Be My Baby's Daddy...

If there's a point to this series of articles on my romantic life, it's that you can break hearts, have your heart broken, and be subject to wild demands and emotional irrationality, and you don't have to kiss a girl.

Now, on to business.

Back in the day, I had this friend, "Dick". His girlfriend had my MSN name. We talked sometimes. Let's call her Janey. Eventually, she mentioned her friend. For the purposes of her not coming angrily after me, let's call her Susie. Now, Janey says Susie is alone - she hasn't had a date for a while. I wasn't dating anyone at the time. So she asks me if I'll date her once, lift her spirits, make her feel good. I figure sure, what the fuck. What could possibly go wrong.

Famous...last...words.

Now, I begin to talk to her on MSN. She seems nice, nothing too much, nothing too substantial. I offer to take her to a movie, Die Another Day. We'll make it a date with Janey and Dick.

Now, this was a pretty bad date. As in, ooh, that's gotta hurt bad. Picture Mike Tyson punching you in the face bad.

I get to the girl's house, driving around. Now, I'm not sure if this is the house, so I'm checking my map, because I've never met the girl before in my life. I'm trying to knock on the door. Then she raps on my passenger side window. Okay, so far, so bad...

Then Janey tells me Dick can't come. (Which would be an awesome sentence if you cut it off before "Dick".) So now I'm entertaining both girls. Trying to stir up conversation with this girl I've barely met, and another I don't really know all that well. Bad.

Then we get to the theater. I can't pay. There's no money - I left it at home. They have to pay my way.

We say nothing the whole movie, and make the briefest chit-chat the way back. The girl's nice, but I'm not about to break the sacred Movie Covenant to talk to her. Besides, I'm too much of a chicken-shit to make out with this girl. That, and I'm not attracted to her.

Now, you think after a date gone this wrong, you'd think she wouldn't want to talk to me. And you'd be right.

Until about two months later. I'm going through high school, playing video games, doing all this shit. Then she turns me on to a MSN message, basically saying

1. She's pregnant
2. The dude's too stupid/retarded/scared to take care of the baby.
3. Will I take care of her baby?

Of course, I took the most calm, reasonable, rational, mature reaction to the situation.

...

"This is a joke, right?"

No, it's not a joke, really! She says.

"This is a joke, right? I'm on it, ah ha."

No, really.

Holy crap. Ah.

Ah, I gotta go.

And, to my eternal credit/shame, I ACTUALLY CONSIDERED DOING IT.

I mean, it's like this, if a beggar said he's poor, hungry, and ashamed, and no one else will take him, and can you please take care of him, you can't kick him out on the street, even though he's a poor beggar.

But then, the "This is a joke, right?" sense kept coming in. I denied it, denied it, denied it. This is a joke. You are screwing with me. No one would possibly ask someone whom they dated once, awkwardly, and haven't conversed in over two months, to raise their child. This is a joke. This is not happening.

I still don't know if it's a joke, because I never saw the girl during the pregnancy. Never saw her again, except for that one date. Never saw her.

Although her story has the worst kind of happy ending. She had a miscarriage. So, now she's not a teenage mother.

What a horrible story.

And then, the next summer, she calls me up at 10:00 at night. She asks me how I'm doing, what I'm doing. I tell her I'm at home, relaxing.

"Oh, you need to go out and drink, have some fun. You're so boring."

Then she hung up.

Oh, Susie, I'm infinitely grateful I never got a second date. Day-um.