Chicken Dance

"Hey, Stretch, where's Napoleon?" asks Larry, as I take my usual seat at the bar. He's referring to AC, and doesn't realize that tonight I'm here with Maria. She arrived first and is already sitting there with a beer in front of her. Larry is one of the owners of The Banknote.

"I don't know, it's not my night to watch him," I reply. "This is my friend Maria. Be nice to her, she's here to review your chicken wings."

"Shhh, don't tell him!" Maria scolds me. "I don't want them to do anything special."

Larry comes over to our side of the bar and shakes Maria's hand. "The wings are really good here," he says, "Especially the Cajun wings."

Those are my favourite, too. First, though, we're going to have a couple of fine hoppy beverages, and talk about boys. Because that's what girls do.

"Hey, can I show you two something?" asks a boy's voice from the other side of the pillar at the end of the bar. He doesn't wait for us to answer. Instead, he holds out a tube of Dep hair gel.

"This is the greatest stuff," he continues. "I got it in my stocking for Christmas, but never tried it until today."

"It doesn't look like hair gel," I offer. It's a light green colour, and opaque; sort of milky looking. Not the usual translucent bubbly look, but I recognize the brand name. So would The Viking, I'm sure.

"It's new," says the boy. "It's cream gel. Seriously, it's great."

"Are they paying you to say that?" I ask.

"No, but seriously, this stuff is so great, I want to work for the company."

Maria is examining the menu. "I have to order hot wings for the review," she says, "So it's the same as all the other places. But maybe I should try the Cajun wings too? And I want some real food; I haven't eaten all day."

Maria is serious about her chicken wing reviews. She carries her Palmpilot with a spreadsheet and rates the chicken wings on a list of qualities and criteria, takes a picture of the wing presentation, then publishes her review on her blog.

"The ribs are really good here, if you like ribs," I say. "You have to be really hungry, though; they're huge."

We decide to get one order of the ribs and wings, and another small order of wings, and share. That way she can try both the hot wings and the Cajun wings.

While we're waiting for our food we talk about blog stalkers. Blog stalkers, it seems, are almost always boys. Maria had one, once. Me, I just had Donny.

"So who is this Boz guy?" asks Maria. "Is he really your neighbour?"

"Oh, he's real, all right," I tell her. "And every time I run into him, I look like something the cat dragged in, or barfed up."

Maria laughs. With me, I like to think, not at me.

"Seriously, it's like I'm cursed. If there's a day that I run out of coffee, say, and decide to walk over to the corner store to get some, and I've got my hair in a ponytail and my sweatpants on, and I look like I haven't had any coffee yet that morning — a terrifying sight, I promise you — that's when I'll run into him. Inside the store; or he'll be walking back from it just as I'm walking to it, and our paths will cross and we'll say hello. And then he'll go on his way, thinking to himself, who was that bag lady? She looked familiar."

Then I tell Maria what happened after Boz rang my doorbell last Sunday. I'll tell you the rest of the story, Gentle Reader, tomorrow.

Maria tells me a story about a boy who lives in her building. Seems she also has designs on a handsome neighbour. We have a lot in common. She has tap shoes, too.

I'm looking in my wallet for my tap teacher's business card to show Maria. I can't find it, but I find a picture, and show that to her instead.

"Who's that?" she asks.

"It's Jack."

"Jack? Oh, is he the guy you wrote the song for?"

Now it's my turn to laugh. "That's a Fleetwood Mac song!"

"What happened to him?" Maria asks.

"He dumped me. Again."

"Again?"

"It's a long story," I say.

Long enough to be a novel, in fact.

The chicken wings arrive. Maria tells me about all the cities she's reviewed wings in: San Diego, Montreal; Buffalo, of course. In some bars they're still called Buffalo Wings.

"Dave says there are all kinds of great wing places in Chicago," Maria says, and so we talk about him. She met him at Joey's birthday party last fall.

"Did you sleep with him?" Maria asks me, and I tell her.

Later, I program Maria's number into my cell phone. I'm scrolling through my list, to make sure she's entered correctly, and she's looking at the screen, too, and she sees Donny's name and says, "Oh, you have his number?"

"Yeah, don't you? He was at your party last weekend."

"Yes, but I only have his email address. What's his number?"

I press the key to display his number for her, and then, because I'm on my third beer, I press the dial key.

"Hi, Donny, it's Sass. What are you doing?"

He says something about pyjamas, and I realize, too late, that it's probably too late to be calling anyone.

"I'm at The Banknote with Maria. She's reviewing their chicken wings. You want to come down here and have a beer with us?"

Down, in Toronto terms, means downtown. As opposed to uptown, which is where Donny lives. Way uptown. Eglinton Avenue.

I hand Maria the phone, and she tries to convince Donny to come. It doesn't seem to be working. I turn to the two boys sitting around the corner from us and ask, "If you were a guy, and you lived alone, and you didn't have a girlfriend, and you weren't working right now so it's not like you have to get up early tomorrow morning, and two girls called you from a bar and asked you to come join them, like, wouldn't you?"

Penny, the waitress, is standing at the bar beside the two boys. She calls across to us, "Is he a virgin? Maybe he's a virgin."

Maria is still talking to Donny.

"I don't think so," I yell back across the bar.

Not that I have any first hand knowledge, you understand, Gentle Reader.

"I mean, he's in his thirties, so it's not likely," I yell.

"I wouldn't have thought so either but I just watched The 40 Year Old Virgin," yells Penny.

Maria looks like she's giving up.

"Here, let me talk to him," says the boy sitting near us at the bar.

In the end, Donny blew us off, and Maria and I went home and blogged.

It's nice to have a new friend who's as dorky as I am.

* * *
Click here to see the picture the Naked KnitGirl took of Postmodern Sass at The Banknote. It won't be long before Postmodern Sass and the Naked KnitGirl return to The Banknote for ribs and wings—and, speaking of crushes, in the next story, you'll find out what happened when Postmodern Sass answered her doorbell, dressed in her dorky best, to find her handsome neighbour had dropped by.