Oh my! The Drinkah doesn�t really merit
2005-09-19, 3:08 p.m.

Oh my! The Drinkah doesn�t really merit just the name of Drinkah. Sure, she deserves that, but so much more. DW and I are stunned. He outright does not like her, and for me, although I can�t say I really like her, the issue is so much bigger than whether or not I like her. It�s more of a stunned disbelief at what she�s like, and what I have learned about her just by casually mentioning to one of our friends that Don is dating her.

OK, so let�s start at the very beginning. We went out to eat Saturday night at the Mexican restaurant that we always go to. Don and let�s call her Sue show up about 20 minutes late, and we figured it�s because they were at the Sports Bar, where Sue, it turns out, practically lives, and they were finishing up a game or a round or a match of Nerd Bar Trivia.

Oh God. Does it sound seedy and desperate? It gets worse.

DonandSue, because that�s their new name, DonandSue get there and this very pretty woman immediately opens her mouth and starts braying and spewing all kinds of cuss words in a very family restaurant. Telling her raucous bar stories and hooting and hollering and dropping names and monopolizing ALL conversation and, I don�t know. DW and I, we are not quiet people. We cuss a lot. We laugh out loud. We tell good stories. But we let the other people talk sometimes, and we know when to tone it down for propriety�s sake, like children and old people at the next table.

You know when you first meet new people, i.e. your new boyfriend�s BEST FRIEND AND HIS WIFE, and you kind of go slowly toward revealing the extent of your loud heehawing personality, and your drinking problem, and your drug dabbling, and all that? You know how you do that?

And you know how after you know people for a little while, you start to open up to them a bit, and after a meeting or two or three times, if the time is right, you might get to a point of comfort where you let them see your loud drunk personality? But you don�t particularly want them to know that as your first, and one and only personality? And it�s just a special occasion loud drunk personality, not an all-the-time personality?

OK, well Sue doesn�t. She doesn�t do any of that. You shake her hand, and she launches into the loud, drunk, bigger than life thing. And not in a fun way. More like if Courtney Love had come to dinner with us.

In fact, let�s call her Court. Screw this Sue business.

After dinner, DonandCourt very obviously wanted to go back to the Sports Bar to (1) get drunk (2) play nerd bar trivia and (3) be back in their native habitat but I was having none of it. So they suggested the other bar they inhabit, I kid you not, the Hotsy Totsy. Yep, there�s a Hotsy Totsy.

As an aside, there was once a diner in our town, or so I�ve heard, that was called the Squat-n-Gobble. Small town Texas. You must love it � I command you.

I did not want to go to the Tot, as we call it, either. I didn�t want to go somewhere that we would be falling into the warm, damp, breeding grounds of the drunken barflies I had before me. I wanted to get them out of their comfort zones and do something besides swill beer in a beer joint.

We went to Free Live Music Bar.

Court proceeded to latch onto me and tell me fun stories like the time she went to the emergency room with some post-Mexico godawful illness, and her tox screen came back with alcohol (�Well, duh!�), pot (�That was from a month before!�), and barbiturates (�I don�t even know what a barbiturate is.� Sure you don�t). And the ER doctor announced this in front of her aged parents and two grown sons, who now are horrified at their mother and much to her inconvenience, get all worried when they see her drinking a beer. My heart hurts for her family, by the way.

And there was the story about losing custody of her younger son when he was 8. I wonder why.

She told us that she has played Nerd Bar Trivia (this is a video game, folks, not a fun bar game played with actual human interaction. It�s you, a big video screen, and a controller, and you�re playing Nerd Bar Trivia with people sitting in the bar, but it�s anonymous). Anyway, she said she�d seen his screen name up on the screen but had never figured out who he was, and then one day she spotted him, and when she saw him, she just thought �Yummy.�

Yummy? we asked.

Yummy, she affirmed.

As I discerned through creative interpretation of her ongoing monologue, she means Yummy, as in �Fresh meat with whom I have not yet slept,� not �What a good-looking hunk of a man.�

Her stories got more and more garbled as she got drunker and drunker and drunker. She actually jumped into Don�s lap, straddling him, I guess when the spirit moved her or something. It was a train wreck.

And it�s not that DW and I are shocked at drunken, wanton behavior. Shit, you should have seen us on our first date. We had the decency to take it outside, at least, but we�re not Amish or librarians or anything. Hee! Just kidding, all you librarians.

It was (1) this woman is so unlike anything we�ve ever seen come out of or on behalf of Don and (2) this woman just absolutely let loose her very worst bar behavior on our first meeting.

I will never let her hang out anywhere around my son. When my mom comes to town in a couple of weeks, she will not be meeting Court. And when I think of Don�s sister Liz and�oh my God. Oh hell no. Liz will have none of this. Don is so much better than Barfly Court.

If Don continues to date her, it will change the relationships he has with the folks who have heretofor been important in his life, much as it seems to have changed his personality and his priorities.

There are just no words. But I�ll think of some tomorrow when we continue our saga with �The Gossip Factor: Life in a Small Town.�

And last, I have been misusing Yummy, as we�ll see in this vignette:

Me: You know what I thought just now, when I looked at you?
DW: Yummy?
Me: No. I thought �Wanker� But now I�m thinking Yummy.

Mmmmmm. Yummy.