You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
A bar stool of crazy!
I’m watching game six of the NBA finals on one screen and Honduras V USA soccer on another.
Suddenly a young woman with a dark complexion sits beside me.
“This seat taken?”
“It’s all you.”
And so begins a trip down crazy lane.
Over the next hour this woman will gulp down 3 whiskey drinks and I will hear the equivalent of a Chris Rock concert full of cuss words.
“Look at that guy’s F**ing head band”
“Can we get the basketball game on another God Damn TV in the mother F***er”
“What a s**tty” game.”
She is so loud, so bumptious, so unbelievably crass, I am drawn to her. She is a verbal train wreck. I want to ignore her, but the story teller in me is drawn to her like a moth to fire.
Every time this bar fly opens her trap, the female bar tender, perhaps 24 years old, turns and casts a discerning, almost alarmed look.
This is the SOUTH. Women just don’t talk like ex cons from Richers Island here.
“F**k that call,” she blurts out like a parrot high on morphine.
The bar maid casts an evil glance at me.
It’s not me I gesture silently crossing my arms in front of my chest as if to ward off her evil spirits.
He’s a C**t.
Bam.
I turn to her amazed, eyes wide open.
Did I just hear that?
“He’s a C**t.”
She just screamed out the C word. The most vile word in the lexicon of English, and she shouts it out.
C this. C that.
I look around feeling awkward, trying to suck myself into my own drink glass.
I feel like everyone is watching, judging me.
“Hey I’m not with her” I want to shout.
You know it’s pretty gutter if you are embarrassed by what other people in a bar might be thinking.
Why is it ok to say the N word but not OK to say the word N*****?
Like a sniper shot in the head, she throws out the N word.
From nowhere, just like that, BAM.
THE N WORD
right after she just said the C word.
OMG.
She is a dark complected white woman with a serious case of the crazies.
She is a verbal sniper shooting invisible targets from the make believe clock tower of her own mind.
I have only had one beer and I’m wondering who this foul mouthed woman is.
Did I hear you say you are a beer snob she blurts out out of the blue.
I look at her face. She is thin and her features attractive in that couple of beers consumed sort of way. But her mouth ruins everything. It’s like a big neon sign of death tatooed across her skull. Her cursing, her rudeness, her insensitivity makes me think she was spawned from the loins of Andrew Dice Clay.
Little Miss Muffet wouldn’t even sign off on this crazy woman with an oral fixation nastier than a Tia Juana urinal.
Huh? I say wondering if she would berate me with cuss words if I decided to slide one bar stool away.
Did I hear you say you were a beer snob? she reiterates like she wants to jack me up.
“I didn’t say anything about beers,” I calmly chuckle trying to watch 8 monitors at once.
She laughs a demonic laugh, perhaps ignoring the voices to kill me in her head.
She orders another whiskey.
I look at her.
“going down smooth?”
She smiles. “I don’t want the calories of beer” she says.
Ah a DUI is way better I think to myself.
I got thrown out of a bar once for saying C***, she will say very very loud.
I wince.
Why does that make you so uncomfortable she says.
C! C! C!
It’s a good question. It’s like a hand grenade in your underpants.
You just know that something is not right.
C!
It’s abrupt and disruptive and the word is a game changer.
They threw you out of the bar for say that word, huh? Imagine that?
“yeah, they threw 8 of us out of the bar.”
“Must have been pretty rough to throw 8 drunks with cash in their pockets out of a bar.”
“Might be because there was a table of kids behind us.”
I roll my eyes. “yeah, maybe,” i quip.
“But the parents shouldn’t have their kids in a bar either,” she says.
Two wrongs don’t make a right, I think, as the bar tender makes a terrible decision bringing her another whiskey.
“And so it goes with this combustible liquored up bar wench. She has a strange desire to shock and awe with words and filthy man like behavior.
she asks my name.
“You don’t need to know my name,” I say like Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter.
She looks at me harshly
I wonder if she has a knife in her hand bag fastened under the bar.
I enjoy a good story and this woman is a land mine of crazy inspiration every time she opens her pie hole.
My friend makes the mistake of trying to engage her in a conversation of thought without curse words.
“Soccer players are athletes, unlike lineman in the NFL. They aren’t athletes, they are just big.”
The sentence is pedestrian enough.
But not in her demented twisted clock tower world. She loses her cool like a water heater that blows a gasket.
“My cousin is Michael Orr of the Baltimore Ravens,” she will boast, perhaps lieing, perhaps not.
“He was a great basketball player. He is a good athlete.”
She is harsh and aggressive. She reminds me of a gang member I met in L.A. behind my Scarff Street apartment.
I wonder if she is a drunk or a gutter snipe. She certainly has all the etiquette of a cursing sailor with tourettes.
I look at my buddy and laugh. This chick is a handful. She is crazy. She seems like she would be a good ally if a bar room brawl breaks out, but other than that, well, she is just plain obnoxious.
The half concludes.
“We out?” my friend says sensing the insanity percolating next to me.
“Absolutely.”
She eyes me suspiciously.
“Was it something I said?” she quips.
I smile as I toss the bar maid a few dollars.
She extends her hand.
I grab it, and then lean in close to her ear and whisper.
“You are the closest thing I’ve met to a C in a long time.”
I pull back and smile.
She laughs out loud. I think I make her drunken and disorderly night.
“Later.”
I walk away, hopefully never to sit next to this female Andrew Dice Clay again.
Life’s Crazy™