The Lieutenant and the Bombshell
Oh, my Gosh, oh, my Gosh, oh, Gosh... This was so completely wrong. Everything about it was wrong. It had sounded exciting when her girlfriends first hatched the plan, but now she could kick herself for having agreed to go along with it. Somebody was going to see them, and recognize them, and then she'd be grounded for Gosh only knew how long — as if she even had a life to be grounded from.
"Calm down, Michelle, for godssake. Sheesh, we're gonna have a great time, I swear to you," Annie said in disbelief, sidling up closer to the bar where she stood between Michelle and Joellen. "How often do we get to hang out at a place with hunks, anyway? Nobody's going to recognize us, for godssake. Nobody we know would ever even come to a place like this."
Michelle was a nervous wreck. She had felt sure that the big, brutish bouncer at the door was going to laugh at the ID's Joellen had wangled her into creating in Computer Club, and then promptly turn all three of them over to the police. Or possibly even just cut to the chase and contact the FBI. But the bouncer had given them the nod to enter. Michelle had been half-hoping he would turn them away at the door, instead, so they could all say, "Oh, well, we tried," and just go home. But no such luck.
Balancing on a bar stool now, she glanced down at the pink floral dress Aunt Gert and Aunt Hildie had made for her and knew that the Bombshell Red lipstick had been a disastrous choice, in retrospect. She had wanted to wear the same Pink Poodle shade that Annie and Jo had on, but they'd insisted she looked way too young in it and needed to go with the Bombshell Red if she wanted to look eighteen — or, more importantly, attract a college man.
Michelle glanced around the place. It was seedy and reeked of stale beer and cigarette smoke. The customers appeared to be a blend of construction workers, young women with far too much Maybelline on, and a couple of those rowdy Hell's Angels-looking men, which explained the big motorcycles lined up outside on the curb. Nowhere was there a college boy to be found.
"Are you sure we're in the right place?" Michelle fretted.
"The night's still young," Annie rationalized.
Just as they had rehearsed earlier in the alleyway, Joellen and Annie took their respective turns ordering a Gin and Tonic. It was the drink Joellen's mother always asked for at a restaurant or social gathering. But when it came time for Michelle to order hers, she suddenly froze.
"Do you have any Coke?" she asked timidly, at the last second.
"Ehh... this ain't that kinda place, toots," the bartender snarled. "I run a clean establishment, so what'll it be."
Michelle had no idea what he was talking about.
"Well, umm, in that case…" she sputtered, feeling put on the spot and pressured to come up with an alternative quickly, "… umm... a Root Beer, I guess?"
"We don't carry Root," the bartender snarled impatiently. "Heineken's, Michelob Lite, or Bud on tap. Pick one. And I ain't got all night."
"Michelle!" Annie muttered under her breath, digging an elbow into her rib cage. "Have something, for goddsake." She turned to the bartender.
"She'll have a Gin and Tonic, too."
"Jimmy," a voice filtered down from the far end of the bar.
"Be right there, Lieutenant," the bartender acknowledged with a turn of his head.
"Now, Jimmy, if ya don't mind," the voice replied politely enough, but firmly.
"Make up your mind before I get back," the bartender snapped gruffly over his shoulder to Michelle as he headed away.
"What are you doing?" Annie scolded her under her breath. "You can't order a Root Beer. It doesn't sound eighteen!"
"We should get out of here," Michelle said pleadingly. "This isn't right."
"Right, schmight. Head's up," Joellen chimed in, breathlessly. "Two hunks closing in, ten o'clock high..."
"Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God," Stacy squealed a little too loudly. But the two strapping young construction workers walked right past them and over to two women seated a few stools down, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and swearing like tractor trailer drivers.
"Bummer!" Joellen cursed the gods. "Does my hair look okay?"
