All Sorts of Classy
We've just returned from watching the big fireworks display from the top of a nearby parking structure and I'm perched on a stool listening to my friend expound upon one of the many conspiracies he has exhaustively researched and cataloged in his brain. I sip my Dutch beer and try to listen, but honestly I've reached that point in the evening where amiable consideration has given way to cramped face muscles from all the dubious eyebrow raising. We're beyond cruise missiles hitting the Pentagon and the Builderburg group now. He's talking about the secret military base on the dark side of the moon, but all I can think about is the movie about moon Nazis that I saw the teaser for many months ago.
Click to viewMy half-hearted attempts to veer off the topic of Howdy-Doody's image being secretly carved into the model they used to fake the original moon landings fall away in the face of the conspiracy onslaught. I've brought along a younger friend who was until tonight mercifully ignorant of global shadow governments and Waco cover-ups. A pitcher of Stella arrives right as the conversation jumps the tracks and into the underground sex rings run by Child Protective Services. "My mom works for Child Protective Services..." he warbles by way of protest. "It's all compartmentalized!" comes the triumphant rejoinder. "See, your mom doesn't know... probably... because she-"
I decide to forgo the lecture to follow, and step outside to answer buzzing in my pocket that is my phone's pithy way of reminding me that I have messages.
It takes three tries before I manage to mash the right series of buttons for my security code. I'm raising the phone to my ear when the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Down the block to my left, a solitary figure in a wheelchair is dragging herself toward me with her one visible leg. I don't know why I know it's a woman. The block between us is dark and the only light on her is a dirty wash of yellow coming from the streetlight behind her. She's perfectly backlit without a single visible detail as she shuffles toward me. I register an ominously repetitive creak coming from one of the wheels and I think to myself that this is the part in the old horror movies when the choir begins chanting and the sound guy mixes in some barely audible sounds of farm animals being slaughtered.
I turn back toward the street and will her to just pass me by. My face is hidden by my phone. I figure that this makes me moderately safe from requests for spare change or what have you. I still haven't seen her but that part of my brain that takes life lessons away from horror movies has informed me in no uncertain terms that whatever is hobbling around behind me is bad, bad news. I am on the phone. They can't see me if I'm not looking at them.
"Do you have a car?"
Fuck.
I turn around, still clutching the phone to my face. This isn't the question I was expecting, and I take my hand out of the pocket I was preparing to jingle expressively to prove my lack of spare change. What's slouching behind me isn't the street-ravaged DHS dependent crone that my brain was telling me to expect, but a girl roughly my age wearing a short skirt and a hot pink cast on one leg that somebody has signed by drawing the logo of the band Slayer. "Um, what..." I'm not asking what she said. I heard her just fine.
"Do you have a car," she repeats "because I'm not from here and my boyfriend just ditched me here, and if I don't find someplace to sleep I'm going to end up spending the night on the sidewalk."
"Oh... nooooo..." I drawl. I'm pretty sure my eyes are flicking around in an obvious sign that I'm trying to come up with a believable story "I rode out here with my friends..." (think of somewhere just beyond reasonably far) "...from Kirkland."
"Oh, that's okay, I'll go to Kirkland with you."
"You what..." I manage aloud, while my brain is screaming something about STD's and robbery.
"I don't mind going to Kirkland, if you'll give me a place to sleep." Fucking beers are fucking up my casual lie ability. I don't know why I feel the need to lie, but I've somehow developed the distinct impression that this is the kind of girl who screams rape when people piss her off.
"Oh," I finally manage to laugh a little "my girlfriend really wouldn't take that too well. She's at home, where the guns are." Part of that is true at least. The guns are at home. An element of truth, I remember my stepmother telling me, is the key to effective lying. I catch myself wondering why, if I had a girlfriend waiting for me, I be here at a skanky bar getting propositioned by a rolling train wreck in a miniskirt and hot pink cast.
She makes a sound that I think must be words of some sort, and I watch her drag herself over to a man walking back from the 4th of July fireworks with his 8 year old boy in hand. I can't hear the exchange but I gather from his body language that the proposition is the same. I can't help but wonder if she included something about being able to keep quiet if the boy happened to be sleeping nearby and I choke out a quiet laugh.
She catches the amusement on my face as I watch her toddle back to make her way into the bar, and blathers some half-assed lie about working there. It occurs to me that the reason that she doesn't sound drunk to me is because I am also drunk. I put the phone away and go back to my friends who are discussing Ebay's complicity in the New World Order agenda.