In a nutshell

Okay, consider this next bit something of a coda to my last post. In fact, I initially wanted to make this post and the last one long one, but it lacked cohesiveness both thematically and chronologically.

Last night was trivia night at Pat's Martini Bar, as is every Tuesday night. Vic, a guy I know, runs the show and I team up with my old buddy Adam to see if we can win a $50 bar tab that will take us months to drink. So far, the best we've managed is second place, although last night looked strong going into the final round. However, the smartest bet we could place with our final point total, plus an almost complete lack of knowledge about Chris Rock movies, meant that we again finished second.

Anyway, trivia's over and Adam and I are just hanging out, shooting the shit, while Adam finishes his drink and I crunch on the ice left over from my soda. After a bit, Vic comes over and we compare notes about the trivia game. Shortly, a friend of Adam's ex-wife comes over and begins regaling us with the tale of the first time she met Adam: the entire point of the story being she was clad from the waist up in only a bra, since she'd whipped off her shirt to wipe Adam's ex-wife's windshield and, by doing so, somehow saved her life. We're mulling over Adam's reactions to this meeting—both actual and possible—when Adam's ex-wife's friend's friend (whom, in the interest of both brevity and anonymity, I shall henceforth refer to as "M.") joins us. Her initial action is to say "Hi," look around the table, stare me dead in the face, smile and say "You have the most gorgeous blue eyes! I noticed them all the way across this dark bar!"

"Um…well, thank you! That's…I…don't know what to say besides 'Thank you.'"

"Oh, but they are so beautiful!" Here she bends a bit so her standing face and my seated face are level. "Somebody should tell you that every day of your life, that you have beautiful eyes. Does someone tell you that every day of your life?"

I'm suddenly stricken, and sad, and smiling. "No. No one's told me that in years."

"Well, I'm telling you," M. says, straightening up, wrapping her arms around my neck and pushing my face into her extremely soft and attractive breasts. I suddenly forget how to breathe.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, let me share some facts with you that have, in my mind, some sort of vague bearing on this situation:

1. Adam's ex-wife's friend had talked to Adam earlier in the evening. I had noticed M., found her attractive and promptly put her out of my mind because, looks-wise, she seemed somewhat out of my league: she looks to be in her late-20s to early-30s, has highlighted hair, a lovely face, clear skin, large eyes, a long neck and a body that is curvy in the places it should be and slender in the places it isn't curvy. Clearly, I have a better chance of winning a $50 bar tab in trivia than I do of going home with this woman. I'm okay with that.


2. I'm okay with that because I'm well aware that I am a socially awkward, 36-year-old man with prematurely gray hair, a complexion hewn by 20 years of smoking and teeth that haven't felt the touch of a dentist's gloved hand in something like 15 years. I am 5'9" tall and chronically underweight. My idea of exercise is to get up out of my chair at work and walk to the coffee pot. My fashion sense begins and ends with black T-shirts, black belt, blue jeans, black sneakers. I don't drink: my idea of a good time is to read, or dick around on the internet, or play D&D in the garage, or, if I'm feeling particularly sociable, to go out and play trivia on Tuesday nights. I carry a computer with me everywhere I go. I make up for my shortcomings by trying to be witty and pleasant and funny and sincerely polite. I'm okay with that.


3. I've been celibate for the last three years.
   
   Now, let me clarify that last point a bit: I'm not in a dry spell, where I've been haplessly hitting on women and getting shot down—I made a conscious decision to not have sex. I'll get to the particulars in a moment.
   
   I'm not celibate the way monks or priests are celibate, in that I have no moral or ethical qualms with it and no "higher power" has dictated that I should be this way. Sex is not a sin, and even if it was, I'd still love it. Honestly, I love it too much, but I'll get to that in a moment as well.
   
   This is also not an Orpheus thing: I have not loved and lost the perfect woman and now spend my time lamenting her loss to the exclusion of all others, although that is a very romantic thing to do. It's also really dumb.
   
   I stopped having sex three years ago because it was getting me in trouble. And I'm not talking about "getting the clap" trouble or "pissing off good friends" trouble (although…yes, I'm guilty on both those counts, as well). I'm talking about "quitting a good-paying and satisfying and obscenely secure job to go live in Milwaukee and end up working retail for 5 years" trouble and "passive-aggressively coaxing a married lover into leaving her husband" trouble and even "getting a divorce and spending the following three years in a desperate mixture of drunken/stoned/depressed nihilism while waiting to die" trouble.
   
   In short, three years ago I realized that, as long as I could remember, I'd been in a string of fucked-up relationships and the handle on all of them was sex. I could continue lying to myself and bemoaning the fact that I always end up with crazy bitches, or I could own up, accept my part of the blame and admit something was fucking wrong with me and that, until I got it figured out and fixed, I had no business being involved in anything as complicated as a sexual relationship. So, that's what I've been doing.
   
