A Philadelphia Story

There was a good-looking one, an OK one, and a big one. This, for reasons presumably known best to them, is a pattern in which women tend to cluster. The showroom was emptying out into the bar area where I was sitting with a drink in front of me. My suitcase was at my feet. The Good-looking One spotted me and walked over with drunken, and some natural, self-assurance. The OK One and the Big One followed her, less steady in their eyes.
“You were really funny!” The Good-looking One said, before adding slyly. “We liked you better than the headliner.”
It’s a boorish compliment that has often lured me down a path of professional solidarity, debate, and eventually to, where with me all roads run, speech making. These undertakings, however noble, all move counter to underlying purpose of post-show chats with comedy groupies. It took me a long time to learn how to respond to “you were funnier than the headliner” correctly. “Well,” I told her, affecting some slyness of my own, “He’s terrible!”
They all laughed too loud. The way people laugh when they’re only in on the less important half of a joke. The Good-looking One touched my shoulder. I still had the second show to do, but I asked if I could buy them all a drink. Not just the Good-looking One. All three of them! The club was paying my bar tab. I held all the cards.

I pulled my wheeled suitcase through “the nuts,” the bar and shop based area of Downtown Philadelphia formed by Chestnut and Walnut Street. The bar I was looking for was the alarmingly named Martini Lounge. Unlike lounges, martinis aren’t inherently worrisome. But pink and green martinis, the kind slung at a breakneck in “martini lounges,” are. A fact self-evident enough not to require many supporting examples, but; “How do you take your martini Mr. Bond?”
“Blue, please.”
It changes everything.

It was my last night after a week of shows in the city of brotherly love and in order to save money on an extra night in a hotel I decided to take the train back to New York right after the final show. Over our free drinks the Good-looking One explained to me, in a run on sentence full of important information, that this attempt at thrift was in fact, “So fucking stupid because Saturday is the best night to go out in Philly and you could just meet us after your second show and you don’t need a hotel room because tonight you can just stay at our place!” Good points all.

There was a long but moving line to get into the predictably hellish Martini Lounge. It was a three level monstrosity of a dance club. Once inside I searched the club from one floor to the next. Demons armed with colorful drinks everywhere. Each floor was hotter, louder, and more horrible than the last. It was Dante’s nightmare inverted. The Philadelphians had been looking forward to it all week.

On the top floor I finally spotted the Good-looking One and things immediately started looking up. She was locked arm in arm with a Hispanic woman and repeatedly punching her in the face. For me, this brought palpable upside. The OK One and the Big One were trying restrain The Good-looking One but the Hispanic One had a fistful of her blonde hair and wouldn’t let go. A mob of cat-fight enthusiasts circled them, cheering in delight. It was hard to say whom they were rooting for. Black tee shirt clad bouncers made it through the crowd and set about restoring order, or whatever had been going on previously. Since this ‘repeatedly punching a Hispanic woman in the face’ business foretold an early exit from a place I was already itching to leave, I still considered myself to be coming out ahead. But the earlier feeling of holding all the cards was in the early stages of slipping away. Sensing a string of cold cards coming, I wheeled my suitcase to the bar and ordered a shot of brown bourbon to drink down quickly before my new friends and I were thrown out.

“Why the fuck did you guys try to stop me? I swear to fucking god I’m really pissed! She fucking deserved to get her fucking ass beat! She has no fucking respect!” This was the nature of the conversation as we tried to hail a cab outside the club. The Big One and the OK One reluctantly conceded that they had mishandled the situation and apologized to the Good-looking One. When the Good-looking One accused them of not respecting her and “always doing shit like this”, they tried to explain themselves but the Good-looking One was above being questioned. They apologized again. Watching these three “friends” operate is the closest I’ll come to knowing what it’s like in North Korea.

I sat in the front of the cab next to its Turkish driver. He had middle-eastern music playing on the radio and was immediately told to “turn that shit off” by “the Dear Leader.” The windows were all open, thankfully, making the racist things she was saying about the driver close to inaudible. Save for the four or five occasions that she screamed, “I’M SO FUCKING WASTED!” out the window, the driver and I couldn’t hear much of what she said. Which brings us to us to an important side note:

When the driver asked where we wanted to go the Good-Looking One said, what sounded like Lanser Street. I was sitting right next to him and I thought she said Lanser Street too. It turned out that she had said, or meant to say, Lake Street.

“Where the fuck are you going asshole!?”
“Excuse me?” The driver said.
“This isn’t the way to Lake Street!”
“Lake Street? I thought you said Lanser Street.”
“Well I didn’t! And we’re not paying for this shit!”
“Yeah.” Either the Big One or the OK One offered in timid support. In the middle of his three-point turn I leaned toward him and whispered an apology. The leathery-old veteran of dealings with drunken apes smiled and told me not to worry about it.

A few seconds after righting our course, the good-looking one started shouting that she wanted snacks. In a moment I recognized as pure ceremony, she asked us if we too wanted snacks. I said no. The OK one said she didn’t care. The big one didn’t have to say anything.

