It is a fact that loonies are drawn to me like moths to a flame, and like a flame, I can burn them to a crisp. I usually don’t because even loonies deserve, uh… ok, I usually do flame them, but not always. Yesterday, in fact…
I was sitting on the bench at the MetroRail station, twiddling with my earphones and minding my own business as I waited for the south-bound to take me home. There were women on either side of me. I was wearing a very conservative denim dress, almost ankle-length, long-sleeved and with a deep, but modest v-neck. And a pair of killer, spike-heeled, pointy-toed mules.
Along came a spider loonie, dressed in camo and a tee, with spiked hair with bleached tips. He could have been anywhere from 18 to 25, a little hard-ridden, possibly homeless. He had that look in his eyes, of not being quite all together (but then, who among us is?) I kept my head down and twiddled with my earphones.
He came right up in front of me, dropped into a squat, and very, very gently, like the merest hint of a thought of a touch, caressed my instep. To get my attention or because he’s got some weird foot thing, who knows. I looked up and he very clearly said “You are so beautiful.” Uh-huh, right and old enough to be your mother, I think, and no, I’m not giving you money. I just look at him and pretend I can’t understand or hear. He repeats it and then asked me if I was married. “Yes, very” I replied, and looked back at my lap. Then he got up, looked back at me, told me one more time that he thought I was so beautiful. I touched my fingertips to my heart and said thanks, and then disappeared back into myself and he wandered off into the crowd.
The women on my left just stared at me with saucer-like eyes, and tried to engage me in conversation about what had happened, but by then, I had cranked up the i-pod as loud as I could handle it, and the train was coming and I escaped another conversation.
Once on the train, I spotted RJ in the same car, so I went up to tell her the story, but she was embedded in her own version of the loonie conversation. The woman with her was a Seinfeld-worthy low talker, and carried on a monologue at us for the entire trip, allowing nothing more than an uh-huh or a nod from us. I have no idea what she was on about, because I couldn’t hear a word. RJ kept rolling her eyes at me and wagging her eyebrows, so it must have been deadly.
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Monday, as I mentioned, I went to hear Christopher Moore. The audience was slow to warm to him, and then a cell phone rang, and he made a joke about the only thing cell phones are useful for is to train dogs to salivate. The only people in the crowd to laugh were me, the RLA, and the couple in front of us. The female (with a beautiful set of tattooed angel wings on her back—or at least the tops and tips that I could see were beautiful) joked that the only dog owners in the room were the four of us who laughed. Then Christopher said that, well, he was sorry and that he hadn’t meant to speak in a foreign language. To which I sang out, “Yeah. Well, you are speaking English.” and that broke up the entire room. Take me with you Chris, and I’ll do warm up.
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Finally, will someone explain to me why a white trash, ex-Playboy skank deserves all this ink over the fold, and the report that the pre-war intelligence was cooked, immoral, but probably not illegal gets buried? I’m trying to figure out some way to blame her death (and the increasingly suspicious deaths of everyone connected to her) on the Bush family, a la Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys. Maybe it was Jeb, he’s not doing anything much these days, and she was in Florida.