Some Words

When I drive home from work these days, I always go past the Red Dragon. I do not stop. The Red Dragon is a booze death zone to me now. Half the drinks have 151 snuck in under cover of ice and fruit juice. All of them seem to come in enormous brandy glasses. Two of them can put most of the people I know under, and the really heavy drinkers I know tend to top out at three or four. On top of all this the classics are horribly done there.

So as I’m going by this time I have to stop for a light. A girl, who may have been there with a fake id, comes running out into the road. She has a sign. It reads, “Help a poor college girl by buying her a drink?” Now, at first I was a little shocked, lets leave the panhandling to the desperate cases I think. But then I realized that this is an ingenious plan. A) She was really small. She only needed this to work once and she’d be set for the night. B) Whatever guy in a car does give her the money, he’s off in his car when the light changes. This means that if he turns out to be an ass who thinks that buying her a drink means he’s entitled to anything… away he goes. C) It looked hilarious. She really understood how absurd the whole thing was. You could see it in her face. D) On some level I wish I’d thought of it when I was her age. I still wouldn’t have been cute enough to pull it off, but I wish I’d thought of it.