Part I of Square Peg appeared our homepage last week.
Catch the post here before you read on.
Catch the post here before you read on.
Square Peg
PART TWO
By Matthew Poirier
In the summer of 1992, I had just graduated from BU with a degree in anthropology. I had no money and was washing dishes to make ends meet. Anyway, a friend gets me a job at Fenway as one of those cats who sells peanuts to the fans. First day at work, I’m flirting with some chick out in the stands, not paying attention, and a foul strikes me in the temple, completely knocking me out. I come to three years later in a mental hospital— with over $300 million in assets.
As one can imagine, it was all rather daunting. The best way to describe it is the experience of going to the dentist, being put under anesthesia, and that sensation of coming to immediately after, having no idea that the dentist had taken out your wisdom teeth for the past few hours. I assumed I’d been asleep all that time, like in a coma or something, but the people at the hospital were adamant that I had walked in on my own a week before, and there was no record of me ever being there or at any other hospital and treated for a head injury. I was stunned, and kind of afraid to spend my new found wealth, for fear it wasn’t really mine.
One afternoon, about six months after I’d come to, I was at the McDonald’s at Faneuil Hall, regaining my bearings after a long few days partying, when these two nerdy guys approached me. They threw me this notebook of all kinds of crazy math equations and lines of computer code that made no sense, but were written in my hand. I didn’t know what to make of it.
“Dude, it’s Parker and Dooley. Don’t you remember us?”
I had them take a seat in my booth and tell me their story. They said they met me in a computer lab at MIT around the same time I lost consciousness. We hit it off, became fast friends, and started working on our own computer projects outside of school. We struck gold with a program that revolutionized the porn spam industry, which we sold for around $1 billion. During the celebration party, I disappeared, and Parker and Dooley hired a PI to find me, which he did after six months of searching. For three years, I had been living with amnesia as some kind of computer genius, and with one huge party I was snapped back into my original self none the wiser… only $300 million richer.
This was the story about my wealth that I didn’t want to get into at the wedding when Stacy asked me, and somehow I hadn’t found the proper time to explain it all to her after. What I didn’t realize was how much of that tale was common knowledge to most of Eileen’s friends, including Stacy’s mom, so when Stacy was telling her mom about me, that came up, much to Stacy’s chagrin. On a better note, Stacy’s mom still liked me.
When I got a hold of Stacy finally, she told me she had been having second thoughts anyway. She thought I was a bit of a weirdo at her birthday party, and even though I was hot and all, we were just too different to make things work. Plus, she said, she wasn’t really looking for a boyfriend right now. She had a lot of fun walking and talking with me, though, and she’d like to still do that.
I was hurt. She was dumping me? The girl who looked like a raccoon and couldn’t walk in heels was dumping me? I thought she was The One, and now she was saying “I don’t want a boyfriend right now, let’s just be friends.”
“I already have enough friends.”
“Oh… okay… I’m sorry then. I guess I’ll see you around.”
During a late night spent clubbing with Mads, a couple Russian chicks came back to the apartment with us. In true afterparty style, I grabbed a bunch of two-buck chuck and cheap champagne, and snacks of all sorts, including some 6-year aged parm. I switched on the TV, and after searching for a second, stopped on The Beastmaster. I figured it was the only thing good on at 3 AM, considering I didn't see She Spies anywhere. Everyone seemed fine with the decision of TV show, except Mads.
"Did he just talk to a bird? You can't talk to a bird."
"He's The Beastmaster," I said. "He talks to all animals."
"Yeah, but birds don't talk. They don't have the brain capacity to develop language like we do. All he'd get is a pattern of instincts like: must eat now, must fly away, must build nest..."
"I don't think he talks to them, per se, but sees what they see."
"No, he was talking to that one."
"That could mean anything. He could've been talking to it as we would any pet. Or I think in this case the bird is a guy that a sorcerer turned into a bird, so there's a human in there."
