Reflections from the dozens of flat-screen TVs flashed across Mike's face, the sound of the NFL playoff game barely perceptible beneath the din of the bar crowd.
"These four Asian chicks were just staring at me." He was leaning in close, and it seemed as if he couldn't get the words out quickly enough. "Then they just came over and started rubbing my thighs - like two of them on each side. It was crazy."
My friend Denise had suggested we watch the NFL division championship at Jerry Remy's, or Sausage Fest, the nickname we had bestowed upon the Seaport venue the summer before. The place was always teeming with men.
"They brought me back their place in Chinatown and offered me some coke and started doing it right off the stove - I just wanted vodka. Then they pushed me down and ripped off my pilot's suit. It was Halloween, like Top Gun, you know? Ripped it right down the middle. And blew me. Three Asian chicks were sucking my dick. It was fucking crazy."
The previous five months had been among the most difficult I could remember. I was forty, my mother had just passed away, I was diagnosed with my fifth melanoma and had to undergo my most extensive and invasive surgery to date, and my boyfriend had disappeared down the rabbit hole of depression after a road bike accident in which he broke his back and hand and severely sprained his neck.
"Then they slapped a condom on me and pointed to the bedroom. 'It's her birthday, go fuck her! I totally forgot there was another one! But that's not even my best story."
Mike had introduced himself to me by reintroducing himself; he swore that we had met the weekend before at this very same bar. That we had had some kind of heart to heart. That I had really listened to him. I thought he might have had a bet with his friend, so I played along, assuring him that I remembered our encounter, knowing all along that I had spent last Saturday night on my couch, watching The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
"I fucked two Africans. The first time I fucked a black girl, there were two of them."
He couldn't have been more than thirty - there wasn't even a hint of wrinkle around his green eyes, no gray mixed in with his strawberry blonde hair, no fading muscle mass under his black Under Armour pullover.
"I was at a club in Worcester - it sucked, but what do you want? It was Worcester. I was walking down the street to my buddy's Maxima, but I stopped to see these two chicks in an Altima. Two black chicks - like real Africans, speaking Swahili and stuff."
Mike was awful. But also kind of awesome.
"We're having an after party. That's what I told them - an after party. They started talking, bibbidy gibby shit. They wanted to know if I'd make them breakfast. Can you believe that shit? Breakfast! I told them I had jelly. And they came!"
I called my boyfriend the night I received my melanoma diagnosis, sharing the news on his voicemail when he didn't pick up. When he hadn't responded by late the next afternoon, I broke down to my friend Linda, explaining that all I wanted was my mother to be there to tell me it would be okay. Or at the very least to hear those words from by boyfriend, the words I had emphasized to him when I arrived at the emergency room after receiving his text the month before. The text where he explained that he had crashed his road bike, was at the hospital on a back board, and the doctors and nurses couldn't tell him how bad it was going to be.
"We were only in the apartment for like, two minutes, and my buddy left. He pretended he had a phone call - all blah blah, I have to take this. I think he was afraid of getting a disease or something."
Linda then said what I hadn't yet had the courage to admit, I was alone. Despite the caring attention of family and friends, I was missing the one person I knew could make me feel better, my mothers. And I was pissed that the one person who should be trying to make me feel better, my boyfriend, was MIA.
"I've got these two chicks, side by side, on their backs with their legs in the air. And I'm drilling them, one after another. It was fucking awesome."
Mike had such unabashed enthusiasm, I thought he had to be just a little too young (or dumb) to understand that sooner or later, someone or something would disappoint him.
"Then they were all, 'I thought you were going to make us breakfast?' So I make some toast and eggs and put it out all nice on plates and stuff. They come out to the kitchen and all they say is, 'You got ketchup?' And when I tell them I don't, they just leave. Don't even touch the shit I just made."
His friends started waving at him from the other side of the bar, but Mike didn't move. He just kept talking.
"Those are pretty good stories, right? You liked them, didn't you? They're all true. Really though, didn't we meet last weekend? I don't care if you're just fucking with me, but I think we did."
Mike must have been a regular at Remy's - the bartender called his name, pointing to the group of guys who were still angling to get his attention. I told him that it had been fun talking, that he should really go back and hang out with his friends, all the while thinking that if I wasn't careful, The Cougar from Remy's would soon be added to his storytelling repertoire. I turned my attention back to the football game and to my Packers-obsessed friend Denise. Mike moved on to the other side of the bar.
Soon a looming, lurching pair of twenty-something guys inserted themselves between Denise and me. Friends from college, they explained, one now worked as an assistant basketball coach at a school in upstate New York that had lost to Boston University earlier that day. The other was an investment banker in Manhattan. Boston was lame, they slurred. Couldn't we make sure they had fun?
As the bartender reached across the bar to hand them their boilermakers, Mike arrived, grabbing one of the beers and shots of whiskey. "How you guys doing? You don't mind if I have one of these, do you?" He downed the boilermaker before firmly planting himself between me and the basketball coach.
Denise and I looked quickly at each other, then the door. Grabbing our jackets, we scurried to the exit, leaving Mike and the basketball coach nose to nose, ready for what looked like a promising fight.
"Holy shit," Denise cackled, "Mike just totally cock-blocked that guy!"
I knew that he wasn't the solution to my feeling less vulnerable, less alone, but Mike was something, and I was grateful for that.
