As I paid the bouncer and stepped into the bar proper, the bass ripped through my eardrums and began scrambling my cerebral cortex like farm-fresh eggs.
Chris and I were out for revenge, for blood. Our target? Valentine’s Day. A thoroughly depressing run of Lonely Hearts Club binges on this yearly bummer had driven us to PJ Bottoms.
We were determined that we absolutely would not spend this year in some dark, musty dive bar with “Singles Specials,” hoping to run into disheartened members of the opposite sex who were doing the same thing. This year we would meet Valentine’s Day head-on. And that’s how I met Laura.
Well, in all honesty, her name could have been Laura, or Nora, or Casseopeia, for all I know. The speakers in PJ’s could stop a pacemaker, so conversation becomes a game of educated guesses.
“SO, YOU’RE A WRITER,” Laura half-asked, half-yelled.
“Yeah,” I shouted back. “It’s got its perks.”
“Oh my God,” she exclaimed, a hand to her chest. “I LOVE The Strokes!”
Using a combination of semaphore code and sign language I’d picked up from Voyage of the Mimi, I hailed Chris from across the bar and indicated that we should go out for a smoke.
Laura, tagging along, idly toyed with a lock of her brown hair and sucked on one of my Marlboro Lights. She could not have been less interested in our conversation.
She glanced up and down Main Street and complained that she had to go home early; she had a test in the morning. I asked what subject.
“It’s the fucking Earth Science Regents,” said Laura, or whoever the hell she was. “I’m in Honors, but I still have to take it.”
She had said “Honors” like I would care.
I turned to grab Chris and escape from this statutory nightmare, but he was already halfway down the block, running a full sprint to beat hell towards the Metro station.
Earlier that night we had been at the opposite end of the age-discrepancy table. We had started our Valentine’s Night quest at the Marriott Hotel bar. The Marriott has a reputation on the local bar scene for being a “cougar den,” a venue for sexually-aggressive older women to find some casual fun with college-age guys while on business trips.
A twenty-something male stepping into a cougar den is like a freshman girl stepping into PJ’s. A slight ripple of recognition shoots through the crowd, and you feel as though you’ve accidentally stepped onstage during a Broadway musical or a livestock auction.
Sure enough, faster than you could say, “Mrs. Robinson,” Chris and I found ourselves sharing cocktails with two regional managers for accounting firms from the Midwest. They were in town for a conference, and tonight was their last night at the hotel. The women were stunning and seemed nice enough at first, but their body language and not-so-subtle innuendo quickly convinced us that we just weren’t mature enough for that kind of mindfuck. There is just no way you can jump into such a dramatic sexual role reversal with no prior cougar experience and still keep your poise. You need to work up to that sort of thing gradually, with training wheels—or marijuana. We had neither.
Yet still, the women pushed. One grabbed Chris’s junk; the other called me a pussy when I took her hand out of my pocket. I was starting to feel dirty. We fled the place, but only after one of the women mentioned she had a son—two years our junior. What started as a Graduate fantasy wound up a nightmare...months from now I’ll still be waking up screaming after seeing an endless parade of powersuits with fanged vaginas walking around like zombies, spitting gin from the neckholes and moaning, “Meat...meeaatt...MEEAATTT!!!”
In the end, we wound up exactly where we expected to be: Lonely Hearts Club Night at some dive on Allen Street. As I slid into a seat at the bar, a girl next to me wished me a happy Valentine’s Day.
“Go to bed with me,” I said.
“No.”
“Thanks for your honesty.”