"Yeah, but just because a human was turned into a bird, it doesn't mean he's got a human's consciousness. You can't fit a 1400 cc brain into a bird's skull."
"He's a sorcerer, he can do anything. I think you need to just chill out and watch the hot chicks."
"That's another thing. No woman would wear a skimpy outfit like that living in the forest. There's bugs, it's cold, she could get sunburn..."
I picked up the knife I was using for cutting the parm.
"Mads, I'll fucking kill you."
I’m not sure what made me snap like that, but I didn’t have the energy to deal with his inane digressions. I don’t think I would’ve stabbed him, especially since the cheese knife was one of those curved ones with the forked knob on the end, but we both sensed the gravity of the situation, and only the familiarity from our long friendship gave us the ability to play off one-another and give the girls the impression that we were joking, which made us all the more endearing to them, and allowed us to exit and deal with the situation in a much more private capacity in the kitchen.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” He said in a harsh whisper. “Wait, don’t tell me, you talked to her, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know… I thought the friends thing might work, and maybe when she’s ready for a boyfriend…”
“She’s forty-fucking-years-old! She’s never been more ready for a boyfriend! She’s telling you that to let you down easy!”
“Wow, don’t sugarcoat it or anything.”
He grabbed me by the collar and pushed me against the wall.
“You need to get your fucking mind right. Oksana in there has the hots for you. Her tits are stupendous, she’s a former figure skater, so she must be amazing in bed… oh, and wait, she knows how to apply make-up properly and doesn’t take her shoes off in a T stop because she doesn’t know how to walk in heels. Do you know what it takes to get a woman like that in Europe?”
“I.. I…”
“I’m gonna tell you. A hotty like that, on her home turf in Moscow, won’t go home with you for any less than a Benz, a platinum card with no limit, and a fucking condo in the upscale part of Berlin.”
“What? She’s Russian. What about the whole mail-order bride thing? Any fat used car dealer in the States could get her with the promise of a green card.”
“That was 2000. This is 2008, and the mail-order industry is a seller’s market. Plus, with the dollar’s drop against the Euro, Berlin’s just as nice a destination as Boston.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, ‘seller’s market’? Just tell me which one is Oksana and I’ll get this over with.”
I turned to go, but he pushed me back.
“I’m not kidding, dude, you need to get that Stacy chick out of your dome right now. As far as you’re concerned, Oksana is your soul mate. I’m gonna work on her friend Svetlana, and if I get a knock on my door from Oksana bitching about wanting to go home while we’re in the middle of—”
“Okay, okay, I get it. And by the way, it’s my room, not yours. This is my apartment you know!”
But he was already walking away from me. He was right, Stacy probably did say the thing about not wanting a boyfriend to let me down easy, but what he didn’t realize was, that wasn’t the right time to tell me that. I understood the basic rules governing us Wing Men, that it was my job to keep Oksana entertained so Mads could do his thing with her friend. Any slip up, and Oksana would want to leave, forcing the girls to fall back on their own set of laws, the most important being if you arrive together, you leave together. Had Svetlana forced Oksana to stay or made her leave on her own, it would be as egregious in their world as me trying to steal Svetlana from Mads or actively hindering his chances with her would be in ours.
I tried my best. While Mads was showing Svetlana something in his room with the door closed, I was having a conversation with Oksana about her studies at Harvard. Mads was right, she was very hot. Stacy would’ve never worn a dress so short it’s almost a shirt over top of black leather tights. Not to mention, Oksana’s tits were stupendous. It was time to get over Stacy.
“I just couldn’t do it.”
“Because of the Tramp Stamp?”
“We were in my bedroom, ready to do it, but then I saw those two ugly dolphins on her lower back, and that was it.”
I was at the Starbucks near South Station with Matty the next day. He was taking a Chinatown bus to Foxwoods to see some friends, but the one he had planned on riding was full, so he had a few hours to kill until the next one.
“What did Mads say when she went in the other room looking for her friend?”
