We used to go to the Skylark and play the “Find the celebrity in the crowd” game. One of us would find someone in the bar who looked like a celebrity and the other would have to find that person. We found Chris Farley, that fat guy turned not so fat guy from Blues Traveller, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Trent Reznor, Cyndi Lauper, Zooey Deschanel and a million more together.
Last night he sat across from me at a table, in a poorly lit bar, holding another girls hand under the table, trying to hide it from me, playing the game with her.
Next to me Claire reached out and squeezed my thigh, scooted closer to me and put her head on my shoulder. Her hair smelled like vanilla mint. She held her phone up to me so I could see the screen: Are you upset? It read. I shook my head and put my cheek against her hair.
It wasn’t the hand holding that bothered me and it wasn’t the fact that he was hiding it, it was that the game wasn’t ours anymore. It was like watching your ‘best friend’ in grade school play with someone new.
He shook her hand under the table. “I see Andy Warhol,” he said. The girl moved her head back and forth around the bar. She sat up out of her chair a little to be the same height as him, in hopes of seeing this ordinary person turned celebrity. She leaned back in her chair, seemingly defeated. He had been stumping her for a good 5 minutes.
“Right there,” I said, extending my hand out toward the far left of the bar. “Next to the girl in the polka dot jacket.”
She shot me a hard look, as if to say, “This is our thing now, butt out.”
I shot her a look right back, not intimidated by her tiny blue eyes, so blue they were cold to look at. “This game takes a lot of years to get right,” I said.
I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but as the hours passed my brain was having a hard time being quiet. His face was quiet. I couldn’t read it. I didn’t know if it was because I was sober and he wasn’t or if he agreed with me. She was bad at this game. We had always been good.
“You’ll get it,” he said, patting her thigh. “You just need a little practice.” She smiled a little and leaned back in her chair, triumphant.
A few minutes later, sitting in the bathroom, I texted him, wanting to see if he would reply, if his silence with me was just due to his proximity to her or her proximity to me. Somehow, I accidentally texted someone else and then I just gave up. I stood there in the stall, my phone heavy in my hands, wondering when I was going to grow up a little. Being this sick, you would think it would happen sometime soon.
“Did you fall in?” Claire texted me. “Do you want to go home? This shit is kinda lame.”
I wanted to agree with her, but I couldn’t. I stayed in the bathroom a little longer until Claire came in, her little head ducking under the stall.
“Come on,” Claire said, tapping at the stall door. “She couldn’t even find Angelina Jolie. This is just too depressing to watch.”
Angelina Jolie was sitting at the table right next to us. I’d been watching her all night, waiting for him to pick her. I always knew his next move, which is maybe what I missed the most, the anticipation of countering that.
I’d always been ahead of him, but now I was just tripping up behind him, being swallowed by his dust, waiting to find a chance to slip through the gap and gallop on ahead.