She'd just had it fashioned — or unfashioned — to look like Madonna's, and it seemed to be sticking out all over the place. So did Michelle's, but not because she wanted it to, or had styled it that way. There just wasn't a thing she could ever do with it except put it in clip, or stick on a headband, and pray that thick, curly hair, with a mind of its own, would come into style someday.
The bartender returned with their drinks, each with a lime wedge perched on the rim and a straw jutting out of the glass.
"How much?" Annie asked, trying to sound as though she had asked the same question thousands of times throughout the course of her highly sophisticated life.
"Paid for," the bartender snarled.
"By whom?" Michelle asked.
"By none of your business-mmm," the bartender mocked her. "Drink 'em or leave 'em."
Annie and Joellen tried not to squeal so loudly this time as they canvassed the bar room, discussing which likely suspect was likeliest to have found them alluring enough to buy their drinks. Michelle, on the other hand, immediately glanced down the bar to where the bartender had waited on the Lieutenant and saw a dark-haired, uniformed Marine seated in front of a beer. He was expressionless, but staring directly at her. He was also extremely, totally, really cute, but way too old for her, unfortunately: twenty, if he was a day. Plus, it made Michelle uncomfortable to be stared at, and she wasn't even sure if he was the person who'd bought the drinks, so she quickly diverted her eyes and picked up her Gin and Tonic.
"Be careful, Michelle," Annie warned with her drink in hand. "These things are wicked-strong. Two sips and I'm feeling it already. So be sure you nurse it, or we'll be carrying you out of the place tonight."
Michelle's nose crinkled up when she took a sip. She'd never tried a real drink before. It tasted bitter, but not entirely terrible.
"Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God," Annie squealed again. A few minutes later she and Joellen had dumped their purses into Michelle's lap and were picking out music with two young, filthy construction workers who'd evidently come directly from their job sites to the bar without even washing their hands. They weren't college boys, but they were male and eighteen, which was an okay start, as far as Annie and Jo were apparently concerned.
Michelle sat alone, feeling self-conscious and terrified and completely out of place. She actually thought for a moment that she was going to begin to cry. As five minutes ticked into ten, Annie and Joellen started sounding louder, gigglier, and tipsier, and Michelle began to worry if they were all going to make it home okay on the bus.
But as if that, in itself, weren't enough to stress over, a few minutes later a huge, burly, extremely unpleasant smelling Hell's Angel-looking man exploded in through the backroom door and stumbled up alongside her. His hair suggested to Michelle that he had probably been sleeping back there, but after a female voice screeched out, reminding him not to get "the lite shit," but "the real shit," Michelle scratched her original assumption and blushed.
"Nice lipstick, Cha-Cha," the Hell's Angel-looking man bellowed directly into Michelle's face, nearly knocking her off her stool with his heavily beer-laden breath. "Who the hell do I gotta blow to get a goddam pitcher of beer around here?" he then roared out to the bartender before returning his attention to Michelle. Her eyes were as wide as saucers, concealing every last vestige of the bright green eye shadow he could've sworn he had seen on her lids just a second ago.
"Wanna go for a ride on my Harley, princess?" he bellowed again, shocking Michelle nearly to tears when he foisted his crotch out at her in precise synchronization with the word "Harley."
Speechless, she looked frantically for the bartender, or anyone who could help her, for that matter. But the Hell's Angel-looking man was so broad and portly, and had situated himself so up-close to her, that her forward field of vision was entirely obstructed, all but for the word "Animal" scrawled in embroidery on his putrid-smelling leather vest. The only thing Michelle could think to do at that point was scream, a plan she was just about to execute when an unemotional, unruffled voice emanated from behind the "Animal" man.
"Get away from my sister or I'll kill ya."
The "Animal" man's face instantly pinched with fury as he spun around to gladly meet the challenge, nearly clipping Michelle in the head with his grey, crusty elbow in mid-spin.
