gpc

The preface to the story about the Girls from Thursday turns out to be another girl — a girl who is too young, according to our thirtyish driver.

“I had to tell her I don’t want to date her,” he says. “She’s like twenty-two or whatever. I don’t stay out that late anymore, so I was like forget it.”

“Awww, too bad for you,” mocks the front-passenger girl (whose age remains a question mark). She then decides to meander from the plan. “You hear that, Mr. Sleepyhead in back? He leaves them alone when they’re that young.”

I yawn as I finally sit up in the back seat. Are we still on Ninth?

The driver glances up at the rear-view mirror. “You got something going on I should know about?” he asks me.

“Nah, just some girl I was talking to earlier. Certain bystanders have chosen to exaggerate.”

FPG scoffs. “Pfffffffff. I know what I saw.”

“How old is she?” the driver asks me.

“I don’t know. She’s young; she graduated last year.”

“Niiiiiiiiiice.”

“Excuse me,” FPG interrupts. “What is so nice about it? You were just complaining about Miss Twenty-Two-Year-Old a minute ago. Hypocrite.”

“Naw, naw, it’s not being hypocritical really,” notes the driver. “I’m just saying younger is always easier to start out with. I mean, young girls, they like experience, okay? You can’t be afraid to act on it if it’s what they want. So in general it’s much less stressful in the beginning.”

“Oh my god. How about you pull over right here and I can walk home.”

The driver ignores her and looks at me again in the mirror. “Which girl was it?”

“Eh, it’s not really worth getting into—”

“The one with the short brown hair and the green shirt,” FPG says. “They were sitting together for a while. Brown eyes, kind of short. Did I miss anything, Mr. Sleepyhead?”

Traitor.

“Oh yeah I remember her,” the driver says. “I didn’t really get to talk to her. What’s she like?”

“She’s a smart kid,” I say. “But, you know, she’s in the middle of that still-finding-herself phase.”

“And now she needs your help. Niiiiiiiiiice.”

“That’s it!” yells FPG. “Pull over! I’m serious.”

“Haha. Relax there — we’re just educating you some.”

“I am done with you two. Seriously.”

It’s here where I decide to get back to the plan; the flattery angle typically works best.

“So sensei,” I say to the driver. “You have to explain the darts thing to me. I don’t really get it. I mean, darts would seem to be a major turn-off for most girls.”

“Naw, naw, it really depends on how you play it, see. I happen to be pretty good at darts. It looks easy but it’s harder than you think. You throw one and they wanna try it. And so I teach ’em: I sorta guide ’em on how to do it, and it becomes like this excuse to hold onto something — you got an arm over her shoulder, maybe, or a hand near her hips. That kinda thing.”

“And what was this girl wearing, if you don’t mind telling me?” asks FPG.

“The first one? Well, she’s some manager type who wears executive clothing. I guess I’d call it executive tight clothing. And so I’m showing her how to the throw the darts and I tell her a lot of it is your posture during the throw — which is true by the way — and she’s got her chest out a little, kinda…What? What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” says FPG. “Just finish your stupid story.”

“Why you trying to make me feel bad about it, huh? These girls know the game.”

“If you say so.”

“Look I’ll tell you straight about this girl and the darts. I like her but I’m probably not gonna call her again. She wants a relationship and I’m not into that right now.”

“And so you play the darts and lead her on.”

“I’m not leading her on! I’m showing her how to friggin’ throw darts! She asked me to show her.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Hey it’s not like I’m hooking up with these girls — I’m just meeting ’em, talking to them, flirting with them, seeing if it stays interesting. I like meeting people. It’s fun. But I get bored with ’em sometimes.”

“Out! I want out of this car!”

“Look, it’s not like I drag it out. Two dates is my limit. If it doesn’t stay interesting after two dates, I don’t take ’em out anymore.”

“And what if they want to keep going out with you?”

“Well, I tell ’em I’m busy or gotta work late or maybe we can meet up the next week. By the next week they probably found someone else. They play the game too, you know. But what gets annoying is that they still text me — all the time, it’s ridiculous. All this texting, it gets expensive, man.”

“You don’t have unlimited?”

“Naw, naw, I only have a thousand. And they won’t stop texting me.”

“Poor baby,” says FPG. “Get unlimited and stop whining.”

“I’d rather just get fewer texts from these girls…”

“Okay, okay,” I interrupt. “I think we’ve got the darts girl down. What about the second one?”

“Right — the second one,” says the driver. “So the darts girl leaves, and I see this other girl, Puerto Rican girl, eating dinner at the bar.”

“So you ask her to play the darts too?” asks FPG.

“Naw, naw. I just go up to her and say, ‘That looks good, whatchew eating?’”

“Seriously? ‘Whatchew eating?’ is your pickup line?”

“Hey I like to talk, okay? If I see somebody and I feel like talking, I find something to talk about. I don’t care how obvious it is. I don’t need some fancy line to get started. I was hungry. Her food looked good. That’s enough to start talking to her.”

“And then what happened?”

“And then we hit a few more bars and we drink and we say goodnight to each other. That’s it. We had fun. That’s it.”

I ask the driver if he’s going to see her again.

