One of my old Boston roomies (we’ll call her V) lives down here on the island.  As the small world would have it, the new girl subletting the room in our then Cambridge apartment had just been living on the same island my family was building a house.  V’s moved back to the island and now I have a great playmate to take me out and get me into mischief whenever I can get down here.  (I should also briefly mention that, also by complete coincidence, mmf’s best friend from growing up in VT also lives down on the island.) 

This trip, I have had the pleasure of also getting to meet and spend time with V’s boyfriend (we’ll call him NH).  The only real pieces of knowledge you need about NH is that I like him, he has a fantastically mischievous smile, and he is a cook on the island.  And all the cooks/waitstaff/etc on island know each other.  I mention him in the blog only because he features prominently in this story.

There is a bar on the main strip of town on the island called “Woody’s.”  Woody’s is famous for it’s happy hours and its cute waitresses in tight and tiny clothes.  It’s a little like if you combined Hooter’s with a Jimmy Buffet song with a antiquated burger shack.  As you can imagine, it attracts mostly tourists and becomes an Arian-inspired genetically gifted drunken mess.  It’s one of my least favorite places to go (cept for their late night take out).  It was one such late night take out binge that drove me toward Woody’s around midnight-ish.  I couldn’t get myself to go in.  On this particular night there was a group of 6 footers in what used to be dress clothes (I think one might have been a tux).  They were already swaying in that lovely drunken way whereby it looks as if they are trying to balance the top half of their bodies upon the lower.  The women in this group looked like grown up versions of the girls in those kid beauty pageants, and in this case were sporting track pants riding low enough to see the entire top of their hipbones jutting out like the perfect cliff-climbing handholds.  Then I spotted NH in the back of the joint, chatting with the cook and a few other friends.  We make eye contact and I now felt confident enough to enter.  We meet right in the center of the bar/drunken dancing/meat-marketing. 

He asks,”You seen V?”

I reply, “Yah, she’s at the bar upstairs.”

Him, “She wasted?”

Me, “No, she . . .”

As I’m finishing, or rather beginning, this sentence, the blondest and waiffiest of the girls spins around to the two of us.  She is fully made up and so skinny that the only resemblance my mind can come up with is of a concentration camp prisoners.  She is also so tanked that the redness that would be in her face from all the booze is finally starting to seep through the makeup and dot her face.  She obviously had applied the most around her eyes since that area has remained almost eerily white. 

Drunk girl (to me): “ME?” 

She was asking if we were asking if she was wasted or not.  As if the sight of this skinny bag of sex'd up bones were enough to change all topic of conversation to who she was, what she was feeling, and how I could be around her. 

Me (to her):  “No, not you.  You are wasted.  The person we are talking about is not.”

Drunk Girl: (looking a combination of confused and offended) “Wait, what?!”

Me (to her): “You asked if we were saying you were wasted.  And I told you, ‘no,’ because you are obviously wasted, and the person we were actually talking about is not wasted, like you are.”

And this is the best part.  She is still so confused and offended that she decides to glance to NH in hopes that he will confirm my dickishness and defend her.   And NH just looks at her, with his big eyes and that sly grin and nods, “yah, he’s right.”

She retreats. 

Man, I wish it could have been like this in high school.