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Vice Blog

CANADA - HOW I DIDN'T GET TO BE SAN DIEGO'S MATTRESS QUEEN


Last night my friend had such a sweet first date that he called to brag about it while he was still on the date and then the fucker turned up at the bar, smiling, with bags of groceries in hand - he had actually left her at home in his bed, six hours after the date had started - to stroll over to the patio where I was drinking whiskey just to tell me how well his date was going. "So how's your date?" I said, as he stood there, even though he had that British smug-face of his on, so I already knew how it was going. "Not bad, not at all bad," he said, "In the sense that on our first date she turned up and got STRAIGHT INTO MY BED without me having to bother with drinks or dinner." Oh, wow! I said. That reminds me of the time I went out with the illustrious Mattress King of San Diego. Except for every single detail.

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I was living in San Diego and I met this tall, handsome guy outside the house of those guys from that terrible band Louis XIV (they throw a lot of parties but I don't know if they're ever actually AT the parties). Anyway, I was pretty drunk and when the mattress king asked me out I was already imagining my life as the future wife of the Mattress King. The um, Mattress Queen.

The night of our date he met me at this restaurant in Hillcrest and the first thing he told me after he sat down was that he was "really faded" because he'd spent all day drinking wine with his mom on their boat.  "My mom is a babe," he said. Yeah. Then he took the pictures of her out of his wallet. Yeah, that was weird and yeah, she was hot. And I'm not saying I'm hot or anything but we kind of looked alike. But I mean, what was I gonna do? Get up and run away? I'd just ordered my pizza from the authentic wood-burning oven and he'd just bought a good bottle of wine.

After dinner I suggested he take me home. As in, when he was like, "Where do you want to go next?" I was like, "Home. Definitely." So we got into his BMW SUV - that shit is all leather - and he turned on the ignition and made for the 163, which was not in the direction of my home at all, but in the direction of Escondido, the annoying suburb where he lived. Using his knees to steer, he took his pipe out of the console and started taking hits off it, driving about 115 miles an hour on a four-lane freeway.  "I thought you were going to take me home," I said. "You're fucking scaring me, quit driving with your knees!" I said, to which he responded, "Don't be such a Cassandra," and took another hit off his pipe."What's a Cassandra?" I said. "Someone who takes the fun out of everything."

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About 30 minutes of holding the oh-shit handle and feeling like I was going to pee we pulled up in front of his stupid mansion in Escondido. I was so happy to be alive. His place was decorated in all this fancy Eames-style furniture and his doorbell made bird calls instead of a ding. He was very proud of that. Outside he had a lap-pool and a jacuzzi, and as he was mixing us some drinks, I realized that I was going to have to spend the night unless I could rope someone into driving all the way out there to pick me up which was unfuckinglikely on a Friday night. I took the drink he handed me and let him lead me through a tour of his place. Here's the bedroom. Here's my big stupid expensive king-sized bed. Here's the kitchen. Here's my classy French Pernod.  Blah blah blah. He took me into the laundry room.

"Oh, I forgot to take the sheets out of the dryer, here hold this-" he said, and gave me his drink to hold. He took his white sheets out of the dryer and proceeded to throw them over my head. Meantime, I've got a drink in either hand and because of my misplaced reverence for alcohol I'm basically stuck under there like Casper the Friendly Ghost, since I don't want to spill the drinks. "Take this sheet off my head," I said. "Take this fucking sheet off my head," and he's all, "Ha ha ha ha no," because he wants me to follow him around his house with the sheet on my head. Like a game.

Go left, he says, and I bump my shin on the washing machine. Sorry, no, go to your right a bit. OK good, no no straight, just follow my voice. I finally stopped following his direction when I realized I could still drink my drink from under the sheet. I considered drinking from his in case he had roofied mine, but I'd forgotten which was which so I just drank from both. That bored the Mattress King so he took the sheets off my head and tried to make out.

"This isn't going to work between us, is it?" He asked me, and I said no, while lighting the first of many cigarettes inside his perfectly manicured bungalow-mansion. Later he lent me a toothbrush and we brushed our teeth and then fell asleep at a VERY considerable distance from each other on his California King. Which wasn't even that comfortable anyway.

ANNA NICOLE STEINBERG