Hole in None

Very shortly after my 17th birthday I had my first real date ever: putt-putting with a boy I’d met from another high school. His mother and her boyfriend came to pick us up, but when we got to the mini-golf, they made it clear they weren’t going anywhere. So my first date, ever, was a double-date with my date’s mother and her boyfriend. Apparently, she didn’t trust her son to behave himself alone with a girl. Once we started to play I accidentally hit my date in the knee once with the ball, and once right in the gonads with the club on a mis-aimed backswing. Then we went to an adjacent restaurant for the standard burgers and fries fare. The thing was, the boy I was with didn’t have enough money to pay for his own food, much less mine. And his mother wouldn’t give him any. I wound up paying for the two of us, even though he’d been the one to ask me out. I naively kept dating him that summer, but before September I dumped him. He called my house two weeks later; my mother told him I wasn’t home. He told her he’d accidentally cut off a finger in woodshop class.