My Significant Other decided we were going to a dive bar last weekend. She has a PhD and so is naturally drawn to seedy gin mills. I spent a large part of my wasted younger years working in one dive bar after another and never really felt the urge to return to one after I changed careers. Whenever I walk into a joint and see a typical dive bar crowd of unwashed tweakers, brain-dead alcoholics and bar-band groupies, I think to myself "I'm not getting paid to hang around with these people anymore. Why am I here?"
My special lady threw on a denim skirt of significant shortness in which she looks very good, so good that it is not even necessary to add "for her age,' at the end of that phrase. We don't talk about her age, because of her professed hatred for the term "middle-aged." I cling to the term myself, since not only has my sweet bird of youth long flown, but my plump pigeon of middle age is edging towards the exit as well, and it won't be too many calendar years before I can look back on my middle era nostalgically.
So we'll just say she was born in the sixties and leave it there. She tucked a tight tankish-looking top into the skirt. That clothes item barely concealed her breasts, giving her that when-worlds-collide décolletage that we guys like so much.
We were headed to Dirk's in Lemon Grove. We decided to pick a spot to eat when we got there. If you go to Lemon Grove, a municipality which features a giant sculpted lemon at one end of town with the municipal boast "The Best Climate on Earth" printed on it, don't make this mistake. I suppose they could have put "The Only Town on the Planet That Has a Mexican Restaurant That Closes at Eight O'Clock on a Saturday Night" on the giant lemon, as a fair warning to tourists, but that is a trifle long-winded.
So after some pretty indifferent Chinese food we were standing on Broadway, the main drag in LG, while one of us had a smoke. A well-dressed black woman, not much younger than us, approached because her car was parked next to ours. She seemed unnecessarily apprehensive. My S. O., who loves to make small talk with strangers, said "I like the headlights on your car."
Her car was a Lexus-ish looking thing with those kind of intricate, high-tech headlights that look really cool and you as a car owner are proud of until one gets broken and you find out it costs $800 to replace it.
She said "Thank you," in a nervous way. When she had gotten her door open and had slipped safely behind the wheel, she looked directly at my date and said "Don't work too hard."
I knew right away that my girl and I had been completely misjudged. My suspicions were confirmed when I spotted an actual hooker hovering about sixty feet away. We had accidentally picked the block where the professional ladies of Lemon Grove worked their trade to have dinner.
My special lady did not say anything at first, and I wasn't going to press the issue, for fear of being ordered to pursue the black woman in the Lexus so we could correct her. My girl can be a stickler for accuracy. We went down to Dirk's without mentioning it.
The band at Dirk's was the Farmers, who are the remnants of the Beat Farmers, who flirted with fame until the untimely death of their lead singer and guiding force, "Country Dick" Montana, in 1995. They still play many of the songs from his sardonic lexicon, which includes tunes like "Gun Sale at the Church," "East County Woman," and "Lakeside Trailer Park." That's why I like them.
The crowd was another matter. Lemon Grove is located in inland San Diego County, where the cowboys meet the surfers meet the Vietnamese refugees. Colorful is not nearly an adequate enough term to describe them. Most of them were older than us, or had at least acquired a crystal meth habit that made them look that way. Dimpled thighs and drooping breasts did not keep the women from squeezing into micro-minis and halter tops, nor did round little bellies and flat asses keep the guys from wearing too-tight shirts and jeans.
You could get inspiration for at least two seasons of "What Not to Wear" just from the people on the dance floor. My favorite was a man in his seventies with a knee brace on one leg and an ankle brace on the other. He was limping onto the floor for every song, twitching his shoulders rhythmically. I have never seen a truer hero of dance.
After we had ordered our drinks, my girl said "You know that lady back there thought I was a hooker, don't you?" in a tone that made it clear she was not offended by the error at all. Far from it. It was apparent that she was inordinately proud of it.
I nodded. I had been mistaken for her john, which wasn't nearly so much of a compliment, but why trash her high? If the bottom fell out of the market for college professors, she at least knew that she could lure random men into shady places for furtive sex as a career alternative. She smoothed out the skirt of shame as she gazed contentedly at the crowd. Suddenly a thought occurred to her.
