Chapter 45: In Which Our Hero Does 'Coyote Ugly'
Life is all about seasons. We move slowly, like a piece of shrapnel in a bust-up knee, from one to the next. The season du jour for Our Hero right now appears to be Fall Retrospective with a heavy dose of Farewell thrown in for good measure. There is a photo folder on my laptop called 'Parties' and it's beginning to fill up with more Farewells than anything else. [Heaves a big sigh].
Wednesday night was Krista's farewell, held at Carnegie's, that club/pub/restaurant of ill-repute. I'd been there once before, a year ago, one week after training ended for a big catch-up session with Mary and Emmett (before they got all OC Jimmy Cooper on us, stole money and left the country suddenly). This time all the usual suspects were there - An-Magrit, Avril, The Boys, Christina etc.
Wednesday night at Carnegie's are an institution, I'm told. The concept is simple: it's Ladies Night, which basically means free champagne (within limits) for the gals and an opportunity for every drunk, overweight, skanky old man in existence to try get lucky. It was a veritable meat market and I was the only piece of tofu in the place! Still, once dinner had ended and the DJ began to play music that wasn't hip-hop (Taiwan clubs have this unspoken/spoken rule - if it's not hip-hop, it's just not chicken's feet!), I figured I could put up with the smell of Dirty Old Man, cope with the fact that the queue for the bar was longer than most of the people in the place had been without sex and that I Was Definitely Doing This For Krista.
Turns out, ha ha, how wrong I was. The evening was too too fabulous. Before I knew it, they were playing Gwen Stefani, Britney Spears and Madonna, and Yours Truly was up on the bar counter shaking his youknowwhats like he'd just downed 5 cocktails. Which he hadn't, FYI! Dear dear sweet Krista insisted that I have to get on the bar for a dance, adding, "Justin's done it" by way of incentive. Clearly Mz Blair doesn't know me for the stage-whore, bar-climbing, attention-seeking dance slut that I am. We gave them a hip-grinding, crotch-thrusting, all-eyes-on-us show that had the boys green with envy. Either thaty or going, "Hey! Who's the fag on the bar?". Not to be limited to just the one girl, I soon had Claire up there with me, followed by Sal, and then Claire and Sal together, by which point the novelty had worn off for the patrons. But fuck it I was having a blast. I Coyote Uglied with the best of 'em.
We strolled home at about 1:30am, not drunkenly at all, in fact stone cold sober, as I'd been the entire evening. And as we debated the merits of weird-'n-forceful Indian men, I thought to myself, "I could really go in for some karaoke right now!"...
Wednesday night was Krista's farewell, held at Carnegie's, that club/pub/restaurant of ill-repute. I'd been there once before, a year ago, one week after training ended for a big catch-up session with Mary and Emmett (before they got all OC Jimmy Cooper on us, stole money and left the country suddenly). This time all the usual suspects were there - An-Magrit, Avril, The Boys, Christina etc.
Wednesday night at Carnegie's are an institution, I'm told. The concept is simple: it's Ladies Night, which basically means free champagne (within limits) for the gals and an opportunity for every drunk, overweight, skanky old man in existence to try get lucky. It was a veritable meat market and I was the only piece of tofu in the place! Still, once dinner had ended and the DJ began to play music that wasn't hip-hop (Taiwan clubs have this unspoken/spoken rule - if it's not hip-hop, it's just not chicken's feet!), I figured I could put up with the smell of Dirty Old Man, cope with the fact that the queue for the bar was longer than most of the people in the place had been without sex and that I Was Definitely Doing This For Krista.
Turns out, ha ha, how wrong I was. The evening was too too fabulous. Before I knew it, they were playing Gwen Stefani, Britney Spears and Madonna, and Yours Truly was up on the bar counter shaking his youknowwhats like he'd just downed 5 cocktails. Which he hadn't, FYI! Dear dear sweet Krista insisted that I have to get on the bar for a dance, adding, "Justin's done it" by way of incentive. Clearly Mz Blair doesn't know me for the stage-whore, bar-climbing, attention-seeking dance slut that I am. We gave them a hip-grinding, crotch-thrusting, all-eyes-on-us show that had the boys green with envy. Either thaty or going, "Hey! Who's the fag on the bar?". Not to be limited to just the one girl, I soon had Claire up there with me, followed by Sal, and then Claire and Sal together, by which point the novelty had worn off for the patrons. But fuck it I was having a blast. I Coyote Uglied with the best of 'em.
We strolled home at about 1:30am, not drunkenly at all, in fact stone cold sober, as I'd been the entire evening. And as we debated the merits of weird-'n-forceful Indian men, I thought to myself, "I could really go in for some karaoke right now!"...