Back when I was single and living in Colosse, I used to frequent music bars. My most common hangout was The Stockpile, a country-music bar that lined up the best regional country musicians around (as well as some national acts). It’s nice having your own bar, where, in the immortal words of the Cheers theme, everybody knows your name. Well, the bartenders knew my name and my drink-of-choice so they were great about, when I was waiting in line, passing a beer off to me even while I would a couple people back in line. And regular fans of the kind of music that played there knew who I was, even often as as “That tall guy.” And I often “got to know” the people there insofar as I saw them on a regular basis, had an idea of which of the acts they liked, and what to talk about if a conversation got struck up.

The bar wasn’t a particularly good place to pick up women. At least not for me, insofar as I never succeeded and rarely gave it a whole lot of effort. I almost succeeded once with a surprisingly hot girl. She and I were exchanging glances and smiles and when the conversation finally occurred, I blew it somehow. I think I know what the issue was and I think it was one of the reasons that I didn’t get very far even when I did make a sort of effort. Namely, it’s not good to go to shows alone as I almost always did. Being that guy who stands by himself and hangs out by himself is rather off-putting. Said hot girl was exchanging glances when I was sort of in a group of casual people, but it became clear in the midst of our conversation that I was there alone and the guy that had sort of introduced us was a guy that I had actually just met. Then I probably said something stupid. But to the extent that I was there to pick up women - and I generally wasn’t - being there alone was a Really Bad Idea.

Even though I knew the chances of my making a move on anyone were slight, and even though I knew that I was rather fundamentally incompatible with a good portion of the women there (I like country music, but I’m not a Country Music Person), I did always keep my eye out. And, just by virtue of going to the same place one to three nights a week, I got to know the people that went there (male and female) person by person even if I never learned or promptly forgot their names. I was enough of a fixture that I felt reasonably comfortable walking up and talking to strangers in that environment. If nothing else, we had a point of conversation: the music. The exception was, well, single women. They were harder because, well, it’s just different walking up and talking to unescorted ladies. So the people I probably should have talked to the most, to the extent that I was looking to pick people up, were often the ones I did so to the least.

In all of this was a group of young people that were there about as much as I was. I’ve long-since forgotten their names, if I ever knew them, so I will call them Jerry, Chrystal, and the gang (JC&tG). Jerry and Chrystal were centers of attention in part because they were both very skilled dancers and would tear up the dance floor together. They weren’t a couple, though. Jerry would frequently come with other dates and go back and forth between dancing with his date and dancing with Chrystal. Chrystal was probably a 6 or so (upper Station Three) with a nice body though a pointedly plain looking face. I can’t say that I wasn’t at all attracted, but it was a passing attraction at most. I never really harbored illusions that there were any romantic possibilities, though, for the main reason that with some ladies you can kind of close your eyes and imagine something happening and with others you generally can’t. Even if they weren’t romantically involved, it seemed like her standard was set by Jerry and the other guys in the gang and that was a standard that I did not meet. Jerry wasn’t a remarkable looking guy, but he came across as extremely affable and had that big-belt, snuff-spitting college-educated frat boy succeeded at places like The Stockpile.

One night at the bar I was feeling more chatty than usual and decided, in between the opening act and the headliner, to talk to sit at their table and introduce myself. I had introduced myself to others, though this was one of the first times I had really gone out of my way to do so. So I did. Jerry was pretty cool and I talked to him and some others in the gang. I tried to talk to Chrystal, too, but she was unbelievably cold. Like, if she were in a comic strip, there’d be icicles hanging from her word balloons. Jerry, despite the two of us being pretty radically different people, was much cooler. But to Chrystal my existence was limited to that as irritant and interloper or something of the kind.

That was the only time I really talked to JC&tG. I realized afterward that unlike with others at the bar, including Jerry as best I could recall, Chrystal never held the same standard of friendliness in casual non-encounters. Most of the people, when you smile or smile and nod out of familiarity or the recollection of those times when you stood face to face and couldn’t figure out who was going to walk around whom and how, none of that had ever occurred with Chrystal (the same way it had occurs generally without regard to gender and age). After that whole encounter, I noticed it a lot more. I was truly invisible to her. There is something viscerally disturbing about being invisible that makes you want to say something in reference to a female canine whenever it is a woman that does it. Of course, if I was invisible to some guys there, too, I probably wouldn’t have been nearly as likely to notice.

It genuinely wasn’t the case that Chrystal was this really attractive woman who was ridiculously out of my league. I’d dated women more attractive than she. I found my wife more attractive when I first not-quite-met her even as she, too, snubbed me. And given that I had made an effort (a modest one for most, a big one for me) to get to know the regulars of The Stockpile, it didn’t feel as though I were simply wanting to talk to the hot chick. At the same time, though, I probably wouldn’t have gone as far out of my way to talk to that group had she not been a part of it. I never talked to Jerry again (except nods and smiles) after that even on nights where she wasn’t around. Had a guy behaved as she did, I wouldn’t remember it these years later.

I attribute the rudeness to a couple of factors. First, looking back, I don’t think that she was a particularly social person. I don’t recall her talking to very many guys outside of the Gang at all. Though Jerry knew a lot of the same people that I did at The Stockpile, he seemed to talk to them independently. I attributed that to his affable nature, but it’s probably also the case that she didn’t because she is the opposite of affable. The other factor to which I attribute the rudeness is that I was a guy to whom she was utterly incompatible and any sort of warmth in my general direction could have given me the wrong idea. It’s unlikely that it would have, but she didn’t know that. And I couldn’t say for certain as I am the dope that asked out the barmaid at the Stockpile that was much warmer to me even when there off-duty (and thus I was not impervious to getting the wrong idea). The last possibility is precisely what, if anything, was going on between her and Jerry and maybe I was monopolizing the guy since he was the one I talked most to. I had sort of had the impression that to the extent that they weren’t dating it was because he had better options than her rather than vice-versa.

The last time I saw her, Evangeline and I were on a pseudo-date at a different bar catching a show together. The tables were full and there was no place to stand, so we found a couple benches in the little hallway to the pool table and restroom in back. As she walked to the back, so paused, smiled, and said “Oh, hi!” and walked on. It was the nicest she had ever been to me. Eva, with whom all was not particularly good at that point, kind of coldly asked “And whoooooo is that?”

“Good question,” I replied.