Oh the Humanity!

(AP) RICHMOND — Burning buildings, looters, and rubble could be seen all around on Tuesday, as Richmond struggled to recover from the disastrous earthquake that struck earlier that day.

Said a Main St. resident of the destruction, “Actually, everything is pretty much where we left it – I think one of my lawn flamingos fell over, but that’s about it. Actually that might have been the wind.”

Clearly residents are struck by the horror of the situation. Everywhere, mass panic envelopes the streets. Even the firefighters struggle to cope with the mayhem.

“Yeah, we haven’t really had any calls about structure fires, or people hurt. Though, there was a pretty ornery cat stuck in a tree this morning,” said Capt. Norman McCarthy, of the second district station. “But I think that was before the earthquake, I think, it’s kind of hard to remember.”

Andy Rees contributed to this reporting. This story was last updated at 4:24 p.m.
—-

So I got to leave the office early today due to the earthquake. My co-workers wanted us to email them an update when I got home about the damage in the city… so I wrote this for them.

As a few of you may know, I’ve been in a bit of a creative rut since I started working. It’s amazing how copy-editing brochures and guides can create an utter hatred of the written word. So I’m trying something new, a little angry, a little dark, and a little pornographic. I figured it couldn’t hurt to post a few excerpts from this new manuscript. The premise of the story is this: a washed up romance novelist falls into bed with a widow — the widow of a man the writer helped kill. It’s an experiment with a guilty narrator. Let me know what you think. Here are a few bits from the first couple of pages.

“I have never been to war, but I have killed a man. It wasn’t by poison or sword. It wasn’t anything that I could ever be arrested for. I killed a man with bad advice. I wrote words. His wife read them. He killed himself.

I stood on the edge a balcony fourteen stories up, wearing a three piece suit, and staring down into the dark abyss of the Arlington night. I was on the edge of the world, lost and alive with chemicals coursing through my brain and heart. My dick was hard. I was still young at this point, still numb to the possibility of happiness. I still smoked. I still fucked like a drunken sailor on his first shore leave.

A girl snored in my bed.”

…

“The night swirled underneath me, the sound of cars on the interstate mixed with the lapping of the Potomac, and for longer than I care to remember, I forgot where I was. I was ready to jump.

I mention this now, at the beginning, so that you can understand why I’m writing this story. You see, like any good confession, I expect punishment for my crime. I killed a man, I fucked his wife, I have to die.

—

This all started, innocently enough, with an idea for a novel. I started my adult life – and will end it – as a romance novelist of the worst kind. I wrote the kind of trash that only horned up old housewives read, the kind of trash that they sell in the ‘book’ aisles of a sad old grocery stores. I wrote about the sort of love that only exists in paperback novels. I wrote the phrase ‘throbbing member’ a few too many times. Then, the housing market went bust.

As I learned from my grandmother, housewives have one remarkable skill set. They can sell houses like nobody’s business. It’s a pretty easy job: take a young couple to a house, serve them some freshly baked cookies, and point out the breakfast nook where Mr. Newlywed can read the Post, and Mrs. Newlywed can sit pretty and wait for her husband to explain the news of the day. And when they weren’t selling houses or vacuuming the rug, they were reading my books. But it’s damned hard to be a housewife-real-estate-agent when nobody’s buying houses. So, housewives got real jobs, their husbands came home at the end of the day, and everyone was servicing everyone else. Nobody was paying for my smut.”

The roads were empty as I drove to the airport. It was nearly 5 in the morning, and I’d been awake since 9 the day before. I listened to some terrible suspense novel-on-tape, one filled with international politics and awkward descriptions of love making.

Like the roads, the airport was also deserted, staffed by a skeleton crew of airline representatives and security guards. I stuck my credit card in the automated check-in kiosk and was greeted with “You are too late to check in.” One of the airline folks gave me a reproachful look and in a southern accent said, “Looks like somebody has been a naughty boy.”

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s been a long night.”

