[ i wrote, and posted these, last night/this morning, on facebook. Hence the weird delay thing]
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All that writing sobered me right up.
Now it’s 3AM (I must be lonely?) and I’m in an office (a couple of blocks away from the club in mention), no longer needing to wait to sober up, but obligated to finish this story.
So. I’m at Fat Tuesday, looking for my friend Jeff, marveling at the novelty of being in a club. I do one quick lap, they aren’t there. On my way out some girl makes eye contact and smiles, so I smile back, no clue who she was. She says “Good to see you again.” Only the fifth word is a lie when I respond “Good to see you again too!”
I stop by Lillians, sing a couple of songs with my friend Berg. Badly.
I hit Fat Tuesday’s again, and decide to post up on the ‘stage’ and hang out for a while, and talk to my friend, who happens to bounce there. (I like that sentence because it gives the image of my friend, like flubber, bouncing from wall to wall).
After about five minutes of doing my best attempt to not look awkward or out of place, I notice that there’s a girl in front of me, noticing me. She does a triple or quadruple take before finally saying “Are you Phil?”
I say “Yes”. Because I was (Still am). At which point she asks me something I’ve never been asked.
“Will you dance one clean dance with me?”
My poker face for unusual statements is pretty rock solid.
I’ve conditioned myself to respond with enthusiasm whenever anyone says something that might be somewhat confessional in nature. People need the encouragement, and I would hate for someone to broach something with me because they feel that I, of all people, will be receptive, and then I snub them so then they never tell anyone again.
Last month someone, in casual conversation, unexpectedly told me “Well, I’m a sadomasochist.” and rather than going “WHAT THE F@K NO F@KING WAY?!” I just said “Cool!” and smiled. Then she showed me her hand cuffs. Then her riding crop. Then her ball gag. Poker face. True story.
Unfortunately this level-headedness backfires because I never get a second chance to respond the way I really want to. This girl, Angie, asked if I would clean dance with her and I just said “Of course” when really I would’ve loved to have tried any number of other responses. Namely:
“Oh do I have to?”
“How about ‘Kinda clean’?”
“No. I don’t clean dance. Dirty is all I got. Turn around. Bend over.”
“What? Wait. What? Huh? Who are you? Do I know you? Clean? … I don’t understand.”
Should I have been flattered? Insulted? I still don’t know. The optimist in me says she knows that most guys versions of dancing looks something like Zygote genesis, so she just preemptively stops it by stating “Hey, I don’t need to feel you every step of this song.”
However… that style of dancing is far from new, and I’ve -never- been asked that question (or had that restriction placed on me), so the pessimist in me says “This girl looked at you, and wanted to dance but thought you were going to maul her, so she thought she’d be up front and lay down some ground rules.”
But maybe not.
Maybe girls ALWAYS explain “Hey.. Clean dance.” and it’s just that every girl I’ve ever danced with, before this girl wanted me to freak them senseless, and I just didn’t know. How disappointed they must’ve all been.
(“This doesn’t seem so dirty.” – Every Girl I’ve Ever Danced With, Internally.)
(Which is to say, that was their internal monologue. I wasn’t dancing with them internally. That would make it very dirty.)
So I ask her how she knows my name, and she says something about the band. She says that we’ve met three or four times before (which I think is a complete lie but I don’t say as much. I have a horrible memory for faces, names, directions, pretty much anything you would need to remember. But I remember how Miles Dyson dies in Terminator 2, so that’s worth something.), so we clean dance. Moments later I overhear someone say “Deena would be SO jealous!”
A couple minutes into the clean dance, she asks if I know Deena. Of course I know Deena Williams, she’s also a very sweet person and has been to a handful of shows. I do it like that (“I know firstname lastname”) because when you’re a faux celebrity you’re expected to be bluffing, people take the lastname as an indicator of truth. If you just say “Oh yeah I know firstname”, people think you’re full of shit, and full of yourself. A=B, A=C, B=C. You = Shit.
In ordinary conversations, if you say firstname/lastname, it’d be sort of odd.
Instantly there’s someone’s phone in my hand, and I’m supposed to leave a message for Deena. You want proof of me on a voicemail? Oh. I’m so so very sorry. At this point I want to explain to them that I’m really not famous, or cool, or any of these things, and that maybe there are some guys from the football team around, they’re probably much better at this sort of thing. (“This is how we do!”)
Instead I scream something that is meant to be personable and friendly into the answering machine, and I’m sure it was mostly distorted and weird, but c’est la vie.