I met Mike — not less than I feel his identify was Mike — on the health club. I do not forget that he had the pink pores and skin of a piglet, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and requested me if I used to be married. As a 22-year-old, this was a query I had by no means been requested, a lot much less within the type of a pick-up line, and in a health club of all locations. I mentioned no, I wasn’t, after which, when he requested if I’d prefer to exit someday, I mentioned sure, I might.
Would I prefer to exit with Mike? Truthfully, I wasn’t satisfied. However I’d by no means been on a date earlier than, and, since shifting to Birmingham, Alabama, from suburban Philadelphia a number of months earlier, had but to satisfy a person who may very well be thought-about heterosexual relationship materials. Each man I knew was homosexual, and most of my free time was consequently spent in homosexual bars and golf equipment. I’d had one single crush since I arrived, on a good-looking and charming architect who additionally occurred to be my third cousin. And, as he disclosed to me one night time at a homosexual bar, homosexual.
So it appeared like a good suggestion to go on a date with an avowed straight man, one who I wasn’t even associated to by blood.
With no private expertise to attract from, I’d dredged most of my concepts about relationship from the effectively of popular culture. One in every of my earliest movie reminiscences is that scene in Girl and the Tramp through which the titular canines share a plate of spaghetti and meatballs; from there, reveals like Intercourse and the Metropolis and Felicity, and films as disparate as Good Will Looking, Tom Jones, and Moonstruck conditioned me to imagine that the restaurant is an important a part of any self-respecting courtship.
Previous to shifting to Birmingham to intern with a publishing firm, I’d attended a girls’s school the place, as somebody each heterosexual and congenitally shy, my erotic longing was reserved for sulky British actors. Courting, as portrayed by a lot of the films I watched, appeared enjoyable and demeaning: On the one hand, you might be taken out to a pleasant restaurant, or flattered with presents, and even kissed in a Tuscan poppy discipline; on the opposite, you might be dumped, or cheated upon, or compelled to make use of your date’s bodily fluids as hair product. Making it to an precise restaurant appeared like a type of prize, or a summit that had been scaled: It meant that somebody appreciated you sufficient to ask you to participate within the ceremony of public seduction, and presumably spend cash on you. Motion pictures and TV at all times made it look so subtle and glamorous, the true mark of commencement from the grubby cocoon of adolescence to unique, winged maturity.
A few days after I gave Mike my quantity, he referred to as and we made a plan. It was, in its entirety, to eat one thing, someplace, in one another’s firm. We might work out the place once we met up.
The place would Mike prefer to go? Was he a steakhouse sort of man (each man I’d met in Birmingham was a steakhouse sort of man), or extra of a greasy spoon kind? I had no concept as a result of it was the late ’90s and our date was to happen within the land earlier than time, with out assistance from social media or a lot in the best way of Google to allow some productive stalking. There was no Tinder profile to supply clues of Mike’s musical preferences or grasp of fundamental grammar. There wasn’t even a LinkedIn the place I may confirm that he was the architectural draftsman he claimed to be. Barring any info past his bodily look, clothes, and exercise routine, Mike remained a cipher. It will fall to our alternative of restaurant to shed some gentle on our diploma of compatibility.
On the night of our appointed date, we pulled our vehicles up subsequent to one another in a chosen assembly place, like we had been performing some sort of hostage-for-weapons swap. I obtained in his automotive and he started to drive. The place, we nonetheless didn’t know.
This looks as if an excellent place to cease and say that folks assume a number of issues about Birmingham that aren’t true. Like that it doesn’t have any homosexual folks or Jews, two assumptions that I’ve needed to right extra instances than I care to rely. Some folks may additionally assume that Birmingham lacks good eating choices. Once more, incorrect: There have been a variety of eating places I might have been pleased to go to. Candy little Chez Lulu, for instance, with its red-ceilinged eating room and estimable quiche, or Chris Hastings’s Scorching and Scorching Fish Membership, its identify evocative of a fevered bayou speakeasy, or Surin West, the very first place I’d ever eaten sushi. Even P.F. Chang’s, all the best way out on the Summit Mall, would have been good. I cherished P.F. Chang’s as a result of every part about it was huge: the parts, the flavors, the tables.
