A Guido Made Me Pancakes
Banana Pancakes with protein powder. He made them while in silk boxers, his hair still firmly gelled from the night before. He played Jack Johnson’s “Banana Pancakes” while he cooked. Really.
This was my latest adventure in online dating. We didn’t talk on the phone before meeting, so when he showed up to our first date saying things like “Ah, traffic is wicked sick out deah – how long’d it take you ta get hee-ah?” I was thrilled. He was from Long Island. Authentic, 100% real Guido. And this was at the height of Jersey Shore. Guidos were in. I couldn’t afford a designer handbag, but I could afford this guy.
And so it began. One night he took me to a local bar, “Babe, babe,” he said, gesturing me over. “You gonna want to hold ontah that sweatah the whole night? It’s wicked haht in hee-ah.” “Nah, it’s fine, thanks, they don’t have a coat check,” I said. “Babe, babe, come on, give me yah sweatah.” So I gave it to him, and he walked up the bartender, slid him a twenty and said, “Yo, bro, will yah keep my girl’s coat behind the bah?” The bartender started to say no, glanced at the twenty bucks, then said sure.
The Guido was a big health food junkie, he thought that frozen yogurt and Robek’s were healthy snack options. He asked me if I wanted to go get some “yogah” with him. “Yoga?” I asked. “No. Yogah.” I paused. “What are you saying right now?” “Oh come ahn. Yogah. Frozen yogah.”
“Say yoga.” I said.
“Yogah.”
“Now say yogurt.”
“Yogah.”
“Mmhm.”
But there were bigger differences between his culture and mine. Guidos are creatures of booze. But this is LA, we smoke our poison. Or — eat it… Which brings us to my friend’s Cinco de Mayo house party.
The Guido and I had been seeing each other, sans actual commitment, for a few weeks – my friends all knew him by now, and he was having a great time. Cute girls were walking around pouring shots of tequila right into people’s mouths. And in a neat little basket on the snack table, there were some tasty “special” edible treats. This was a first for The Guido. But he was a big burly guy; he could handle whatever hippie shit LA threw at him.
An hour later, as he lay on the floor, straight as a board, pinned between the back of the couch and the wall, he was, perhaps, not so confident. To this day, no one is sure how he got there.
Now, this was the type of party that starts at noon, and ends the next morning. So, I decided to go take a nap upstairs, unaware of Guido’s predicament. At some point, he wiggled his Guido self out from behind the couch, and back onto the lawn/his dance floor. There, he found a young, attractive…… married, Mexican woman, who barely spoke English, but apparently spoke Guido. In a foggy tequila/brownie daze, the two sloppily started going at it on the dance floor/lawn.
Seeing Guido making out with what appeared to be a short, curvy, brown haired girl, thinking it was me – a friend ran up behind them and yelled, “caught you!” They both turned around long enough for my friend to realize, that was NOT me, before they went back to their sloppily mischievous activities.
Meanwhile, upstairs, I awoke refreshed, calm and happy to be joining the party again. As I descended the stairs, heads started to turn towards me. Not in the Cinderella kind of way, but in the She Has Something On Her Face sort of way. A girlfriend discreetly pulled me aside to tell me what happened.
I couldn’t help but laugh. How else would I want my Guido romance to end? Certainly not with a classy and mutually respectful conversation – no no. Yes, it was supposed to end in this gloriously intoxicated, sloppy and magnificently public way.
To his credit, he did send me yellow roses “the cuh-lah of friendship and new beginnins” to apologize. But it was too late, I had danced too close to the Guido flames and I got burned.
But… those were some wicked good pancakes.
