Her name was Trixie, and that right there caused problems.
“Trixie as in the cereal?” I asked. I was on stage, packing up my gear, sweaty from playing my show. It’s just me and my guitar, and this was a big club. I felt like I had to strum and yowl and stomp extra loud to be heard.
“Actually, yeah,” she said, giving me a screw-you look.
“Oh. Sorry.” I’d meant it as a joke.
“My mom was a nut job,” she said. “She’s institutionalized now. Glad you asked?”
Trixie had tattoo sleeves, and her arms were about twice the size of mine. Not flabby, and not like a crazy female bodybuilder, either: Just plain firm. She had those Rosie-the-Riveter, eggplant-color bangs that hip girls wore back in ’08, only this was 2012.
I was glad I was still on stage. If I’d been down below, on the floor, I felt like she would have towered over me by about five feet.
“I’m going to Filthy Phil’s for dinner,” she said. “Want to come?”
“Uh –”
“Or do you not eat? Because you look like you don’t eat.”
I was kind of hurt and annoyed that she hadn’t said a word about my show. Usually if a girl’s going to flirt with me, she’s going to compliment my music first.
I decided to try to make another joke — you know, since the first one had gone so well. “Beg pardon, but Filthy Phil’s doesn’t sound so enticing,” I said.
She grinned. “Oh, Filthy Phil’s isn’t what’s supposed to be enticing. I am.”
It occurred to me right then, with her teeth gleaming in the stage lights, that be that she might be nuts, too. Like mother like daughter.
“You’re not some kind of sociopath or psychopath or any other kind of path, are you?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Nope, no paths. It’s just — I’ve ruined enough guys lives’, according to them? That when I saw you up there, all alone, I figured I’d try to save one.”
“And how do you know I need saving?”
For a response, she cast her eyes around the nearly empty bar. Attendance at the show had been sparse. Fine, practically nonexistent.
I pressed on. “So I’m like an experiment.”
“Is the right answer to that ‘yes’ or ‘no’?” she asked.
“The right answer is ‘No, I want you to go to Filthy Phil’s with me because you’re an incredibly hot and talented musician.’”
“All right. That, then.” She tapped her foot impatiently. “Jeez, come on, hop down from there already, would you? Mewants some biscuits and gravy.”
“Oh man, biscuits? Why didn’t you say so?”
She extended a tattooed arm. I hesitated, then took it. As a waitress gravel-laughed in the background, Trixie pulled me outside into the night.
