And she went into the bedroom…

Let’s be frank about this.  My blog may be many things, but it’s not a dating / relationships blog.  It’s neither a foodie blog nor a political blog, which means that I don’t draw three-fourths of the Times Union blog traffic, but I digress.

That being said – this is an observational blog.  And I’ve told this specific story at least twice on other peoples’ TU blogs, and I felt like re-telling it – in further detail – today.

Spin back the clock to about 1991.  It’s been three years since my divorce – maybe I’ll blog about it some day, maybe I won’t – and my daughter Cassaundra and her older sister are visiting their mother for the weekend.  That left the weekend for me.  I went to a local bar – I think it was the Lamp Post at the time – just to see if there was anything out there that could shake me out of my humdrum existence.

And there she was.  And as far as you know, her name was April.  She was a tall blonde with sparkly blue eyes – I don’t think there’s enough Scoville heat units that would match how hot she was.  And we started talking.

And it seemed as if we had common interests.  She was a baseball fan – a Minneapolis girl, she loved Twins baseball – so I asked if she wanted to go to an Albany-Colonie Yankees game with me, and she agreed.

We went and we had a great time at the ballpark.  She even won a raffle at the game.

After a couple of other dates, things started to heat up between us.  April asked if I would be interested in coming over to her apartment.  She wanted to tell me something, and she thought back at her place would be a nice private location.

This was great. I could not believe my luck.  That’s right, Chuck with a capital L.

We went back to her place, a two-family apartment house on Lancaster Street in Albany.  She invited me in.  Pointing to the couch, she asked if I would sit down on the couch while she went into her bedroom for a moment.  And she went into the bedroom…

My 70′s R&B playlist was queueing up on my mental jukebox. Teddy Pendergrass. Barry White. Marvin Gaye.

And a little voice inside me kept saying, “Chuck, this can’t be happening.  You’re not this lucky.  This happens to other people.  Not to you.”

And at that point, I told the little voice inside me to jump in the lake.

One minute later, she came out of the bedroom – carrying baskets of skin conditioner and moisturizers. “Have you ever wanted to make your own money?” she asked me.

Not sure where this was going, I replied in the affirmative.

“See, I wanted to talk to you about being one of my distributors for Nu-Skin skin care products.” She suddenly went, in the span of about 30 seconds, from bow-chica-wow-wow to oh my Lord she’s involved in a multi-level marketing pyramid scheme – and she wants to suck me into it as well.

That little voice inside my head came back from its swim.  “I told you, Chuck, I told you I told you.”

I quickly gathered my senses.  “Um… I think I have to leave.”

“What’s the matter, Chuck, don’t you like money? Wouldn’t you want to make enough to retire at 30?”

I knew exactly where this was going.  Nu-Skin, like Amway and all those other multi-level marketing schemes, promises big money for the distributors of the products – so long as they can get other people to distribute and sell the products FOR them.  And it wasn’t that I had to sell that overpriced gunk that they called shampoo and facial cream – I would have had to sell that stuff to my friends, to my co-workers, or even worse – go door to door like a traveling salesman.

And the worst part about all this – April played me for a fool.  She promised something and provided something else.  It was an emotional relationship bait-and-switch.  I wasn’t a potential boyfriend.  All she saw me as was a “mark,” someone who would sell for her without any possible hope of redemption or reinforcement or remuneration.

At that moment, I knew I had a choice to make.

I could:

(A) listen to April’s pitch about Nu-Skin and gladly offer to sell her products and line up potential distirbutors.

(B) buy several of April’s expensive Nu-Skin products and recommend them to my friends.

(C) call my friends over and have April pitch the Nu-Skin products directly to them, so that she would get more distributors.

I thought about all those possibilities.

And in an instant, I chose option (D).

I grabbed my coat.

“I had a great time this evening. I hope you did too. But I gotta get up early for work tomorrow. Gotta go. Bye.”

As I closed her apartment door behind me, I could hear her saying to me, “You just wait, one day I’ll drive up to your house in a brand new Cadillac.”

About a week later, I came home from work – and there was a message on my answering machine.  “Hi Chuck, it’s April, give me a call back, I know I acted like a jerk to you …”

Hey, everyone’s allowed to make a mistake, I thought.  Maybe this relationship can work out –

“… but I would really, really like you to consider working with me on this Nu-Skin line of products – ”

I popped the cassette tape out of the answering machine – and tossed the tape in the garbage.  And I never called or spoke to her again.  At the time, I may have been lonely and desperate, but I was not THAT lonely nor THAT desperate.

And surprisingly – and thankfully – 20 years later, that Cadillac hasn’t arrived at my address.