Barstool Prophets

I spent the remainder of my 20s adrift, carried by listless currents that were more eddies than tides. Years passed with little to show for them. I worked, I spent weekends in bars, on the pretense that I was looking for someone. That’s the lie I told myself, that I was looking for someone. I suppose I was, if you can call being visible and available and waiting for some other soul’s current to bump them into mine. None did.

I began to wonder what it was all about, this listlessness. I began to wonder how aging singles actually met one another outside of school, without the luxury of been matched up by friends. I browsed the want ads in the paper. I browsed wallboards in what community spaces I found them in. I found no succor there.

I asked those few single souls I knew and brushed shoulders with at Casey’s, both before and behind the bar. The attractive ones looked at me like I was an idiot. Potential lovers resolved out of thin air in their world; all they had to do was flirt with those desperate supplicants drawn in by their presumably irresistible magnetism. It helped that they worked in a public space. No help there.

The others lived in a cliquey co-ed world. They didn’t have to look too far to meet the opposite sex. They worked with them, and barring that, met their co-workers friends through them

Relegated to hangers-on status, I found no help there, either.

We were customers, not clique members. We were kept at a bar’s width from admission.

The question, as one of our sad and lonely number raised, was how to break the ice with a single woman when she was invariably protected by a phalanx of critical peers. Did we, single men, approach individually and brave their collective scrutiny, in hopes that the one we’d set our eyes on would take a chance and allow herself to be even momentarily separated from her pack? That was unlikely. In our experience, girls did not abandon their friends. But what did we know? Our level of experience had left of marooned at a bar.

And nice girls didn’t meet nice boys in bars. If that were so, what the hell were they doing there, then? Wasn’t I a nice boy? Those who knew me seemed to think so. But by that inscrutable logic, I was anything but while met in the bar, yet miraculously worthy were I to be introduced by a mutual friend. The rules of courtship were dizzying in their complexity.

We sad lonely hearts declared those rules utter bullshit. We were not so daft as to not realize that they were iron clad and we had to play by them, regardless what we thought of them. But how to get beyond them?

One day, one of our sad lonely number resolved to do something about our sad lonely state. He declared that we should wake up and change the course of our lives. We would meet a couple girls that night. How hard could it be? He asked me if I was in. Of course I was in. But how were we to go about it, I asked, waiting. We’d been down this road of deliberation before.

Girls travelled in packs of two or more, he declared. I agreed. Thus, he and I would venture out together once we spied a suitable pair of females, that way neither girl would feel that her chatting up one of us was a betrayal of her friend. That was reasonable logic, in my view.

We ought not to wait too long, either, he reasoned. To wait too long invited others to sneak in ahead of us. To wait too long would only invite inebriation, too. Girls do not like drooping drunks

I couldn’t argue with either point. But as there were few people in attendance as yet, I did not see the need to rush, either.

We panned the room. We critiqued what pairs we did see. And finally settled on a pair that we both found attractive. It all seemed too quick and easy, in my reckoning. But he was adamant. We would strike out. I shrugged, and gestured, after you.

We grabbed our beers, slid off our barstools, and crossed the room. We introduced ourselves.

I could see right off that we were on a fool’s errand. The girls were polite, but not particularly welcoming. Their response to our attempts at breaking the ice were terse, at best. Not once did either of them smile. I felt stupid. In my limited experience, men did not approach women unless they received signals. Smiles cast across the room. A head toss that set her mane in motion, reeling our undivided attention in. A twirl, a dance. The siren’s call. Come her, big boy! We hadn’t received any of those signals from these girls prior to our invasion. In fact, they hadn’t noticed us at all, hidden behind the bar, as we were. No wonder they brushed our attentions aside. Had we introduced ourselves from afar first, say with drinks sent their way, giving them time to look us over for a moment or two, things might have been different. But we hadn’t. They weren’t.

My friend kept up a brave face. He persisted. I did not. I nudged him, trying to gather his intention. It’s no good, my eyes screamed at him. Either he didn’t understand what I was trying to project or he chose to ignore my psychic insistence. He turned away, his attention back on the girl of his choosing.
I nudged him again. Now, he too brushed me off.

“Jesus,” I said, rolling my head in exasperation. “This is pointless.” I leaned closer to the ladies and apologized for our intrusion. And left.

My friend persisted a few moments more before beating his own retreat.

“You abandon me,” he said, once he was back on his stool, somewhat red of face.

“Only because a good general knows when to cut his losses,” I said. “We never stood a chance.”

I didn’t venture too far off that stool again until I met Manon.