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The Hot Drive-Thru Girl

So there’s this burger joint I like to go to on the edge of town (I say that mainly because it sounds kind of cool and dangerous like a biker bar, but it really is on the edge of town). Since I’m not going to spend my own dwindling cash supply on frivolities like fast food, I rely on mooching off my parents for such things. Because yesterday I was overruled on our traditional Sunday artery-clogger, what with it being mother’s day and all, my mom felt oddly guilty* and offered to buy me lunch today if I went with her to get a haircut. I needed a haircut, but like most unemployed 25-year-olds living at home with a mother who just lost her job, when I need to go out and do something, I want to go alone.

Unfortunately, she needed a haircut, too. Even though I go to the cheapest imaginable place, I was sucked in by the offer of both a free haircut and a free lunch. We went together to BoRics and stopped at the burger joint drive-thru on the way home.

The girl at the pickup window was incredibly cute (and not just rated on the scale of drive-thru workers, who are not usually the cream of the crop, looks-wise). Even better: against all odds, she was giving me The Look. No, not that Look — the complete opposite. She was giving me that va-va-va-voom, look-at-the-cute-guy-in-the-car look, edging her eyes past my mom and trying to make eye contact with me. Rather than make direct eye contact, I tried not to move my head past the three-quarter-profile she saw, because obviously there was something she liked. After staring at myself in a mirror while harsh fluorescents beat down on my bleached skin, exposing every fault (major or minor), my confidence was shaken. I didn’t want to look at her dead-on and have her see what I saw and lose interest.

Oh, also: I was sitting in a car with my mother. In her old-lady Buick. It wasn’t like my old Buick, which I transformed from an old-lady car (literally owned by my 85-year-old great aunt for 20 years before it was passed down to me) to a bad-ass pussy wagon**. It was an old-lady car owned and driven by an old lady, and I was the passenger with the obvious family resemblance: the 25-year-old son picking up drive-thru with his mom at 2:30 in the afternoon. This was a humiliating experience on a number of levels, and I wanted it to end as quickly as possible. I didn’t want to make eyes back at her and catch a whiff of disappointment; I didn’t want my mom to say something that she thinks is adorable that is actually embarrassing. I just wanted to get the food and drive away as quickly as possible.

On the way home, I started thinking: this is a girl who is seeing me at my absolute worse. I’m being carted around by my mother like a drunken, shiftless loser, and she knows that. I am a fat pig who, on occasion, orders a bacon double cheeseburger and large fries on a Monday afternoon, and she knows that. And despite taking my disgusting order and witnessing me on the Mom-mobile, she was still looking at me with an encouraging degree of lust.

While this could (and probably will) end with me being named in a lawsuit involving food and pubic hair, I can’t help but think this is some kind of opportunity. Good or bad, I don’t know. Maybe I’m reading too much into Fortuna’s wheel spins, but it seems fortuitous that on the same day I get my new, improved “job-interview-ready” haircut, I both receive a call from my most promising job lead in months and discover a girl looking past my gut and my mom and saying, “I want me some Stanbeef.” Am I leaving the “crushed dreams” phase of life and moving on to “settling for less”?

I sure hope so!

*Which is funny because I totally didn’t care about where we ate. I just tossed out a suggestion and was shot down. It’s not unusual.
**Note: despite the overall coolness factor, this car only managed to get me to second base.

Posted by Stan on May 14, 2007 5:41 PM  | Permalink | Fumbling Attempts at Relationships | Digg It