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Last night I went out to meet with

rm (who, for those of you not following my current obsessions, is my lovely partner-in-crime in Swordspoint fandom) at a pub, and proceeded to attempt to out-do each other with stories on topics such as "large fires I have been involved in", "inappropriate violence I have commited", and- this is the most relevant, as you will see- "random strangers who have taken it upon themselves to tell me their life stories".

As we're talking, a man with a heavy accent standing nearby at the bar begins shouting into his phone, "I think I'm in New York! Am I in New York? I don't know- I might be in New York?", and we glance at each other, because really, how do you end up in the middle of fucking Manhattan and not know you're in New York? A minute later, he leans over to us and asks, "Excuse me, can I ask you a question? Is this New York?" We reassure him that it is indeed, and once he steps away, try to figure out if he was legitimate, or if we had been part of some sort of elaborate joke.

Shortly later, he comes back and asks, "Can I sit here?" I was too surprised to answer, so he sits down in our booth next to me and explains that he has set up his female friend with a man, and now wants to give them some privacy. "I used to be so shy I wouldn't talk to anyone," he says, in an extremely thick, slow southern accent. "But then I realized that everyone was sick in one way or another, so now I don't mind talking to strangers. Everyone's crazy somehow."

rm and I burst out laughing because, given that we have just been interrupted from a discussion of (what else?) Swordspoint BDSM porn, the many, many ways in which we could demonstrate our own craziness are staggering.

So, he asks us the typical things, where we're from and what we do and so on, while I mostly waited for him to either go away or become annoying enough that I'd feel justified in telling him to go away. He was particularly enamored of the exotic tools I must have, as an archaeologist; "Not really," I told him, "most of mine came from Home Depot."

rm said that the most unusual people shopped at Home Depot: 2am in the ropes and chains aisle had been where perverts cruised for dates in North Carolina. I figured this was an excellent topic to freak out the guy enough to leave, so we began avidly talking about the opportunities to test out ropes before taking your new partner home and so on.

It did not work. Instead, the guy spoke up to inform us that he, in fact, preferred to use neckties, and that Home Depot was not the perfect place, because you couldn't get fuzzy handcuffs there. He said, "But that wasn't what ruined my life. It was an omelette and a thong: no twenty-year old man can resist that."

I don't know about you, but I am incapable of hearing such a sentence and not needing to hear the story behind it. I no longer wanted the dude to leave; instead I said, "Okay, wait, now you have to explain that."

It involved his best friend from high school, who had once looked like Opie, but who he had come back from the army to find had become a "real woman", beautiful beyond compare. Everything had come to climax one morning when she made him an omelette (with cheese and caramelized onions, fluffed with water, not milk, and good water, not that heavy, mineral-laden kind) while wearing a thong and stiletto heels. Unfortunately, she had later become a stripper and drug-addict, and his house and thousands of dollars "went up her nose". He had photos of both the woman and the omelette, to prove their irresistibility, but not on him. However, he had now learned his lesson, and he doesn't get involved with women like that anymore.

I think this was when I decided I needed a drink, and we all ordered. Which somehow led to his professing to disbelieve anyone of my "generation" would know what cooties are.

rm, who fences, mentioned off-hand that if only she carried her weapons with her, she could defend herself from random guys in bars.

"You don't need to defend yourself! I'm not even sitting next to you," he said.

"But you're sitting next to me," I pointed out. "She might need the weapons to defend me."

He turned to me. "Now, you might be all scrunched up in the corner there,"- I had wedged myself in the back of the booth up against the wall, but because I don't like being touched by strangers, not because I was actually afraid of any advances from him- "but you can't say that you need to be defended. I haven't done anything wrong."

Of course, you could say that if someone notices body language messages like that and yet chooses to ignore them, they're not exactly in the right, so we began (jokingly) wondering exactly how ethically problematical it would be to stab him, since he had sat down at our booth first.

His (very drunk) female friend, who was not seeming all that interested in the man she'd been talking to, came to sit with us, interrupting that. She called him Tony (the first I'd heard of a name for him), attempted to figure out how to use his camera and took a photo of the side of my head, debated whether her man looked more like Tim Robbins or Matthew Mcconaughey, and told us repeatedly to tell 'Tony' that he was "funny. Ha. Ha.". He told her, "They were threatening to stab me. If they did, I'd be really real!" although I was laughing way too hard (why it's funny is complicated, but if you don't get the reference, believe me, it's insanely fucking hilarious) to hear why on earth he said that.

His friend went back to her man, and Tony explained to me that he was good for getting men talking, and then he'd hand them over to her. "If they're attracted to you, are you sure they're going to be interested in her?" I asked.

