drinks, lies, and laughs..

we went to 3 bars. we knew the first bar we went to wouldn't be our style, but a guy i know was there and it was free drinks. to get into the place was $10. there are bars in the city that you need to pay a cover for, but there are more that you don't need to pay for, so no bar is worth a cover, especially this place. so my friend and i were standing in the doorway while i was trying to call the guy i know to find out the name of his party, but he wasn't picking up. the guys at the door asked us what our deal was and my friend said we don't want to pay the cover. guys love her, she's just naturally pretty and she doesn't show it off or anything, so he told her she's too pretty to pay cover, and we got in. the whole bar was weird - it was just trashy. a lot of young people and i think people were funnelling beer off the bars at one point. there were a lot of guys and my friend and i felt like every guy was staring at us. the area that the party we were joining was at the back of the bar and had a black light, so i was really paranoid about how i looked and my black shirt had a lot of lint on it, so i wasn't very comfortable. two guys starting talking to us. there's a term here called "bridge & tunnel," which refers to people who go out in manhattan and get here via a bridge or tunnel - ie. new jersey, staten island, long island. it's kind of rude, and of course a generalization, but the crowd at the bar was very bridge & tunnel. there were girls there with long acrylic nails and you could tell they were trying to be trendy, but they weren't pulling it off and the guys were also trying the same thing. so one bridge & tunnel guy i talked to was annoying me cause he was trying too hard and was putting his arm around me and stuff and i didn't even know who he was. he also had me guess what he does for work. i hate having to guess. i guessed that he works in finance cause most guys in the city do. he said he used to work in finance and he could if he wanted to, but now he's unemployed and collecting unemployment checks. he had started annoying me before we got into this conversation, so when he started talking about collecting unemployment, i quipped "and your proud of that?" he laughed it off and said he wasn't really (unemployed) and then the conversation kind of fizzled away. after my friend and i were finished with our drinks and we had disappointed the break dancing guy by telling him we didn't want to dance, we were ready to leave. so we made our way through the crowd of, by that time, mostly 21 year old girls wearing tank tops and dancing around, and found a cab outside.

we told the cabbie, "bowery and spring" and made our way downtown. my friend and i had been to the next bar together before and it was pretty good. we have opposite tastes in guys, so we thought this place might be a good compromise for us. we thought the bathroom at the last place would be gross, so we waited till we got to the next bar and made our first stop there at coat check and the bathroom downstairs. after that trip, my friend and i made it back upstairs and before we could take a step towards the bar for a drink, two guys stopped to talk to us. we found out later that they had just done sake bombs. if you don't know what that it is, it means they were trashed cause sake bombs are deadly strong drinks - i say that from experience. so one of the guys told us that he works in advertising. i got excited, cause i do too, so i asked him "where?" he said "downtown." i said "at what company?" he said "wpp group." i said "what?" he said "wpp group." i said "that's not an ad agency, that's the holding group for a bunch of ad agencies." i repeated that a couple times and then he admitted that he doesn't really, that he works in finance. i asked him why guys lie about where they work and he didn't really have an answer and went off to dance with a girl.

so then we were left with his friend, who was really cute. he said he went to harvard - i don't know if that's true, but i'll give him the benefit of the doubt. i don't think he knew what to do with my friend and i standing there, so he offered us a drink, which we took - two stoli and sprites. we continued talking, but he kept checking his phone and my friend saw a girl come up to him and pinch his butt, whatever.. he asked how old we were and then later said he graduated college in 2006. 2006? wasn't that last year? i've never met anyone at a bar in new york who graduated college after me. i'm getting old. so we sipped our drinks and eventually the guy went off to answer his phone or something. we took that as our opportunity to scope the rest of the bar, so we walked towards the door. we kept having to move where we were standing because we were surrounded by nyu couples making out. the harvard kid met up with us again. he said a few things and then mid-sentence walked off unannounced to go back to his phone. weird. we got our coats and walked around the block to the next bar.