"What if the cops thought I was a hooker?"
I looked at all the exposed, middle-aged girl flesh bumping and grinding on the dance floor. "No chance of that," I said. "The cops would have known right away you were just going to Dirks."
My special lady threw on a denim skirt of significant shortness in which she looks very good, so good that it is not even necessary to add "for her age,' at the end of that phrase. We don't talk about her age, because of her professed hatred for the term "middle-aged." I cling to the term myself, since not only has my sweet bird of youth long flown, but my plump pigeon of middle age is edging towards the exit as well, and it won't be too many calendar years before I can look back on my middle era nostalgically.
So we'll just say she was born in the sixties and leave it there. She tucked a tight tankish-looking top into the skirt. That clothes item barely concealed her breasts, giving her that when-worlds-collide décolletage that we guys like so much.
We were headed to Dirk's in Lemon Grove. We decided to pick a spot to eat when we got there. If you go to Lemon Grove, a municipality which features a giant sculpted lemon at one end of town with the municipal boast "The Best Climate on Earth" printed on it, don't make this mistake. I suppose they could have put "The Only Town on the Planet That Has a Mexican Restaurant That Closes at Eight O'Clock on a Saturday Night" on the giant lemon, as a fair warning to tourists, but that is a trifle long-winded.
So after some pretty indifferent Chinese food we were standing on Broadway, the main drag in LG, while one of us had a smoke. A well-dressed black woman, not much younger than us, approached because her car was parked next to ours. She seemed unnecessarily apprehensive. My S. O., who loves to make small talk with strangers, said "I like the headlights on your car."
Her car was a Lexus-ish looking thing with those kind of intricate, high-tech headlights that look really cool and you as a car owner are proud of until one gets broken and you find out it costs $800 to replace it.
She said "Thank you," in a nervous way. When she had gotten her door open and had slipped safely behind the wheel, she looked directly at my date and said "Don't work too hard."
I knew right away that my girl and I had been completely misjudged. My suspicions were confirmed when I spotted an actual hooker hovering about sixty feet away. We had accidentally picked the block where the professional ladies of Lemon Grove worked their trade to have dinner.
My special lady did not say anything at first, and I wasn't going to press the issue, for fear of being ordered to pursue the black woman in the Lexus so we could correct her. My girl can be a stickler for accuracy. We went down to Dirk's without mentioning it.
The band at Dirk's was the Farmers, who are the remnants of the Beat Farmers, who flirted with fame until the untimely death of their lead singer and guiding force, "Country Dick" Montana, in 1995. They still play many of the songs from his sardonic lexicon, which includes tunes like "Gun Sale at the Church," "East County Woman," and "Lakeside Trailer Park." That's why I like them.
The crowd was another matter. Lemon Grove is located in inland San Diego County, where the cowboys meet the surfers meet the Vietnamese refugees. Colorful is not nearly an adequate enough term to describe them. Most of them were older than us, or had at least acquired a crystal meth habit that made them look that way. Dimpled thighs and drooping breasts did not keep the women from squeezing into micro-minis and halter tops, nor did round little bellies and flat asses keep the guys from wearing too-tight shirts and jeans.
You could get inspiration for at least two seasons of "What Not to Wear" just from the people on the dance floor. My favorite was a man in his seventies with a knee brace on one leg and an ankle brace on the other. He was limping onto the floor for every song, twitching his shoulders rhythmically. I have never seen a truer hero of dance.
After we had ordered our drinks, my girl said "You know that lady back there thought I was a hooker, don't you?" in a tone that made it clear she was not offended by the error at all. Far from it. It was apparent that she was inordinately proud of it.
I nodded. I had been mistaken for her john, which wasn't nearly so much of a compliment, but why trash her high? If the bottom fell out of the market for college professors, she at least knew that she could lure random men into shady places for furtive sex as a career alternative. She smoothed out the skirt of shame as she gazed contentedly at the crowd. Suddenly a thought occurred to her.
"What if the cops thought I was a hooker?"
I looked at all the exposed, middle-aged girl flesh bumping and grinding on the dance floor. "No chance of that," I said. "The cops would have known right away you were just going to Dirks."
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