"Holy shit! Almeida! How the hella ya been, baby?" she heard the giant Animal roar as he lunged forward with outstretched arms, wrapping them like a grizzly bear around "Almeida," whom Michelle assumed belonged to the hands that were now clapping the mammoth's sides.
"How ya been, Petey?" the smooth, easy voice responded, in stark contrast to the Animal's own.
"I was shocked to shit when I heard ya dropped outta brainiac school and joined the Marines," Petey bellowed, his voice seemingly incapable of assuming any other level or volume. "Are they really training ya to sit in trees and blow muthafuckas' heads off?"
"Yeah, I couldn't resist signing up. You know how much I like trees."
The two turned sideways, revealing "Almeida," her new brother, to be the young Lieutenant who'd stared at her before from the end of the bar.
"Ya almost done with that?" he asked her. "Mom wants us back by seven-thirty."
"Hey, I'm sorry about that, Tony, man. All this time, and I never even knew ya had a sister, I swear to God..."
"No, problem, Petey," Lt. Almeida assured him. "Ya been keeping yourself outta trouble, for a change?"
"Hell, no. Now they're lookin' to lock my fat ass back up for breaking parole. Ya can't win with these shitheads, I swear. So we're riding through for Mack's funeral. Then I'm getting my ass the hell outta here. You know how much I hate jail."
"It's not for everyone," the Lieutenant comforted him.
"Ya making the funeral?" Petey asked them both.
"Ya kidding me? The whole family came down for it," Lt. Almeida responded as Michelle nodded along in agreement, like wild horses couldn't keep her away. "Wouldn't miss paying our respects to Mack for anything. My Dad even cancelled some meetings to fly in on time."
"Such a shame, ain't it, Tony?"
"Broke my heart when I heard about it. So young…" the Lieutenant reflected, pulling a hand from his pocket to rub his forehead in dismay. "Nobody even knew he had a bad ticker..."
"Yeah. But, hey… whadda way to go, huh?"
Michelle watched as they chatted for another minute and hugged a few more times. Petey then turned to her and bellowed out a beer-breathed apology, just in case he had said anything that could've possibly offended her somehow.
"A damned shame about Mack," he reflected with her for a moment as she passed him his pitcher of beer from the bar.
"So young," Michelle responded in disbelief, unable to come up with anything a little more original at the moment.
Petey sadly agreed, dropping a heavy hand of comfort on her shoulder, which landed like a punch and made her flinch.
Michelle watched as the gentle giant exchanged a final round of not-so-gentle noogies, headlocks, hugs, cheek-kisses, face-slaps, and assorted secret handshakes with the Lieutenant before stumbling back through the backroom door he'd originally blasted out from.
"Frickin' finally!" she heard the woman's voice screech out just before it slammed shut behind him.
"Thanks," Michelle said to the Lieutenant in a small, mousy voice, looking up bashfully and blushing profusely.
"No problem," Lt. Almeida assured her as he glanced around, assessing the crowd. "Pete's not without his problems, but he's big on family. So I hope ya didn't mind the 'sister' thing."
"Of course not," Michelle said, politely adding, "I'm sorry about your friend Mack."
"Thanks," the Lieutenant nodded without even looking at her, bringing his eyes to a rest, instead, upon Annie and Joellen. It didn't come as much of a surprise to Michelle. After all, Joellen's new hairdo made her look like Madonna, or at least from the back. And unlike the Bombshell Red she'd insisted Michelle wear, Annie's Pink Poodle was alluring to men, evidenced by the grin on the face of the filthy construction worker she was drunkenly falling all over.
Michelle's heavily bright-green eyeshadowed lids looked down longingly at her own Gin and Tonic. She wanted to take a huge, confident gulp in the hopes it might make her appear more sophisticated, but was afraid she'd end up just as drunk as her girlfriends appeared to be.
"Go ahead," the Lieutenant said, finally acknowledging her existence again. "It doesn't have anything in it. None of them do."
"Huh?"
