Today: One anonymous man’s recount of a Friday night out slash Saturday morning in. Eye-muffs Mom – this is not a tale of our generation’s finest moment…

Tomorrow: An assessment of what it means. For him. For her. For us. That is, if it means anything…

Also – don’t shoot the messenger.
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Late Friday afternoon rolls around, and I’m sitting at work looking out the window, exalting in the burst of relaxation and excitement engendered when one’s boss leaves for the weekend. My buoyant mood notwithstanding, I still don’t have a plan for the evening, until Jeff texts me. “Andrea is bringing friends to the beergarten.” Andrea, for the uninitiated, is Jeff’s new woman du jour. She’s 24, works at JP Morgan, and is outgoing such that I think she might have friends who are built for speed. I arrive at Jeff’s and after a few beers and a few innings of the Mets beating the Phillies, we head two blocks over to the beergarten. 



Andrea is already there, standing near the entrance with a cute friend named Mary. Mary is 5’4″, dyed blond hair, suspiciously tan, but still possessing that attractive dirty/slutty/fake-tanned/fake-blond look. It works pretty well for her; she is fit, with a little meat on her bones. And, she is wearing tight clothes that also show off a pretty decent rack. I can work with this. She is outgoing, and a little crass. Fun.

Five minutes into chatting, she mentions that her friend Kevin is coming. Oh shit. Friend Kevin. My night just got a lot worse. I will be playing 5th wheel, and lord knows it could get really ugly fast, since Jeff and Andrea greeted each other with a smile-filled kiss. But then Mary makes a kick-save and a beauty. She says, “why do I feel the need to say my friend Kevin is gay?” I’m sure I did not hide my emotions: my face probably light up like a Christmas tree switching on. From zero to hero. The prodigal son returning home. Pauper to prince. Those were the most beautiful words I could have heard. She’s making a point to say she’s still available, so I continue chatting with her.

We sit down at one of the long tables, alongside Jeff and Andrea, and Jeff’s brother Tom and his friends, and we soon commence some flipcup. In the first round of flipcup, Andrea is struggling. She takes forever to down her beer, and then can’t balance the cup on the table. Then, after the round concludes, she’s learning back in her seat, such that I’m scared she’s going to fall right out of the picnic table. Then, as soon as Jeff asks her if she is okay, she grabs him and starts whispering into his ear. Andrea has a wry smile as she’s whispering into his ear, and Jeff ellicts a cheerful response of: “Well….hahaha…okay, let’s have a few drinks here then we can go.” My guess as to what she said: “Let’s go back to your place….” 



How did Andrea end up so drunk two beers into the night? I don’t know, but this is not helpful for my chances with Mary. Andrea makes a few trips to the bathroom with Mary, but they don’t really improve her situation. She’s very drunk and not going to last long. I forget about this potential snafu, and I continue chatting with Mary. I start to make some good progress, discovering we are both English majors, and she even claims to like Robert Frost. She tells me about her work selling insurance for alternative energy projects, and she even suggests we should meet for coffee. A little weird to have a girl ask you out so quickly, but hey, it feels like a good sign. Then, disaster strikes. She gets a call from her roommate, who’s having some emotional breakdown. In an instant, I’m giving her a kiss on the cheek goodbye. I left with Mary’s business card, a drunk Andrea/Jeff, and Mary’s “gay friend” Kevin.



The group leaves the beergarten, and heads to a bar. Jeff/Andrea put forth a valiant effort, and do show up at the bar, but 2 minutes later they are gone. So I’m left solo with Tom and his friends. I haven’t spoken to any of them all night, because they were far down the other end of the table. I don’t even know half of them. I grab a bacardi and diet, and stroll over towards Liz, a friend of Tom’s who is a familiar face. She’s chatting with a buxom blue-eyed blond girl – Katrina. I pull out my strongest game, because I’m kind of drunk. Let me tally up the drinking thus far…

I had two full 1-liter mugs of beer at the beergarten, and I made sure to pick out the beer with the highest alcohol content. Very Tucker Max of me, I know. Add into that the beer from 10 rounds of flip cup and the couple I had at Jeff’s, and, well, yeah, I’m feeling good. This is probably why I went with Bacardi Diet, which is my party drink. It hits you harder than beer, it’s got a little caffeine in it too, and it’s diet! 



So what’s my very best game, you ask? My best pick-up/bar move is offering to guess everything about a girl. “Nice to meet you Katrina…wait, don’t tell me anything…I’m going to guess where you’re from, where you live in the city, and what your job is.” This is actually a pretty fun exercise, and girls love it. It’s also practical, because it’s a natural conversation starter. In the process of hints, clues, and guessing there is a lot of laughing and room for digressions.

