Girl Walks Into a Bar (17 page)

“Hi! Who’s this?” I said halfheartedly.

“This is Sam. He’s six weeks old.”

“Awwww,” I said, like the trained monkey I had become when looking at babies to whom I have no connection. Sam produced a smile.

“Oh, just look at him,” says new dad. “
Is there anything better than this?
”

And congratulations! Ding Ding Ding!! (Balloon drop/confetti) You have just won the contest of “Things not to say to a forty-two-year-old single woman who is spending her Sunday afternoon at a baby shower.”
Is there anything better than this?
No. That’s what I keep hearing over and over again and that’s what I’m “missing out on” and the whole world has babies and it’s
the
life experience and if you don’t have it, YOU SHOULDN’T EVEN BOTHER TO LIVE BECAUSE THERE ISN’T ANYTHING
BETTER THAN THIS AND OH! IT’S TIME TO GATHER ’ROUND AND LOOK AT TINY PANTS!

I just wasn’t one of those women who would want to have a child on her own. I knew I wasn’t cut out for the sperm bank or solo adoption. Motherhood was something I had always imagined for myself, but I didn’t think of myself as a “baby person,” the first one to say “Ohhhhhh! Can I hold your babyyyy?” when a friend had a child. If I found a partner, yes, I definitely wanted kids. But here I was at forty, forty-one, forty-two, now forty-three. I kept moving up the window of fertility and possibility, trying to block out the statistics with which I was bombarded, but to be realistic, I started to adjust to the fact that I wasn’t having kids. I was trying genuinely and oh so gradually to become OK with that; I had to focus on the benefits of my life. Some friends’ marriages were beginning to crumble and other friends were completely consumed with shuttling to soccer games and swim meets, while in my jet-set lifestyle, I was flying off to the Caribbean for a last-minute getaway or to Burning Man to see old-man dicks.

Sure, I’d still have mornings where I’d wake up thinking, “Wow. I may be alone forever and never have a family. I may miss out on a really big LIFE THING,” which could create a rising panic in me. But for the most part, I realized that as we grow older, we adjust and roll with what we have in the present, though it may not be the future we had dreamed up for ourselves in the past. I was forty-three years old and I was actually seeing the benefits of not having kids and was accepting my fate after all those years of struggling.

Then, I met a guy in a bar.

Girl Walks into a Bar

On a Sunday night
at the beginning of summer in New York City, I went out with my friend Lisa. Lisa is a total New York City character, the unofficial mayor of the Lower East Side. I met her back when she was the bartender at my favorite New York restaurant, and we eventually struck up a friendship. She is brash and loud at times, but she also has a surprising wisdom about human behavior, like a stereotypical bartender you’d see in a movie. Lisa has long black hair and a complexion so pale it tips the fact that she rarely ventures out in daytime. She knows her wine very well, maybe too well, in fact. The woman likes to drink. I remember one time she said she was giving up drinking.

“You are?” I said, totally shocked.

“Yeah,” she said in complete seriousness, “I’m only drinking white wine.”

Lisa is also best kept in the ten-block radius of her neighborhood. One of the only times we lured her out of her turf, she came to see the live show of
SNL
. At the after-party, she
approached Dennis Haysbert, who had done a guest spot on the show. He is perhaps best known as the Allstate Insurance guy, though also a legit actor whom I knew of from the movie
Far from Heaven
. Lisa started talking to him and cornered the guy for about twenty minutes. He was completely gracious about it, but from then on, we realized we had to be careful when we took Lisa out of her usual society of ne’er-do-wells and oddballs. “I’m inviting Lisa to this party,” I’d say to Daisy. “But keep an eye on her and don’t let her Haysbert anyone.”

Lisa was pretty much always up for going out on the town at a moment’s notice. She is gay and practically the only person with whom I manage to meet guys, because she literally forces me to talk to them whether I want to or not. She usually facilitates conversation, then ditches me with the guy, often someone I have no interest in speaking with, saying, “I’LL JUST LEAVE YOU TWO TO GET BETTER ACQUAINTED!” or some other subtle phrase such as that. When I don’t feel like chatting up strangers and I try to object, Lisa will usually come back at with me a loud “Step
away
from the lesbian!”