“I dunno,” he replies. “She’s supposed to text me.”

I don’t have much furniture at home, and there are times when I really miss the kind of sprawl — lying back, hands tucked behind head, legs stretched, foot propped up on an arm rest — that you can only do on a proper couch, which I do not own.

Tonight, however, I get a decent substitute: the entire back seat of a Nissan Altima heading north on Tenth Avenue.

The driver is someone I know but not well; the girl in the front passenger seat knows him better.

“And tell me why we are driving so far out of the way,” she nags him.

“I thought I told you already. I left my ID at a bar on Thursday.”

“Which bar?”

“See, that’s the thing. I’m not sure. But I should be able to figure it out once we’re around there.”

The girl turns her head to look at me. “Comfy?” she asks.

“Very.”

I feel the car swerve to the right. Fifty-Eighth Street.

“I know it’ll be on the right, on Ninth,” the driver says.

“So the bouncer didn’t give the ID back to you?” I ask.

“Naw, naw. The bartender took it. I was playing darts, see.”

“Why did he take it?”

“They make you give it to ’em — in exchange for the darts.”

“Oh, like a deposit,” I say. “That seems…unnecessary. Are there really enough people out there who go around stealing darts from bars that they make you hand over your ID?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of bullshit, ain’t it? Anyway, afterwards I gave back the darts but forgot my ID.”

“You forgot? Or you were drunk and then you forgot?”

“Well, yeah. I was, kinda.”

“And he was with a girl,” interrupts the girl who is not the girl from Thursday.

“Yeah. I was, kinda.”

We pass by Valhalla. “Shit…was it this place?” the driver asks. He pulls over next to a hydrant and jumps out of the car.

“Hey,” I say to the front-passenger girl. “Do you know the girl he’s talking about? The one from Thursday?”

“No,” says FPG.

“Can you get him to talk about her?”

“Um. Why?”

“Because if I ask him, he won’t talk about it. But if you ask, he’ll talk.”

“What are you, a friggin’ spy?”

“No, I just want to see where he goes with it,” I tell her. “All you gotta do is get him to talk, okay? Do it as a favor for me.”

“And why should I do that?”

“Because I’m asking very, very nicely, aren’t I?”

Her eyes narrow. “You know, you have become a lot weirder since I met you,” she says. “Okay, I’ll do it. But maybe I get a favor in return. Later, I mean.”

“Yeah yeah yeah whatever.”

“Hey — you didn’t say that very nice.”

“Okay,” I say. “I owe you a nice favor, and now I’m saying it nice. But you have to make him talk.”

The driver returns without his ID. He sits behind the wheel, annoyed. “I fucking know it was around here,” he says. “It’s gotta be close. I just don’t remember…”

“You could text the girl,” I suggest.

He pulls out his cell phone and chuckles to himself. “I guess I should just text both of them then.”

“Both?” FPG asks. “There were two Thursday girls?”

“Well yeah. There was one I started with, and then it kinda overlapped at some point with the second one. The darts was somewhere in the middle, so it’s hard to say which one was there exactly.”

FPG rolls her eyes.

The driver puts away his phone. “Naw, naw, I’d rather find it on my own. It’ll be quick. We’ve gotta be close. I know we’re close.”

We drive another block and slow down in front of Brickyard.

“All these places look the same to me,” I say.

The driver stares at the facade for a few seconds. “Yeah, I think we mighta stopped in here.” Again he pulls over and jumps out of the car.

FPG turns around in her seat. “So why do you care about his stupid little Thursday night exploits?” she asks. “Taking notes, are we? Jealous, maybe?”

“No, it’s not like that,” I reply. “It’s more that I want to compare. I mean, I’ve heard people talk about him a certain way. They categorize him as one of these afraid-to-commit kind of guys. Maybe it’s true. But I think it’s probably more complicated. So that’s all it is — I want to hear his side of it.”

“Ah, so you’re a sympathizer. I still think you’re being very weird.”

“I know.”

“Still comfy back there?” she asks.

“Yes. Very.”

The driver returns again, again empty-handed. “Fuck. This is really pissing me off now.”

“Text the girls,” I say. “Just park somewhere and we’ll wait a few minutes. It’ll probably save us time.”

“Naw, naw, let’s just keep going, okay?”

We continue our vehicular crawl down the right lane of Ninth Avenue. The driver is muttering to himself. Meanwhile my left leg has fallen asleep so I reorient my back-seat sprawl so that I’m now facing east instead of west. FPG startles us with a scream.

“There! Stop!” she yells, pointing to a red awning just past 51st Street. “The Snug! ‘Music, Darts, Food.’ That’s gotta be it!”

The driver brakes to a halt and jumps out of the car. This time FPG and I wait in silence. I forget exactly how I met her. It was somewhere in Midtown; a friend introduced us, and we all went out for a drink. If I gave myself enough time to think about it, I could probably figure out the details. Maybe I’ll do it later.

The driver returns with a smile.

“Haha! Good call,” he says. “The Snug.”

We keep heading south. I close my eyes once I hear FPG follow through on the plan.

“So tell me about Thursday Girl number one,” she says to the driver. “She cute?”