However we didn’t go to any of those eating places. I don’t keep in mind why. What I keep in mind is sitting in Mike’s passenger seat as we drove by way of the night time, as aimless as a drifting climate balloon. As I slowly realized we didn’t have a lot in frequent, I turned conscious of the detrimental area between us the place sprightly dialog must be. I additionally turned conscious of the geography of Birmingham, the town the place I used to be born and had visited household virtually each summer season rising up: by no means earlier than had it appeared so huge, but so empty of chance.
Finally, on a parkway trimmed with automotive dealerships and strip malls, Mike placed on the brakes and mentioned, “what about right here?”
Earlier than us was a Kenny Rogers Roasters. In my reminiscence, its home windows glowed with the queasy gentle of an airport rest room. No, I believed. “Okay,” I mentioned.
I’d by no means set foot in a Kenny Rogers Roasters, which now not exists in the USA, but has, curiously, discovered modern-day success in components of Asia. As I don’t come from a rustic music household, I related Kenny Rogers largely with Dole pineapple commercials. However right here he was, a rooster man. A rooster, steak, ribs, burger, and sausage man — Kenny Rogers’s menu was 98 % animal components. I hadn’t informed Mike that I didn’t eat meat, and he hadn’t requested. So I defaulted to the technique I employed at barbecue eating places and went for the edges: little ramekins of mac and cheese, coleslaw, and steamed greens. Once I recited my order to the server, Mike checked out me like I’d requested a basket of severed ears. Then he ordered a rack of ribs.
When the server left, we tried extra in the best way of dialog, however right here, as within the automotive, it proved to be a constipated affair. It’s tough for me to recollect what, precisely, we talked about — what I can say is that it strengthened our lack of frequent floor. It wasn’t as if he revealed himself to be a raging misogynist or perhaps a usually disagreeable particular person; it was extra that my bizarre didn’t align together with his bizarre, and because of this, we had virtually nothing to speak about. By the point the meals got here, Kenny Rogers Roasters had taught me what I wanted to find out about Mike, particularly that I had by no means felt so lonely within the firm of one other particular person. I had been led to imagine {that a} restaurant date was an inherently romantic assemble. In my creativeness, a restaurant was the place adults went to play footsie underneath the desk and drink purple wine and order a tiny, molten chocolate cake served with two forks earlier than stumbling off to seal the deal. It was not the place you went to eat flaccid carrot cash and watch a person whose final identify you didn’t know lick sauce from his thick fingers one after the other.
As I sat there, my idealized picture of the romantic restaurant date evaporating round me, I used to be confronted with the gulf between what we think about life can be, and what it truly is. Which is to say, disappointment. What I didn’t but grasp is that with the fitting particular person, the romantic restaurant date was the factor I wished it to be, and that together with appearing as a measure of compatibility, the selection of restaurant may allow the seed of connection to develop and discover expression. It was unsuitable to anticipate a restaurant to carry out miracles, or to be the miracle in and of itself; that got here right down to the 2 folks sitting throughout from one another. Additionally, these film restaurant dates benefitted from an important benefit that we didn’t: a script.
On reflection, I feel I used to be too laborious on Mike: Whereas a Kenny Rogers Roasters was not the stuff that second dates had been constructed upon, it was additionally, in all equity, a final resort, i.e. the final place you wish to find yourself on a date, except for perhaps a newspaper crime blotter. By the point we pulled into that car parking zone I think we each knew that this wasn’t going wherever, so it would as effectively go to a Kenny Rogers Roasters. We’d already failed the compatibility take a look at; the restaurant was our participation trophy.
And but that didn’t cease Mike, as soon as he’d pushed me to my automotive, from asking if he may kiss me. I wish to let you know that I demurred with tact. However I used to be 22 and exhausted from wringing small speak from a stone at a Kenny Rogers Roasters for what had felt like a full calendar week. So I laughed in Mike’s face and mentioned, “I don’t care.”
I nonetheless cringe once I keep in mind these phrases leaving my mouth, and Mike deciphering them as a directive to kiss me anyway. Now I knew what it was like to take a seat throughout from somebody at a restaurant with the affordable expectation of finally being kissed, and it was under no circumstances what I believed or hoped it could be. It will take a very long time earlier than it was. And but, the Kenny Rogers Roasters had served a invaluable operate: It gave me the knowledge I wanted, and a meal that, irrespective of how laborious I attempted, I’ve by no means been capable of neglect.