“He had already planned on it happening. He actually told Svetlana ahead of time that I was getting over some broad that didn’t know how to dress herself, and that he and her would probably have to go to her apartment, which they did when Oksana came knocking. He came in this morning with breakfast from McDonald’s for me.”
“I guess the Norwegians are more pragmatic about Wing Man rules than us Americans. We could learn something from them.”
“After being friends with Mads for as long as I have, if I’ve learned anything it’s that the Norwegians have nothing to teach us.”
“Speak of the devil, what is he up to today?”
“He’s over at WGBH lending his expertise to a special on the birds of New England.”
“WGBH? They’re using him again after the Puffin Incident?”
“I think there’s a new guy over there that’s unfamiliar with the situation.”
The Puffin Incident happened three years ago, when Mads was asked to do some on-camera interviews for a special WGBH did on the puffin. He agreed, but spent all of his interview time insisting that the puffin didn’t really exist, that is was a myth like Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster.
Matty shook his head.
“The Tramp Stamp? Really?”
“I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”
“You’ve never been with a chick with a Tramp Stamp before? There’s no way, statistically speaking, based on how many college co-eds you’ve slept with, and how many of that same demographic have gross tattoos on their lower backs, that you’ve never had sex with at least one.”
“Oh, I have done more than I can count with Tramp Stamps. I just… I don’t know… it was like watching a comic book movie and seeing the damsel in distress hanging from some precipice 100 stories up, waiting for the hero to save her. I was like: again? Can’t you come up with something else?”
“Dude, do you hear yourself? You’re comparing bad big budget film clichés with having sex with a hot Russian co-ed who just happened to have an unimaginative tattoo in an unimaginative place. That story never gets old. It will always have a big first weekend. It will always be number one at the box office. It’s the pining over the chick that was so wrong for you and that you only dated for two weeks that bombs. That’s the film that the people involved with it are hoping it will do well in DVD sales and FX and TNT will pay hella cash to air it so they can recoup some of their lost money, only to have it end up between Catwoman and Jersey Girl on everyone’s Ten Worst lists. Seriously, what did Stacy have that Oksana didn’t?”
“Did you just say ‘hella’?”
“Don’t turn this around on me. You can’t convince me that you’d turn down a chick most guys would shoot their mothers to have sex just once with because she had a frickin’ Tramp Stamp.”
“Has it ever crossed your mind I’m tired of all this?”
“What, that you’re ready to settle down?”
“Yes… no… I don’t know… I’m… I’m just tired of Tramp Stamps and Wing Mans and myriad women who are all extremely hot but all look the same, say the same things, watch the same shows…”
“But dude, you watch The Hills too.”
“That’s not my point. You wanna know what Stacy has that these other girls don’t? She knows who Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark are. She remembers when they were new, when they were cool, when we all liked them. Most of these girls weren’t even born back then.”
“So that’s it, you and Stacy can sing along together to ‘If You leave’ and remember how you feathered your hair and went to see Pretty in Pink in the theater?”
“Actually, she hates 80s music. When ‘If You Leave’ came on the radio in her car, she changed the station.”
He shook his head and sighed.
“What?”
“I’m looking at a two-year-old still trying to cram a peg into the wrong hole.”
“Would you drop that stupid fucking metaphor? It’s way too convoluted to be of any use to anyone but you.”
“Fine, I’ll give you one that’s much simpler. For the past nine years, since you initially crossed paths with Mads, you’ve been eating McDonald’s three meals a day. Nine years of McDonald’s, and now you’re sick of it, so you eat a salad; and I’m not talking a Cobb salad, I’m talking some basic, bland bowl of iceberg lettuce with some low-fat Italian dressing on top. But because you’ve been eating McDonald’s for so long, you think this salad is the greatest thing ever.”
“What’s your point?”
“There’s a happy medium between a boring salad and McDonald’s.”
“Like sake-miso marinated Alaskan butterfish?”