He wagged his finger at me. "That's not funny. I'm part of the secret guy's club; I know the handshake and everything. I can get them talking. I'm real good for starting conversations, but I can only talk about sports for a few minutes. Then I'm done." I had absolutely no idea if this was his way of confessing to me that he was straight or gay, but then he assured me that he "liked beautiful women. I'm attracted to beautiful women."

His friend had gone somewhere (to the bathroom? outside to smoke?), so Tony got up to talk to her man. Whereas she had continually been giving off every signal of not being too into him, the two men were quickly leaning into each other and laughing and talking quickly.

rm and I tried to figure out what the hell was going on with the interpersonal relationships with these people, and who was interested in who. We couldn't decide, but agreed that the whole thing absolutely had to be a livejournal post.

He came back to join us after a while, bearing photographs of a construction project he had worked on. He pointed out that he was actually in some of the photos, in case we thought that he was lying, and we told him that we hadn't been curious about that.

rm asked him why, exactly, he was so good at talking to men, if he was sure he wasn't gay. "I wish I was! Do you know how easy that would be?"

We cracked up and asked him if men often hit on him. "All the time. You know I'm not gay, don't you?"

"We don't know you at all," she said. "The important thing is if you know you're not gay."

He then proceeded to tell us a story about how, until he was eight, he had spent every afternoon in his grandmother's beautyshop, listening to the women talk. When he was bored, he would shampoo and fluff the hair on his pet poodle, Pierre, and paint his nails. And then sex ed had begun at his school, and he had written a paper detailing how to find the G-spot and how to last for four or five hours during sex, and the counselor and principal had been called in. It was decided he would spend his afternoons at his grandfather's furniture factory from then on instead. And this was why he related so well to women (yeah, I don't know what that had to do with the question, either.) In the progress of this story, by the way, he referred to himself as Alan (Allen? I don't know. Certainly not Tony).

"But didn't spending time at the factory change anything?" I asked.

Of course he had listened to the men's poker games just as he had earlier listened to the women in the beautyshop. One day, when he'd fallen asleep, some of the guys sealed him in a box and pretended they were planning to ship him away with the rest of the furniture. He woke up and started yelling for them to let him out, and when they didn't, he "struck on the ultimate line. I said, 'Basil Roberts, if you don't let me out of this box right this minute, I'll tell your wife about your girlfriend and your girlfriend that you call her a fat whore!' And the next thing I knew, the box opened up."

Once we had stopped laughing at that, we moved on to assessing the progress of his friend with her man. "Look, he's finally touching her!" I said, since he had put his hand on her arm. Unfortunately he heard me, flinched and pulled back.

"They look like they're discussing O. Henry," he said. "They haven't even moved on to Romantic poetry." This is particularly bizarre because less than two minutes earlier, he had teased

rm for using the word 'interject' in conversation, and yet now was name-dropping O. Henry himself.

"What's going on with you?"

rm asked. "Are you really just friends, or is she secretly in love with you, or..."

He leaned in and lowered his voice. "Let me tell you something. When I was in college, I broke one of my cardinal rules. You might not know anything about writing, but let me tell you, it's very, very intimate." We glanced at each other and assured him that, yes, we might be aware of a few things about writing. "You've got to be careful about who you co-write with. You can get very emotionally involved, so you can't do it with just anyone; it's like having sex. Now this friend of mine, she wanted to write together. And women don't like to hear 'no'. When I was in college, I wrote with this guy, a friend of mine, and that's when I learned you have to be careful." What on earth happened to him in college, or what it had to do with this female friend, we never got to learn, because the friend walked over at that point. As they were talking,

rm and I leaned in to babble 'I cannot believe this is happening' at each other, so I missed how it happened, but somehow I turned to look, and he was insisting his friend slap him in the face. She refused. He told her to again, and she did lightly. "No! Harder!" he said, taking off his glasses. "Really hit me!" She did, slightly harder, though it was still clearly nothing more than a pat. I was too busy alternating between staring and laughing too hard to breath to say anything, but

rm demonstrated how to snap your wrist at the end of a slap to put real force into it.

"Try again!" we told her. She did, though it was still not really a slap. At that point they wandered away.

He did come back just before he left, dressed in a black, double-breasted jacket that, though I hate to support stereotypes, didn't really seem like the typical dress of a construction worker from Nashville. "If you see me on TV, watch me, okay?" he said, very drunk and in what now seemed to be a British accent. "Look for me in two-oh-eight, spring."

I have no idea if these people were legitimate, insane, very quiet performance artists, or practicing on us for the new version of Borat. But my god, that was a memorable evening.

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