"It's just tonic water. I reminded Jimmy that he'd better hold the gin if he wanted to hold onto his liquor license," he elaborated. "Cops were in last night, hassling people for ID's. And you know cops. They'll be back again tonight... Jimmy doesn't always use his head."
From the corner of his eye, Lt. Almeida watched her face grow scarlet, which in an odd and curious way, seemed to compliment her hideous bright red lipstick, he thought.
"How could you tell we weren't eighteen?" Michelle asked him sheepishly, feeling immensely foolish, but dying to know. The Lieutenant took a second or two to ponder the question.
"Well, you could pass," he said kindly, though knowing she couldn't be more than fifteen. But he didn't want to wound her. Not after the trouble she'd obviously gone through to age herself with cosmetics. "But your girlfriends…?"
He glanced back over at Annie and Joellen for a second, then crinkled his nose and shook his head. "Cops would pin those two out in a heartbeat," he assured her, watching as her face began to illuminate with a newfound sense of hope and self-pride.
"Well, gotta make a call," he abruptly halted the conversation, knocking his knuckles against the bar. "Then I'm outta here," he added and suddenly started heading away without so much as a formal goodbye.
He was really, really, super cute, Michelle noted again, and wished he weren't leaving so quickly. If he'd been closer to eighteen, instead of something much more like twenty, maybe he would've even ended up liking her enough to stick around and talk some more. But it didn't really matter, she concluded, since she herself would be gathering her girlfriends up in a minute and leaving before something disastrous happened; like, cops coming into the place and pinning Annie and Joellen out in a heartbeat. They'd all be thrown in jail, Michelle fretted. And with her notorious, gosh-awful luck, she'd end up under a bright light in an FBI interrogation room, deprived of food, sleep, and the Ladies Room until she'd come clean about falsifying the ID's.
"Uhh, listen..." the Lieutenant stopped a few feet away and said. "Not for nothing, but this neighborhood can get a little rough at night. And since you're the responsible one, I thought you'd wanna know."
Michelle nodded a shy thank-you with a bright, red smile. He didn't smile back. In fact, he'd never smiled at her the whole entire time, come to think of it. Except with his eyes, if that counted. He was even a little arrogant, when you came right down to it. But she thought about him some more, anyway, as she struggled to get Annie and Joellen onto their feet and out the door. It wasn't easy, considering how drunk they thought they were. Michelle didn't tell them that they'd only been drinking tonic water. She didn't want to wound them. For the same reason, she would allow them to continue believing that they looked older than she.
Michelle would simply assume the ringleader role, since she was the responsible one, after all, and get the three of them safely out of that place before the law had a chance to catch up with them. With any luck, they also wouldn't encounter any trouble while waiting on that dark street corner for the bus to come by.
Her safety concerns were quickly extinguished, however, as she helped her friends stumble onto the street. The first thing Michelle laid eyes upon was an empty taxicab sitting right smack there at the curb, directly in front of their faces.
She found herself immediately praying that they had enough cash left over to afford the fare. But then she suddenly realized that they hadn't even spent any of the money they'd pooled together to buy drinks that night. Thanks to the Lieutenant, who'd picked up their tab — for no reason other than concern for his friend's liquor license, of course — their drinks hadn't cost them a dime. Which meant Michelle and her girlfriends could now use that same cash, instead, for a safe, worry-free ride home in the cab, sparing themselves any potential run-ins with shady characters. Not that she didn't feel confident that she could handle things, if it came to that.
But what luck to find a cab and avoid ever having to find out, Michelle thought, rolling Annie and Joellen into the back seat. Maybe she wasn't doomed to a life of bad luck after all. Maybe her luck was changing. Perhaps it was actually possible that some really, really, really cute guy might even ask her out someday, formally ending her unrivalled track record for the most consecutive dates on the planet with the geekiest looking guys in the world. Maybe thick, curly hair, with a mind of its own, might even come into style someday. A girl could dream, after all.