Now then. Where were we?
Noah and I (with friends Josh and Gut in tow) finished our enormous meal (complete with insane chocolaty dessert) and were headed for Waterfront, a bar that is apparently the after-hours location of choice for Karl Strauss employees and also possibly everyone else that ever lived, ever.
As we went our separate ways momentarily to take care of both ordering the first round of drinks and attending to the way-past-broken seal situation, Josh managed to snag us a table in the front corner of the bar, prime location for people watching with solid vantage points throughout the entire room, and onto the front patio. After spending a good few minutes watching Noah attempt a Rick Roll on the iPad that was posted on the wall next to our table (presumably placed there for menu surfing and not YouTube-ing Rick Astley videos), we were probably just cracking open drink two when I decided I needed to approach the DJ.
You and I both should’ve known this was an error, but I went boldly forward to a place that I can almost guarantee no one had tread before me: requesting a Tina Turner song from the Thursday night DJ at Waterfront. And you can just add that to the increasingly long list of times in my life when I’ve asked for a Tina song and been brutally rebuffed. And y’all, I had reason to believe the dream was achievable. He’d been playing soul classics, some 70s funk, a little James Brown, some MoTown. I did not think this request was impossible or crazy. But apparently it was, even after I basically promised lewd and lascivious acts to this guy if only he could come up with a little “Nutbush City Limits.”
A few drinks later, I was basically recovered from this musical devastation when Noah’s work buddies showed up to join us, so I wasted no time in recapping them thoroughly on the events of the evening thus far. First things first, I was able to detail for them the interactions of a fairly unattractive middle aged couple who were seated awkwardly on bar stools not near any table or the bar, just sort of floating in the middle of the walkway/impromptu dance floor. But their seating location choice was less of an issue than their decision to make out with PUH-LENTY of tongue aggressively and ad nauseum for at least 20 minutes. They definitely came up for air a few times, but luckily not long enough to notice that I was kneeling on my bar stool, leaning over our table (not five feet away) doing what I felt was a highly accurate real-time one-woman reenactment of exactly what was happening. Also with PUH-LENTY of tongue.
I then shared with them the woeful tale of the hippie girl and the Wall-Street-looking type who was trying to woo her. Or perhaps she was trying to woo him. They were sitting at the edge of the bar just across from our table, and they kept getting up to dance, which inevitably each time would turn into him doing something that resembled John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, while SHE was doing something that resembled some sort of hippie gypsy seduction snake dance. And once I’m pretty sure she almost lost her skirt. There’s a chance it was being held up by safety pins.
Finally, I had to give them the full scoop on the full-on-Monet curvaceous gal in what can only be described as a Beagle Boys jail-break dress who was basically giving lap dances to just about every willing guy in the bar. When she’d started her dancing, innocently enough, she had been in the open area next to our table. And crazy as she was (and you KNOW how I love crazy) I openly dared myself to dance with her. But when I tried I found that even actively attempting to rub myself on her did not seem to work, drunk as she absolutely was, because her rear end was magnetically attracted to whatever male crotch was in the most immediate vicinity. As I was telling them this story, I thought she’d actually left the bar since I hadn’t seen her anywhere in a while. But then? Out of the corner of my eye? Like another little gift from the universe, the punchline of my story was waiting right there at the far end of the bar, dropping it like it was luke warm at the VERY least on another semi-willing victim.
The rest of the evening gets a little muddy for me. I’m hoping I can hit the highlights for you. (The ones I can remember.)
Josh and I spent some time exploring the bar (and when I say “exploring the bar” I clearly mean getting the lay of the land and gawking at other bar patrons openly) and discovered in the process that there was an old fashioned popcorn machine in the back AND an erotic photo hunt game AND perhaps about a half-dozen guys playing pool with a single, solitary female, all of whom may have just dropped directly out of the expo hall of a comic book convention.
I later bonded with Noah’s friend Ashley over the fact that we both say HOLY BALLS, and actually my reaction to learning this fact was somewhere between “You have a long-lost half-sister” and “Oh em gee I have those EXACT SAME SHOES.” This might have been around the point in the evening that everything I had to say became way too important to sit on my bottom on that bar stool any longer. I was propped up on my knees, gesticulating wildly, PBR in one hand, in one of the few moments in my life when I have ever been able to tower over anyone. And then, all of a sudden, I was REAL drunk. That stuff just sneaks up on you, doesn’t it? It is possible that all those beers had something to do with it.
Not surprisingly, when Noah and I were back at Strauss a few days later and I was talking with one of the girls who’d been there that night, I mentioned something about what I do for a living and she said, “Yeah, you told me all about it, it sounds like so much fun!”
“I told you about my job?” I said. She laughed.
Because yes. Apparently I did. At length. Isn’t that sweet?
And even in that state of affairs, after 12 some-odd beers I still decided it would be a good idea to do a whiskey shot somewhere close to last call. And of course, it was Bulleit. You never miss, do you?
After I got home from vacation I found a note in my phone that was created at 1:07 a.m. that night. It said “Tom Hardy mixtape beats by 9th Wonder.” I had no memory of creating the note. I had no memory of where the information in the note came from. But with that time stamp? I felt it was a direct order from tipsy, bar-stool propped, HOLY-BALLS-yelling me. Or also, the universe.
I downloaded it immediately.
cheers,
elizabeth
P.S.: Thanks to the wonders of the collective recalled memory that is often called Facebook, I learned that Josh had told me about Tom Hardy. And that mixtape? It’s the business.
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