He printed off the ticket and sent me off to security. I made it through the metal detector and avoided the awkward pat-down that the news had been squawking about for months. When I arrived at the gate, a few more airline personnel were standing around, staring at me.

“Seattle?” A bearded representative asked.

“That’s me.” I replied.

“We were reading your itinerary while we waited for you.” I didn’t realize I had become a minor celebrity in this airport terminal.

A lot has been written about air travel, about the people that are randomly thrown together in those flying buses, and the awkward conversations that inevitably occur. Business or pleasure? How long are you staying? Did I drool on you when I was sleeping? How about a quickie in the lavatory?

My seat companion was a 66-year-old welder from Upstate New York. He had flown before. He knew how to have plane conversations. And so I sat through 6 hours of short canned stories carefully crafted to make me laugh, or to think, or to expose some facet of this man’s life.

He was an army supply sergeant during the Vietnam War — stationed in Germany. His daughter worked at a prison. His ex-son-in-law went to prison. He was a grand-father, a husband, a high school graduate, and a member of a bowling team.

“My daughter just moved down to Charlotte,” he said. “And she insisted on driving her 28-foot U-Haul by herself.”

“Must’ve been quite an adventure, those things have absurd blind spots,” I tried.

“Nope, she made it down just fine,” he said. “And when we were unloading the truck, do you know who was helping me?”

“I couldn’t even imagine.”

“A guy with a PhD.”

“He’s working at a moving company now?” Maybe this was a story about the bad economy.

“No, he’s just a friend of my daughter.”

He didn’t know that I was a writer, his potential biographer. I sat and listened and determined that I could not bring his story to a publisher. He had barely passed high school, joined the army, came home and got married, sent his kid off to college and grad-school, retired, and was taking a cruise of the Pacific North West.  How can you sell the story of the American dream that came true? Nobody wants to read stories about hope.

“So why are you headed out to Seattle?” he asked.

“Visiting a friend for the weekend.”

“No kidding, any particular reason?”

“I don’t know, I just felt like going, so I went.”

While all of this engaging conversation was going on, I could hear the sound of mechanical dogs barking beneath my feet. As the pilot would eventually explain, a triple redundant hydraulic system had malfunctioned redundantly, and there was nothing to worry about. The end result was just a 6-hour chorus of dog barks. Bark bark bark.

I got a free glass of scotch for “the inconvenience.”

Between the barking and the talking, I didn’t get any sleep.

After we landed, I shook his hand and wished him a nice trip. I didn’t know his name, and he didn’t ask for mine.

Walking up the jetway, the fatigue hit me. By my own bleary-eyed sleep-deprived calculations, I’d been awake for 30 hours. Without even knowing it, I had checked off “Be sleepless in Seattle” from my bucket list. Then I went to go find the smoking section.

Now, if you don’t know if you’re physically addicted to something, try taking a long flight. When you land after 6 or 7 hours of not getting a fix, take a look at your hands. If they’re shaking, it’s a pretty good bet that you’re not “doing it casually.” You’re a professional.

After a good 10 minutes of following signs to the smoking section, I began to wonder if this was an elaborate trick to lure me toward an anti-smoking advertisement. A minute later, I realized it was, in a way.

Twenty or so passengers, TSA guards, and flight attendants sat in a 40-by-40 section of a parking lot, cordoned off with cement barriers. If there were troughs and some hay, this may as well have been an animal pen. I checked myself in to this disgusting-habit-prison, and gave Grace a call.

“I’m here,” I said.

Some time before this all started, I used to only have one pillow. At the time, it was the only pillow I needed. I was single, and whomever I decided to share my bed with never complained about the fact that I never planned for them. Then things changed.

Suddenly, I wasn’t single anymore — through no fault of my own. I shared a bed. My covers became her covers. Legs and arms now fought for space in my full-size appointment on a regular basis. It became a comfortable conflict.

Then one morning, as we were both putting our clothes on, my girlfriend looked at me and said: “Dan, you need to buy a second pillow.”

