“Hey, do you mind if we go smoke, Rebecca?”
I knew that the question wasn’t so much whether I truly minded if they smoked, but more if I minded being the lone person at the table in this sad little bar.
I was out with some friends from grad school—excuse me, ad school, the rough equivalent of a top ten grad school in cost, but minus the actual degree. We were studying to become “creatives”—copywriters, art directors, and designers—in advertising. In addition to learning the craft of creating award-winning advertising campaigns, we were also quickly learning that to survive and stay sane in the business, you had to drink. A lot. And we took our education very seriously.
Needless to say, we were broke, and that’s how we decided upon the klassy establishment in North Beach that served dollar beers. We shot pool for a while, then we sat down and shot the shit over a few Fosters. As is usually the case after four or five beers, everyone decided they needed to smoke—everyone except me, the only non-smoker. I guarded the table, presumably from the six other patrons, who all looked like they’d spent a good $17 at dollar beer night by that time and thus, probably not a big threat to steal our table since they were having a considerable amount of trouble just standing.
I sipped my beer and took in the scene. Before going back to school, I’d worked in the professional world for eleven years, and in my new grad school life, I was always amazed to see people out getting completely shit-faced on a random Tuesday night. But who was I to judge? There I was, getting tanked with the rest of the randoms in this bar. The thought unnerved me, so I downed my beer. And that’s when I saw him staring at me.
I’m not sure why I hadn’t noticed him before. He was a large African-American man with a commanding presence, and he was wearing a bolero hat and sunglasses. (Did I mention that it was 11 o’clock at night and that the bar was dim?) When he saw me notice him, he took that as an invitation to walk over and sit down with me. He brought his shot and beer with him. Clearly, he thought he’d be hanging around for a while.
