‘Out’ and About
While Chrissy was trying to work out things with her Ex, I decided to move on with my life. Matt had given me a great offer to buy his 1984 Oldsmobile “Snout”. It was a deal I couldn’t pass up. When I went to pick the car up, he handed me a folder of every maintenance receipt he ever had on the car. He then started to tell me that in another 10,000 miles it would need to have the shocks replaced.. I think he noticed my eyes squinting or something because he stopped himself in mid-sentence and said “you aren’t going to do any of this are you?”
I looked at him and told him “it’s a 1984 Oldsmobile that I’m buying for $350 dollars. I’m going to drive this thing into the ground.” Not that I really planned to, but it was a funny thing to say to such an anal retentive person.
Meanwhile, our friend Brooke who had recently ‘came out’ as a lesbian earlier this year to her parents had been lamenting that it was so hard to find anybody when we went out places. We speculated it was because she went with us to places that were generally straight, in groups with both guys and girls, and it may not be easy to pick up on the fact that she was an available lesbian. Somehow, I volunteered to go to a gay bar with her on weekend.
A week or so later, the two of us went off to go ‘gay bar hopping’. I don’t know what I was envisioning, but it was this idea that I’d peruse the bar and find hot chicks for Brooke to hook up with. The first place we went to was dead. Brooke and I just had a drink and talked. It was more of a lounge bar, but I did notice the drinks were inexpensive. The second place we went to was more of a club atmosphere. The first thing I saw when we walked through the door was two guys from the stock room of J.C.Penney’s where I worked. They were so flamboyantly gay that I was taken back when they saw me and said, “Hey, bet you’re surprised to see us here. I didn’t realize they were keeping it a secret because it was the worse kept secret in the workplace. I feigned shock, nonetheless. They asked if I was gay and I told them no, I was here for my friend and Brooke just said “great, we go to a gay club and you know more people here than I do!”
Brooke went off to mingle, and I went to the bar to get a drink from a scantily clad muscular bartender. My Seabreeze came to only $2.00 and I debated to myself whether a really cheap mixed drink was worth receiving it from a man wearing a thong, and I thought ‘Yes.’ I then set off to find the perfect girl for Brooke. I had very little luck, but Brooke found someone. I never understood lesbians that dated lesbians that looked like boys, but Brooke found one. Kind of heavyset with a sweatshirt, short hair, and a baseball cap. Her name was Kristin and was nice enough, but I kept thinking. If you like girls, they should look like a girl. But what do I know?
By the end of the following week, I took Chrissy to my brother’s Battle of the Bands show and she told me that things between her and Sam were not going to work out. Where that left us was up in the air because I made the same mistakes I did with Jen. I put the ball in her court. I put my heart through the ringer over this and I wasn’t about to just put it back out there. But once again, we started to hang out all the time.
One of the first things we did was to go to a party Brooke’s new friend was throwing. An interesting party with mostly strangers with the highlight being Chrissy and I swimming in the pool with all of our clothes on. Brooke and Kristin didn’t really spark. Brooke ended up dating a different Kristen shortly afterwards.
After that, Azuree’s sister, Sarah, who had recently broken up with ‘Jesus’ Dan, was planning to study in Russia. “Jesus’ Dan was still friends with her, but after the whole Azuree thing, Sarah and I were not on good terms at all. Dan decided to throw a huge Bon Voyage/Fund raiser party for Sarah’s trip at his place.
In a strange twist, Brooke and ‘Jesus’ Dan had become roommates and now rented this house together. I was doing a very good job avoiding Sarah up to this point. I knew how she felt about me because Azuree told me, in specific detail, and I suspect, anything I may have said about her would have slipped out of Azuree’s mouth just as efficiently due to her lack of filter. Against my better judgment, Chrissy made me attend because of my friendship with Dan and Brooke. We compromised and showed up late, really late.
As soon as we got there we had seen Dan, he gave us a quick tour and explained to us how, Sarah’s study group trip plan thing got cancelled and because she sold her car in preparation of this trip it was now a “Help Sarah get her feet back on the ground Fundraiser” in which I sarcastically scoffed at. Worst charity ever, I thought to myself. And Chrissy was too poor to donate. As matter of fact, since she moved away from her boyfriend, she had trouble affording her last month’s rent so I spotted her some cash so if she donated to this cause, I would have been quite upset.
I told Dan we were quite sorry, for her luck, but I was there to see Brooke. We went straight up to her room where Brooke was sitting with a livid Jay. Jay was extremely annoyed. He explained how he showed up, and Dan immediately shook him down for about $50 bucks for Sarah, which he was okay with because that was what the party was about, but only after the fact did Dan mention that she wasn’t going to Russia and that it was so Sarah could buy a new car.
&n
bsp;“I could have used that money to fix up my own damn car!” he yelled. I just laughed and told him how I wasn’t scammed and he looked at me glaring “And you…!” I had no idea what I had done.
He continued, “I was so annoyed at Dan for being so sneaky that I told him I just wanted to hang out with Brooke, so I came here and we were hanging out. The whole time that girl Azuree sat in a chair staring at us. At one point I asked Brooke ‘isn’t Kerry supposed to show up?’ and out of nowhere THAT girl went on a tirade saying ‘he’d better not show up or I’ll give him a piece of my mind! I can’t believe…blah, blah, blah’ she went on for what seemed like forever until I had to stop her and say ‘I don’t even know who this guy Kerry is.’(Which is totally hysterical seeing that I’ve known Jay since 1st grade.) At that moment she immediately shut up and apologized for her rant. What did you DO to that girl?”
Running into Azuree had been a fear of mine, but thought it might be unlikely. I had decided that she was agoraphobic and had a fear of the outside world. That was why she didn’t have anything to say other than those few stories. She just didn’t get out. She didn’t ‘love me’ as much as she didn’t know anyone else. At least she had left the party before that land mine blew up in my face.