Now Liz is going on and on about how she’s related to Boss Tweed. It’s fairly interesting, but gets boring after a while. Thankfully, the conversation turns to my shirt. Now, I agonized for longer than I’d care to admit about what to wear out yesterday. I ended up choosing a white dress shirt that also doubles as a tuxedo shirt. It’s a very sharp looking shirt, it’s textured and has french cuffs, so my sleeves were rolled up. Katrina is saying how she loves the texture, and starts rubbing my chest. Liz does the same, and says she wishes her boyfriend would wear shirts like mine. Liz, with her boyfriend watching, is rubbing my shirt more intently than Katrina. Katrina and Liz go to grab drinks, and Adam comes over and jokingly tells me to stop hitting on his girlfriend. 



Now’s it’s decision time. Do I jump in a cab home and give my body some time to digest this alcohol, meaning there is a chance I’ll wake up early feeling good on a beautiful Saturday morning? Or do I make a full-court press for Katrina. You guys know me: I’m a whore. I think all women are attractive, and I’ll sleep with just about anyone. Of course I went for Katrina. It turns out she is pretty interesting. She was an astronomy major at Barnard, and I impress her with my knowledge about stars, relativity, the history of the universe, and snarkily remark about how I watched the first episode of the new series on Discovery written by Stephen Hawking, but I didn’t learn anything new, because I already knew it all. She’s picking up what I’m putting down. Things are going well. The group heads to another bar, and I buy a round of drinks. Of course, in that round I bought three shots of Jamo. Why 3? I don’t know, but it’s always good to have extra. I tell Katrina that one is for Tom, one is for me, and unless she can beat me in rock-scissors-paper, she’s taking the third. It’s best out of three, and I lose the first two games straight away. I’m like the Oklahoma City Thunder. But you know what? She grabs the shot and downs it anyway. L’Chaim!



The night’s winding down and we’re outside the bar talking. Everyone’s leaving. I work the classic, “let’s grab one more drink. We both live on the west side, it’s definitely too early to call it a night.” So somehow I ask her, “where do you want to go?,” which is not the right move, because you need to be assertive and you need to have a plan. Those are key elements in any successful date or any successful attempt at getting laid. She mumbles some nonsense that as best I can remember was: “I’ll go anywhere. We could go to a bar…don’t really care…would be fine. (Sheepishly) I’ll even go to your place now if you want.” Wow, talk about making it easy for me. I flag a cab and we’re on our way to my apartment.

Now – the thing about sleeping with a random girl for the first time is that the sex is rarely good. Sex is perfected only after you have chemistry with a girl. And, I don’t mean you need emotional chemistry. It was pretty good, but not my best performance ever. Immediately after, she says out loud: “That’s it? I thought you would have been better.”

Ouch. I can’t believe she said that. Here I am, abandoned by Jeff, drunk, and then she insults my performance. Wow, what a low. I should have struck back but I demurred, got us both some bottles of water and we drifted off into a drunken sleep. But, not before she warned me that she snores. Endearing. 



I wake up, to a beautiful day, with sun beaming in my window and a swath of blue sky visible. I can tell that Katrina is awake, and she wants me to wake up too. She wants me to get up first and move about, so she doesn’t have to climb over me and get dressed in front of me. She certainly doesn’t want to be the one to break the “morning after silence.” I don’t really care, I want to sleep more. So I just go back to sleep for 20 minutes without saying a word. Then, I start to feel charitable, and I break the “morning after silence” by saying “good morning.” Morning after silences can be really awkward. I was kind of reeling from being insulted last night, so I purposefully let this one drag out for a little bit. Cruel, I know, but then I went to fetch us some waters. 



I head to the bathroom first, and looking at myself in the mirror, some self-pity emerges. I look like a complete mess. My hair which once looked really good, courtesy of the Ax messy look paste I applied before going out, now looks horrible, precisely because the combination of sweat, sex, and sleep have mixed with the ax messy-look paste to make my hair look like a bird’s nest that’s been split in half in a heavy rainstorm. I have a slight hangover, and my eyes are bloodshot and still adjusting to the light of day. Self-pity is growing fast and strong. 

But, then, I have an ah-ha moment. My inner thoughts shifted to Pacino’s speech in Any Given Sunday. 



“I don’t know what to say really.
Three minutes
to the biggest battle of our professional lives
all comes down to today.
Either we heal as a team
or we are going to crumble.
Inch by inch
play by play
till we’re finished.
We are in hell right now, gentlemen
believe me and
we can stay here
and get the shit kicked out of us
or we can fight our way
back into the light.
We can climb out of hell.
One inch, at a time.”




I decided to climb out of hell, gentlemen. I fought for that inch. I threw on my Motown playlist in the living room, grabbed to bottles of water, and went back into the bedroom ready to fight for some morning sex. I was going back in. Sadly, It was another subpar performance but I shook it off, grabbed my book of Robert Frost poetry and engaged her with that. She seemed to enjoy it, and I read her a few of my favorite poems, and discussed them with her. 



Soon enough, she was on her way out the door. To be polite, I asked for her phone number. And she left with the always classic, morning-after-a-one-night-stand euphemism: “Well…it was really great to…meet you last night,” she said in a slightly embarrassed tone as I showed her to the door.