So, I went to a bar last night. L. was there. This wasn’t just any old bar. It’s where we met. I thought she might be there, given my memory of her routines. It reminded me of the funny joke:

The past, the present, and the future walked in to a bar. It was tense.

Except I wasn’t really feeling tense. I think she was, and the bartender seemed to sense the silence between us was… well, something. We said nothing, both pretending the other did not exist. I read poetry and she sat alone, doing stuff on her phone. I was reminded of the sage advice from an old guy at Veronica’s, years ago: “Young man, beware of a woman who sits alone at a bar!” I had never seen fit to follow that advice, but I did so last night. If I was going to say anything it would be when she was not drunk, which she probably was.

So that was that. I got up to leave and, possibly in reaction to that, she disappeared into the bathroom. Or maybe that was just coincidental. But it would suit her other behaviors if she ran away from me like that.

This little standoff last night reminded to remind myself of how things started breaking down, and how we likely had no kind of a stable or comfortable future together. We were at a bar, having a lovely night, we even commented on this as we paid the check. We got up to leave and suddenly she started running away from me, physically pushing me away from her and making it appear to anyone who might be paying attention that I had done something awful. Hand on heart: Nothing happened. I didn’t say anything, I didn’t do anything, not at the moment or at any time that night did I say anything awful enough to prompt this kind of action.

I had seen this one other time, but in that instance whatever got into her head exited and we continued our lovely night out. She is just a volatile drunk, I knew that going in, but it also reminds that to some women this is what men are for: to be blamed for things that did not happen and publicly humiliated for things that do not even matter.

Coincidentally enough I just bumped into her on 34th Avenue a couple of hours ago. She did a lousy job of pretending not to see me, but I called out her name. We talked for a couple of minutes, nothing more than pleasantries. She looked shocked, I don’t know if that was at the fact that I said anything at all or just at seeing my ugly face again. She is still working on a TV show, a job that was supposed to have ended by now but which is in extended production. I didn’t want to keep her, so I ended the conversation with no suggestion that we meet up or talk. It felt very adult and grownup for two who had a rather torrid romance to be polite to each other like that. That’s how it is supposed to be, right?

She probably thinks I blocked her on Facebook, because that suits her sense of drama, but I deactivated. She posts just about nothing on Facebook but, as I’ve discovered with a lot of people who are like that, she reads it and more importantly reads into it almost obsessively.

…

So I tried to keep the rogue payphone alive by using John’s phone to make an actual call. In my e-mail to him the other night I mentioned that I could not use the phone because the coins got jammed. Today the phone was fixed as far as the coin slot being cleared. So I called to leave a message for the .MOBI. But I came home to find that the 90 second recording I thought I’d made was silent. A follow up call where I left the phone hanging to record whatever ambient sounds were around also was silent. That’s a bummer, but I’m not going to tell him. I don’t want to be his best friend or anything, though I would not object to having a couple of beers with him. I realized after our exchange that he was afraid I was going to write about this phone in a way that identifies him as the culprit behind it. Apparently that scenario caused trouble for him some years ago when I wrote about an illegal phone of his that used to be outside the Bel Aire Diner on 21st Street. He praticlly begged me to either delete the story or excise specific details. I didn’t understand this at the time because I was writing about a phone that was no longer there, but apparently the City agency in charge of this stuff read my site and gave him some retroactive crap for having had that phone out there without them approving it. Yeah, it’s a glamorous life of this payphone muckraker.

…

At the ghetto coffee shop, feeling a clean anxiety attack surfacing. Time to get at the piano.