The bartender hands me the Blue Moon that I had asked for and I take it with a mumbled thanks. The bar is a big open room, well lit with two TVs hanging on the wall in front of me. The one on the right is playing ESPN basketball highlights and the one on the left is Saturday Night Live.
Andy Samberg mouths something I assume might be funny if I could hear it, and you can see the rest of the SNL cast wait for a laugh from the audience that I can't hear either. A few seats over, a woman in her mid thirties smiles at me and then looks back at the man whose thigh she is touching with her hand. He takes a drag from his cigarette, and I wonder how cocked baseball hats ever became the fashion.
On my left, a patron starts talking to the bartender. I assume they know one another, as it sounds like they're talking about a party or night they shared earlier in the week. Someone got drunk and sick. I look back at the TV with ESPN and take another sip of beer.
It's still on basketball highlights. Whatever, I'll pretend to watch it because I don't have anything better to do. I don't know anyone here, most of my friends are at least a two-hour drive away. But I couldn't stay in my apartment tonight by myself. It just wasn't going to happen.
Just don't help the boy's team, OK?
There's a knock at the door to my apartment. I'm still asleep and it wakes me up. I look at my phone: 10:14 a.m. I get out of bed to answer the door on the off chance that it might be a natural gas leak or something else important.
I must've been an impressive sight with my bed-hair, black t-shirt and plaid pajama pants. I open the door and a womangirl who reeked of cigarette smoke starts talking to me about some contest she is in. I am for all intents and purposes still asleep, just standing up with my eyes open and my mouth slightly agape.
From the cadence of her speech was obviously a pitch she had gone over several times, either through rehearsal or field-experience. I was still completely out of it, so any reaction she was expecting from the jokes in her pitch fell completely flat and she went to the next line like a drama student rehearsing a play with a lazy co-star.
It wasn't until she handed me a worn and laminated paper that showed a bunch of magazine covers that I realized she was trying to sell me a magazine subscription. I looked through all the magazine covers and there wasn't one that looked interesting. People, Shape, Men's Health, that kind of thing.
She started asking me some questions.
"What do you do?"
I work for the University, I mumble.
"The ARC?" she repeats.
No, sorry, the University.
"Killer. So, what do you do when you're not at work?"
Why did she care? I like to draw, read, write. That kind of stuff.
"Did I just wake you up?"
Yeah.
"Do you like to work out?"
Not really, I keep it pretty low-key.
"Killer. Are you married?"
Nope.
"Girlfriend?"
Nope.
"Kids?"
Nope.
"Well, do you like to work out?"
I think at this point I realized that when a girl asks you "Do you like to work out" it qualifies as a "Ray Question" in that the answer is always yes regardless of actual facts. But I just shrugged and smiled awkwardly.
With my weak reactions she had run out of ways to figure out a magazine to suggest. She smiled and said: "Well, promise that when the boys' team comes by you won't help them, OK?" Sure, I said and closed my door before I even saw her walk up the stairs.
I guess there were teams involved, a magazine-selling battle of the sexes. According to the pitch she had given me right after I opened the door, anyway. A representitive from the boys' team never showed up.
Bar Nymphs and Pixie Dream Girls
I finish my second beer and leave the bar. I don't feel like giving in just yet. A short walk down the street and I can hear the muddy din of live music coming from another bar I had never been in yet. I hand the bouncer my card and he asks for cover money. I figure I can squeeze $3 of value from the experience, so hand him the cash and walk in.
The band is playing in the entrance of the bar, so I had to walk through them to get to a place where I could watch. It's two guitar players, a singer/guitarist and a young drummer who looks like a guy I went to high school with.
They're playing something that's probably rock and roll. It's loud as hell and there is drums, bass, rythym guitar, high-pitched screaming/singing. I don't really recognize the song, but that was never my forté. It might even be one that they wrote themselves.
I go to stand behind a pool table and take everything in. The place is pretty crowded. Standard operating procedure for a place like this is to find the girls that look the most interesting to me and then spend the next hour wishing I had the courage or genius to find an excuse to talk to them.
Of note tonight was a woman who bore a resemblance to how Carrie Fischer probably looked in 1987 or 88. Think Princess Leia just past her prime. In the other corner of the room was a 20-something who looked like she was about to audition to be a suicide girl. She sported jet-black hair in a bowl-cut, low cut top that looked more like a bustier than anything, and a generous smattering of tattoos all over her left arm and back. Given how meek I am I always think it's funny when a girl like this catches my eye.
The loud drone of the band doesn't do much to distract me from the disastrous scenarios forming in my head.
Hey, I see you have a lot of tattoos. I designed a tattoo for my ex-girlfriend last month.
Or:
Hey, I know we just met, but you should come back to my place, I took apart my vacuum cleaner today so I could rinse out the filters and the kitchen table is covered in parts!
Or:
I like the leopard print on those heels you have on!
I wait out the live show. The band plays something they claim is ACDC and it mostly passes muster. Most people are drunk, but my twin beers have long-since worn off. The band stops playing and their drunken frontman tells everyone to get the fuck out as the bar is closing.
Fine with me, I didn't really belong there in the first place.
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