Now, there are a thousand little things that end a relationship. Disagreements about future plans, other men and women, conflicts of professional interest, and sex — regardless of your gender, sex always finds itself at the table where relationships are concerned. But, despite those thousand things, I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if I had bought that pillow. It’s been years since that train wreck found a section of tracks to jump, but I still think about that pillow.

She left me a couple of weeks after that innocuous request for a pillow. I got myself good and drunk for a week after that happened. Drinking is a fantastic way to stop your thoughts from racing, but if I knew a better way to shut the noise off — one without the other side-effects — I don’t know if I would make the switch. Then I bought a pillow. And then a pillow case. Somewhere, down in the depths of hope, I imagined that a new pillow would bring her back.

It didn’t. There are no light switches where boys and girls are concerned. If there were, there would be no excuse to write books. But in the absence of a light switch, I will take a symbol. Two pillows for two heads.

Now, I use that second pillow in back of the first when I’m watching TV in bed. Now, she’s engaged to a guy named Erik. I’ve never met him, but I hear he’s nice (we tend to villainize the men women love after they’re done with us). I think they’re happy. I just hope he bought a second pillow.

“We’re moving too fast,” she said on a cold night in October. Sarah Cardiff sat on the edge of my bed, staring intently at my fingers. I was finishing up some copy for next week’s magazine.

As she stared at them, they froze. A one night stand had turned into a relationship quicker than I cared to admit. I was busy with work.

“I think we need to slow it down, maybe just go back to hanging out.” She spoke quietly, with a rehearsed sense of confidence.

I kept on typing.

The door to my room opened. Hal Holiday, a forty of malt in his hand, stumbled in. “Daniel!” he shouted. “Time to open up the bar.”

“Mr. Holiday, this is not a great time,” I replied. We were throwing a Columbus Day party down stairs. I was in charge of the bar. Hal stumbled out, cursing as he went. Sarah stared at me with her piercing brown eyes.

“It’s not another guy, I promise. It’s not about Chad.”

Chad was the third baseman on the LOPI baseball team. I wouldn’t have even know his name had she not turned in a profile on him last week. Until this very moment, I hadn’t even considered Chad. I turned away from the screen, toward her. “Yeah? Great, wonderful.”

Ten days ago, Sarah had invited my sister up from Connecticut for the weekend. Kelsey was waiting down stairs to meet a girlfriend I would never see again.

I was still silent, aghast and completely aware of what was going on. Sarah tried again, “Danny, I want the world.”

Time stopped and I was suddenly confronted with it. The comedy and tragedy. God, in his infinite wisdom, had given me a punchline to the entire affair.

“Sarah.” I took God’s punchline and ran with it. “I don’t want the world. I just want your half.”

We talked for a few minutes, and I stayed as quiet as circumstances allowed. She left when she was done talking. Shortly after, I went down stairs in a daze. I poured drinks for the rest of the night, but never took one for myself. My sister asked me where my girlfriend was, and I didn’t have a good answer. She wanted to meet her, but never did.

I woke up the next morning alone. There was no Sarah to hog the sheets or kiss me good morning.

“Great. Wonderful,” I muttered to the empty room.

We didn’t know each other, Annie and I. We met on a balcony at a masquerade party; she wore a black dress and five inch heels, and I wore my cheap, old tuxedo and a white mask. There was no fate involved.

An ancient lady who still understood the meaning of youth had thrown the ball — her chance for agelessness. I was drunk as a skunk, as my grandfather would have said. The penthouse apartment where this woman put on this gala sparkled with fifty pairs of glittering eyes and the Christmas lights that decked the walls. And there Annie was, glittering with the rest of them. An answer to a question never asked. Some sort of ladder out of the hole that life had become.

At this point in the story, I had hit a brick wall where Life was concerned. I had a job, I fed my addictions, and I refused to write anything that mattered. I was utterly alone. This night, as it turned out, would not be the turning point for a man at the edge of his own reality. This night would be a glimpse of what might come one day. So I climbed the fire escape of this well appointed apartment and went out onto the rooftop.

