Caught in a Cougar Trap

It's been so long since anything like this has happened to me, so maybe I am mistaken, but I think I just got hit on. I am at work minding my own business leaning against the bar trying to find the breeze of the air conditioner that the owner of the restaurant swears is turned on. The lady at the end of the bar glances my way. I smile at her because I am in customer service and I smile at anybody who looks my way. My face is saying, "I am happy to be here. How can I help you?" while my brain is saying, "Take this steak knife out of my hand before I end it all right here and then have to mop up the blood off the floor before I expire." I move behind the bar to retrieve the order that is coming out of the printer. It's for a glass of wine so I decide to be a team player and pour it since the bartender is busy doing something important like updating his Facebook status.

"You pour that wine very nicely," says the lady, her eyes lingering on me a little longer than I feel comfortable.

"Years of practice," I say. "Although at my apartment it usually comes out of a box and gets poured into a jelly jar."

"Is that your natural hair?" she asks me. "

Yep, this is it," I say, like anyone would go to the wig store and look for the biggest frizziest broken down mess of hair and exclaim, "That's the hair for me!"

 "Well, it's adorable. How do you make it do that," she wanted to know.

"I wash it and go like this." I shake my head back and forth making my hair even bigger than it was to begin with. I ignore the three or four stray hairs that fall onto the cutting board for the bread.

"Well, you're so cute, you could do what ever you want."

She takes another sip of her dirty martini and while she is trying to fish the olive out from the bottom of her glass with her tongue, I take my chance to escape. I know her type. She's alone at a bar and is willing to have a conversation with anyone who will want to listen to her. I am not willing. I give a cursory check to table seven and decide I need to hang out someplace where bored customers won't try to talk with me. After playing my turns on Words With Friends and making a phone call in the bathroom, I am forced back to the bar which is the only place in the restaurant that gives the illusion that we have air conditioning. There she is, on martini number two and scanning the room for someone to listen to her. Her eyes fall on me.

"Did you come back here so you could be close to me?" she asks.

"No, the A/C." I flip my hair out of my eyes and hope that our conversation is over.

"Well, just so you know, I wouldn't kick you out of bed."

This is my cue to get the fuck away from the crazy delusional lady who has worse Gaydar than Michele Bachman. "Good to know," I say."I'll keep that in mind."

I head directly to the kitchen where I can shake off the thought of the middle-aged woman lying in my bed with a post coital cigarette and a dirty martini as she scans my room looking at all the manly artifacts surrounding her like the framed picture of Judy Garland hanging on my Tiffany blue walls. Maybe I am reading too much into our conversation, but there is a definite Coo Coo Kachoo Mrs. Robinson thing going on. I am scared to go back to the bar but the lure of pseudo-air conditioning gets the best of me and I am again standing close to my would-be suitor. Her second martini is almost a memory now and I watch her swallow that last little bit. She licks her lips and pulls out a lipstick from her ratty purse that looks like it was a free prize at the 1964 World's Fair. She slathers the lipstick on, a shade probably called Rouge de Cougar, or Desperation Rosewood and watches me all the while. She puts on enough lipstick for at least three pair of lips but not quite enough for one Lisa Rinna. Her eyes never stray from me.

I stare back at her just because I want to play the game. I also want to stay in the piddling stream of air conditioning. I wonder what she expects to get by coming on to a waiter. Perhaps she thinks I will rip my apron off and carry her downstairs to the storage room where we will make sweet love on some broken down cardboard boxes next to the giant cans of ketchup. Or maybe she hopes that my shift is almost over and I will follow her back to her pad, no doubt decorated with zebra print scarves thrown over lamp shades with a stereo console playing Tom Jones records.

"Well, I guess I'll be on my way," she tells me as she picks up her glass of water for one final wetting of the whistle. When she puts the glass back down, it now has a lipstick smear on it that will require a paper towel and some major elbow grease to remove. She smiles at me and I see a hint of lipstick on her front tooth.

"Have a good night, ma'am," I chirp. I wave good bye and smile at her in a way that maybe will let her think if I was off work, 15 years older and liked women, that just maybe she had a chance with me. "See you next time."

She gets off her bar stool and exits the restaurant alone. The door closes faster than she expects and it catches the heel of her shoe making her give out a final yelp as the door shuts. She waves at me through the window and she is then out of sight.

So was she hitting on me? Yeah, I think she was. Did she strike out? Yes she did. Do I still got it? Abso-fucking-lutely.



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