So Weird
March 31, 2005
I met Deborah last night. Who's Deborah? She's the girl who left me that funny comment recently.
"I can't believe you agreed to meet me," she said shyly, covering her face in embarrassment when I sat down.
"I nearly chickened out at the last minute," I admitted.
It was true: on my way to meet her, pangs of, "What the fuck am I doing?" puckered my gut, but since it was too late to cancel without looking like a complete asshole, I bit the bullet, hopped on the subway and went to meet my fate.
And you know what?
I'm glad I did.
April 3, 2005
The plan for our second date was for me to meet Deborah in Park Slope where her friend Arlan's band was playing, and then hit a movie afterwards. But, as anyone who's ever gone to see a friend's band play knows, band "start times" work on a completely different clock than movie "start times".
As far as Deborah knew, the band was due to go on at eight o'clock, which would've left us plenty of time to make the 10:20 movie, but when we arrived and saw two guys playing pool on a table where a stage should've been, Deborah began to worry that she had the wrong night. She called Arlan to find out, and he assured her that, no, she had it right and he was on his way.
The hands on my watch creaked under the strain as eight o'clock became nine o'clock and nine became ten. Deborah went outside for a smoke, and I tagged along. After being in the vacuum of bar time for a few hours--if you can call them hours--the nearby clock tower looked more like a propeller, or a fan, and it blew our movie plans down the rainy street.
Time is relative, it's true.
I didn't care. The idea was to spend time with Deborah; the rest was just window dressing. And besides, the band was good.
I pulled out my camera and took a picture. Deborah's friend Kyra was snapping photos of her own, and after briefly comparing cameras, she handed me her card. "I have a good picture of Deborah on my website," she said. (I've since looked, but couldn't find it.)
Strictly out of curiosity, we stayed to watch the band that followed Arlan's. The bar's vibe was distinctly roots rock and country twang, but the musicians milling about, waiting to go on, appeared to be a motley collection of glam-rockers. Faux hawks, pointy boots, and stovepipe pants. I leaned into Deborah's ear and sang her a line from a song that my friends Erick and Brian wrote:
"Glam rocker, glam rocker Rod Stewart hair, Mick Jagger-mocker—"
After watching with a twinge of disappointment as the band shuffled through a couple of country covers, our curiosity was satisfied, and we left.
"One last drink," Deborah suggested, as she took me by the hand and steered me to an even dive-ier dive. "Here, we have to take a detour. People get shot the other way."
The place was cavernous and had so many shelves, and so little booze, that the bottles were spread out like David Letterman's teeth. A stone-drunk fireman was yelling through a filthy, orange safety cone like a carnival barker, "Step right up, step right up," while the bartender threw lemon wedges into the cone's wide end.
Since Deborah and I both felt like we'd had enough to drink by that point, our nightcaps became a couple of club sodas that the bartender poured from a 2-liter plastic bottle. We nestled into a musty booth, under the blue glow of neon from a beer sign in the front window.
"I had fun tonight," she said.
"Me too. A lot of fun."
"I still can't believe you agreed to meet me after I acted so weird."
I looked around the bar at the theatrics that surrounded us: The bartender winding up strikes with fistfulls of lemon; the fireman with the cone still to his lips, weaving back and forth like a charmed snake; the crowd of neighborhood toughs, yelling from the booths; their girlfriends, with unlikely hairdos and jeweled cotton candy fingernails, cackling over distorted music oozing from tattered speakers. Then I turned back to Deborah and shrugged. "You weren't so weird."