All around, Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, glistened. Water towers and sky scrapers cut dark shadows and brilliant columns into the sky line. Other people, sipping pinot noir from the fertile vineyards of Virginia, talked quietly on the edges of this sky-bound garden of Eden. I had barely taken a step onto the cinder blocks that covered the roof when I saw her. Brown haired and hazel eyed, she sat on a chaise lounge chair with no drink in her hand. I walked over to her, introduced myself, and we talked.

I can’t really say if anything I said made any sense, my mind had taken the night off. All I know is that my tongue spilled words into the night air, and she smiled, giggled, and twisted her hair with her fingers. We kissed on that rooftop. I wore a tuxedo. She wore a black dress. And for once in my life, I was neither insincere nor sober.

John Fairbanks drove me home; I told him about it while we bumped along the uneven streets of the city.

“John,” I said. “I think you should know that I felt something tonight.”

“You don’t say,” he replied, turning on to Main Street. “Dan, I just hope you didn’t make a complete ass of yourself tonight.”

I didn’t, couldn’t, answer.

“Thanks for being a taxi driver,” I said.

“Not a problem.” John gunned his car through a yellow light.

I woke up the next morning feeling happy, sad, silly and dead. All at the same time.

John Fairbanks and I sat in a dark corner of a Mexican themed bar a few blocks from our apartment. Over half drank beers, we talked about the usual things. Women. Life. Death. Fairbanks didn’t let on, but I knew what he saw in my face. The emptiness had returned. It always came back, around this time of year. But this time it was different. On the other side of the bar’s front door, the world was changing. And with it, me.

“‘Banks,” I said. “I think summer’s just around the bend.”

“Danny, I think you’re right.” Banks took a short sip of the cheap stuff.

“How’s the wife?” I asked. Girlfriends in those days were our wives, and God knows that our generation gave up getting married permanently.

“She’s out with Sarah tonight. We’re having boys night out, after all.” Sarah, as usual, was something of an ex-something.

We paid our tabs and found the next watering hole. Something alliterative, Tess’s Truss, named after a nearby bridge. It was a little fancier than the Mexican joint, with a dark wood bar and girls in short black dresses. John danced to the beat of a house DJ and I sat down next to a cute blond. She was a nanny for a friend-of-a-senator. I didn’t catch her name.

“You don’t want kids?” She asked after a few minutes of small talk.

I laughed at that. “Are you kidding me? Of course I want kids.”

“But you don’t like kids.”

“I’ll love my kids, I just don’t like all kids.” This was true.

She frowned. “Everybody says that, but how do you know your kids will turn out okay?”

“Let me rephrase,” I replied and took a sip of my bourbon. “I’ve met a lot of parents that I don’t like.”

She laughed at that and then excused herself to go to the bathroom.

“Hold on, I’m actually about to leave.” I gave the sign to Fairbanks, who appeared to be turning down a girl’s invitation to dance. “Let me give you my card.”

She took it, read it, smiled, and left.

Then John and I headed out into the warming Richmond night. Where to? I couldn’t tell you. I woke up the next morning with a hangover and no missed calls.

Alistair Dunne sat in the backyard, eyes closed to the mid-morning sun. The haggard patio set, which he’d been given as a housewarming gift a few summers before, rested awkwardly on the uneven ground. As I walked out the back door, he looked up, shielding his eyes with his hand.

“Ready Al?” I asked, taking a cigarette from its box.

“Always ready, Danny Boy,” Al said, hoisting himself out of the chair.

We climbed into his roughed-up silver Subaru and took off for the L.O.P.I. campus, leaving behind us a trail of dust and smoke and song. This had become something of a Friday morning routine for us. Hangovers sufficiently set in, Al and I would head out on the weekly distribution run for The Observer. It was something I’d started doing while I was editor of the magazine. I wasn’t the boss any more, and I rarely went to the meetings, but I liked seeing the freshly printed copies hit the stands.

