Has Anyone Seen My Pants? (11 page)

Once safely in my room, I turned on the television, cracked open some wine and Peanut M&M’s from the minibar, and crawled into bed. I was so happy.
God, I really do like being alone
,
I thought.

Then there was a knock on my door. I assumed it was room service; I hadn’t ordered any and I figured they were just at the wrong room, but I was a little hungry and wanting to take a look at what someone else had ordered before I decided to tell them the order wasn’t actually mine.

Thank God I peeked out the peephole first, because it was not room service, unless Jayson with a Y had started working for the hotel. I ducked, panicked he might have somehow seen me through the peephole.

“You can see out, he can’t see in, stupid,” I whispered to myself as I crawled across the floor and into a corner.

Jayson with a Y knocked again, rather persistently. And just as I was about to give in, I heard his weird sex voice through the door asking, “Sarah, baby . . . you in there, girl?”

I rolled my eyes and continued to stuff Peanut M&M’s in
my mouth, being careful to chew quietly so as not to alert him that I was hiding in a corner like a refugee.

I swear another ten minutes went by before he gave up and went away. Twenty-seven-year-olds are so persistent. About two minutes later, I received another text from him, with another picture of him shirtless—this time in bed—asking if I wanted company tonight.

It was clearly not taken in a bed in the hotel, so I was able to deduce that he had several shirtless photos of himself on deck for emergency situations. And since
he
didn’t know that
I
knew he was pounding on my door moments before he texted me, he was trying to make me think he was at home in bed and just casually texting to see if I was around to get that dick.

This is probably going to sound ridiculous, but I thought it was kind of sweet. He was really making an effort to see me again. I thought about what Jackie said, how I was feeling lonely lately and maybe another round with a hot guy wouldn’t be a horrible way to end my weekend in Florida.

Then I thought about him calling me “girl” and about the nice older lady who had to look at his smashed-against-the-glass ass when all she wanted to do was enjoy her chicken Caesar by the pool. And I decided against getting that dick one more time. I did, however, order room service and watch a bad movie on TV . . . and it was glorious.

Maui-Owie

O
ne of our longest breaks when I was a full-time writer on
Chelsea Lately
was over Christmas and New Year’s, which is the trickiest time of year to find someone to take a vacation with you when you’re single, for obvious reasons. This is a double problem for me because my birthday is December twenty-ninth, so if I want to take a fun trip for my birthday, I have to ask people to try to squeeze me in between holidays. This pretty much rules out any and all married friends.

I always go home to Arkansas for Christmas to see my family, but after about a week there, I’m all set and want to spend the next week facedown on a pool lounge with a cocktail placed right underneath my face and a long straw bringing the frozen joy into my mouth. Specific, I know.

The year my book tour ended I was even more hell-bent on taking a vacation, and luckily my friend Jen was on board. We looked into flights and ultimately decided on Maui. I’d
never been to Hawaii and the last time Jen had been there was on her honeymoon, during which she got violently sick. Now she was divorced and appeared to have a stronger stomach. So Maui it was.

Wanting to do it up, we looked into staying at the Four Seasons, but that was all booked—apparently that’s where the rest of the world goes in December. So we settled on a place called the Grand Wailea, because they prided themselves on having an “adults only” pool on site. Neither of us has children, neither of us wants children, neither of us hates children, but both of us loved the idea of not having to share our upcoming pool-lounging time with children all ramped up on guava juice, running around screaming and, God forbid, knocking over one of our many cocktails.

Before this, Jen and I had taken a couple weekend getaways together to Santa Monica, which is about twenty minutes from where we live. It may sound silly to take a mini vacation so close to your own home, but the closest I can get to poolside drink service at my house is drinking wine in the bathtub, which can be very dangerous when you live alone and aren’t equipped with a med-alert bracelet. We’d also traveled out of the country together for work, as well as on group vacation trips, but this would be our first time spending more than two days together, alone, a long distance from home. This can be a very dangerous thing to do with a good friend because if it doesn’t go well, you have to find a way to let said friend know that you’d rather stick your tongue in a blender
than ever again spend more than four hours at a time alone with them.

However, I was not worried about that happening with Jen because I know her very well and we both like to do the same thing on vacation—nothing. Neither of us discussed a snorkeling outing or a hike up a fucking volcano. We both just wanted to relax by the hotel pool, wander down to the beach, and flip through reviews on TripAdvisor to determine where we would have dinner each night. Ours was a match made in heaven.

