Study of an SLC boy/Cheetah Farmer’s Vainglorious Attempt to Get Laid, As Seen Through the Eyes of a Drunk Fly on the Bar…
(I copied the following virtually verbatim from my notebook. I sat on a barstool with a notebook, next two three Sarah Lawrence undergrads at the Station House on a Friday night. This is what I heard. I could have cleaned it up more, but I felt it more important to leave it as is…)
Isn’t it cute how the SLC boys try and talk about sports like they have a clue? Some attempt to display masculinity in front of his female companion. And it looked like he almost had a chance. Until her friend showed up. He tried to compensate by ordering the same drink as this perceived interloper. I was the only one who noticed, a different kind of interloper in this humorous exchange.
Too bad for him, the source of his efforts is a worthless pursuit, a typical Sarah Lawrence girl -- too preoccupied with talking to the older, wiser bartender about the cider that she is drinking, comparing the Magners to the Bulmers of Europe, her subtle way of displaying how she is a world traveler, or, in reality, a teenager who spent a year abroad. Everything is done so subtly. You’d hardly even notice if you weren’t paying attention.
Seeing his chances fading with her interest, the SLC guy walks away, to put a dollar in the juke box. Very clever.
A minute later, “oh, this is my song,” to get the attention back, and after a few notes, that canned hipster follow-up, “you probably don’t know this song.” Neither girl does. Score one point for the Sarah Lawrence boy.
“It’s New Order,” he says. I guess they’re too young to know who New Order is, but he obviously is not. It’s almost as bad a smokescreen as talking about cider with the bartender. So subtle.
Of course, just as the girls again begin to lose interest, he makes another bid for attention by interjecting that the current part of the song is one of his favorite solos.
-- And now it’s his turn to show he’s a foreigner, so he throws in a “ya’ll” to show how he just can’t fit in with the SLC crowd. Just in case they didn’t catch the hint, he describes how tough it is for a southerner to fit in with the SLC crowd. Woe is he.
Magners and then Guinness, surely they are world travelled women…
-- He tries to explain how he’s a Texas football fan. The description somehow falls short.
An attempt to blend the two threads into one: “I realized I can’t get high anymore when I watch the Super Bowl, because it just makes me hate America, and I love America.”
The conversation on Palestine and their bid for UN recognition is just a fucking joke. They philosophize on the world based on one or two lines they’ve heard on television. It is a carbon copy of that scene in “Good Will Hunting,” just spewing out a bunch of shit they heard somewhere else, as if it will make them sound intelligent. But to some, it just makes them sound like, well, to put it lightly, fucking idiots.
Oh, she starts to lose interest again, just as he has a story to tell, it has to do with “that time I was a guard at a cheetah farm in Namibia” (I could not make that up if I tried). He gives it a few seconds to let it set in. He pushes the point of how awesome he is. “Yeah, that was my life,” and then drives it home with some vague attempt to compare it to “that scene in Jarhead.”
“So yeah, I was like Jake Gyllenhall.” I think it’s the same associative disorder that Dick Nixon has.
Obviously the highbrow conversation does not impress her.
“… working at a camp, the relationships became very homoerotic…”
Trying to defend the humor of “Bridesmaids,” while sounding intelligent is just hilarious. It’s a movie built on one long joke about people shitting themselves, and he’s trying to justify it as, “I think, given the material she had to work with, Rose Byrne did an exceptional job.”
Perhaps he realizes that he shot too low with Bridesmaids, and comes back with “Buffalo 66… by this guy named Vincent Gallo.” It’s a beautiful way to shift the conversation back to how awesome you are. Oh, shit, and Mickey Rourke shows up in the movie!
From there it only gets worse…
“My senior year I was high all the time.”
“Sherlock Holmes was Guy Ritchie’s best movie in years.”
The girls start talking about a topic that he cannot chime in on. What to do! Magically he looks up at the television and out comes, “Man! The Yankees thumped the Red Sox! That’s surprising because the Red Sox are so good this year.” I’m guessing that the television then updated the standings, because in the span of ten seconds, his professional evaluation of the Sox changes into “The Red Sox might not even make the playoffs this year. The Angels look really good.” Obviously the tv said nothing about Tampa Bay, who is ahead of one and gaining furiously on the other.
Some gibberish about him being heavily medicated during his senior year. Woe is the life of this unique, unfortunate SLC boy…
Since the discussion of what shots the girls should do is obviously diverting attention from the guy, he brings out his wild card.
“You want to know what my favorite YouTube video is?”
(I get distracted with someone to my right talking about the Hartford Whalers. Alas, I never hear what his favorite video is.)
“Did I tell you why my dad doesn’t come here anymore? Because the Sarah Lawrence kids laughed at him.”
They decide on shots and the bartender proceeds to pour them a “Baby Guinness.”
I finally chime in to the conversation.
“You want to pour me one of those too, Pat?”
He looks at me. “You want this, or you want a real shot?” Saying nothing more, he comes back with a bottle of Michael Collins.
The girls down their shots and head for the bathroom together, leaving him and his father to ponder in silence the next move…
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