Free Girl Walks Into a Bar by Rachel Dratch Page B

you are talking about, just as long as you say anything at all to your potential pickup. So when I asked this man about the strange appetizers, although I’m embarrassed to admit it, I think I was channeling the master himself, Mystery.
    We had a bit of chitchat going on and then I asked him his name, unfortunately just as he put some food in his mouth. He chewed while giving me the “just a second” finger in the air, swallowed, and returned with “I know what you do and I’d expect you to have better timing than that.” Pretty slick. That was kind of the coolest way anyone has said they recognized me from TV. I ended up talking to him all night long. It was exactly how meeting your boyfriend is supposed to go. I started asking him questions right when he put food in his mouth. Bite. “Whereyoufrom?” Bite. “HowdoyouknowHenry?”
    When he told me he grew up in New York City, I said that I had always pictured people who grew up in the city as hard-living kids, doing cocaine on the subways at age fifteen. I realized in hindsight that I was engaging in yet another one of Mystery’s techniques: “Negging.” Negging is where you throw out a slightly negative comment toward the other person, like “You have bad timing” or “You were probably a coke addict by age fifteen,” and for some reason, rather than causing offense, it draws the other person in.
    “Steve” and I were totally hitting it off. If you are reading this and thinking, “Big deal, this happens to me every weekend,” then I commend you. I must tell you that this kind of thing rarely happened to me. He was supereasy to talk to, and he seemed funny too. And he was a biologist, which in my opinion is a pretty hot profession. To others, maybe a rock staror actor sounds like a hot profession to date, but not to me. Not anymore. Having dated only comedians, I was ready for a nice stable scientist like Steve, who worked for a biotech company. He was successful, funny, well traveled, and fluent in Japanese. At this point, I wasn’t hiding my interest. When he told me he was fluent in Japanese, I pretended to swoon and fan myself.
    We talked all night and laughed a lot. At one point, we were chatting about our favorite restaurants in the city. When I told him mine, he responded with, “I’ve never been. We should go there sometime.” It was all happening so effortlessly! At the end of the night, he got my number. I felt like this was how things happened in the movies, not in real life.
    The next morning, I woke up a little giddy, reliving all the little jokes and laughs and fun flirtiness we had shared. “Hold up, Dratch,” warned my inner voice. “You’ve had these fun flirtations before. And then … nothing!” As a matter of fact, at Henry’s holiday party the previous year, I had met this cool British accountant who, no joke, had just come back from Africa, where he was building wells for orphans or something. We had talked the night away and even gotten a drink afterward. And then … nothing. I never heard from him again. So I was thinking to myself, “Remember the Brit! Don’t get ahead of yourself.”
    Then a magical thing happened—Steve texted me at noon that day. He even asked me out right then for the upcoming weekend. A Friday or Saturday night. Those are the nights normal people go on dates, right? I skipped through the week. Knowing that there was even the potential of love changed my whole demeanor. Then on Thursday, I went to Trader Joe’s.
    I was at the checkout at Trader Joe’s and when I reached down to pick up my bag of groceries, SPROING! went my back. The bag wasn’t even that heavy. Why was this my luck? Did God not want me to date?
    It actually wasn’t the first time this back thing had happened. The other time was much worse. It was during a read-through of SNL . I had stumbled while walking back to my seat, and my back went out big-time. You know that feeling of a leg cramp? Imagine that in your back but ten