Friday March 7
Amber and I venture down to engage in what is known in San Diego as the PB crawl. On the main drag in Pacific Beach are countless bars, clubs, tattoo parlors, restaurants and shops. She, happily involved with a wonderful man, is content to bear witness to my quest for the tall, dark, legendary Louisiana boy of my dreams. Armed with a bag full of Cajun spice and crawfish, we set out on our way.
I know what I'm looking for. I've seen him before. I have even spoken to him. Those soft, tawny eyes and thick Louisiana accent just drive me wild! We start at the pub where I first made contact. There are plenty of fine young men here, but none of the Cajun persuasion. We have a beer and make good with the doorman. Emmet is a Dave Grohl look alike who is often offered Mentos in exchange for free beer. He always takes the Mentos but shakes his head in reply, "Hey, I'm just the doorman." Emmet plays dirty pool but has some interesting ideas regarding rust control. OK, so they're not all that interesting.
The next bar is a small underground dive that caters to an eclectically mixed crowd of college students and bikers. I strike up a conversation with Brady, who curiously is neither a college student nor a biker. But for that matter, neither am I, though I do have closeted biker chick tendencies. Brady has been a long time resident of Pacific Beach who is mad as hell about the new traffic lights they are putting in. At the moment I couldn't care less about local politics, so I quickly make a motion to Amber and we steal away in the midst of his drunken rambling.
We walk into the Dog. There's a live band playing and it's crowded almost to capacity. There's something fun about a rowdy mob packed into a limited amount of space. There's also something really creepy about having foreign bodies rub up against your own, which is starting to feel rather foreign itself from the whiskey. Or maybe it's just this stupid underwire death contraption I'm wearing over my breasts. I scan the bar for a head with closely cropped dark hair, dimples and sneaky eyes. Petite as I am, though, I'm having trouble seeing over and around the wooly mammoth woman to my left who keeps flipping her hair into my drink, let alone across to the other side of the bar. You know, if she had silky, Paul Mitchell Awapuhi smelling, pretty hair, I wouldn't mind so much. But it's wiry and fried at the ends, and smells of smoke and fish grease. I reach into my bag and pull out some spices and proceed to sprinkle these into her long mane. If she's gonna smell like fish, best if it be smoked Cajun catfish!
The alcohol is starting to blur my senses, and by the time I meet Matt at Stinger's, non-Cajuns are starting to look pretty good, too. I don't hear a word he's saying to me, but damn he's cute. I keep nodding my head at him and smiling, and the next thing I know he's slipping his phone number into my hand. I, in turn, hand him a squirmy crawfish. I don't think he understands the profundity of this gesture. Amber comes to me then, shoots Matt a dirty look and with a protective tug on my arm, we're heading out the door.
And so it goes through the night, with no Louisiana boy sightings and ever increasing alcohol consumption. My liver is screaming for reprieve as we crawl into a cab to head home. They don't call it a pub crawl for nothing. I had given up, defeated and unsuccessful - for this time. As my old pal Kenny used to say, "You gotta know when to fold ‘em." There's always next weekend. Remember, it's not stalking if you have absolutely no idea where the person is at any given time.
Copyright 1998 Jennifer Chung
Stalk me now, ask me how!