“Sure, why not?... like there’s women your age who not only know who OMD is, but they enjoy listening to it like you do. The thing is, they don’t hang out at Gypsy Bar, and you don’t meet them by playing Wing Man to some Norwegian playboy-slash-renown ornithologist.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
That was a few months ago, and in the interim, I had given up partying, Mads moved in with the Pageant Girl, and I was trying out new methods to meet women my age. Internet sites, evening art courses, Jewish Single’s Nights (Eileen’s idea)— I even got a Facebook account (I couldn’t believe how many people in my class had let themselves go). Results were so far were mixed, but I felt like I was making a start.
Tonight I was trying my hand eight-minute dating, and was filling out my note card on the woman that was just at my table, Bianca:
…said her favorite movie was For the Love of the Game, definite red flags there…
When I heard:
“Hey stranger.”
It was Julie. I didn’t recognize her from a distance because she’d cut her hair shorter.
“I was wondering if you were going to say hi… or maybe you’d just pretend you didn’t know me, huh?”
“I didn’t recognize you with your new hairdo. It looks nice by the way.”
She still had an amazing rack, which she was displaying proudly in the tight, white shirt under a black low-cut sweater.
“I’m surprised I didn’t see you at the Jewish Singles Night?”
“You’re surprised? Hello, I’m not their most popular member at the moment considering how things between Ned and I ended, which you had something to do with. Plus, the divorce isn’t final yet, and they all know that… what were you doing at a Jewish Singles Night?”
“Eileen’s idea.”
She finally sat down across from me. I’d like to say I had some moment of perspicacity, where it all made sense, or even that I looked at her and thought about all that had happened over the past two months that had brought me to the table with her, but I’d be lying. I was staring at her tits, and trying my best not to make it obvious. She sighed.
“That kind of night, huh?”
“I’m here with one of my girlfriends.”
She pointed over to a chick at another table talking to a thirtysomething professional of some sort.
“Are you and Ned trying to work it out, or are you here as an official dater?”
“Oh, Ned and I were through long before Judd’s wedding… I’d been dying of boredom with him, and I guess you just happened to be the lucky winner to capitalize on it.”
“Lucky huh?”
She looked down at her drink, whirling the ice cubes and olive around with her little red stirrer.
“Speaking of which… I hear this place has great bathrooms… whattaya think?...”
She lifted her head, bit her bottom lip, and looked me straight in the eyes.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
As one can imagine, it was all rather daunting. The best way to describe it is the experience of going to the dentist, being put under anesthesia, and that sensation of coming to immediately after, having no idea that the dentist had taken out your wisdom teeth for the past few hours. I assumed I’d been asleep all that time, like in a coma or something, but the people at the hospital were adamant that I had walked in on my own a week before, and there was no record of me ever being there or at any other hospital and treated for a head injury. I was stunned, and kind of afraid to spend my new found wealth, for fear it wasn’t really mine.
One afternoon, about six months after I’d come to, I was at the McDonald’s at Faneuil Hall, regaining my bearings after a long few days partying, when these two nerdy guys approached me. They threw me this notebook of all kinds of crazy math equations and lines of computer code that made no sense, but were written in my hand. I didn’t know what to make of it.
“Dude, it’s Parker and Dooley. Don’t you remember us?”
I had them take a seat in my booth and tell me their story. They said they met me in a computer lab at MIT around the same time I lost consciousness. We hit it off, became fast friends, and started working on our own computer projects outside of school. We struck gold with a program that revolutionized the porn spam industry, which we sold for around $1 billion. During the celebration party, I disappeared, and Parker and Dooley hired a PI to find me, which he did after six months of searching. For three years, I had been living with amnesia as some kind of computer genius, and with one huge party I was snapped back into my original self none the wiser… only $300 million richer.
This was the story about my wealth that I didn’t want to get into at the wedding when Stacy asked me, and somehow I hadn’t found the proper time to explain it all to her after. What I didn’t realize was how much of that tale was common knowledge to most of Eileen’s friends, including Stacy’s mom, so when Stacy was telling her mom about me, that came up, much to Stacy’s chagrin. On a better note, Stacy’s mom still liked me.