Al’s car rumbled into the loading dock of the print shop and came to a sharp stop inches from the rubber bumpers.  Al was the kind of driver that knew exactly what his car was capable of and showed it off whenever he got the chance. No one was working at the moment — L.O.P.I. had an unofficial moratorium on working on Fridays — so we let ourselves in and set to work.

We piled boxes of magazines into the hatchback of the ancient wagon, and took off again for the distribution route. The first stop was at the rental office for a local apartment complex, a strange make-shift office carved out of a townhouse. We delivered 15 magazines there every week and picked up 15 magazines. This may have seemed like a futile exercise, but every other week there would usually be some sort of free food. Today was hamburgers and hot dogs, cooked in the kitchen that also acted as the office waiting room. We pocketed a few hamburgers and dropped off the 15 magazines.

“Goddamnit,” Al said after swallowing half of his first hamburger.

“What’s wrong,” I asked, staring at my own sandwich.

“Shit’s fucking cold.”

“It’s free.”

“I know, but still, if you’re gonna offer a man a hamburger, it’s common courtesy to make sure it’s hot.” Al was full of these maxims, which were probably derived from some folksy set of morals handed down the Dunne family line.

“True dat,” I said, but ate my burger anyway.

We headed to the bank next, then the book store, and finally to the pub, which were all located in the same shopping complex. This part of the route used to have more distribution points, but the shopping center had seen better days. One by one shops had closed their doors, often leaving us staring into a darkened building at a pile of magazines that would never be read again.

“Mother fuckers.” Al used his colorful vocabulary to start off most of his thoughts. Our distribution spot was constantly being co-opted by other publications, who would invariably dispose of our publication and replace it with their own. Today’s offender was Golf Supply Quarterly. “Nobody ever picks this shit up. How are we supposed to get an accurate pick-up rate?”

I shrugged. “Just mark it down as 100 percent distribution, if nothing else, it’ll help with our advertising shortfall.”

Freely distributed publications didn’t have a reliable way to determine how many eyes were glancing over the cheaply designed ads that graced their pages; so they reported vague figures to advertisers, hoping to justify the amount of money they charged for space on the printed page.

Al dutifully filled in ’100 percent picked-up’ on the appropriate line of his ledger. It was strange what lies were told in an organization devoted to telling the truth.

“Now we’ve just got to hit the dorms and the final distribution spot,” Al said, pocketing his ledger.

The dorms were a fun place to drop off magazines. It was a trip back in time, to some extent. We rolled our hand-truck through the underground tunnels that connected the brick monstrosities that housed L.O.P.I.’s sizable freshman population. There, like every week, we found the roving bands of floor-mates heading to and from the mess hall, acting the cliche parts that we had once played.

“These kids should be outside right now, not trapped in these tunnels,” Al observed. It was a beautiful spring day on the surface.

“Al, if you spend enough time indoors, outside begins to seem like a scary proposition,” I replied.

The last leg of our journey through the underground maze consisted of a long bit of tunnel that sloped down toward a door. Al hopped on the hand-truck and took off. For all of his 22 years, Al was still a kid from the hills of Massachusetts.

Coming to a stop just before the double doors, Al waited for me to catch up. It only took a few seconds, as I had broken into a light jog to follow the careening cart.

“Ready for the last distribution spot?” Al asked with mischief in his eyes.

“Always.”

We headed out the doors, hand-truck in tow, and arrived at a fenced-off section of the dorm parking lot. I opened the heavy wooden gate and followed Al inside. We hoisted up two of the remaining three unopened boxes and tossed them into the dumpster marked “Recycling.”

Al took out his ledger and marked down “550 – dorms, distributed.”

Then we went and had a beer.

Read Part I

After purchasing some malt liquor and orange juice, the three of us found ourselves standing outside a gas station with nowhere to go. Across the street (a multi-lane state highway) was the newly constructed apartment complex in which our good friend and comrade Tom Tennant lived.

