“Not my problem.”
“Twelve hundred.”
“Twelve hundred what? Blowjobs?”
“Dollars. For the ride.”
“I’d rather sell my body for sex,” she said. “I remember this one time when I made four hundred dollars just for sitting next to a guy in his car. God knows what I could have made if I’d actually slept with him.”
“Come on, Clara—Ms. Zapata—Dr. Zapata?”
“That’s ‘Bunny Lovemuffin’ to you!”
“You’re a student and all students need money. So just let me—”
“You’re right, I’m a starving student and I desperately need the money, and I’dstillrather give up twelve hundred easy dollars than spend another minute with you.”
“Fifteen hundred,” I said. “Cash. That’s my final offer.”
“It’s been real,” she said, leaning over me and pushing the passenger door open. “Let’s do it again sometime. Ta.”
I stepped out of the car, but not without a final plea. “Seventeen hundred?”
She pulled the car door closed with a slam and drove away.
At the edge of the gas station parking lot was a pink Porta John with “Eat my shit, Bertha!” graffitied on the door. I walked over to the bench in front of it and sat down. What the hell was I supposed to do now? The obvious answer was to borrow a phone from the attendant and call my father. But then I imagined explaining the series of stupidities and irresponsible behaviors that had gotten me into this mess in the first place. I’d already gotten a million lectures from him on what a careless failure I was. But now, for the first time ever, Dad would actually be right.
The sound of a car backfiring shook me from my thoughts. Driving back in my direction was Bunny Lovemuffin in the shitmobile. Thank the Lord and the entire host of heaven.
I jumped up and started waving my arms in the air like a shipwrecked sailor who’d just detected a rescue boat on the horizon. Not that Clara actually needed any help spotting me. I was jumping up and down in front of a giant pink toilet with “Eat my shit” spray-painted in purple bubble letters above my head. I was hard to miss.
But as the car careened into the parking lot at about fifty miles an hour, it occurred to me that “hard to miss” might not be the best thing to be right now. But no sooner had the words “vehicular manslaughter” entered my head than the car came to an abrupt halt ten inches from where I stood.
Clara stuck her furious head out the window. “A pleasure consultant? Seriously?”
“I was trying to be polite!” I said in an attempt at self-defense. “Every time you log on to the internet, there’s a new word for it. How’s a man supposed to keep up?”
“I bet you were pretty eager to log on to my YouTube channel and watch my videos!”
“Not after you said that thing about taking stool samples, I wasn’t!”
She pulled her head back into the car and began rolling up her window.
“Clara, let me explain!” I yelled as she put the gear shift into reverse.
“Explain what?” she yelled. “That you thought I went to Florida and won the Investment Ratio of DeNiro War?”
Unless Robert DeNiro had personally declared a war against Florida for misrepresenting its expenditure ratios and conscripted Clara to command his private army, I was pretty sure I’d misheard her.
“Could you repeat that?” I said, gesturing for her to roll down her window.
She opened it just a crack. “You thought I went to Florida and won the Best Fellatio of the Year Award?”
That is what I thought.
“If any state sponsored a yearly fellatio contest, trust me, it would be Florida. Didn’t you ever go to Tampa for spring break?”
“I won an award for a lecture I gave at Everglades National Park on the danger of the invasive South American tegu on native amphibians and ground-nesting birds!”