Girl Walks Into A Bar

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• May 31, 2015

Girl walks into a bar, alone.  It’s a Friday.  The smell of a joint lingers in her hair.  She came to this particular bar for two reasons: it was close to home, and they were showing the Ranger game on a large projector screen.

The place is not big.  Most the seats are taken.  Even the empty seats have full glasses of beers in front of them, presumably belonging to the smokers outside.

“Anyone sitting here?” the girl asks the bartender.
“Yeah, but no one’s sitting here,” the bartender points to an empty bar stool, “you can sit next to John.  He doesn’t bite.”
John, a flamboyantly gay man turns to the girl and says, “I don’t bite, I lick.”
“That’s worse,” the girl responds.
“That’s not what most girls would say.”
“I’m not most girls.”
“Oh, I like this one.”
And just like that, a friendship formed, even if just for a night.

The girl sits, and promptly orders a stout.  The bartender asks for her ID.  This is not surprising to the recently turned 26 year old girl.

It was the second period.  She missed the first.  The Lightning scored, tying the game, 1-1.

“Fuck,” the girl said, albeit, not too loud.  Still, her response took John by surprise, who hadn’t known she came to watch hockey.

“Where’s the wifey?” John asked Doug.
“She had an artichoke and five glasses of wine for dinner.”
The girl, eavesdropping, laughs, without making eye contact.  Hiding behind her over sized black rimmed Ray Bans.
“You know Doug?” John asks.
“No,” replies the girl, “I don’t know anywhere here.”
“I love this girl,” John says. “That’s Doug, and that’s Kelly.”
“I’m Lori,” the girl says.

The two men smoking outside return, and sit next to Lori, resuming their conversation and their beers.  Kelly is going on and on about trying to have children with her new husband.  She says she wants to have lots of babies with her husband, and she needs to do so before she’s too old.  Doug reassures her that she’s still young.
“I’m not young,” Kelly said, “I remember smoking on airplanes.”
“There’s no way you remember smoking on airplanes,” the smoker sitting besides Lori chimes in.
“Trust me, I’m older than I look,” Kelly says.
“I’m an airplane mechanic.  There’s no way.”
“I grew up in Hawaii, and we traveled back and forth to California a lot.  I remember sitting in the back of a plane, suffocating as a child.”
“Maybe those flights were considered international,” the mechanic said, biting into some fried shrimp.
Kelly was fishing in her purse for cigarettes, “you smoke, Lori?”
“No.”
“That’s why your face is so pretty.”
Kelly left to smoke a cigarette.

The Rangers scored, taking the lead.  Lori throws her arms in the air, “Yes!”
The bartender pours a shot for Lori and himself.
“Because you’re the only fan here, I’ll give you a shot every time the Rangers score.”
“Thanks,” Lori throws back the shot of bourbon.  She tries not to make a face of disgust while it goes down.  She chases it with her stout.  The stout is over 10% alcohol.  She’s already feeling the affects. Less than two minutes later, the Rangers score again.
“That’s what I’m talking about, baby,” Lori celebrates, as she’s fed another shot.

The period ends, and Lori orders some food.  She’s hardly eaten all day.  She’s hardly eaten all week, since having food poisoning Monday night.  This, she realized, is probably why she’s already almost drunk.  So she ordered some fried fish, and another beer that’s not quite as strong.