   I am really okay with that, all of it, too.


4. The last time I was sober and an attractive woman threw herself at me bodily the way M. was doing last night, I was in college. And I ended up marrying that woman. Okay…that I sort of regret.

So, there I am, breathless in my first un-chaste embrace in three years. I can hear M.'s heart beating through the thin fabric of her…I'm not even sure what the hell kind of top it was: it's sort of like a tank top, except the strap over the shoulders is more like a string and it's loose and not tucked in and it's got sort of a scooped neck that doesn't quite show cleavage but that leaves nothing to the imagination if the woman wearing it should bend over in front of you. Especially if she's not wearing a bra. Which M., I quickly realized, was not. I can also vaguely hear the sounds of Vic and Adam and Adam's ex-wife's friend changing the topic of conversation as a prelude to getting the fuck up from the table and leaving, which I was pleased about. The buzzing in my ears that was making it difficult for me to hear them talking was becoming somewhat irritating and I almost let it distract me before I realized it was caused by lack of oxygen. So I took a deep breath.

God help me, M. smelled wonderful.

At this point we break the embrace but don't break physical contact: I'm sitting down and M. is crowded up against my left thigh with her right arm draped around my shoulders, rubbing her hand along between my right shoulder and my neck. I have my left arm around her waist and she is pressing my right palm against her belly with her left hand. At this point, before we re-join the conversation around the table, I introduce myself and ask her name. Since I am entirely entranced, this seems like the appropriate thing to do. Then we make small talk with Vic and Adam and M.'s friend and with each other. Every now and again, while we're talking, M.'s right breast brushes against my head. When this happens, I look up at her and smile, and she looks down at me and smiles back. It is, honestly, just as sweet a moment as I've ever imagined.

Now, let me be absolutely honest, here: I am not yet in love with M., which for me is really good, because I've briefly fallen in love with different women several times a week for years and years. Women I've never even touched. Women with whom I've never even passed the time of day. Women who haven't even been present in the same room.

No, at this point I'm thinking that I'm on the receiving end of a friendly, casual bar pick-up: M.'s kind of drunk, maybe she's kind of horny, but in any case she likes my looks enough to consider having sex with me. Nothing's written in stone, but that seems to be the way things are moving.

True, I've never actually been involved in a friendly, casual bar pick-up, but I've heard a whole lot about them and, peripherally, seen them happen. At this point, I figure, I've got nothing to lose; M. came over to me and squished my face into her boobs before we'd even been properly introduced. All I was doing was sitting here wishing I'd been able to remember what year Pootie Tang came out.

So, the extraneous parties all clear out and I invite M. to have a seat. We make small talk: bitching about people who constantly have Bluetooth headsets jammed in their ears, bemoaning society's general lack of manners and dribbling out personal details here and there. M. tells me that she's 34, a single-mom, that she has a good job and only goes out drinking one night a week, usually Fridays, but this week she decided to head out on a Tuesday. I compliment her on her intuition and thank her because I only ever really go out on Tuesdays, so I wouldn't've met her otherwise. The whole time we're talking, we're all over each other: our knees are touching, she has one arm draped languidly around my shoulders, I have a hand on her knee, she has one on my thigh, our feet are rubbing together, we're holding hands. She tells me that she feels like she's got something on her lip and I dutifully lean in real close to look and stroke my fingertip against it and tell her that it's all good now….

Seriously, it's kind of gross to describe it, probably as gross as it would be to witness it. But neither one of us seems to care.

At this point, I ask M. if she wants a drink. I'm not trying to get her all liquored up, but I've long ago finished the ice in my plastic soda cup and I'm starting to get thirsty, so I figure it's polite to offer. M. refuses to let me buy her a drink and, instead, says that she will buy me a drink. She points at my cup and asks me what I'm drinking.

"It's just Coke," I say with a smile.

"Oh, no," she says, "I'm not buying you a Coke. I'm going to buy you a real drink."

At this point I lean in very close, so that I'm breathing directly into her ear, and say "Darlin', I don't really drink."

This revelation is followed up by a quick conversation about whether or not I'm in AA, which I'm not, and have I ever drank, which I have. And here she does the weirdest thing: she takes hold of my earlobes between her thumbs and forefingers and she begins to massage them, which feels surprisingly relaxing. She tells me to close my eyes and she presses her forehead against mine, massaging my earlobes the entire time, and she speaks right into my mouth, so that I can taste her breath, and tells me to remember what my favorite shot was when I did drink, because here is a pretty woman offering to buy it for me.