He, like us, was a little off the beaten path, but in a good way. His apartment was on the corner of a large building, overlooking an empty quad. We decided to impose upon his solitude and give him a call.

“Thomas Tennant, it’s Danny Brecon, what’s the news?” I said over the telephone in response to his characteristic “Ay yo!” greeting.

“Just chillin’, doin’ some studyin’,” he replied. It was 7:30 on a Friday night. Studying was an unacceptable use of time. I decided we had to save him.

“Fantastic. I’ve got Lewis and Fairbanks with me and a bag of forties and orange juice. Unfortunately, we’ve got nowhere to drink these fine libations — mind if we intrude upon your scholastic endeavors?” I asked, knowing the answer before he did.

Without even a hint of pause, he replied, “Word! come on by, we’s got nothing goin’ on.”

So we did just that.

Tom Tennant’s apartment was about the fanciest place I’d ever seen a college student live. It was a two bedroom joint with two full baths, a common living/kitchen/dining room, and a veranda overlooking the quad. Tom wasn’t terribly rich, he was just extremely lucky. There was very little about the man that betrayed his good fortune, except for the way he walked. Luck was in his stride. He had managed to strike a deal with the building owners who were desperate to fill the space.

Tom met us at the door with a broad smile. He was wearing shutter shades, a brightly colored t-shirt and some sort of fancy shoes that I didn’t recognize.

“What do, gentlemen?” Tom said, staring at the contents of our plastic bags.

I smiled back and said, “Just out and about, looking for adventure.”

He welcomed us into his place with the airs of a southern gentleman and we took a seat at his kitchen table. Lewis began unpacking our purchases: Two forties of malt liquor — one for myself and one for him — and a 22 of Steel Reserve for Fairbanks. He was a lightweight in those days. Lewis also produced a few bottles of orange juice.

A common cocktail among the poor, uneducated and ironic college student populations was called a Brass Monkey. The mixing instructions were simple: “Drink the forty down to the label and fill the rest up with orange juice.” I am convinced, to this day, that Brass Monkeys were invented by the Johnson administration as a part of their War on Poverty — a way of delivering vitamin C to the destitute.

Fairbanks cracked his 22 and began taking swigs from the clear glass bottle.

“Making a Diddy Kong, Banks?” Lewis asked. Diddy Kongs were the smaller cousins of Brass Monkeys.

“Sure am, Lew” Fairbanks said, grinning.

Tom Tennant watched this preparation with eager eyes. He had taken off his shutter shades, which hid his countenance. Tom was always smiling. In the years that I’d known him, he had never once shown any hint of sadness. He loved to dance. He played the mandolin. There was a sort of fire burning inside of him. He was good people.

“So Tom, know of anything good going on tonight?” asked Fairbanks. Tom Tennant always had a party to go to.

“Hmm, let’s see what we’ve got cooking,” Tom said, pulling out his laptop. We lived in a beautiful age of social organization. Websites reminded us that we were loved and liked by hundreds of friends. Instant messaging kept us plugged into plenty of bored folks who just wanted to say “Hello.” The best part about it was that if you were drunk and alone on a Thursday night, you were only a few clicks and emoticons away from a booty call.

I liked booty calls.

But tonight we weren’t alone. We were in Tom Tennant’s apartment, ready to explode into the world. According to Tom’s laptop, there were plenty of things to do — things within stumbling distance.

There was a party down the road at an on-campus apartment occupied by a girl named Sarah. I hadn’t slept with her, but given the name, there was no hurt in trying. That would be our first stop.

After that, we could go to University Row, a more expensive on-campus apartment complex. There were always parties going on there.

“Are these themed parties?” asked Lewis, taking a slug from his Brass Monkey. “Because I don’t know what good a plaid shirt will do at a Stop Light party.”

“Well, plaid could mean that you’re not interested in dating humans,” offered Fairbanks. “Like, plaid could mean you only like hooking up with trees.”

