musings on a (not so) flat chested girl -- part three

A couple of days of phone conversations followed the night out in San Marcos, and one afternoon Dakota came to pick me up from Garrick and Toby's place for a date. She told me she had planned to take me out to test drive cars, but she hadn't quite gotten her act together in time to do it so we'd just go downtown instead. Since I hadn't been there before, she took me to Barton Springs, a set of four natural water springs located in south Austin and then off to a few boutiques that were nearby. While we were mulling around looking at clothes, she confessed something to me:

"The other night, when you moved the hair from my face, you had me. I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but..."

I didn't know what to say. She quickly dropped it and we decided to get something to eat. She took me to a hamburger joint she liked. I had pineapple on my burger. Shortly after that we went to play pool at one of my favorite bars on 6th Street, El Casino Camino. We drank a few Lone Stars, smoked a grip of cigarettes, and played a couple of games of pool. Some lyrics sprang to mind:

"She said she was the worst pool player under the sun
but the blokes always went easy on her so she always won."

I didn't go easy on her, but I told her that I had a habit of winning for the entire game only to blow it on the last shot. Lo and behold, that's exactly what I did. She laughed and we stepped back out onto 6th Street hand in hand.

We strolled into the next bar, already a bit intoxicated from the high number of cheap domestic beers consumed at Casino El Camino. We sat down at the bar and I thought I recognized the place as somewhere I had been before. I swore at the time that I knew they served the Best Bloody Mary in the World. I asked the bartender if he was the guy who made the Best Bloody Mary in the World and he gave me the look of someone who had already spent too much time that day dealing with assholes. I asked him to check with someone else to see if they made the Best Bloody Mary, and while I deserved a punch in the mouth for asking, he obliged me for a moment and talked to the other bartender. Shortly thereafter he came back wearing a wry smile and said he didn't know what I was talking about, but that he would try his best to make me an extra spicy, extra strong New Best Bloody Mary in the World. He probably spit in it. Dakota and I had a few more drinks and talked over a couple of hours. I burned through half a pack of cigarettes. After about my fifth bloody mary, I clumsily reached across her for a change of pace in the form of a cheap beer and we started kissing. When we stopped, she looked up at me with a wry grin.

"You were saying?"

We continued on undisturbed by any onlookers or any semblance of shame we might have possessed before ingesting so many alcoholic beverages. The display spilled out onto the street, into the next bar, back on the street and on and on. Things were looking up. My first week back in Austin and I had met this wonderful, kind girl. Or so it would seem. When it came time to go home, we had both forgotten where she parked her car. She thought it had been stolen, and started to become agitated. In a drunken stupor she approached a policeman to tell him her car had been stolen. Since she was visibly drunk, the cop asked her if she simply hadn't forgotten where she had parked it. She was fuming at this point. How dare the cop ask her something like that? She knew exactly where the car was supposed to be! She wasn't even drunk!

Okay, so she was drunk and we couldn't find the car. I tried to calm her down and we returned to looking for the car. After a couple of minutes we found it. Naturally, we had been looking on the wrong street all along. I remembered a line from Paul F. Tompkins about how drinking brings out the real asshole inside that's been dying to get out all along. Could that be right? No, no... she just became upset because of the missing car. Totally understandable. She loved that thing. Yeah, of course.

I drove her car back to Garrick and Toby's place and we laid down on their couch and made out until we both passed out in each other's arms. Only one hitch all night. Things were looking up in my life.