I caved. At first I said "Jack Daniels," but M. wasn't very fond of brown liquor, so I told her Goldschlager. That went over fine and she hopped up to get the shots.

Now, I'm not going to agonize over the drinking thing because, honestly, it all felt like part of the entire courtship ritual. I never would've ordered a drink on my own and I wouldn't've taken a second shot. Hell, I was so keyed up on endorphins that I barely noticed the alcohol. So, take it as read that I've not started drinking again. But, if a hot woman in a bar makes continuing a conversation contingent on her buying me a drink? Who am I to say "No"?

While I didn't notice the alcohol's effect on me, I was noticing its effect on M., who was beginning to appear and act much drunker than I'd initially suspected. She was slurring her words, lacking hand/eye coordination, repeating questions I'd already answered. With the exception of one brief period in our conversation when she was doing the earlobe massage thing again, with her forehead and nose pressed against mine and…well, talking dirty (seriously, she used the word cunt, and not in a friendly, Shaun of the Dead, British way, but in a very specific, very exciting, very anatomically accurate way) in this throaty voice that came from lips so close to mine I could feel them vibrate, I began to change my thoughts away from friendly, casual bar pick-up to just getting her phone number and calling her later, once she'd sobered up. I mean, entranced as I was, undersexed as I am, I still have some scruples and standards. Going home with a woman I've just met for the express purpose of having sex with her when she is barely able to walk fits neither.

Plus, I was beginning to get the feeling she might vomit at a most inopportune time. I've already got enough issues with sex and I'm not about to add an irrational terror of vomitus to them.

Beyond all that, the conversation was beginning to get weird in a decidedly unhealthy way. She had begun talking about her ex (referring to him on one occasion as, I shit you not, her "babydaddy"), how "he still fucked her" every now and then and how she'd seen him out earlier in the evening with a stripper from the Discotheque. That, all things considered, hit a bit too close to home in my head, so I began to work on getting her phone number and getting her back to her friend.

And that's when everything went batshit.

There are still scraps of paper on the table from trivia. I reach into my backpack to get a pen. M., with a typical, drunken disregard for the obvious, says "Whose backpack is that?"

"Mine," I say, sliding her a scrap of paper and the pen.

"What's in it?" she says, starting to scrawl out her name and phone number.

"My computer."

(Yes, yes, I had my computer in the bar. I told you, I carry it with me everywhere, because nothing says "I'm available, ladies! Queue up here for free smooches!" like sitting in a public place typing in that cool, LCD-glow while wearing headphones. Seriously, it's a portable computer: what good is it if you don't port it places?)

"Why?"

"Because I work on a computer all day and it's sometimes helpful to have it with me."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute. Where do you work again?"

"I told you: I work at the local paper. I'm a graphic designer in the advertising department."

Now, I'm sure that the tirade that followed made sense in M.'s head and, had I known her a bit better, I'd've been able to piece it together as well. But, the whole point of me getting her phone number was so I could get to know her a little bit better, so I'm excusing myself from understanding it any better than what I'm about to relate to you.

Here's the fine gist of it, boiled down to a single sentence: M. was afraid that I would write a story about her being a drunk single mother and publish it in the paper. You want details? Okay, here are a few: M. was under the impression that this sort of thing had happened to her before. She was angry at me because she had trusted me and yet she was "just another story" to me. Her friend (who I don't know and had never met) had warned her against getting involved with me, because "it was all going to happen again." She was very upset and needed to go to the bathroom, but I was not to leave with her phone number until she had come back and talked about this.

Then she got up and went. Presumably to the bathroom. I wouldn't know, as I was so disassociated at the moment I wasn't even watching her.

I sat there at the table for a couple minutes, then I reached over, grabbed the scrap of paper that had her name and phone number on it, flipped it over and wrote my own name and phone number on the back. I stood up, shouldered my backpack, saw that Vic was still sitting at the bar and that he was looking at me. I looked him in the eye. Shook my head a bit and shrugged with my eyes. Then I walked over to where M.'s friend was sitting at the bar, holding her cell-phone against her ear, not talking and not looking at me.

"Hey," I said, sliding the piece of paper over in front of her, with my name and number facing up.

No reaction. She stared into the distance and didn't talk into her phone.

"That piece of paper has M.'s phone number on it," I said, tapping it with the pen. "Make sure she gets it, because it's obviously very important to her."

No eye contact. Nodding her head, as if the person who wasn't on the other end of the line could see her agreeing.

"And that's my name and number, there." Tap, tap. "If M. wants to call me, maybe once she's sobered up," here there is a glance, cold and fleeting, "tell her to feel free."

Nod. Nod.

"Sorry," I said, shrugging, "but I have to go."