started flashing on and off in a dim area of my mind I often ignore. But because I am a person who was raised to have good manners, with the attendant social etiquette of being able to quickly think of interesting questions to ask people about themselves, combined with a dirty mind always thinking about sex, instead of fleeing I instantly asked,
"How do they breed? Do they mount?" While making what I imagined to be spider sex motions with my hands, interlocking my fingers like 8 spider legs and slapping my palms together.
I never got the answer to the breeding position question because I quickly asked another, far more pertinent question related to my phobia of hairy spiders.
Maux, breathing shallowly: "How many tarantulas do you have?"
Jeff, boastful: "Oh, about 80-ish."
Then, and only then, did I realize it was never going to work out between us.
Not the fact that he was 16 years older than me, not the fact that he was engaged in parrot smuggling, not the boa named Mom, not the fact that he was only 10 years younger than my mom, not even the ownership of tarantula's; with enough single desperation I could possibly have overlooked all of those things in light of how perfect he seemed for me on paper. And not just overlooked, I could have made those unique traits thrive in a good cocktail party environment.
It was the plural suffix "ish" that did it for me.
If you have tarantulas in your house, I think it is essential to know exactly how many there are at one time. I must insist that this cannot be a gray area. Maybe he was a young 24 year old backpacking through Asia in 1990 when the movie 'Arachnaphobia' came out, but I certainly was not. I was an impressionable 8 year-old happy to finally know the clinical name of my condition.
I was incredulous when he next claimed not only to never have seen the movie, but never to have even heard of it. A tarantula breeder being unaware of the movie Arachnoaphobia was just preposterous, and the fact that this conversation was taking place amidst cages of dozens of exotic, tropical smuggled toucans made it even more surreal.
"Why do you breed them? For fun?" I asked fearfully.
He then detailed for me how financially lucrative tarantula breeding can be, and seemed especially proud of himself that he bred a rare Venezuelan tarantula that was blue in color. How had this information not come out over margarita's and mexican food?
I tried to remember if any of his tattoos were of spiders.
"Are any of your tattoos of spiders?"
The answer: "Just two of them."
NEXT!
While he finished up the paperwork with the parrot smuggler, who still had two birds perched on his shoulders, I contemplated. I thought it lucky that we had only met in public places. What if I had gone to his house, unaware of the tarantulas? Perish the thought! What if I had spent the night and woke up in the morning, and while groggily walking to the kitchen for orange juice had made a wrong turn at the living room and ended up in a room full of tarantula cages? Or stumbled upon it en route to a post sex tinkle? Thank god I have morals, questionable though they may be! No sir, no sleeping with anybody on the first date here.
Sweet Jesus, look at what I just found a picture of on the internet:
(a spider breeding laboratory! gasp-shudder-vomit-cry)
I should have handed him my helmet right then and there, walked out, and taken the bus home. But noooooo. Stupid manners win again. I let him finish up his toucan smuggling and then take me home on the bike, the motorcycle pockets bulging with brightly colored wooden toys he had bought in anticipation of his smuggled parrots homecoming.
As I swung my leg over his bike back in front of my apartment building, he asked when he could see me again.
"I'm pretty busy this week with work, I'll call you" I said as I backed away slowly.
I went inside to take a nap. I was exhausted. Dating is so exhausting. There are just so many freaks. Later that night I had a nightmare about waking up chained to the wall of his garage by my wrists while he placed 80-ish tarantulas all over my body and Mom the boa waited in the wings to snuff the life out of me, with a row of Harley's gleaming, while 'Don't fear the reaper' played top volume so the neighbors couldn't hear me screaming. And who would come rescue me anyway, his friends the police? I woke up in a sweat, thinking I could hear a parrot squawking. But it was just my cell phone vibrating with a text message from Jeff. Did I want to come over? No, I'm sorry, I do not.
