Double Date

I’ve only been on one double date in my life.

And it was with my brother.

Party on, Wayne.

We were in high school, not last week. I don’t remember who the girls were (sorry, ladies) but I sure as heck remember how it went.

Not too good.

You see, both my brother and I both happened to be girlfriendless at this particular point in our high school career. That was a little rare for me. I don’t want to brag, but I was quite the Casanova in my youth.

My brother told me he wanted to take out with this ‘hot’ girl in his class but her parents would not let her go out unless her sister accompanied them.

That’s where I came in.

“Come on. I’ll pay for dinner. All you have to do is go and be nice,” he said.

“Is she ugly?” I asked.

You can never trust a horny sibling.

He assured me that the sister was neither ugly nor had she been mangled in a horrible industrial accident. So, I agreed.

Who knows? Maybe the sister would be my future wife. (She wasn’t)

After he made all the arrangements with the ‘Sisters’ we had to decide where we were going and what we would do. He was paying for dinner so he got to choose.

So, my brother picked the newest and nicest restaurant in Cairo.
McDonalds.

Yeah, I am that old. McDonalds had just opened in our little town and had yet to become the cesspool of bad service and soggy burgers that it is now.

The dining spot was chosen so we now we just had to decide what to do afterwards. The Sisters had to be home by 10pm (I think their daddy must have been an Amish elder or something) so going to a movie was out. And we were way too cool for the skating rink.

We discussed what our expectations were for this double date.

I had none. My brother, however, had his sights set on first base. Maybe even stealing second.

“We need to think of something that makes them clingy,” my brother said.

“Clingy?” I asked.

“You know. Something that makes them want to snuggle up to us even though they don’t know us very well.”

Very well? I didn’t know this girl at all. But, what the heck. Maybe I would get to play a little baseball, too.

My brother went on to explain that nothing created clinginess in young ladies like fear. And he had the perfect plan.

There was an old graveyard north of town. It was isolated and out in the middle of nowhere. No highway. No traffic.

No daddy.

Now, at this point, you may start thinking that we were two perverts trying to figure out a way to get these girls out into the woods for immoral purposes.

Not at all. We just wanted to scare them and taking a little after-dinner stroll in a creepy old graveyard would be perfect.

Now that I think about it, it was a little perverty. My apologies ladies. I fully embrace both the Me Too movement and women’s suffrage, even though that last one sound la an awful lot like childbirth.

However,according to my brother, strolling among the dead wouldn’t be quite scary enough. We had to do something to crank up the terror a little. So, my conniving brother hatched a plan to go out to the graveyard the day before our date and ‘plant’ a couple of ‘props’ among the headstones.

Namely a couple of old bedsheets that we swiped from my mama’s clothesline.

At this point, I should have known nothing good would come from this little scheme.

If I had just said ‘no’, I would have saved myself a lot of pain and embarrassment, but my hormones had already had a meeting and overruled my brain.

The fateful night came and we piled into my brother’s Old Cutlas Supreme and went to pick up our dates.

Their father met us at the door and gave us a look that said, ‘put a hand on my daughters and you’ll have one less hand.’

Me and my ‘date’ squeezed into the luxurious crushed velour backseat of my brother’s Oldsmobile. She immediately slid over and pressed herself against me.

It was then I realized that dear old dad my not know that his precious babies weren’t as pure as he thought.

She put her hand on my knee and smiled at me. Now I was the one who was scared.

I don’t remember our gourmet dinner at McDonalds but I sure remembered what happened next.

We arrived at the cemetery just as it was getting good and dark. Our dates didn’t seem to be the least bit fazed by our destination.

That didn’t seem right.

My brother promised me these two would be shaking in their knee socks the moment they saw those headstones. Instead, they just popped out of the car with big smiles on their faces.

For a brief moment, I was afraid that I had bitten off more I could chew with this girl. It seemed her idea of a ‘date’ meant someone was going home with a wicked hickey.

I was 15 and not quite ready for that kind of commitment.

My brother, oh so nonchalantly, suggested to our young paramours that we should take a little stroll through the moonlight. He somehow forgot to mention that our little stroll would be through a creepy old graveyard.

This activity didn’t seem to bother our dates. They cheerfully chirped ‘Okay’, grabbed our arms, and we headed off through the maze of headstones.

We had hung my mom’s bedsheets in an old tree at the other end of the cemetery. The plan was to stroll up to the tree, act like we saw ghosts and see what happened.

What we hoped would happen was that the Sisters would lose their minds with terror and require some heavy petting to soothe them.

That’s not what happened.

We approached the tree with the sheets. They were swaying in the wind menacingly. Everything was perfect. Except…

Except, our dates didn’t scream. They didn’t run. They didn’t do anything.

They just stood there and watched the sheets blowing in the winds.

But my brother had a backup plan. If the ‘ghosts’ didn’t do the trick, we were going to ‘prime the pump’ a little. And by that, he meant we were going to scream like little girls, turn on our heals and race back to the car.

Hopefully, our dates would follow our lead and fall victim to the group hysteria that we started.

It was a worth a shot.

My brother glanced over at me and nodded back towards to car. That was my sign.

So I screamed. He screamed. I turned around. He turned around. I ran. He ran.

And our dates just stood and watched us go.

What we had not factored into our secondary plan was that it would be pitch black dark by this hour. And we could not see a thing.

Including the many hundreds of headstones between us and the car.
I guess I figured that the faster I ran and the louder I screamed, the more authentic my fear would appear.

So, by the time I encountered that first headstone, I was going about 280 miles per hour.

My shin connected with that granite headstone and I felt a pain worse than suffrage. An electric shock ran up my leg, through my torso and straight into my perverty brain.

I must have blacked out because the next thing I remember I was lying on the ground with my date standing over me, laughing.

There would be no first base or second base that night.

No hickeys.

The girls helped me and my brother back to the car. Yes, he had an painful encounter with his own tombstone and a knot on his knee about the size of the Quarter Pounder with Cheese he had just devoured for dinner.

Our dates somehow got us both into the backseat of my brother’s Cutlas and one of the Sisters drove home.

I learned my lesson that fateful evening. I no longer double date or run through graveyards at night.

According to my beautiful wife, both can be fatal.