When I got a hold of Stacy finally, she told me she had been having second thoughts anyway. She thought I was a bit of a weirdo at her birthday party, and even though I was hot and all, we were just too different to make things work. Plus, she said, she wasn’t really looking for a boyfriend right now. She had a lot of fun walking and talking with me, though, and she’d like to still do that.
I was hurt. She was dumping me? The girl who looked like a raccoon and couldn’t walk in heels was dumping me? I thought she was The One, and now she was saying “I don’t want a boyfriend right now, let’s just be friends.”
“I already have enough friends.”
“Oh… okay… I’m sorry then. I guess I’ll see you around.”
During a late night spent clubbing with Mads, a couple Russian chicks came back to the apartment with us. In true afterparty style, I grabbed a bunch of two-buck chuck and cheap champagne, and snacks of all sorts, including some 6-year aged parm. I switched on the TV, and after searching for a second, stopped on The Beastmaster. I figured it was the only thing good on at 3 AM, considering I didn't see She Spies anywhere. Everyone seemed fine with the decision of TV show, except Mads.
"Did he just talk to a bird? You can't talk to a bird."
"He's The Beastmaster," I said. "He talks to all animals."
"Yeah, but birds don't talk. They don't have the brain capacity to develop language like we do. All he'd get is a pattern of instincts like: must eat now, must fly away, must build nest..."
"I don't think he talks to them, per se, but sees what they see."
"No, he was talking to that one."
"That could mean anything. He could've been talking to it as we would any pet. Or I think in this case the bird is a guy that a sorcerer turned into a bird, so there's a human in there."
"Yeah, but just because a human was turned into a bird, it doesn't mean he's got a human's consciousness. You can't fit a 1400 cc brain into a bird's skull."
"He's a sorcerer, he can do anything. I think you need to just chill out and watch the hot chicks."
"That's another thing. No woman would wear a skimpy outfit like that living in the forest. There's bugs, it's cold, she could get sunburn..."
I picked up the knife I was using for cutting the parm.
"Mads, I'll fucking kill you."
I’m not sure what made me snap like that, but I didn’t have the energy to deal with his inane digressions. I don’t think I would’ve stabbed him, especially since the cheese knife was one of those curved ones with the forked knob on the end, but we both sensed the gravity of the situation, and only the familiarity from our long friendship gave us the ability to play off one-another and give the girls the impression that we were joking, which made us all the more endearing to them, and allowed us to exit and deal with the situation in a much more private capacity in the kitchen.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” He said in a harsh whisper. “Wait, don’t tell me, you talked to her, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know… I thought the friends thing might work, and maybe when she’s ready for a boyfriend…”
“She’s forty-fucking-years-old! She’s never been more ready for a boyfriend! She’s telling you that to let you down easy!”
“Wow, don’t sugarcoat it or anything.”
He grabbed me by the collar and pushed me against the wall.
“You need to get your fucking mind right. Oksana in there has the hots for you. Her tits are stupendous, she’s a former figure skater, so she must be amazing in bed… oh, and wait, she knows how to apply make-up properly and doesn’t take her shoes off in a T stop because she doesn’t know how to walk in heels. Do you know what it takes to get a woman like that in Europe?”
“I.. I…”
“I’m gonna tell you. A hotty like that, on her home turf in Moscow, won’t go home with you for any less than a Benz, a platinum card with no limit, and a fucking condo in the upscale part of Berlin.”
“What? She’s Russian. What about the whole mail-order bride thing? Any fat used car dealer in the States could get her with the promise of a green card.”
“That was 2000. This is 2008, and the mail-order industry is a seller’s market. Plus, with the dollar’s drop against the Euro, Berlin’s just as nice a destination as Boston.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, ‘seller’s market’? Just tell me which one is Oksana and I’ll get this over with.”
I turned to go, but he pushed me back.