When we arrived at the Grand Wailea, tipsy from our plane ride, we immediately wanted to check out the grounds. As we wandered around, we were both a little overwhelmed by how much of a “family” hotel it was. I mean, we knew that they had a kid-friendly pool to offset the adults-only pool, but I don’t think either of us realized that the kid-friendly pool was going to be a mini Disneyland. There were water slides and caves and big round plastic balls that kids could get inside—for what reason, I don’t know. I assumed it was so you couldn’t hear their screams, but it turned out that when they climbed inside of those plastic balls their screams were pretty much all you could hear.

“Thank God they have a separate pool for us,” Jen noted.

“Seriously!” I laughed. “This pool is a disaster.”

“Let’s go check out
our
pool area,” Jen suggested.

“It’s probably pretty far away so that you don’t even hear the noise from this area,” I screamed.

“You don’t have to scream. I mean, it is loud here but also I’m standing right next to you.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said, still screaming.

A waitress walked by and I stopped her to ask how to get to the adult pool.

“Um, just follow the arrows on the wooden signs,” she said in a bitchy tone.

“Oh, I didn’t see those,” I responded defensively.

“They’re everywhere,” she replied, even bitchier.

“Well, how about you just point to where we should go since you’re already standing here and it’s taken longer for you to tell us that there are signs we can follow than it would for you to just tell us where the pool is,” I shot back, with a huge smile on my face.

The waitress flopped her wrist in a general direction and stomped away, leaving Jen and me alone to diagnose her attitude.

“She’s probably hungover,” I offered.

“She’s probably in a bad mood because she has to work at the kids’ pool,” Jen retorted.

I decided Jen was correct, then we searched for the wooden sign to point us in the right direction because we assumed Angry Waitress was probably trying to send us to the wrong place on purpose (that may sound paranoid, but we were right).

The adults-only pool was just a few feet away from the kid-friendly pool, which at first had us concerned, but somehow the layout made it seem very serene. I mean, I could still hear
the screams of the children running through the pool in plastic balls like panicked hamsters, but it was very, very faint.

We located two cushy lounge chairs and settled in for an afternoon of quietish comfort by the pool. We were immediately greeted by a waiter, who happily took our order and, minutes later, returned with two margaritas. Things were sailing along smoothly, with Jen and I flipping through
Us Weekly
, drinking and tweeting flattering photos of each other. I was just about to doze off when I heard a shrill sound coming from the throat of a girl who was clearly not yet eighteen, even though her squeal was definitely coming from inside the adults-only pool.

I shot up out of my lounge chair, only to see that Jen had already spotted the underage offender. “There, she’s right there.” Jen pointed.

I slid my sunglasses down my nose so I could get a good look at her, confirming that she was definitely not of age.

“She’s like twelve,” I noted, irritated.

“She’s not even a teenager yet,” Jen replied, “that’s for sure.”

“What the fuck is she doing over here? This is the adults-only pool!” I complained.

Just then we noticed that the tween interloper was not alone—the nonadult also had a few friends with her,
all
of whom were nonadults. We were being invaded!

“We need to do something about this,” Jen said in a determined voice.

As if on cue, a security guard passed by. Jen cleared her throat and summoned him over.

“Excuse me,” Jen said in her sweetest voice. “Do you see that girl over there?”

The security guard looked over to where we were both pointing. “Yes. What about her?”

“Well, she’s like twelve,” Jen explained. “And this is the adults-only pool.”

I nodded in agreement, unable to speak, due to the straw dangling from my mouth.

“Oh, right.” The security guard nodded. “I’ll take care of it,” he said as he walked away.

Jen and I watched in anticipation as he approached the girl and her friends, ready to see the preteen perps get bounced. But instead all we saw was the security guard walk in their general direction and then veer off to the right without saying a word to them.

“What the fuck was that?” I asked in astonishment as my straw came flying out of my mouth.

“I don’t know!”

A few minutes later, the security guard came passing by again and Jen stopped him, this time with a little less sweetness in her voice. “So did you ask those girls to leave the adults-only pool?”

“I did,” he lied.

“Oh, well that’s weird, because they’re still here,” Jen said.

“Huh,” he said in fake astonishment. “I’ll go talk to them again.”

Jen and I watched him like hawks as he meandered slowly in their direction. This time he did make it all the way to them,
appeared to say something, then quickly walked away. We stared at the group of kids, waiting for them to run off to their designated pool area and respect the segregation that was so clearly noted by the hotel. Instead, they stayed put. They even started laughing loudly, as if whatever the security guard had said to them only made them more comfortable.

When the security guard passed by us again, he moved at a much quicker pace, clearly hoping to bypass us. No such luck, though: we were now on a mission.

“Excuse me!” Jen yelled, her voice now filled with such a strong mixture of sweet and sour it belonged on a Chinese food menu. “Security!? Hi. I couldn’t help but notice that those underage kids are still here.”

