Blueprint for a Blind Date by Joe Kapitan

Find a worn Italian restaurant, from your parents’ era, a back-corner table where you can have a little privacy, and then bring It. The Silence. All you can muster, and watch what she does with it. She may try to crush the life out of it with tales of successful Manhattan designer-shoe-safaris, tragic social media accidents, lists of failings belonging to boyfriends past that veer perilously close to lists you’ve heard from girlfriends past. You’ll forget her easily. Or she could surprise you, with her own nothing. If so, you’ll stare at each other until the discomfort manifests as a ball of featureless meat on the table in front of you. Go ahead, pull off a piece and chew on it, friend, because if you have that second date, and then maybe a third, there’s bound to be many quiet moments coming, and you might as well know ahead of time what they’re going to taste like, so you can already be thinking white or red.

You know everyone will ask you tomorrow about Chemistry and Spark, so do this: leave the restaurant and head for a busy sidewalk, like the ones in the theater district. Grab a young woman, a stranger, and pull her into an alley with you both. Push the stranger up against a brick wall and make unilateral introductions with your hydraulic mouth and piston hands. Now freeze! Hands down. She’ll run. Let the stranger run – you need to concentrate. Who’s in your mind at that exact moment: the date, or the stranger? Listen up, this is crucial. If the stranger, the experiment is over. Cough up some excuse and go home the back way. If the date, tell her so. Tell her you’d very much like to see her again, and tell her she can be the stranger next time, if she wants.

© 2011 Joe Kapitan

Joe Kapitan wanders northern Ohio. He works often, writes sometimes, is published occasionally in places like elimae, Smokelong Quarterly, PANK, Emprise Review and Annalemma.

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