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reaching up like McDonalds arches
Thursday, May 31 2001
John and I sipped vodkatea from an old 32 oz. bottle of King Cobra as we walked to McLeans, the Irish pub near the corner of 26th and Wilshire in Santa Monica. There we played game after game of pool with a couple of straight up regular guys who happened to be from New York City. Surprisingly enough, we weren't actually playing all that badly, though we kept having bad luck in the form of game-losing scratches. We managed to lose every game we played save one, including two different "beer games," meaning we had to buy two rounds of beers. The humiliation was getting so intense towards the end that John suggested we just grab the stack of quarters on the table and run. But truth be known, we were far too drunk to care.
We'd been drinking Red Hook (I'm back to that after a couple years in the Sierra Nevada desert), but these gentlemen wanted a pitcher of Caffrey's. We tried to join them in drinking it, but it tasted (as John observed) "like wallpaper glue."
We were sort of hungry and in need of a change of scene by this point, so we walked to the Ralphs at Bundy and Wilshire. I wasn't quite sure why we were going to a supermarket for the satiation of hunger until John started "sampling" the goods. This entailed walking up and down the aisles whilst eating all 2000 calories worth of a bag of rosemary-flavored potato chips, a task he executed in as matter-of-fact manner as you can possibly imagine. No one in the store seemed to care; the hour was late and the employees were too busy stocking shelves from the many palettes of merchandise that had been pulled out of the warehouse area into the retail space. For my part, I feasted upon a good many tin-foil packaged peanut-butter & chocolate candy cups. We walked out of Ralphs with full stomachs, having never once touched our wallets.
We staggered through a side-plaza, pissing wantonly on a tree planter, and continued on to Q's, the big schteveish bar further east down Wilshire. Mustering what sobriety we could, we walked in and went directly to the bar. "They're looking at us funny and talking to each other," John observed, adding "they must remember you." "No way," I said, "there are far too many people coming through here for them to remember me. Besides, that was a long time ago." But then the bartender came up to us and said that though he'd never seen me before, he'd just been talking to two of his "colleagues" and they recognized me as someone who had been drunk and causing lots of trouble and mayhem on some earlier occasion. Ever the diplomat, John assured the bartender that he'd never in his life known me to cause the slightest trouble and that, furthermore, we were perfectly sober. Hesitantly, then, the bartender got us a beer to share. The bouncers (now equipped with Britney-style radio headsets) watched us closely from then on, but we behaved ourselves like perfect gentlemen, even while our drunkenness pleaded for us to behave otherwise.
So well behaved were we that, instead of being repulsive to women, we seemed to attract the attention of a few. One girl around the bar kept looking over at John in a way that gave him the confidence to buy her a vodka martini and then actually get up and go talk to her. Meanwhile there was a drunk girl to my left who was flirtingly accusing me of making dirty faces at her friend. Eventually, though, I went to join John, who was now seated with his random flirt-friend. She wasn't all that cute, but she had her tits all jacked up in a sexy way and John had especially thick beer goggles on. She had a friend with her who was trying even harder to look super sexy in the skanky way that mostly just turns my stomach. This friend had her tits set at maximum cleavage, stuffed within a tight pink halter top that stopped somewhat above her pants. Intruding into the fleshy space in-between were the parabolic straps of her thong, reaching up like McDonalds arches over her hips. This friend girl, she was a source of some insecurity for the flirty girl John was talking to. The flirty girl had already asked John if he was talking to her just to meet the friend. Mark this down, students of flirting, John's response had been perfect: "What other girl?"
But if I thought I was ever going to talk to this "extra" friend girl, I was mistaken. She sat there with her nose in the air, looking around the room and directly through me in a frantic halting way, trying to come off as if she was extremely bored and perhaps awaiting a rendezvous with Tommy Lee. Since John and the first girl were taking up all the available spaces in their segment of bar, I briefly sat with the friend in a booth. This lasted for about fifteen seconds before she jumped up and faux-purposefully hurried off to scope out the front of the bar, acting as if she was a very important person. Obviously, though, she was but a nobody. Los Angeles nightlife is a nonstop tapestry of celebrity imitators, groupies and wanna-bes, but most of them have a little more class and a lot less skank.
When Q's closed down for the night, John and I did the cool thing and split, not even bothering to ask for a number. But the girls still managed to catch up with us on the sidewalk and the ritual number exchange was forced by circumstance. While the skanky bitch hung back and talked to some random hunky guy, the flirty girl entered John's number directly into her cell phone and then immediately tried it out, leaving a message on our answering machine. Somewhat sexually frustrated by my comparative lack of success, I didn't feel like sticking around, so I left John and the girl and went home on my own.
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