First Sober Date (continued)
When I see the men and women in suits outside sucking down cigarettes, I say to myself, “I don’t think this is a restaurant”. My date opens the door and a wave of heat and loud music bathe us in the smell of sweat and booze. I recognize this place, this is a bar. Not just any bar, but specifically a hot spot for the after-work crowd comfortable dancing to club favorites at 6 o’clock on a weekday. This is lower Manhattan at its finest, the financial district after 5 o’clock. These workaholics are reminding me I’m an alcoholic and no matter what a drinker is wearing they all dance and sing-along the same.
As we scan the place for a table I see him, The Drunk Guy. Every bar has at least one and most regulars think management is renting a room to him in the basement. As my first-sober-date-luck has it, he is by my side for the rest of the evening, swaying and slurring. Stuck in a corner booth, across from the DJ, on the edge of the dance floor I am having dinner with The Drunk Guy and my actual date. To make recovering alcoholic matters worse, the waitress who is so easy to identify with the glitter lettering across her mutually funded double D’s, follows us to our table with two cold bottles of beer. She pops them open, my eyes as big as her areolas and declares, “They’re free!”
There I am standing at the edge of the swimming pool. I have my suit on, my towel over my shoulder and I am wearing flip-flops. I look like I am ready to go swimming. I have to back away from the pool. I push the beer farther out of my reach and start reading my menu. I hear the clock start to tick, and I ask myself, “What am I doing here?” Then, very unexpectedly, the vacuum closes. I shut my menu, look at my date and I start asking him questions, “Where did you grow up? Do you have any brothers or sisters?” Before I know it, my soda water has arrived, he is drinking the other beer that was intended for me, our hamburgers are almost finished and the crisis is averted.
Now, it has been almost two hours since the bell has rung, releasing these financial mongers from their work cages and they are acting more like zoo animals then when we’d first arrived. All evening I expected The Drunk Guy to spill or swear but instead he casually places both of his beers and plate on our table intermittently throughout dinner while my date assures him, “It’s okay”. Even more memorable was when a woman in the crowd suddenly stops dancing (if you can call it that,) looks at me and asks, “Are you using that napkin?” I look down at the cloth napkin on my lap and clearly annunciate the words, “You want my napkin?” This must have come as shock to her because when my date reaches out with his napkin (clearly my delivery carried undertones of rejection,) she looks back at me and says, “Oh, I’m just kidding.” I look at my date with as much sarcasm as I can manage over the deafeningly loud music and remark, “She wasn’t kidding.”
To cap off the evening, my date tells me about his most recent keg party where he pored vodka down his roommate’s throat and the guy was blacked-out throwing up until four o’clock in the morning. Fortunately, the end of this date is on public transportation and the chance of him going in for a goodnight kiss seems small. As the subway doors close behind me and I find myself alone on the platform, I exhale for the first time since the evening began. I survived my first sober date and I can’t wait to call and tell someone about it, “She asked for the napkin that was on my lap! Can you believe it?”
Lola Rovello
25, New York City