there weren't many people at that bar, but we walked in. we kept our coats on while we assessed the situation. my friend looked around and asked me if it was gay night. i looked around and noticed that there were a lot of guys standing around, hmmm. well, it wasn't gay night and we made the straight guy's night by walking in. before we had a chance to take off our coat a guy came up to us and told us he had a question for us. i wasn't really in the mood for this and hesitated in responding. he assured us not to worry because he's married - "see, look at my ring." ok. then he told us that his friends think we're cute and want to talk to us. i've heard this before and i don't like it. if the guys are too shy to come up and talk to us and they need a "harmless" married guy to break the ice for them, then it's already points off for them - and i told the married guy that. he said his friends wanted us to go over and talk to them. we told him they need to come to us. they have to put some effort into this. while this is going on, some guy who was standing near the bar alone was listening to our conversation and started sympathizing for us by going on about how it must be annoying for us that guys are talking to us before we take off our coats. he's going on about this, meanwhile, we still hadn't taken off our coats, so he was also annoying us the same way the married guy was. it got weirder when one of the married guy's friends came over to talk to us, while the dorky guy continued to talk to us. the married guy's friend was painfully shy. i tried asking him questions and getting the conversation going, but it wasn't going anywhere and the dorky guy stepped it up when he bought my friend and i a drink. the shy guy eventually walked off and my friend and i were stuck talking to the dorky guy. now, guys probably know this, but maybe not - when a girl is bored with a guy she is talking to at a bar, she starts making up lies about herself to keep things interesting, especially when her friend is joining in the conversation. i think every girl has a name she introduces herself with as a sign to her friend that she's not interested in the guy. my "name" is amanda and my friend's name was tiffany. my friend was cracking me up telling him she wants to move to europe and become a nurse and that she is in nursing classes now. it's not a far-fetched story for someone and the guy was interested, but i knew it was totally untrue. we were so bored by this guy and he didn't get the point. at one point, a guy walked by me and bumped into my arm. the dorky guy almost started a fight with the guy over that. i told him it's ok. last thing we needed was for the dorky guy to get in a fight with the cute guy who bumped into me. so my friend and i continued our ridiculous conversation with the dorky guy. at one point when he turned around to order another drink, i commented to my friend that i think the other guys were looking at us and realized that we didn't want to be talking to this guy. "can't any of them save us?" she asked.

not too long after, we did get saved. strategically, 2 guys came over to us. i had pulled out my phone to text message "emily" to see if she was coming to the bar, which really meant texting the friend i was with as some kind of diversion to the dorky guy talking to us, which ended up working. the guy who came over to me told me i must be bored if i'm texting in a bar. i didn't want to be too obvious to him about what i was doing, but he knew. he said he was standing to the right side of me so i would have to turn my back to the dorky guy. i know, it's mean, but the dorky guy's friends had met him at the bar by that point, so he wasn't left alone. it got a little weird after that with the guy who saved me. we talked for a little. he lives 2 1/2 blocks away from me, so he asked if i wanted to meet for brunch on sunday at a neighborhood diner. i was up for it, even though i didn't completely believe it would happen, but i gave him my number. shortly after that he said he had to go back over to his friends. then he came back again and explained that he can't really talk to me because his friend was trying to set him up with a girl who was with his group. he said he wasn't interested in her, but he didn't want to be rude, so he couldn't really talk to me. ok, whatever. so i joined my friend who was talking to the guy who had come over to save her. he told us a story about how he cleans his niece's butt after she goes to the bathroom. he admitted he didn't know why he was telling us that and my friend and i today didn't remember how we ever got on that subject. shortly after that story, he said he had to get back to his friends, but he took my friend's number and said it's his birthday in a few weeks and he'll invite us to his party. after he left, we got out of there. i didn't even look around - just pointed my eyes towards the door. my friend and i ran out to get in our separate cabs and talked to each other on our phones on our rides home - "what was up with that night? it was the weirdest night ever." it was definitely a weird night. but my friend and i had a lot to laugh about the next day.