If this kid asks me one more time if I want to “lick his lollipop”, I am going to take it from him, and put it somewhere he will have to have a nurse help him find. I am too drunk for this. I look past him at Rena, my ride-or-die-bar-fly who is sitting at the end of the row, hitting on Lollipop’s friend. When we make eye contact I mouth the words, “Can we go?” but she ignores me and turns back to the latest in a long line.
I shake my head and hop off my barstool, pushing past
Lollipop to stumble over to the ladies room. It is a Tuesday night. I have no
idea how we even ended up here again tonight when we swore we wouldn’t, except
for that it was the typical place to be when we had nothing going on the next
day and we’d been day drinking all afternoon. How bleak, I tell myself in the
mirror. Get your shit together! Movement at the edge of my reflection has me
whirling around to see Lollipop, leering at me from the doorway of the
restroom. When he holds up the lollipop and begins to speak I lose it. I think
he falls into the trash can as I shove him but who knows. I am on a mission.
“Rena!” I half-shout. She takes her time turning around. The
man she is glued to glares at me as she peels herself off of him and I am
reminded of an octopus.
“Whaaaaaat?” she whines at me. She is only held up from
being a drunken puddle on the ground because she is straddling this stranger,
and if I was a better friend I would peel her the rest of the way off and drag
her back to her house. But she goes into these bars with
this exact plan in mind and I do not have the energy to talk drunk her out of
this tonight.
“’I’m leaving,” I inform her. “Are you coming with me?” She
shakes her head and melts back into the man in the corner so I turn, having to
push past Lollipop yet again, who has miraculously recovered from the trash
can. The octopus brothers.
I am beyond angry when I stumble out of the bar onto the
sidewalk. I am on the one of the busiest streets in our city and I am dressed
like happy hooker. On a Tuesday. I am in Rena’s shoes, at least a size too
small. My skirt is riding up and my knees are fat in this artificial sidewalk
moonlight. I am morose over my fat knees, and lamenting whether I deserve them
for being a bar fly out on a Tuesday night when out of nowhere a white van
driven by the devil flies into my line of sight and into my right hip. I am
flying through the air.
I immediately come to, because what if a cop just saw that,
and pop up from my spreadeagle there on the pavement, struggling to gather my
senses, and the contents of my purse. The contents of my purse are scattered
down the sidewalk and into the gutter. This van has hit me so hard I have
popped right out of Rena’s shoes! I rake my items back into my purse and snatch
the shoes up with one hand, stumbling as I now turn to give the driver of this
van a piece of my mind!
The van is just sitting there, the tinted window rolled up,
the driver watching me as I lunge closer to him. “Oh it’s on now buddy!” I yell
at the van as I stomp my bare feet toward it. I am getting angrier the closer I
get, that this moron has the audacity not to even pretend concern at the fact
that he mowed me down, right there in the street. Right there in front of
everybody! And then it dawns on me.
He's not going to roll down the window and ask me if I’m
okay because he doesn’t exist. There’s nobody sitting behind the tinted window
in the driver’s seat. I’ve just been knocked out by a parked van. At the car dealership
next door to the bar. And as it dawns on me, the streetlamp now seems to have
focused it’s beam on the van, mocking me. “Hey”, a voice calls from out of the
shadows. I whirl around. It’s Lollipop.
