Living in Los Angeles means there’s always a possibility you might wind up on TV. Since my cousin Carly is the force behind this date, I should have expected it to be a setup. The girl lives for reality television and has spent an obscene amount of time forcing me to help her make her submission tapes. The Bachelorette, The Real World, Road Rules, The Amazing Race, Survivor, Big Brother—she’s auditioned for them all. She’s also sent tapes to Say Yes to the Dress (she doesn’t have a boyfriend), Dance Moms (she’s childless), and Keeping up With The Kardashians (she isn’t one). Carly would do terrible things to be involved in any reality show.
My senses should’ve gone into overdrive when she forced me into this nightmare. I’m in no way ready to date, but she spent the last four days hammering at me about going out with a friend of a friend (“nicest guy in the world,” she’d said) who needed some “emergency help” to “get out of his shell”. She kept at me until I surrendered. When I agreed to this, I’d assured myself it would be painless—a quick dinner followed by splitting the check and going home, alone, without any kind of drama. Too bad that’s not what’s happening.
Ham is so ridiculous it’s obvious Carly decided to branch out and set up a prank on her favorite family member in order to get a few seconds of airtime. Meanwhile, the longer I endure Ham’s commentary, the more likely it becomes that Carly’s reality TV debut will be on COPS, since I’m probably going to beat her silly.
After a fruitless minute of camera searching, I turn my attention back to Ham. He’s selling the douche persona wholeheartedly, which makes me think he’s probably a shit in real life. We’ve been sitting here for less than ten minutes and I’ve contemplated leaving at least a hundred times. Only the fact that the things he’s spewing are so over-the-top has clued me in.
I’ve decided I’m the victim of a how-long-can-they-stand-it type show. That being the case, chances are good I’ll walk away with some money—as long as I manage to maintain my cool through dinner.
At the moment, the thing keeping me in this chair is a gorgeous bag in the window of the Tory Burch store on Rodeo I’ve been eying on my lunch breaks for the last few weeks. I’m going to count it as a win if I walk away from this with the cash to buy it. I bet if I withstand this through an entire dinner, I could walk away with a thousand dollars—so maybe a purse and a pair of heels. Yeah. For that, I can do this. A girl can endure a lot of things for great fashion. Forcing myself to at least pretend to be invested in the date, I prop my chin up on my hand and tune back in to what Ham is saying.
“I bet if you lost fifteen pounds and got liposuction on the fat in your ass, you’d be a solid seven and a half. One of the girls in my acting class works for a plastic surgeon, so if you do me right, I might be able to get you a discount,” he says, his tone and expression both serious. “You’ll have to find a dentist on your own, though. The surgeon can’t do anything about your teeth, you feel?”
Well, hell. That’s a wrap on my dreams of the purse and the pair of Louboutins I saved to my shoe board on Pinterest. Whatever prank show is recording the date from hell can kiss the fat in my ass. I like a joke as much as the next person, but being told I need to drop some pounds, get plastic surgery, and do something about my teeth isn’t hilarious. Especially not when it’s going to wind up on TV.
Sitting up straight, I slow clap. “Bravo, Ham! You have sold the hell out of this. Wherever Carly is, someone needs to tell her to come out now. For what it’s worth, the cameras are going to want to get a nice, tight shot of that, because I’m going to strangle her. Where are they, by the way? I’ve been trying to look without being too obvious and I haven’t managed to suss them out."
Ham stares at me as though I just confessed to smoking crack on my way here.
“What cameras?” he huffs, looking annoyed. “What are you talking about?”
He's still selling this role like a crook sells swamp property in Florida, but I'm not buying. If he’s run this scene before, the last person he did it to must’ve been blind, dumb, or both.
“Come on, I caught you fair and square,” I tease. “If this were your real personality, someone would've ripped your nuts off and shoved them down your throat long before now."