“I’m not kidding, dude, you need to get that Stacy chick out of your dome right now. As far as you’re concerned, Oksana is your soul mate. I’m gonna work on her friend Svetlana, and if I get a knock on my door from Oksana bitching about wanting to go home while we’re in the middle of—”
“Okay, okay, I get it. And by the way, it’s my room, not yours. This is my apartment you know!”
But he was already walking away from me. He was right, Stacy probably did say the thing about not wanting a boyfriend to let me down easy, but what he didn’t realize was, that wasn’t the right time to tell me that. I understood the basic rules governing us Wing Men, that it was my job to keep Oksana entertained so Mads could do his thing with her friend. Any slip up, and Oksana would want to leave, forcing the girls to fall back on their own set of laws, the most important being if you arrive together, you leave together. Had Svetlana forced Oksana to stay or made her leave on her own, it would be as egregious in their world as me trying to steal Svetlana from Mads or actively hindering his chances with her would be in ours.
I tried my best. While Mads was showing Svetlana something in his room with the door closed, I was having a conversation with Oksana about her studies at Harvard. Mads was right, she was very hot. Stacy would’ve never worn a dress so short it’s almost a shirt over top of black leather tights. Not to mention, Oksana’s tits were stupendous. It was time to get over Stacy.
“I just couldn’t do it.”
“Because of the Tramp Stamp?”
“We were in my bedroom, ready to do it, but then I saw those two ugly dolphins on her lower back, and that was it.”
I was at the Starbucks near South Station with Matty the next day. He was taking a Chinatown bus to Foxwoods to see some friends, but the one he had planned on riding was full, so he had a few hours to kill until the next one.
“What did Mads say when she went in the other room looking for her friend?”
“He had already planned on it happening. He actually told Svetlana ahead of time that I was getting over some broad that didn’t know how to dress herself, and that he and her would probably have to go to her apartment, which they did when Oksana came knocking. He came in this morning with breakfast from McDonald’s for me.”
“I guess the Norwegians are more pragmatic about Wing Man rules than us Americans. We could learn something from them.”
“After being friends with Mads for as long as I have, if I’ve learned anything it’s that the Norwegians have nothing to teach us.”
“Speak of the devil, what is he up to today?”
“He’s over at WGBH lending his expertise to a special on the birds of New England.”
“WGBH? They’re using him again after the Puffin Incident?”
“I think there’s a new guy over there that’s unfamiliar with the situation.”
The Puffin Incident happened three years ago, when Mads was asked to do some on-camera interviews for a special WGBH did on the puffin. He agreed, but spent all of his interview time insisting that the puffin didn’t really exist, that is was a myth like Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster.
Matty shook his head.
“The Tramp Stamp? Really?”
“I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”
“You’ve never been with a chick with a Tramp Stamp before? There’s no way, statistically speaking, based on how many college co-eds you’ve slept with, and how many of that same demographic have gross tattoos on their lower backs, that you’ve never had sex with at least one.”
“Oh, I have done more than I can count with Tramp Stamps. I just… I don’t know… it was like watching a comic book movie and seeing the damsel in distress hanging from some precipice 100 stories up, waiting for the hero to save her. I was like: again? Can’t you come up with something else?”
“Dude, do you hear yourself? You’re comparing bad big budget film clichés with having sex with a hot Russian co-ed who just happened to have an unimaginative tattoo in an unimaginative place. That story never gets old. It will always have a big first weekend. It will always be number one at the box office. It’s the pining over the chick that was so wrong for you and that you only dated for two weeks that bombs. That’s the film that the people involved with it are hoping it will do well in DVD sales and FX and TNT will pay hella cash to air it so they can recoup some of their lost money, only to have it end up between Catwoman and Jersey Girl on everyone’s Ten Worst lists. Seriously, what did Stacy have that Oksana didn’t?”
“Did you just say ‘hella’?”
“Don’t turn this around on me. You can’t convince me that you’d turn down a chick most guys would shoot their mothers to have sex just once with because she had a frickin’ Tramp Stamp.”
“Has it ever crossed your mind I’m tired of all this?”
