Pickup Lines: A Tale of Terror
One dark night, when the wind was howling (or maybe that was my drunk friend cheering over a shot), I found myself in a very frightening corner of a very seedy little bar. Being dead sober, I watched in horror as my friend babbled incoherently about her cramps to anyone who would listen. I had my face buried in my hands in embarrassment when one of the onlookers of this nightmare came over to talk to/console me.
He was a nice looking guy in his mid-thirties and was polite to my overly enthusiastic friend. I asked him what he did for a living. He told me that a corporate job didn’t suit him, which I have nothing against. However, the reason it didn’t suit him was that it would interfere with his surfing and extreme mountain biking.
I nodded, not sure how to respond to that.
He offered to buy me a drink, but someone had to haul the drunk girl home, so I ordered water.
We walked outside to the patio for fresh air and talked a little about my job while drunk girl struggled with the child-proofing on her lighter. When she had successfully lit her cigarette my attention was divided between the conversation and dodging her erratically swinging hand for fear of having my hair catch on fire.
To get my attention, extreme mountain biker poked me in the arm. I looked down and saw he was missing part of a finger and he was poking me with a stub. Never would I ask someone how they lost a body part, but he held it up and said, “Look, I’m missing a finger.”
I nodded and figured this was an invitation to ask him how he lost said finger.
“It fell off,” he said simply.
Was this an indication of leprosy? Was he like my childhood dolls whose parts popped off randomly? He wouldn’t tell me anymore and I began picture his finger rolling around in a gutter somewhere trying to inch its way back to its owner.
At this point, drunk girl told me she needed to vomit. It was time to go.
“I want to see you again,” he said. I nodded while hauling a woman 6 inches taller and 50 lbs heavier to me to the sidewalk. “Do you want to go see ‘Pearl Harbor’? You’re, like, smart and it’s about history or something.”
Lesson learned: I have nothing against dating men with missing limbs. I do, however, fear dating a man whose appendages randomly fall off, especially when he uses bad pickup lines.
I have a really horrible visual now of you being poked by a random guy with no finger. I could go a lot of places with that, but I’ll just leave it.