Kelly returns, and she says she has a song by Yelawolf stuck in her head.  Doug and John don’t know the song.
“I know it,” Lori says, “it’s a good song.”
“I feel so cool that I know music Lori’s into,” Kelly says.
“Where did you grow up in Hawaii?” Lori asked, since Hawaii was just about one of the few things Lori was actually interested in talking about.
“Kauai.”
“Nice.  My sister lived in Oahu for a year, then Maui.  I love it there.”
“Where you from?”
“New York.  Long Island.”
“I want to move there! And raise children, who are like you.  What do you do?”
“I’m a writer.”
“I want children who are writers.  I want a Lori.”
Lori gave her the names of some towns she was a fan of on Long Island.  All towns on the south shore, near the beach.  A lot of people didn’t like Long Island.  Especially some people from there.  Lori understood this, but this was not her experience.  Lori had a pleasant childhood.  She couldn’t imagine being from anywhere else.  She would be an entirely different person if she didn’t grow up near the beach and the city.  Where were these other Lori’s?  What did they do?  And were they happy?  She had to stop herself from thinking about this further.  She could disappear for days, in her own mind, wondering alternate universes.  But now, she didn’t want to be anyone else.  She just wanted to be here, in this bar.  A rare night off.  Watching hockey.
“Long Island beaches are sorely underrated,” Lori told Kelly, “and I don’t mean Jones or Rockaway.  Go further East.  Go to Fire Island.  It’s like a whole other world.”
“The first time I went to the beach in New York, some one died.  Drowned.  So I never went back,” Kelly sipped her wine.

Lori’s food came, and she dug in.  It was her first real meal in five days.
“How is it?” the mechanic asked.
“Really good,” though anything probably would have been delicious to her at this point.
“I’ve never had a bad meal here,” he said.
“I’ve only been here once before, for brunch.”
“What kind of writing do you do?”
“Humor pieces, short stories, that sort of thing.”  It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth, either.  Lori didn’t always like telling people she was a stand-up comic. People always wanted to hear a joke.  This, Lori hated.  All comics hated.  Plus, Lori was relatively quiet, a people watcher.  People had a hard time accepting she was a comedian.  They always seemed to want more from her.  She diverted the conversation towards him.  A plane mechanic.  What’s that like?  Lori didn’t know much about engines.  She could fix her bike, and that she learned from trial and error.  She likes fast cars, and her father explained engines to her many times, but she still didn’t understand.  Engines, the internet, bridges… it might as well be magic, that’s how little Lori understood about the luxuries of the modern western world.

The mechanic lived in Astoria, but worked in DC.  He only worked three days a week.
“Do you like it?  Are you happy?” Lori asked.  This, was the only question that ever mattered.
“I love the job.  Don’t care for the commute, though.”
She believed him.  She thought this made him a rare human adult.

The game resumed, and Lori shifted her focus. Lori sat at the edge of her seat, her leg shaking.

“Lori, you watch Sons of Anarchy?” Kelly asked.
“No. I hear it’s good though.”
“I’m obsessed.  Are you into men?”
“Jesus, Kelly,” Doug chimed in, “you can’t just ask someone that.”
“Why not?  It’s a legitimate question.”
“It’s fine,” Lori said, “yes, I’m into men.”
“Me too,” John said.
“We know,” said Doug.
“Then you should watch Sons of Anarchy.  If nothing else but for the lead character.  He’s beautiful.”
“I can’t believe you just asked her that,” Doug, nodding his head in embarrassment.
“I don’t care either way,” Kelly slurred, “I just don’t want to waste her time telling her to watch a show because of a hot dude, if she’s into girls.”
“It’s rude.”
“Is that rude?” Kelly asked Lori.
Lori shrugged her shoulders, “I don’t think so.”  Lori genuinely didn’t think it was rude.  Was it?  She wasn’t so sure herself.  She didn’t think it was rude simply because she was asked this question on a daily basis.  She was into sports way more than any girl she knew, she dressed poorly, and was a stand-up comic.  Strangers, family, and some of her closest friends had asked her if she was gay.  It hadn’t occurred to her that the question could be rude, because she understood why they asked.  It wasn’t rare for women to hit on her, either, especially after shows.  It also wasn’t rare for her to flirt with them back.

The Rangers scored again.  “Fuck yes,” Lori slammed her fist onto the bar.  The bartender poured another shot.  This one went down smoother.

Doug invited Lori to play kickball with them on Sundays, in Astoria Park.  Flattered, Lori said she’d love to.  This wasn’t a lie, but she knew she’d never go.  Mostly, because she was usually busy, but also because she wasn’t so socially outgoing.  And she probably wouldn’t be drunk on Sunday mornings.