“What, that you’re ready to settle down?”
“Yes… no… I don’t know… I’m… I’m just tired of Tramp Stamps and Wing Mans and myriad women who are all extremely hot but all look the same, say the same things, watch the same shows…”
“But dude, you watch The Hills too.”
“That’s not my point. You wanna know what Stacy has that these other girls don’t? She knows who Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark are. She remembers when they were new, when they were cool, when we all liked them. Most of these girls weren’t even born back then.”
“So that’s it, you and Stacy can sing along together to ‘If You leave’ and remember how you feathered your hair and went to see Pretty in Pink in the theater?”
“Actually, she hates 80s music. When ‘If You Leave’ came on the radio in her car, she changed the station.”
He shook his head and sighed.
“What?”
“I’m looking at a two-year-old still trying to cram a peg into the wrong hole.”
“Would you drop that stupid fucking metaphor? It’s way too convoluted to be of any use to anyone but you.”
“Fine, I’ll give you one that’s much simpler. For the past nine years, since you initially crossed paths with Mads, you’ve been eating McDonald’s three meals a day. Nine years of McDonald’s, and now you’re sick of it, so you eat a salad; and I’m not talking a Cobb salad, I’m talking some basic, bland bowl of iceberg lettuce with some low-fat Italian dressing on top. But because you’ve been eating McDonald’s for so long, you think this salad is the greatest thing ever.”
“What’s your point?”
“There’s a happy medium between a boring salad and McDonald’s.”
“Like sake-miso marinated Alaskan butterfish?”
“Sure, why not?... like there’s women your age who not only know who OMD is, but they enjoy listening to it like you do. The thing is, they don’t hang out at Gypsy Bar, and you don’t meet them by playing Wing Man to some Norwegian playboy-slash-renown ornithologist.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
That was a few months ago, and in the interim, I had given up partying, Mads moved in with the Pageant Girl, and I was trying out new methods to meet women my age. Internet sites, evening art courses, Jewish Single’s Nights (Eileen’s idea)— I even got a Facebook account (I couldn’t believe how many people in my class had let themselves go). Results were so far were mixed, but I felt like I was making a start.
Tonight I was trying my hand eight-minute dating, and was filling out my note card on the woman that was just at my table, Bianca:
…said her favorite movie was For the Love of the Game, definite red flags there…
When I heard:
“Hey stranger.”
It was Julie. I didn’t recognize her from a distance because she’d cut her hair shorter.
“I was wondering if you were going to say hi… or maybe you’d just pretend you didn’t know me, huh?”
“I didn’t recognize you with your new hairdo. It looks nice by the way.”
She still had an amazing rack, which she was displaying proudly in the tight, white shirt under a black low-cut sweater.
“I’m surprised I didn’t see you at the Jewish Singles Night?”
“You’re surprised? Hello, I’m not their most popular member at the moment considering how things between Ned and I ended, which you had something to do with. Plus, the divorce isn’t final yet, and they all know that… what were you doing at a Jewish Singles Night?”
“Eileen’s idea.”
She finally sat down across from me. I’d like to say I had some moment of perspicacity, where it all made sense, or even that I looked at her and thought about all that had happened over the past two months that had brought me to the table with her, but I’d be lying. I was staring at her tits, and trying my best not to make it obvious. She sighed.
“That kind of night, huh?”
“I’m here with one of my girlfriends.”
She pointed over to a chick at another table talking to a thirtysomething professional of some sort.
“Are you and Ned trying to work it out, or are you here as an official dater?”
“Oh, Ned and I were through long before Judd’s wedding… I’d been dying of boredom with him, and I guess you just happened to be the lucky winner to capitalize on it.”
“Lucky huh?”
She looked down at her drink, whirling the ice cubes and olive around with her little red stirrer.
“Speaking of which… I hear this place has great bathrooms… whattaya think?...”
She lifted her head, bit her bottom lip, and looked me straight in the eyes.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
No comments:
Post a Comment