This particular night, I suggested we go to Zum Schneider, a fun outdoor beer joint that’s conveniently located near her apartment, but to my surprise she texted back, “Let’s go to Shoolbred’s,” a bar near my apartment. So I met her at Shoolbred’s. We sat outside, but the waiter was taking a really long time to come out and take our order that night, so I went in to order for us at the bar. I walked up to the bar, and a man standing next to me turned to me and said, “Hey, we’re about to order absinthe. Have you ever tried it?”

“Uch! Don’t do it!” I said. “That stuff is disgusting!”

The only other time I had tried absinthe was with Horsemeat, and we all know how that one turned out. I talked to Absinthe Man, whose name I learned was John, while I waited for my order. He told me he worked for a wine company and was in New York on business for a food show. He was there with his niece and her boyfriend, who lived across the street. He was from Northern California, which was a strange coincidence because a mere three days before, I had gotten desperate enough to start browsing on
Match.com
. Oh, I wasn’t bold enough to take action or ever create a profile. I was just window-shopping. I checked out the New York offerings and couldn’t imagine myself with any of them. I thought of the guys in Northern California—how I always find cute guys there with varied interests who are so much more down-to-earth than New York actors I had encountered. So a mere three days before I met John, I had been looking at
Match.com
San Francisco, and now here I was meeting a handsome, friendly, funny guy from the Bay Area.
Universe??

After only about fifteen minutes of conversation, he asked me when I was coming to visit him in California. I had to go back to Lisa at our table outside, but I told them to come join us out there and they did. He was quite forward, telling Lisa right in front of me, “I think your friend is cute.” Of course he had to check with her first on the sly to make sure we weren’t a couple—that’s the drawback of having a lesbian as your wingman.

Only a few minutes after John and company joined our table, we had a jarring New York Moment. I find New York City to be a pretty friendly place, and to me, once you know your
way around, it feels like a big neighborhood. I’ve rarely run into any “crazies.” We were sitting at the table and a man was walking by with two large dogs pulling at their leashes. I first noticed him because of the unusual dogs—they were straight-up hound dogs, a rare sighting in Manhattan. The man looked to be in his mid-fifties with a gray crew cut and black-rimmed glasses and shorts. As he walked by the table, he leaned in and, out of nowhere,
screamed
at us, “YOU’RE ALL A BUNCH OF COCKSUCKERS!” The dogs reared up on their hind legs and started barking like the animal henchmen who accompany the villain in a Disney movie. We were so shocked, we practically choked on our drinks, not knowing whether to giggle or “throw down.” (Not that I’ve ever “thrown down.” Which you can tell because I put it in quotes.) Then he looked right at me. He looked straight into my eyes and said, “AND YOU! YOU’RE A F***ING C***!”

Well! That was … um … wow. Strange scenario to be in with someone you just met. We all had a shocked laugh about it. I wanted to apologize for my city the way you would for an embarrassing relative. “I swear, New York
never
acts like this. I don’t know what New York’s problem is—usually, New York is really nice, seriously!”

I didn’t think John knew who I was from TV. If he did, he didn’t let on. Later in the evening, someone walking by asked to take my picture, I think, but the moment just came and went without discussion. I later found out John did know who I was but also that he didn’t have a TV. So he had a vague idea of me but wasn’t such a fan he was going to barrage me with questions: “So! Who was the worst host?”

John was going to be in town for one more night. He walked me back to my apartment. “Am I going to see you again before I leave?” he asked me, so I invited him to come out with a group of friends who were going to dinner the next night.

He arrived at dinner bearing bacon-flavored lip balm for all, from the food show he had attended earlier that day. This guy could be a winner. We broke off from the group after the meal and hit another bar and then he walked me back to my place. “You can come up,” I said, “but let’s not go apeshit.” The next day, John had to go to the food show to work. He had mentioned that in addition to selling wine from New Zealand, his company also sold New Zealand mussels, but the mussels weren’t selling as well. In the morning, we were joking around about how he could get the mussels to sell better. I was picturing him bounding out onto the demo area, wearing a foam mussel headpiece for a costume, with one of those headset microphones, clapping his hands over his head as the song “Y’all ready for this? ba ba bum BA BA bum, bum bum bum bum BA BA ba bum bum bum bum” played overhead. We started laughing at this vision and ended up laughing so hard, we couldn’t breathe and had tears streaming down our faces. I admit this may have been one of those “you had to be there” moments, but I registered at the time that it’s pretty rare to have a laughing fit like that with someone you just met.

