Ok, so I didn't really. I just like saying that.
The other night a friend of mine from out of state was in town.
We had dinner. He wanted to go out for a drink afterward.
I grudgingly agreed.
I'm the world's worst tour guide, especially when it comes to bars, and I didn't feel like trying to park downtown, so I took him to St. Joe's, uptown...which is ever so collegiate and straight.
But it has a lovely kinda Royal-Pavilion-at-Brighton-on-a-budget themed courtyard.
With Chinese lanterns! I'm a sucker for a Chinese lantern.
It was packed with college and post-college sorts....and us.
We got drinks. He continued pontificating about philosophy and
literature.
He's really tall and good looking, so he can get away with that shit, you know.
A few minutes into a rerun of his spiel about Muriel Spark, we were interrupted by a blonde grad-school looking gal.
"Hey, has anyone ever told you that you look like Joe Manganiello?" she asked.
She asked my friend, that is.
Not me.
I mean no one has
ever been
that drunk.
"Huh?" he asked. "I don't know who that is," he told her curtly.
She tried to explain, but he didn't much care. Didn't stop her, however. God bless her.
Next thing I know he's insulting her taste in books.
Then she turned her attention to me.
"Jeez, he's kind of an asshole, isn't he, your friend there?" she nodded flirtatiously at him....and touched my knee.
"Yeah," I agreed.
"But you're not. You're nice. I like you
better anyway," she went on.
He roared out a hearty laugh.
The three of us continued to talk. Somewhere, about twenty minutes into the conversation, with no moves being made on our parts, she sobered up a bit and asked the obvious:
"Wait, you two aren't gay, are you?"
"Sorry," we smiled.
"Oh damn. What the hell!" she sighed.
But she didn't leave.
We kept talking. Bought her a drink. Her friends at the other table kept giggling.
God bless her.
Turned out she was on vacation, from DC, some kind of intern or something.
Hated it there and hated the midwest too. where she was from originally.
She hadn't seen anything of the city but what her friends had dragged her to.
We got out a cocktail napkin and made a list of places for her to go, outside of the quarter, places where she could meet some straight and not fratty guys, hopefully. She thanked us and went back to her friends.
Then we got our drinks, said our goodbyes...and went to a gay bar...where, of course,
no one hit on us at all.
