Rude On A Tube
My Very Worst Date happened on Memorial Day of 2011. On Sunday night, I received a call from a girl with whom I had exchanged numbers outside a bar in November of the previous year. She used to date a friend of mine; we had chatted for a few minutes and decided to keep in touch. We had been calling and texting each other every so often but nothing terribly serious. I got a call from her on Sunday night of Memorial Day weekend and she wanted to go tubing down the Salt River in Phoenix. I had never done this so, since I had no other plans, told her I would pick her up the following morning.
The next day, after showing me her apartment, she told me it costs $15 to rent the tubes and that she had $20 (OK, math checks out). As we are driving, she yelled at me to turn around and go to a liquor store we just passed. In the drive-thru, she ordered cigarettes and candy. Her total…$20. OK, looks like I’m paying for her tube.
As we drove a little further down the road, she told me we needed to go to Wal-Mart to pick up supplies. In the store, she started barking at me to grab things for her as she tried on different hats. I was trying to be as non-confrontational as possible because I would have to spend the entire day with her and I wanted to have fun. We got to the checkout counter and I assumed she’d be using credit cards to pay. The total came to about $45 and guess what? Apparently I was supposed to pay.
“I don’t even want any of this stuff,” I said.
Her reply: “Well, didn’t you just get a promotion at work?” …Was she for real?
“I didn’t bust my ass at work just to buy things for you!”
We started arguing in front of everyone. I finally decided to whip out my credit card just so she’d shut up. I was regretting my decision to go tubing more and more by the minute.
So we continued our 45-minute drive to the river. It was actually a fairly pleasant drive so far and I was still hoping the day might actually be fun. About 20 minutes into the drive she wanted to smoke. Normally, I wouldn’t care but I didn’t want my car to smell like smoke. She screamed at me like a banshee, telling me how badly she needed to smoke. To save my eardrums, I agreed to let her smoke just one cigarette.
As we neared the river there was a traffic jam. Guess who needed to have another smoke? This time I put my foot down and told her that under no circumstances could she have another smoke in my car. She had agreed earlier that when I let her smoke it would only be one cigarette. I told her that she was in MY car and, since I was paying for the gas and the tube and her stupid crap at Wal-Mart, that she was going to have to respect my wishes. Now keep in mind at this time we were only inching along in traffic. “Well then I’m getting out to smoke!” she said. “OK, fine.” Then she acted like she was getting out. When I called her bluff, she sat back down and said “You weren’t even going to stop me?”
We finally got to the river and she started shamelessly flirting with every guy she came in contact with. Not only that, but she acted butt hurt over me yelling at her and now she wouldn’t even talk to me. After I paid for her tube, we took a shuttle bus to the head of the river. She grabbed her tube, walked ahead of me and made her way down to the river without even saying a word to me. After about 15 minutes into our float down the river (it’s four hours total), she started flirting with a group of about ten Ukrainian guys. She was floating behind them, asking them a bunch of questions, but they were barely even paying attention to her. Most guys do pay attention to her – not because of her awful personality, but because of her giant fake boobs and string bikini top. I decided to float on my own. I didn’t want to be tagging along with someone who was desperately tagging along with other people.
For about the first 45 minutes, I could still keep an eye on her because I was in her vicinity but after that, I didn’t see her. At the halfway mark, I decided to stop and look for her. I climbed up a hill and watched people float by, but she was nowhere to be seen. Did she pass me? I started floating down the river even faster, thinking she had passed me a long time ago and I had to catch up.
After a long two hours, I finally made it to the end. I was tired and hungry, and now I was surrounded by drunk assholes. I spent an hour waiting for her on the river bank and didn’t see her. It dawned on me that somehow she must have been ahead of me the whole time and that she might be waiting in the parking lot for me. I hopped on the bus and rode back to the parking lot. Once there, I continued my search but all I could find were drunken idiots.
After waiting in the hot Arizona sun for an hour, I decided to visit a police substation and let them know that my friend was missing. While the police searched for her, I went back to the parking lot to wait as bus after bus unloaded fellow tubers. I really wished I could have just split but I had put my keys in one of the cargo pockets of my “date’s” pants.
The Salt River closed at 7:00 pm. It was now 7:30 and the last bus had left, none of which contained my friend. Keep in mind that I parked my car there at about 11:15 am, more than 8 hours ago. I had no access to my car, I was way beyond tired, I hadn’t eaten anything since 8:00 that morning and I was about a 45 minute drive from anybody that knew me and I still had no idea where my friend was. Luckily, there was a locksmith who worked out of his van that was able to help me with my predicament…for a price. Since my car key contained a special chip, this was going to be pricey. So for the second time that day, I had to bust out my credit card and pay $315 for the locksmith to make me another key. At that point, I didn’t even care. All in all, the day cost me about $390 but I just wanted to put that ugly day behind me and get home. I didn’t walk through my front door until about 9:00 pm and I had to get up and go to work the next day.
Don’t ask me why, but there was part of me that was still concerned about my friend. Was she in the emergency room with a gash in her head? Was she being raped by the side of the road?
I got a call from an unknown number on my cell phone at work the next day. It was my friend. It turns out she had decided to go with a group of guys back to Tucson, which is about a two hour drive from where we were, and now she needed a ride home. She started the voice mail with, “Yeah, you ditched me. Not cool.” I called her back and told her she could crawl back to Phoenix on her hands and knees for all I care.
She tried to act nice to me when she got home later that night, after a mutual friend drove her past my house so she could pick up her cell phone. She told me she would pay back $100 of the cost of getting a new key because she really did lose it. I’m sure she was lying but I just wanted to put that whole incident behind me.
They say the best revenge is living well and that’s what I have done. I’m now dating a wonderful girl who I adore and my “friend’s” life is a complete mess. She is in her early 40′s and still gets falling down drunk at least once a week and can only get jobs that involve flirting with men and showing off her rack…and she still can’t manage to keep a job. She always says that she wants a nice guy but nice guys can always see her for the truly ugly person she is inside. Most men are only after one thing and when she gives that up (without much effort), men drop her like a load of bad asphalt. That day may have cost me $390 dollars but she really ended up paying in the long run.
