**Editors' Note: This guest post came in late last night. I happened to be around for this one (funny how often that happens) and was one of the unfortuante fools suffering the Nikki-Six wannabe. After reading this, I'm glad I got him and not the ass hitting on the married chick.**
Dating may be weird, but believe it or not … marriage can be pretty damn bizarre, as well. But those are stories for a whole 'nuther blog. I've been out of the dating scene for years, and while I do visit the bars (ok, one bar) from time to time I am not usually privy to an insider's look at the dating/pick-up scene in the 21st century. My fortunes changed one evening not long ago.
I met some friends at "the" bar for drinks and conversation. The four of us—three of us female and one male—sat at the bar for a spell, making small talk over our beers and whiskeys. When the linear arrangement of seating made conversation difficult we picked up our drinks and moved down to a table. Things were busy that night, with a table down the way quickly filling with people and growing in size as more tables were dragged over to accommodate the blossoming number of drunks gathering there. They were young, for the most part … and granted I'm older than everyone in this story so a bunch of early-20-somethings made it look like frat-boy night at the bar to me. Though, NONE of these people looked like ever they'd seen a college, let alone a frat house.
The four of us minded our own business, drinking and talking, laughing and drinking more. Eventually the youngsters outgrew their accommodations and went looking for more seats. They found them at our table, and instead of picking the chairs up and dragging them over to their soiree, three of the guys plopped their asses in chairs around our table. At first I was sure one of my companions knew these guys, despite the fact that one of them—the ringleader, it seemed—looked like a Nikki Sixx-wannabe, and the other two looked like they were Nikki Sixx-wannabe wannabes. Aim high, young men … aim high. Needless to say, my companions did not know these boys.
Wannabe One placed himself at the end of the table, between me and my male friend. Wannabe One looked at me and said, "You're married, aren't you?" To which I replied, with a sarcastic flash of my ring finger in front of my face, "Wow, what ever gave you that idea?" Give the young man props for his astuteness. His answer? "Because you're so sexy." Wow again. And thus began Wannabe One's heavy-handed charm … from his sharing of his pay stub with me (he had a job!) to his drunken slurring of my name whenever he could fit it in a sentence. Boy was all of 24 chronologically, but not a day over 16 emotionally. At the end of the table, one of my girlfriends was getting the suave treatment by Nikki Sixx-wannabe and Wannabe Two. At one point Nikki Sixx-wannabe looked at me, trying for his best deep and smoky look, and asked, "Where are you from?"
So I'm from California … I don't always share it up front because I get some ribbing for it, but with this guy I was more than willing to do some verbal sparing. "California," I said. "Ah, me too," said Nikki, sealing our common bond, "I'm from Huntington Beach." "Oh," I replied, "Huh. I'm from Northern California … we don't typically like the SoCal bunch."
And what do you do when a woman makes a point to show she has no interest in who you are or where you're from? You try to impress her with your rock-star credentials, of course. "I'm just up here with my band," says Nikki. "Oh?," I say, "What's the name of your band?" To which he replies:
"Slut."
Honest to god. (No, this is not the same band as the German band Slut … in case you music lovers were wondering.) "You must get a lot of girls with that," says my girlfriend who's been stuck with these two hacks hovering over her. But they still don't get the hint. Obviously our acid is not acidic enough. Finally, after disturbing our peace for a good 20 minutes, Nikki Sixx-wannabe asks, "So, what are you guys doing tonight?" To which my friend and I look at each other and reply dryly and in unison: "This."
They didn't run away immediately, but they apparently heard chastity belts locking because they pulled back on their assault, slowly filtering back into their own crowd of hairspray, black leather and ear piercings. We continued with our night.
I told my husband the story when I got home, and he just laughed. Which, on one hand, was nice … he wasn't going to blow a gasket over me being at a bar with random losers hitting on me. On the other hand, he could have shown a little concern. I mean, really? Your wife is at a dive bar and you have zero territorial instincts when you hear she's been hit upon? That's just one way in which marriage is weird. But again, that's a story for another blog.