Date From Hell

Seeing the light

Dating new people is always a learning experience. Not about your date; about yourself. No matter whether it's a good experience or a bad one, I always find that I walk away knowing myself just a little bit better, because after all, every time you reveal something about yourself you have the opportunity to examine that characteristic and to make a change if desired. I had considered myself an on-the-fence agnostic for many years...until I met Justin, who made me see the light.

I met Justin in a café one cloudy afternoon and we got to talking. He was attentive, intelligent, kind, easy-going and handsome. We talked so long that he finally asked if I'd like to join him for dinner that very night. Feeling dizzy with freedom after recently getting out of a relationship, I threw caution into the wind and accepted.

He led me out to the parking lot right up to a motorcycle and hopped on. Obviously he hadn't noticed the short skirt I was wearing. We left the bike and walked to a nearby restaurant instead, which was a good idea since he didn't have an extra helmet anyway.

At the restaurant he told me to order anything I wanted and then when the waiter came he wound up ordering for me. He chewed with his mouth open, made me guess his middle name for an inordinate amount of time, and walked up and down between the tables to demonstrate that one of his legs was shorter than the other. Why did I not recognize these tell-tale signs of what was to come? Because I am the Queen of the Benefit of the Doubt, that's why.

When it was time to go home, he insisted on driving me (I'd walked to this part of town earlier, but now it was dark and cold), and rather than side-straddling his bike, we strolled to his nearby house to get his car. Inside his house I sat on the plastic-covered couch and looked around at the crucifix-covered walls and the two leather-bound bibles carefully placed on doilies on the coffee table. I heard a noise and looked up to see what can only be described as Tammy Faye Bakker meets The Village People. The woman standing in the doorway to the living room was dressed in a powder blue polyester pant suit with the hem several inches shy of her gold, open-toe sandals; her finger- and toenails were frighteningly long and hot pink; her coiffeur looked like a hair helmet; her glasses were 80s-style huge and tinted; her face was caked with makeup; and she held a cigarette in a long filter between her talons.

Justin swooped up behind her and introduced his mom to me. She stared at me for a second as she sucked on her cancer stick and then said in a low, raspy voice, ‘What church do you go to?' When I replied, ‘none,' she made a clicking sound with her tongue and Justin rushed over to sit next to me. He patted my knee and smiled at me like I was mentally-challenged and told me, ‘Well, you'll have to convert to Christianity when we get married, of course.'

I looked from Justin to his mom several times, waiting for one of them to leap up and yell, ‘Smile! You're on Candid Camera!' No one leaped. There was no camera. This was real life. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, hoping to make my break from there, but the little windowless room offered no escape. When I emerged (after sitting on the toilet with a two-foot-tall bleeding Jesus Christ staring mournfully at me) I beelined for the front door, not even bothering to say goodbye. The last thing I heard was Justin's mom say, ‘Honey, that person is leaving.'

Walking the three miles back home in the dark, cold night gave me ample time to think about Justin, his Village Person mom, and their religiously tricked-out house. If agnosticism was the middle ground between religion and atheism, then I wanted to be as far away from religion as possible. I jumped off the fence and landed solidly on atheist ground.