I met Mike — at least I think his name was Mike — at the gym. I remember that he had the pink skin of a piglet, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and asked me if I was married. As a 22-year-old, this was a question I had never been asked, much less in the form of a pick-up line, and in a gym of all places. I said no, I wasn’t, and then, when he asked if I’d like to go out sometime, I said yes, I would.
Would I like to go out with Mike? Honestly, I wasn’t convinced. But I’d never been on a date before, and, since moving to Birmingham, Alabama, from suburban Philadelphia a few months earlier, had yet to meet a man who could be considered heterosexual dating material. Every man I knew was gay, and most of my free time was consequently spent in gay bars and clubs. I’d had one single crush since I arrived, on a handsome and charming architect who also happened to be my third cousin. And, as he disclosed to me one night at a gay bar, gay.
So it seemed like a good idea to go on a date with an avowed straight man, one who I wasn’t even related to by blood.
With no personal experience to draw from, I’d dredged most of my ideas about dating from the well of pop culture. One of my earliest film memories is that scene in Lady and the Tramp in which the titular canines share a plate of spaghetti and meatballs; from there, shows like Sex and the City and Felicity, and movies as disparate as Good Will Hunting, Tom Jones, and Moonstruck conditioned me to believe that the restaurant is an essential part of any self-respecting courtship.
Prior to moving to Birmingham to intern with a publishing company, I’d attended a women’s college where, as someone both heterosexual and congenitally shy, my erotic longing was reserved for sulky British actors. Dating, as portrayed by most of the movies I watched, looked fun and demeaning: On the one hand, you could be taken out to a nice restaurant, or flattered with gifts, or even kissed in a Tuscan poppy field; on the other, you could be dumped, or cheated upon, or compelled to use your date’s bodily fluids as hair product. Making it to an actual restaurant seemed like a sort of prize, or a summit that had been scaled: It meant that someone liked you enough to invite you to take part in the ceremony of public seduction, and possibly spend money on you. Movies and TV always made it look so sophisticated and glamorous, the true mark of graduation from the grubby cocoon of adolescence to exotic, winged maturity.
A couple of days after I gave Mike my number, he called and we made a plan. It was, in its entirety, to eat something, somewhere, in each other’s company. We would figure out where when we met up.
Where would Mike like to go? Was he a steakhouse kind of guy (every man I’d met in Birmingham was a steakhouse kind of guy), or more of a greasy spoon type? I had no idea because it was the late ’90s and our date was to take place in the land before time, without the aid of social media or much in the way of Google to enable some productive stalking. There was no Tinder profile to provide clues of Mike’s musical preferences or grasp of basic grammar. There wasn’t even a LinkedIn where I could verify that he was the architectural draftsman he claimed to be. Barring any information beyond his physical appearance, clothing, and workout routine, Mike remained a cipher. It would fall to our choice of restaurant to shed some light on our degree of compatibility.
On the evening of our appointed date, we pulled our cars up next to each other in a designated meeting place, like we were performing some kind of hostage-for-weapons swap. I got in his car and he began to drive. Where, we still did not know.
This seems like a good place to stop and say that people assume a lot of things about Birmingham that aren’t true. Like that it doesn’t have any gay people or Jews, two assumptions that I’ve had to correct more times than I care to count. Some people might also assume that Birmingham lacks good dining options. Again, incorrect: There were a number of restaurants I would have been happy to go to. Sweet little Chez Lulu, for example, with its red-ceilinged dining room and estimable quiche, or Chris Hastings’s Hot and Hot Fish Club, its name evocative of a fevered bayou speakeasy, or Surin West, the very first place I’d ever eaten sushi. Even P.F. Chang’s, all the way out at the Summit Mall, would have been nice. I loved P.F. Chang’s because everything about it was big: the portions, the flavors, the tables.
