A Date with Raggedy Darcy by Tom Hartley This essay originally appeared in "The 3rd Annual All-Sex Issue" (Feb. 11th, 1999) of The Orange County Weekly. Even if she had tried to dress as an adult she wouldn't have looked older than sixteen, but she was wearing a blue-and-white polka-dot dress, knee-length white socks, and blue high-heeled slippers; her hair and her eyebrows were dyed blue, and a pair of pigtails hung from the sides of her head, fastened by white shoelaces; two big dots of blue clown make-up highlighted her cheeks. She was Raggedy Ann, but with a different color scheme -- a cousin or a sister of Raggedy Ann -- Raggedy Judy or Raggedy Darcy. She stood facing the pathway, between a clothing store and a Baja Somethingorother "sports bar" style restaurant, that led into the heart of a shopping mall, but she didn't take the path because she wasn't here to do any shopping. She turned to look one way, then turned to look the other way, and finally turned to face me. I was sitting on a concrete bench, about ten feet away from her. Our eyes met, so it was too late for me to look away from her and pretend I hadn't been staring. Not without some effort, she managed a smile, and, after one or two seconds' hesitation, she approached me. She was obviously embarrassed, and, until she spoke, I assumed this was simply because I had been staring at her. She stood before me, and I remained seated, looking up at her, and, after another couple of seconds' hesitation, polka-dotted, blue-cheeked, blue-haired and pigtailed, fourteen-, fifteen-, maybe even sixteen-year-old Raggedy Judy or Raggedy Jane or Raggedy Darcy said, "Do you want a date?" And that's when I was finally able to look away from her. I looked down at the open book in my lap, a paperback copy of (Dickensian coincidence!) The Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, and said, "No." I was sitting on a concrete bench at one of the bus stops in front of University Town Center, a mall in San Diego. I hadn't actually been in the mall; I was here to change busses. I had to travel thirty miles out of my way to keep an appointment with my current "primary care physician" (fuck you very much, HMO), and was on my way north, back to Oceanside. Obviously I couldn't go back to reading my book after what had just happened, but I could look down at it and pretend to read, and let Raggedy Darcy Raggedy Jane Raggedy Judy know that she would have to find another date that afternoon. I heard the same question again, less than half a minute later, and from a few feet to my right, presumably addressed to the next male she could find who looked old enough to be interested in girls: "Do you want a date?" I didn`t hear the answer, but I knew what it was, because a few seconds later, and from a few feet farther on, I was able to hear the same question: "Do you want a date?" And so on, every couple of dozen seconds and every dozen feet farther away, and I couldn't hear any of the answers, not one, but I could hear that question every single time it was asked: "Do you want a date?" I didn't look up from the words I was staring at, and not reading (none of them were as compelling as that question I kept hearing), until I finally heard the bus pull up to my stop, and there she was, coming back to the stop, walking as fast as she could without having to run, and getting in the line that was forming at the bus' front door. All of the men in the line and all of the other men at the nearby bus stops paid no attention to her, even though she had just asked every single one of them out on a date. The women also ignored her. None of us called the police or mall security. None of us called one of those shelters for runaway teenagers. None of us even bothered to say to her, "If this is what you`re going to do, don`t do it in a crowded place in broad daylight, and don't do it at a bus stop. If any of us could afford you we wouldn`t be riding the busses." We were all cowards that afternoon. We all let her get on the bus, so that she could go on to another bus stop and ask every male she could find who looked at least twelve years old: Do you want a date? Do you want a date? Do you want a date? If any one of us had seen a stray dog wandering down the middle of a busy street, would any of us have been able to look away from that dog? How many minutes, seconds, would have passed by before one of us would have run out into the middle of the street, waving our arms and shouting to hold up the traffic, and have picked up that dog and carried it, or grabbed it by the collar and dragged it if was too big to carry -- that dog would have to bite off one of my fingers to keep me from dragging it -- back to the intersection, and have taken it to University Town Center's lost-and-found department, and then would have stood there behind the counter at the lost-and-found department while someone announced on the intercom, "Will the owner of the brown-and-white collie please come to the lost-and-found department?" just to make sure that the announcement was made, that there was at least one other person on Earth who cared whether or not this dog lived or died? That dog would have to be growling and foaming at the mouth like the reincarnation of motherfucking Cujo to keep me away from it. But nobody reported Raggedy Darcy to lost-and-found. Some of us got on the bus with her, and every single one of us was thinking about her, and every single person who was at one of the bus stops in front of UTC that afternoon still remembers her, and if any of them are reading this, they're saying to themselves, "No, her hair wasn't blue, it was blond," or, "She was wearing a checkered dress, not a polka-dot dress," or, "The dress didn't have a pattern; it was just a white dress. And her hair was done in a ponytail, not a pair of pigtails," or, "She wasn't wearing a dress. She wore a white dress shirt and a blue-and-white checkered skirt. It looked like a schoolgirl's uniform. She didn't look anything at all like Raggedy Ann." If she had gotten off the bus in Oceanside, I might have at least offered to buy her lunch, so that she would receive at least one unselfish act of kindness before she finally met up with the guy who, when the two of them were alone in his bedroom, and they had both undressed, would ask (these guys always wait until the last minute to spring this stuff on you, and if you`re a guy, too, then your dick is as hard and as ready for action as his is, and so he`s hoping you'll be so horny you'll be willing to do any-goddamned-thing, and that's when he asks...), "Are you into golden showers? Can I piss in your mouth?" or, "Do you like to be strangled?" and maybe this is the one night when he just won't take no for an answer, especially since he's paying good money for this, and so he might have to use a little force, just a little, just enough to show her that tonight is definitely not the night to say no to him, and if she gets excited, then he might have to use a little more force, and... well, sometimes a guy just doesn't know his own strength, does he? But she didn't take the bus all the way to Oceanside, she got off at Encinitas, and that was the last time I ever saw her: sitting on a bench at the bus stop in Encinitas, not approaching any of the men at the stop, but just sitting on the bench and staring at my bus as it drove away. "A Date with Raggedy Darcy" copyright © 1999-2002 by Tom Hartley. Email: tomhartley@nethere.com Website: http://home.nethere.net/tomhartley