It is Julia's birthday. We haven't been out together in months. I am presently at a cook-out, sitting around a very smokey campfire, when I get her text message asking: "Hey, did you hear/feel that?" "What on earth are you talking about?"
"It was your higher self telling you to come to the Boom Bap at the 5 Spot to dance with me tonight."
This girl and the things she says. I mean who says this kind of stuff? Of course I will come to Julia's dance party on her birthday eve.
There she is, this fabulous girl, new hair extensions applied, fancy eyelashes and wearing a half see-through shirt that says "I came to dance" across its front. I call her my sophisticated hippie.
"Whiskey," she says.
"Really? I thought you're all done with the booze."
"Yeah, I changed my mind."
We elbow our way to the front of the dance floor.
"Let's dance on stage," she says as her face lights up with this splendid idea.
"Looks like they put up a plexiglass wall to keep the crazies like us off the stage."
"Okay," she shrugs her shoulders and boogies her way to the middle of the crowd. We dance for hours and the whiskey keeps flowing. A partially balding, overly muscular guy with that fake gym tanning bed tan fixates his eyes on me and I get the horrifying suspicion that he is going to attempt to make his way over to my side of the dance floor. I turn around, and there he was, his mess of dark curly hair hanging deep into his face, tall, handsome and so very young.
"What's your name?" he asks. "My name is Sterling."
We dance.
"You smell good," he says.
I have to laugh. I just left a campfire a couple of hours ago and my hair reeked of it. I smelled like smoked bacon. I tried to cover it up with a hint of amber musk perfume oil, but it resulted in me smelling like incense at best. But not having enough time to shower in between cook-outs and dance parties, I had to just roll with it and hope that the 5 Spot would be too smokey to notice anyway.
"Do you live here?" he asks.
"Yes. You?"
"I grew up here in East Nashville, but now I live in Knoxville. I go to college there."
He's in college. So by simple math that automatically makes him at least 10 years younger. Sigh.
"Oh yeah? What do you study?"
"Painting."
I have to hold back a very judgmental belly laugh. In college to study painting. Painting! What an incredible waste of money. Don't get me wrong, I once wanted to go to art school, too. I was 18. It wasn't in the cards for me so instead I studied French, just to realize at graduation that I had no clue what to do with a French degree and that I most certainly did not want to teach or to follow in my mother's footsteps of being a professional translator. The unkind realization that you just invested four years of your life and a small fortune on a more or less worthless degree hits like a rock. What sweet parents to support their son's desire to study painting. Well, with a name like Sterling, they're probably painters, too.
"I used to live in Knoxville. I went to UT, too," I say instead.
"Oh yeah? When did you graduate?"
"2002 the first time and 2004 the second time."
"How old are you?" The look of disbelief painted on the painter's face.
"34."
"That's sexy. But no way."
"Way."
"Where are you from?"
"Austria."
"I'm half Austrian!" he shouts with delight. "My father is Austrian."
"That's wild. Have you been over there?"
"Only when I was very small."
"You should go back."
"You should take me. We should go together."
I snicker at the image of Michaela and her 21(?)-year-old painter, traveling through Austria. It always surprises me how little the young ones care about age difference. Such sweet innocence. And although they flock to me, I unfortunately have grown to understand that I have no use for a 21-year-old college student.
The next morning I wake up to his text message. "You should have stayed," it says. I don't remember giving him my phone number. I do remember leaving the bar in a hurry with the strong desire to write, just to realize that I was too drunk to type.
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