Tuesday, May 31, 2005

I like going out but hate the negative attention

It's a Saturday night. My friend M. and I are out on the town. We go to a pub that plays live music. It's a Poison cover band. Hilarious. That took us back to our wild 80's high-school days when these hair-glam bands were all the rage. I personally hated the music but thought the boys in the band looked good in their tight leather-studded pants and lace-up black combat boots with more rivets than my pair of Jordache jeans. Then these two weasels come sidling up, stale breath exhaling through a puff of even staler cigarette smoke, drinking a watered down pitcher of pale beer. They offer us some and I steadfastly refused to drink the dregs from that pitcher and instead insisted that weasel #1, who was hitting on M., buy me a Shiner, which he did. Weasel #2 was shoulder to shoulder with me and rubbing the back of my velvet dress. He gave me the creeps. Weasel #1 leaned over, put his arm around M. and gave her a kiss. She told him where he could go. In no uncertain terms we let them know we weren't there for a quickie and we left.

It is a cruel game we play with a double-edged sword. My friend M. and I love to go out, have drinks, talk to guys, but then things get weird. The weirdest freaks come up and start talking to us. If these two weasels had been cute cuddly bunnies instead would we have fended off their advances? Would we have gladly given up our digits? And then there was one who seemed to be a prince in the guise of a frog who I kept smiling at. He ended up next door at the next bar we went to. The smiles and eye-contact continued. He came up and began talking to us. We smiled some more. He was an older guy, tall, blond, gold chain around his tan neck, big white straight teeth, kaki shorts, deck shoes, a casual green shirt looking like he was about to catch the next boat out of the marina and go sailing on a moon-lit ocean stream at midnight. Then he opened his mouth, started talking about his thoroughly menial job without inquiring what I did, and the spell was broken. He was just a frog after all. I should have known it by the green shirt he was wearing. He left and I let him get on home to the podunk town he lives in.

An intellectual, an intellectual, my kingdom for a long-haired, bespectacled, brainy, literary, tragic poet type who weeps at obscure films by directors with unpronounceable names, intellectual. Where the hell is he? Lost in a dusty library? Can't find his way out of the labyrinth?

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