Chaotic Not Random

I got my teeth cleaned last week. Was the hygienist cute? I guess she was, now that you mention it. She was slender, bespectacled, slight of bosom, and smartly outfitted in blue scrubs -- I fairly clicked my heels as I followed her out of the waiting room, so eager was I to be examined.

As she took down my dental history, I was relieved to notice the wedding band on her left ring finger -- now I felt no obligation to hit on her. I wouldn't have hit on her anyway, even if she had been wearing a "Single and Horny" T-shirt, but I would have felt obligated to, and then I would have felt weak and insignificant when I left the clinic with no more phone numbers than when I arrived. (Even after discounting for my natural shyness, social ineptitude, and general hostility toward humankind, you have to admit that macking on a dental hygienist is a tough maneuver. I don't doubt it's been executed successfully. But people have also run four-minute miles and climbed Mount Everest, and you won't see me trying to duplicate those feats.)

So this was to be a crush. That was okay, because I like crushes -- that is, I like temporary crushes, as opposed to the pathetic unrequited kind that accounts receivable clerks are known to nurse for years for human resources supervisors until one day they (the HR supervisors) just up and leave to work at Starbucks corporate and don't bother to so much as stop at their (the AR clerks') cubicles to say goodbye.

Temporary crushes, by contrast, offer lots of room for fantasy and self-delusion. For example, let's say you stopped at PetSmart earlier this evening to buy some rat chow. And let's say that the cash register girl was awfully cute: agreeably flat-chested, long dark hair and matching dark eyes, and a smile that would make Apollo squint -- toothsome but not toothy, flirtatious but not wanton, friendly, warm, possibly even genuine.

Your encounter with Ms. Smiley lasted perhaps 90 seconds, from "Did you find everything okay?/Sure did, thanks." to "Have a good night./Yeah, you too." But, as you fight traffic in Cherry Creek, you convince yourself that there was a connection. Nothing major, but as you entered your PIN, you felt a spark pass between you. And you're pretty sure the guy in front of you didn't get quite as nice a smile when she scanned his biodegradable kitty litter. Yeah. She seemed to perk up a little when you came through the line, like she'd been waiting all day to talk to someone like you. Or maybe even you specifically -- you'd been in that store before, and maybe she saw you check out with another cashier and thought, "Wow, he's cute! I hope the next time he comes in he goes through my line!" Now that you think about it, there was an unmistakable hint of recognition in her eyes when she greeted you. Probably she wanted to tell you that she was getting off work in just an hour, if you wanted to grab a caramel-chocolate lattemochaccino at the Peabody's Coffee across the street, but maybe she's shy, or maybe PetSmart has a policy prohibiting employees from hitting on customers, which is bullshit; how can PetSmart stand in the way of something that feels so right? You were this close to asking her out yourself, but you didn't want to embarrass her in front of the other customers, and besides, why not let things simmer for another week or two, until you need to come back for chew toys?

None of this is true, of course. Ms. Smiley probably had a number of things on her mind -- her sick four-year-old, maybe, or her delinquent car payment, or her aching feet -- and couldn't pick you out of a police lineup if you built a rat chow bomb and blew up an elementary school. But who cares? It's not about reality, it's about generating the best possible mental images during your daily autoerotic stimulation session.

And once every 31 years or so, the planets align and a temporary crush becomes... something much better. This happened when I was living in San Francisco in 1999 and had a DEFCON-5 crush on Jill, the 22-year-old counter girl at my regular cybercafe. Jill had a taut body, a party girl attitude, and a penchant for dressing like Shirley Manson of Garbage. She was not the kind of girl I usually dated.

One day, while I was sitting outside the cafe, sipping a caramel-chocolate lattemochaccino and struggling to write funny strings of words in my notebook, Jill stomped out to an adjacent table, flopped in a chair, and lit a cigarette. "This day sucks!" she said, exhaling a plume of smoke. "God! I can't wait for it to be over."

"That's too bad," I said. "You should come see Austin Powers 2 with me tonight. That'll cheer you up." I don't normally say things like that to hard-bodied punk-rock-wannabe party chicks who smoke, and I don't know why I said it then. But I did.

She narrowed her eyes and cast me a sidelong glance. "No," she said, "I'm just gonna go home and take a hot bath and relax."

"Fuck that," I said. "You need to have some fun. How much fun are you going to have sitting around your apartment? You should come out with me."

She glanced at me again. "Okay, yeah," she said, nodding.

"Um, okay," I said, feeling suddenly like an weekend card player heading to the final table of the World Series of Poker. "Let me get your number and I'll call you later."

Because this is a family-oriented blog, I won't describe the good things that happened that evening. I will say that while the good things were happening, I thought, "I really should stop for a moment and write down exactly how this happened, because sure as shit I'm not going to remember in the morning how I pulled this off."

I was right.

Anyway, my dental appointment went fine. The cute hygienist had a gentle touch and laughed politely at the jokes I cracked each time she sucked the spit out of my mouth with the saliva-slurping machine*. And we had this exchange: