The Stripper Chronicles: Chapter 2

At the time, Bill would come pick me up for lunch a lot as well. As a matter of fact, I think we ate lunch together almost every day I worked. The wife and I only had one working car and I think sometimes I was his link to normalcy with the insane goings on. So him getting me away from the store for lunch and he getting to discuss his daily life worked out best for both of us.

Regardless.

One morning before lunch I talked to Bill and there was a stripper sleeping at his house. It's not actually what you think. He didn't sleep with her. He had gotten a phone call saying that she need to be picked up in Keyser at 7am and he did. Then she proceeded to pass out.

Now let me make a side note here. Bill is one of my best friends in the entire world. He would do anything I asked. He truly would, but there is no way in Hell I would ever call him before 10am unless it was pre-arranged. No way. If my car was broken down outside of his house at 8am I would have a tough time knocking on his door. I'd probably call someone else... maybe even his brother... but not him. There's no way I have any desire to wake him. Sleep is nearly sacred to him and I think it's because he seems to schedule it so well while working crazy shifts. Therefore messing with the schedule screws it up for days.

Apparently she woke up. Not surprisingly - she was hungry. I mean everyone's hungry when they've been binging on alcohol for hours on end, that's why Denny's in LaVale stays in business. I think she woke drunk and started where she left off on her gigantic container of Crown Royal, 2 liters if I remember correctly. When she told Bill that she was starving he explained that she'd have to wait, that he'd already made plans to eat lunch with me and wasn't backing out.

Now, Bill is a man of his word. If you take anything from this blog about my friend, I hope you enjoy the humor, but I hope you also realize that this was a great guy dealing with a bad emotional situation as best as he could and doing it relatively successfully. Most admirably, no one got hurt in the process and I still get to laugh at these unbelievable stories.

So the girl gets impatient and after annoying him to death he tells her, "Look, you call him." On my end, one of the other employees at the store tells me I have a phone call and she doesn't know the girl's voice. I pick it up to hear a reasonably sexy voice say, "Hey, Bill?" and when I acknowledge it's me she proceeds to start moaning like I'm paying $1.99/minute for a "good time". I thought, "Oh, how nice, phone sex that calls me." but I knew who it was. I knew straight away that this call was definitely coming from Bill's house.

"Put Bill on.", I said.
"But you don't like it? What do you want me to do? I'll say anything."
"Yeah, that's what worries me. Now put Bill on so we can figure out what we're doing for lunch."
"You didn't even react! I thought I'd get some kind of reaction out of you."
Now, this is where the theme of our friendship at the time was stated as it had been so many times before.
I told her, "Nothing surprises me."
"Dammit! That's exactly what he said you'd say.", and I could then hear Bill laughing hysterically in the background. She finally conceded the phone.

While recovering from the laughing fit he said, "I think Jade wants to go to Chik-Fil-A for lunch."
"Seems to me, she's probably running the show today so that's fine."
He walks to a different room so she doesn't hear him, "Dude, she is so drunk. When I pull up to the store, you just come out. I'm not bringing her in there. Aaron will freak if she comes in there drunk and belligerent."
"What makes you think she'll be any better at the mall?"
"She'll be fine. I think she's really hungry. If we take her straight in and get her food everything will be great."
"Ok. I'll see you in a few."

Now I had no idea that she'd been drinking that much. They get to the store. I get in the car and immediately I can tell I'm going to be annoyed. She's bouncing up and down in the front seat like a third grader... on speed holding a large, clear bottle of liquor, and she's cranking the stereo to the point that my ears feel like they're going to bleed. (He had a very nice sound system in the car) She smells like a brewery threw up a barrel of Jack Daniels mixed with the essence of dog kennel. Then she started asking annoying questions about being a jeweler. "Why don't you give me something?" "Have you ever stolen anything?" "How much do you think my ring's worth?" (it was, unsurprisingly, cheap). That was the longest 2 miles I think I've ever had to endure.

So we get to the mall, head straight for Chik-Fil-A since she's whined about being hungry in between the other irritating requests she's made the whole way there. Bill could tell I wasn't real happy to hang out with her and we were both a little relieved that she wanted to run to a store before she ate. The thing is; she didn't tell us what she wanted and just left. Since she was gone he explained the whole situation to me up to that point while we waited in what seemed to be an exorbitantly long line. She didn't make it back so Bill ordered for her. He barely knew her, so he ordered the basics - chicken sandwich, drink and waffle fries.

We sit down in the food court and start eating when we finally see her again. She moves toward the table gets a puzzled look on her face and heads directly back to Chik-Fil-A. Bill chases after to explain that we already ordered for her and learns that the problem was she didn't see ketchup on the table... little did we know. She came back, plopped down beside me, across from Bill. She must have laid down 20 packets of ketchup - no exaggeration. I passed it off as something drunk people do. Then she got into her purse to show us her findings from that little country store that used to be on that end of the mall. Bill chuckled and said "What the Hell are you going to do with 10 refrigerator magnets? And beyond that, I thought you didn't have any money." and he was correct. We had a smelly, drunk, annoying, kleptomaniac stripper on our hands. This is JUST how I wanted to spend lunch.

As I remember it, when she finally started eating, she ignored the chicken sandwich altogether. She went straight for the fries, but not without some ketchup... lots of ketchup. She ripped open every single packet with her teeth and just started squirting it into this huge mound. Then she'd drag those checkerboard fries through the pile scooping it like dip, gorge on them, rip open more packets, rebuild the Mt. Hood of the condiment kingdom and repeat. I had to back away from her a bit. Ketchup was going all over the place. She was eating as fast as she could rip into those plastic pouches and making noises like a starved dog digging through its first meal in days - but this wasn't her trying to be annoying, she was still succeeding at that, this was the real her at that time.

There was ketchup all over the table. Her face looked like she had been eating ketchup flavored chicken wings. It was dripping down her chin. She had ketchup down her arms to the point that she looked like a surgeon after searching for a missing scalpel. Her hands were obviously covered in ketchup... and I was wearing a white dress shirt. I was praying that I'd avoid collateral ketchup spray and luckily that one thing did go right for lunch.

She finished. We cleaned her up as best we could, (she almost had to be in better condition than she was before she got to the mall), and finally left. My half-hour break had turned into an hour break, and when I finally got back to the store Aaron kind of gave me a dirty look, rightfully so. I told him "Look, believe me when I say, I would have much, MUCH rather missed lunch completely than have to ever experience that again." and told him what happened to unsympathetic laughter.

It turns out that Bill ended up taking her some place else later that afternoon to meet some friends of hers and that house was a complete dump. He told me it was disgusting and had no furniture, just some old ratty mattresses on the floor with no sheets. She couldn't stay there so Bill ended up picking up other assistance and while he walked Jade up to her family's house, his faithful assistant removed everything of hers from his trunk and put it on the sidewalk. As soon as he thought that all the stuff was on the curb, he left the girl screaming at her father and throwing things in the house, got in his car, sped off and hasn't heard from her since.