But we didn’t go to any of these restaurants. I don’t remember why. What I remember is sitting in Mike’s passenger seat as we drove through the night, as aimless as a drifting weather balloon. As I slowly realized we didn’t have much in common, I became aware of the negative space between us where sprightly conversation should be. I also became aware of the geography of Birmingham, the city where I was born and had visited family almost every summer growing up: never before had it seemed so vast, yet so empty of possibility.
Eventually, on a parkway trimmed with car dealerships and strip malls, Mike put on the brakes and said, “what about here?”
Before us was a Kenny Rogers Roasters. In my memory, its windows glowed with the queasy light of an airport bathroom. No, I thought. “Okay,” I said.
I’d never set foot in a Kenny Rogers Roasters, which no longer exists in the United States, yet has, curiously, found modern-day success in parts of Asia. As I don’t come from a country music family, I associated Kenny Rogers mostly with Dole pineapple commercials. But here he was, a chicken man. A chicken, steak, ribs, burger, and sausage man — Kenny Rogers’s menu was 98 percent animal parts. I hadn’t told Mike that I didn’t eat meat, and he hadn’t asked. So I defaulted to the strategy I employed at barbecue restaurants and went for the sides: little ramekins of mac and cheese, coleslaw, and steamed vegetables. When I recited my order to the server, Mike looked at me like I’d requested a basket of severed ears. Then he ordered a rack of ribs.
When the server left, we attempted more in the way of conversation, but here, as in the car, it proved to be a constipated affair. It’s difficult for me to remember what, exactly, we talked about — what I can say is that it reinforced our lack of common ground. It wasn’t as though he revealed himself to be a raging misogynist or even a generally unpleasant person; it was more that my weird did not align with his weird, and as a result, we had almost nothing to talk about. By the time the food came, Kenny Rogers Roasters had taught me what I needed to know about Mike, namely that I had never felt so lonely in the company of another person. I had been led to believe that a restaurant date was an inherently romantic construct. In my imagination, a restaurant was where adults went to play footsie under the table and drink red wine and order a tiny, molten chocolate cake served with two forks before stumbling off to seal the deal. It was not where you went to eat flaccid carrot coins and watch a man whose last name you didn’t know lick sauce from his thick fingers one by one.
As I sat there, my idealized image of the romantic restaurant date evaporating around me, I was confronted with the gulf between what we imagine life will be, and what it actually is. Which is to say, disappointment. What I didn’t yet grasp is that with the right person, the romantic restaurant date was the thing I wanted it to be, and that along with acting as a measure of compatibility, the choice of restaurant could enable the seed of connection to grow and find expression. It was wrong to expect a restaurant to perform miracles, or to be the miracle in and of itself; that came down to the two people sitting across from each other. Also, those movie restaurant dates benefitted from a crucial advantage that we did not: a script.
In retrospect, I think I was too hard on Mike: While a Kenny Rogers Roasters was not the stuff that second dates were built upon, it was also, in all fairness, a last resort, i.e. the very last place you want to end up on a date, aside from maybe a newspaper crime blotter. By the time we pulled into that parking lot I suspect we both knew that this wasn’t going anywhere, so it might as well go to a Kenny Rogers Roasters. We’d already failed the compatibility test; the restaurant was our participation trophy.
And yet that didn’t stop Mike, once he’d driven me to my car, from asking if he could kiss me. I would like to tell you that I demurred with tact. But I was 22 and exhausted from wringing small talk from a stone at a Kenny Rogers Roasters for what had felt like a full calendar week. So I laughed in Mike’s face and said, “I don’t care.”
I still cringe when I remember those words leaving my mouth, and Mike interpreting them as a directive to kiss me anyway. Now I knew what it was like to sit across from someone at a restaurant with the reasonable expectation of eventually being kissed, and it was not at all what I thought or hoped it would be. It would take a long time before it was. And yet, the Kenny Rogers Roasters had served a valuable function: It gave me the information I needed, and a meal that, no matter how hard I tried, I’ve never been able to forget.