He was halfway through his Diddy Kong.

“Moot point,” I said with academic authority. “These people will just have to take us as we are: Drunk adventurers, hopping through the night.”

“Word,” Tom agreed.

There was no great revelation in the first few months. Since moving to Richmond, we had met the young and the old at the corner bars, drinking and talking with little care or repercussion.  John and I had picked up a few girls, made a few friends, but there was almost no sense of permanence in anything we did. It was, at best, a game.

Every morning, we would wake up, check the internet for jobs, mull around the apartment and then play a game of disc golf. We stopped keeping score after a while.

I tried to remember the early days at LOPI, how we had formed friendships out of necessity and proximity. I tried to remember how I had met Grace Nichols or John Fairbanks or Al Dunne. They were just there, magically appointed to play some sort of role in my life.

But here! Here there were no rules, no obligations. Just job hunting, disc golf, drinking and bill paying.

We had our side projects, of course. I was still walking around, saying that I was writing the Great American Novel; when in reality, I couldn’t pick up a pen, for fear of ruining it. John kept on drawing.

One night, we headed out to a bar down the street, just past a life-sized wooden polar bear that was frequently ridden by drunk girls in short skirts. The bar, which we had passed several times, was called Albion. Unlike every other bar on the street, it was sunk into the middle of several row-houses. As John and I handed our IDs over to the bouncer, I noticed that this was no dive bar. The interior was well appointed, with a classic, well polished wooden bar top and dozens of glimmering whiskey bottles sitting next to the cash register.

After taking a seat and ordering our beers, we scanned the crowd, picked out a few cute faces and set to work.

“Alright ‘Banks,” I said in a low voice, “Mission: Two girls, five o’clock, black shirt, red dress.”

John Fairbanks could walk up to any girl and start a conversation. He walked over to the table, introduced himself, and began talking with them. Being less confident, and slightly unshaven, I waited for a few minutes before heading over.

“Oh, by the way, this is my roommate, Dan,” said Fairbanks, gesturing to me as I approached.

The girl in the red dress shook my hand, “Ah, hello, I’m Wendy and this is–”

“Melissa,” the girl in the black shirt interjected.

We talked with them for a while, telling them about our great migration from the North, raising toasts to the South. John went to get another drink, but didn’t come back — he’d already struck up a conversation with another group of girls.

“Well, Melissa, what do you do?” I asked the blond girl in the black shirt.

“I’m a lawyer.” she replied, with a hiccup.

“A lawyer, eh? Where do practice?”

“Uh, actually I’m a second year law student.” She blushed.

“I see, well I’m glad to see you’re already perjuring yourself.” I had been watching a lot of lawyer shows on television lately and in my current state considered myself an expert. “I’m a journalist, and I almost usually tell the truth,” I said and handed her my card. I liked doing that.

“Are you expecting me to call you or something?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t be opposed to you calling me.”

“I don’t call boys. Boys call me.”

“Well,” I said, thinking quickly. “What about the 14th amendment?”

“What about it?”

“Doesn’t the 14th amendment guarantee equal protection under the law?”

“So?”

“Shouldn’t a girl be equally obligated to call a boy, if a boy gives a girl his number?” I was stretching the constitution to its breaking point.

“I’m still not going to call you,” she said and paradoxically moved closer to me.

“I don’t know, I could probably win this case in court.” As I said this, she moved even closer, her face just inches from mine. I smiled.

“I don’t care, I’m not going to call you.” Instead she kissed me. That went on for a little while.

I went outside for a cigarette. John was out there already talking to two girls, a blond and a brunette. I told him what had happened.

“Wow, the 14th amendment? That’s almost as bad as the time you tried to use the 8th amendment to stop that girl from biting you,” John replied.

Just then, Melissa emerged from the bar and handed me a slip of paper with her phone number on it.

“You should call me,” she said.

“Then it appears we’ve reached an impasse,” I replied.

“How’s that?”

“Because I’m not going to call you.”