“You should come to Mill Valley this weekend for July Fourth.”

“You’re joking, right?” I asked him.

“NO! We’d have a blast.”

That was too crazy for me. I had known him for two days at
that point. No, I couldn’t just up and visit him in California that very weekend. After he went back, he sent me cute and funny texts over the next few days, making sure to bring up July Fourth. I thought about the holiday weekend I had planned—Shelter Island with a fun group of friends—but it was my same old deal: me with some couples, a few single ladies, and absolutely no prospects. Maybe it was time for me to take some radical action. I think another factor was a failed setup that had just occurred, where this guy and I had been e-mailing back and forth for about a month but I had been out of town so much that, by the time we were supposed to meet, he had met someone else. That was fresh in my mind regarding John, who lived in California. A few days before July Fourth, I asked John, “Are you still serious about me visiting?”

“Yes! I’ll fly you out here.”

“You don’t have to fly me out there.”

“If you’re gonna spend five hours on a plane to see me, I’m flying you out here,” he insisted. “Weird,” I thought. “This must be what chivalry feels like.”

I got on the plane, propelled by a heady mix of curiosity, adventurousness, and post—Dating Crusade, single-lady desperation. I had always had an impulsive side, which made this seem kind of crazy but not entirely out of my wheelhouse. Somewhere in the back of my head must have been the thought that No leads to dead ends, and Yes leads to possibilities. Again, hearkening back to my improv days, this was the ultimate “Yes And.”

John picked me up at the San Francisco airport. The visit
did not start off seamlessly, since I was on the wrong level and we kept having to call each other and I was saying, “I’m on level 2,” when actually I was on level 1. Already, this was not the movies. Once we connected and I got into his car, we enjoyed an extremely awkward ride back to his house. When I’d met him in New York, he was all confidence, but in the car, he seemed nervous, and that made
me
nervous. We struggled for small talk, with silences filling the air. Internally, I started to panic, thinking, “What the HELL am I doing here? Screw ‘Yes And.’ That’s a horrible concept!” His place was a nice town house with bachelor-pad style—not a lot of furniture, just the basics. Like I said, he didn’t have a TV. He would watch documentaries on Netflix instead. (That automatically meant he used his time more wisely than I, who have my TV on Bravo 24/7, squandering my time with
Real Housewives
.) We had to resort to cracking open a bottle of wine when I arrived—yes, at the extremely early happy hour of one
P.M.
—to ease our fear, but we ended up getting over our nerves, and I actually felt more comfortable with him as the weekend went on. Not fully comfortable—I had a baseline of nervousness that made me barely eat the whole time. This trend would soon reverse when we got to know each other better and he dubbed me The Crow for the way I picked apart my food as well as the remnants of his, leaving behind a plate that looked as if a bird had landed on it.

John was a very sweet planner and tour guide, offering all sorts of options for the weekend. We ended up going to a few parties—one at the home of a friend of his and one that we were invited to by one of the Dartmouth Gays—an annual Pork-Off party where people competed in cooking various
pork dishes. We all had to submit a “porku”—a haiku we wrote about pork. John showed me around San Francisco, a city in which I hadn’t spent much time. We stopped at the marine mammal rehab center and looked at the seals. That trip was slightly interrupted because John also worked for a vitamin company and had taken a B vitamin with a “niacin shot” when we were leaving his house. I took one too—what the heck—and partway through the marine center, my face started to feel hot. I looked in the mirror, and my face, neck, and hands had turned bright red. I was having some sort of allergic reaction to the vitamin. My bright red, burning tomato face lasted about a half hour. It was a bit embarrassing but more funny than anything else. I mean, once you’ve been called a f***ing c*** in front of someone, the bar of social awkwardness has been set pretty high.