growing in the goo

Happy Columbus Day!

So, I have a very good friend, and I have a little story about her Saturday night. She was at a bar with some friends, and met some new faces, learned some new names, etc. One guy was being really friendly, chatting away, doing the whole "lightly touching" thing. It was cool, and flattering. So when this friend and a friend of hers decided to meet some other friends at a different bar, she invited this guy to come with her.

The friend of my friend decided to go back to his friends at the other bar, so it was just my friend and the guy, who seemed nice, but she didn't really know, walking along. My friend, she didn't know the area very well, and no one seemed to know where the bar was that she wanted to go, including the new guy she was with.

The guy, he suggested that they go to a different bar, on U St. and 16th. My friend, she thought for a moment. She knew her friend wanted to see her at the bar, but she knew that her friend had about 10 people with her, and probably wouldn't mind if she didn't show.

So, a little tipsy, she decided to go with that guy to the other bar, which was a couple of blocks away. In her tipsy state, she knew that 16th and U was at least five blocks away, which was a little annoying, but oh well. It was time to live large and try new places.

They were walking with their arms around each other, laughing, and the girl's friends called her on her cell. She jokingly (or not so jokingly) asked her friends if their buddy was a murderer. They, being drunk, called her a rockstar. Being that they didn't answer her question, that didn't really sit well with my friend, but she laughed it off.

They go a couple more blocks, and my friend felt herself being steered towards a building. She stopped, and said (so she told me), "Wait, where are we going?"

He stopped, gestured expansively, and said, "Well, we have two choices. We can go to that bar, which is still a few blocks away, or we can go to my apartment, which is right here."

That pissed my friend off. And she saw that this supposedly nice guy was just trying to get into a tipsy girl's pants. He had gotten her away from her friends under false pretenses. So she told him that she was going back to her friends, whipped out her phone to call her friends, and started booking it. And when my friend walks mad, she walks fast.

He caught up to her, grabbed her arm, telling her to wait, wait, wait, it was okay, they could still go to the bar. She stopped walking, turned around, and told him that he could go to that bar, go to his apartment, or come back with her to her friends, but she was going back to be with her friends.

He responded petulantly that he may as well go to his apartment, since he was practically there. She said that was fine with her, and stalked off to the lights and safety, cursing and scowling the entire way.

Getting back to the main road, after getting turned around a few times, a friend of hers, that she hadn't seen in months, walked in front of her, and asked her what was wrong. She hugged him, telling him the story, and clung to him for a few minutes like an unexpected life raft.

A lame ending to a story - it could have had excitement! Murder! Rape! Tragedy! Instead, just an angry girl.

She was talking to her friend Pat the next day, and he said that she could have ended up in a dumpster with a sock in her mouth. Now, who knows if that guy would have gone to those measures. Most likely not. The point of this story isn't to slander that person.

But there are plenty of those people out there.

My friend considers herself very lucky that she learned an important lesson, without getting hurt.