"Don't ask about my divorce"
I'm at a payphone in Philadelphia. The person at the other end, who does
not want me to know about her divorce, is Gina. I only know this because
I happened to be walking past the payphone when it rang.
I wasn't going to answer it, but someone else on the street also gave the
phone a second glance, so my competitive side got the better of me. That,
and it had already been a strange night.
I started in the hotel bar where I was doing my best to explain, without
much success, to the waitress the difference between a "Vodka, Lime and
Soda" , and a "Vodka tonic". As a result, the whole exchange tweaked the
interest of the person next to me and I thus met Anna, who was from
Brazil, I think.
I don't recall a lot about her, not because the conversation wasn't
interesting, but because of what happened about 20 minutes later. You see,
she was waiting at the bar to meet a friend from work - Mike or someone
like that. Mike worked in a remote office and was staying at the hotel.
So Mike showed up after a while, and we made the usual polite conversation
that strangers are forced to do. But eventually Anna and Mike had to go
off to their next appointment. So they did. They said good bye, crossed
the lobby, got into an elevator and went, presumably, straight back to
Mike's room. From the on the night only got stranger.
Looking for somewhere to eat I later found myself at some South
American-Cuban fusion bar offering mojitos and ceviche. I ended up
staying there longer than I expected because the kids at the end of the
bar were having the an incredibly interesting, and not very quiet,
conversation about their whole on-again/off-again relationship. The
bartender and I were taking turns to keep them plied with alcohol just so
we could get more dirt.
However they eventually had to go home, or find a hotel room, I'm not sure
which. So I paid up and went for a walk. I vaguely recall passing a a
jazz bar in the theatre district where Lou Rawls was playing, but I can't
be sure because that's also around the time I walked past the payphone.
Gina had called me, or, more correctly, the number for the phone. Now she
sounded like a Heavy Chain smoker, or a Drag Queen, or both and before I
could get a word in beyond "Hello ?" She started asking me a few too many
personal questions. "How tall are you?", "How old are you?", "What do you
weigh ?". and then the drop dead question :
"Are you well hung ?"
"Um, What ? " I asked.
She replied with another question..
"Will you tell me to rub my bits ?"
Paydirt - I'd hit on a mis-dialed phone sex callback. So with nothing
better to do I decided to mess with the protocol and started asking her
all the same questions. I'd got as far as finding out basic personal
statistics, the fact that she lived with her cousin, and her general
mental welfare before the conversation came around to her divorce.
As soon as I asked her about that she hung up on me. I guess I hit
a sore spot.
The night was still early, so I found another bar that was playing hip hop bar
with a live percussion act.
Who says Philly is dull ?