Kelly was back to talking about having babies, and moving out to Long Island.  She said she would rather have daughters, but she was afraid to have daughters in today’s world.
“Everything is so hyper-sexualized in today’s society.  I don’t know how girls are gonna turn out.  Unless they’re like Lori.  Lori when did you lose your virginity.”
“You can’t ask someone that you just met,” Doug threw his hands in the air.
This question was extremely forward to ask some one you just met.  But Lori answered, honestly.  Because this is a girl who talks about her life on stage.  Who writes things down, then publicly displays them.  Her mantra was to live a life that if publicly published, you should not be ashamed.
“I was 20,” she said, “I was a late bloomer and a nerd.”
“Oh my God, I want a Lori.”
“Wait, if you don’t mind me asking.  How old are you?” Doug asked.
“I’m 26.”
“I want you to shrink, and put you in my uterus, and give birth to you.”
Probably the strangest part of that statement is that it wasn’t the first time in Lori’s life someone told her they wanted to physically put her in their uterus and give birth to her.  It kind of horrified her, in an amusing way.  One of her high school teachers said she wanted to put Lori in her vagina, and have her as a baby.  This wasn’t sexual harassment.  No, this was something else.
“I want a Lori. A surfer girl, writer, smart, pretty, but not slutty, Lori.”
Lori made a note to tell her mother that another was trying to take her position.  Lori didn’t want another mother.  She very much liked hers.

The mistake Kelly was making, or Lori’s high school teacher, and others who claimed they wanted their daughters to turn out like Lori, was that they didn’t actually know Lori.  She was generally introverted, and hard to read.  Lori left a lot of blanks to fill, and people filled those blanks with what they wanted. Ironically, Lori was afraid to have children because she feared they might turn out to be like her.  She held herself to such impossible standards, so she always felt disappointed, and small.  She experienced high highs, and low lows.  At 26, she never had a lasting romantic relationship.  It seemed she was incapable of intimate and affectionate relationships.   Obsessed with death, and all too aware of her own meaningless existence, made her cling to fiction, where there was always meaning, always purpose.  It is very possible, though undiagnosed, that Lori has BPD.  People with Borderline Personality Disorder had erratic impulsive behaviors (usually self destructive), emotional instability, high anxiety, episodic dysphoria, a chronic feeling of emptiness, crazy mood swings, seeing themselves as “bad,” and being unable to maintain relationships.  She suspected she might have BPD, but feared going to a therapist.  She figured, at this stage in her life, it was best not knowing for sure.

What if her child was this way too?  Could she save him or her?  She wasn’t sure how to safe herself.  She often felt she was beyond saving, and this seemed okay to her.  As long as no one else was trying to save her.  Most the time, she just wanted to be alone.  She could do it alone.  Actually, she’d been quite successful managing it by herself.  The only thing worse than having a child like her would be having a child not like her.  It would be awful to watch her spawn turn into a humanoid, void of thinking for themselves, following the grain, who wasn’t constantly aware that the sunset was an illusion.  There were so few people whom she felt she could actually relate.  What if she had a child like that?

Rangers score, and Lori applauds.  She’s served another shot.  Doug offers to buy her another beer.  She thanks him, but declines.  The game ends.  The Rangers win.  They do another celebratory shot.
“To the Rangers win!”
“To Lori, my future daughter!”

A girl leaves a bar, alone.  She says goodbye to her friends for the night.  “Pleasure meeting you, I can’t wait to give birth to you.”  She’s the new girl in the neighborhood.  The good girl.  The girl next door.  She’s not who they think she is, but she’ll let them believe it.  She’ll let them all believe in the fictional version, because the world needs more people like the fictional version of Lori.

In her bed, Lori shrinks herself.  Curled in the fetal position.  Slowly, she drifts into a dream.  There, she can be fiction for a while.