“Yes,” the security guard sighed. “They are. I asked them to leave, there isn’t much else I can do.”

“Oh? Okay,” Jen said in what appeared to be a relenting voice. But just as the security guard started to walk away, believing he was now off the hook with the two crazy ladies who wanted the kids to get the fuck out of their pool, Jen followed up with, “I mean, it’s your rule, not mine.”

The security guard stopped in his tracks, turning to look back at us, a blank look on his face.

“That’s right,” Jen continued, driving the knife in further. “It’s your rule they’re breaking, not mine.”

The security guard turned and walked away, and I proudly high-fived Jen: “Your rule, not mine,” I repeated, using my best Jen Kirkman impression. “You’re a genius.”

Jen laughed proudly, then noted it was weird that we’d just high-fived, and we both went back to reading our magazines.

Now, if you think that at some point the security guard stepped up and those kids were asked to leave, you’re wrong. We spent the rest of the afternoon tweeting the Grand Wailea (@GrandWailea in case you want to have your voice heard), calling the concierge, and just in general talking loudly about the parents of the kids who seemed to think it was cool to let their children shit all over our quiet adult pool time. There was never really a resolution to it, but halfway through the afternoon we went from flat-out annoyed to amused-annoyed and acknowledged to ourselves that we had become slightly obsessed with the situation. This day also happened to be my birthday, so eventually Jen and I left the lies of the adults-only pool behind to take “spontaneous” photos of each other frolicking in the ocean before heading to dinner at Maui’s famous Mama’s Fish House.

Mama’s Fish House was exactly what we were told it would be: a beautiful restaurant with a great view and wonderful food. We enjoyed amazing service and drank our weight in alcohol as we rang in my thirty-eighth year of life. Jen ordered me some sort of chocolate dessert thing that they brought to the table with a single candle in it. When we left, we noticed a canoe on the sand right in front of the restaurant that was just begging for photo ops. So, obviously, we took turns posing in the canoe in varying positions so that we would both return
home with hot new “just sitting in a canoe in the moonlight” photos that we could upload to Facebook.

(This trip took place just before Instagram became a thing—you know, back in the days when you had to work even harder to get the pose exactly right because there weren’t fifteen filter options for you to choose from in case something on your body was amiss. Jesus, social media makes being single so much more difficult. I never thought I’d miss Polaroids.)

We spent the next two days doing much of the same thing: lying by the pool, rolling our eyes at anyone who was clearly under the appropriate age to be by said pool, and sipping margaritas. There isn’t much of a nightlife in Maui; it all closes down very early for the most part, since it’s mostly couples who go there. But Jen and I didn’t let that get us down. One morning we ordered room service, which came while I was in the shower. When I got out, stoked to see pancakes, Jen was all ramped up about the person who brought our breakfast.

“They asked me if I was Ms. Colonna,” she said, annoyed.

“Oh, they thought you were me? That’s because the room is in my name.”

“I know
that
,
but when I said I wasn’t you they were like, ‘Oh, sorry, wrong room,’ and I said, ‘No, this is the right room, I’m Ms. Kirkman, Ms. Colonna is just in the shower.’ ”

“Okay . . . ?”

“And then he looked at the one bed and was like, ‘I don’t understand,’ as if we are the first two women to share a hotel together in Maui.”

“I hate that! I hate that people think just because we share a bed we’re lesbians. I mean, look at Lucy and Ricky! They had separate twin beds and they were fucking!”

“I’m not sure that’s helpful in this argument,” Jen noted rationally.

“Oh, right, well you know what I meant.”

“I don’t but I do,” Jen said, confused but in solidarity.

“Anyway it’s just annoying that we can’t travel together and share a nice king bed without people assuming we’re lesbians. Plus, isn’t gay marriage legal here, so technically shouldn’t they just support us either way?”

“I don’t think it’s legal here yet but we can definitely come back when it is and see if we’re treated with more respect,” Jen offered.

Look, I understand that when a man sees two women in a hotel room sharing a king bed he wants to assume it’s because they’re going down on each other every night. But the reality—and I’m sorry to break the fantasy, guys—is that female platonic friends are comfortable sharing a king bed and usually prefer it because most hotel double beds are about as comfortable as a jail cot.

New Year’s Eve, Jen and I walked around fighting the gay rumors that we were sure were floating around about us (in reality, nobody was talking about us at all, gay or straight) and trying to plan what we would do that evening. After asking around, we determined that the place to be for dinner that night was the Four Seasons restaurant, which was within
walking distance of our hotel and had an amazing view of the ocean.

“How romantic!” I laughed.

“Exactly, lover!” Jen laughed back as we looked around the adults-only pool for people who were pointing and whispering about us but only spotted a new crop of twelve-year-olds.