straight dudes love a tall man

I likely cannot distinguish between being infatuated and being in love. At times I treat that trait as a wilful decision, other times I concede I was born that way. It’s something that seesaws between can’t and won’t, which is fine by me. It lends itself to overly earnest flings and the sappy, woe-is-me diatribes that follow their dissolution.

So when the most recent love-of-my-life moved back to LA, I thought it best to avoid that typical roadmap – that of preening, short-term sequestering, heavy deadlifts and the Sisyphean pursuit of 10% body fat. I’d done it before, and it worked great, but always felt melodramatic upon completion. And I‘d started to internalize that tweet about men discovering things women did at fifteen (which I still find insanely derisive, but I also didn’t want to be a fifteen-year-old girl).

I went out alone a week later, and saw a late screening of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It was much hornier than I expected, and the sentiment had been contagious, so I wound up at a basement bar. Live band, busy – more faux-club than anything else by that time of night. It was Brooklyn-themed, which was funny because it very much wasn’t in Brooklyn. The girl from LA had made that observation to me last time, and I bristled a bit remembering it, because I was there to stop thinking about her so much.

I made two friends in the line outside almost immediately. Two dudes on holiday from New Zealand, one celebrating his 28th birthday. They were cool and rough and had clearly found bravado at the bottom of prior drinks. One made a joke about me stealing all the bad bitches inside and I did the routine in response. A big chortle, followed by the embellished rebound of the compliment, the insistence that they’d be the ones taking my girl. I don’t know the female equivalent of that. Maybe compliments from a girl you meet in a club bathroom, or something similarly mythologised in many a girlhood essay. In any case, they did the final step of it. A pointed up-down look, a hand-waving dismissal of your humility. The guy doing all the talking said fuck off, look how tall you are. Birthday boy was wasted, and slurred his drunk approval. 

When I got inside, I recognised one of the bartenders. The last time I was there, he’d made my date blush. When we came up to the bar, he’d nodded towards her and shouted save some for the rest of us. She’d gone beet red, and told me to fuck off when I pointed at her cheeks.

A happy memory.