Outside a 7-11 the good-looking leaned into the cabbie’s window and said, “Just wait here, we’ll be right out! I swear to god you better not leave! And we’re not paying for that wrong turn you took. You better not fucking leave!” And she staggered off in the direction of the snacks. I said goodnight to the driver. He wished me luck and drove off.

Inside the 7-11 we were the only white people. The good-looking one immediately muttered “nice outfit” to a video-vixen looking black woman who walked by. The vixen didn’t seem to hear. Neither did the four power forward sized men she was with. It would be an enterprise in itself to begin to try to imagine all the things that could possibly go wrong for me in this convenience store.

In front of a rack of chips, the Big One found her voice. She snatched at bags, muttering “we’ll take one of these. And one of these…” out loud as she stuck them under her arms. The Good-looking One was surprisingly deferential, letting the Big One do her work. It was an area where she must have long ago earned trust.

There was a 16 or 17 year-old black girl standing in front of us in line waiting to pay for a rainbow colored Slurpy. The pageant of colorful frozen sugar-water caught the eye of the Good-looking One who grabbed it while the black girl wasn’t looking and said “Hey, Look at this!” When the black girl realized her Slurpy had been taken she, rather innocently, said, “Hey, that’s mine.” The Good-looking One barked, “Fucking relax! I’m just looking at it!” And she slammed it onto the counter in front of the girl. She looked at me with that same sly smile she had employed earlier when talking about the headliner. It was coming like a heart attack. “That’s how you have to talk to these people.” She said.

“Will you be quiet? Seriously?” This limp injunction was the best I could muster. It was a far cry from how I wanted to deal with her; by caving the side of her head in with my fist. Then this white trash, drunken, foul-mouthed, racist idiot looked at me and slid her hand inside my arm and gave my bicep an engaging squeeze. She slid her hand down my arm and finally slipped it into my back pocket. Now to be fair, she hadn’t really done anything that bad. She was alright. Did I mention good-looking?

Back at the apartment the Big One was in her glory rationing chips and candy into small bowls and strategically positioning the bowls around the living room. Once the bowls were arranged to her satisfaction, we snacked.

The Good-looking One and I were sitting next to each other, arm in arm, on the couch. The OK One told a lunatic story about a kind of coffee beans she doesn’t like. As the OK One talked and the Big One made minced-meat out of bowl after bowl the Good-looking One furtively slipped her phone from her purse and read a text message. She got up suddenly, told me she would be right back, and left the apartment. The coffee bean madness continued. The Big One was enraptured with chips. A few minutes later the Good-looking One came back and nervously waved the Big One over for a conference. The OK One realized something was going on and stopped her pea-brained jabbering. I’ll never know how things ended with the coffee beans. The good-looking one hurried back out of the apartment. The Big One walked toward me with news. She told me, as though I didn’t already know, that the Good-looking One’s boyfriend was outside.

His enormous biceps, along with the tank top and the track pants he was wearing, suggested Tommy had come straight from the gym. The fact that he was coked out of his mind suggested he hadn’t. He pointed at me and asked who the fuck I was. He was already in a rage and not terribly interested in the answer to his own question. At this point I had had just about enough of this evening and these people and, leaping before I looked, I told Tommy to “calm down.” He charged for me. The OK One screamed. The Good-looking One lived for this kind of thing. The Big One bravely tried to stop him, but proved, a bit tragically, not big enough. I glanced around, making a Jason Bourne styled assessment of my surroundings. Maybe I could blind him with the tin of potpourri on the end table? Too late. I was tackled. How does Jason Bourne think so fast? Slamming down to the floor immediately aggravated an old ‘sleeping funny’ injury and my back muscles locked tight. I tried to wriggle out from under this gorilla but it was like having a safe on your chest. Muscle weighs more than IQ. Tommy was about to unleash his fists when three neighbors burst into the apartment. It seemed they had dealt with Tommy before. They pulled him off of me and tried to unreason with him. When I got to my feet the big one was holding my suitcase, “Let’s go!” She ordered, and we ran out of the apartment into the Philadelphia night.

When we got back to her apartment she pulled a frozen pizza out of the freezer and put it in the oven just as mechanically as she had flipped on the lights, hung up her jacket, and blinked her eyes. She was on autopilot. Two beers were popped open and placed on the counter. She apologized for the Good-looking One’s behavior (more force of habit). She was usually a really cool person. I told her I believed her. We drank, ate pizza and joked until 4am. She brought sheets and a pillow out for me and made up the couch. I thanked her for letting me stay and she bid me a good night before going to her bedroom. She shut off the lights, more ceremony, and exactly 13 seconds later, I counted, the lights popped back on. She stuck her head out of the bedroom, “You know, if you’re not going to be comfortable on the couch, you don’t have to sleep out there.” She said. My back, it’s important to remember, really was bothering me.