anthem

Morgan and I are spending a Friday night at our favorite karaoke bar in Culver City.  This is the kind of place where you can show up wearing a cocktail dress or pajama pants, and you'll blend in either way.  Tonight, we're in jeans and ponytails, sloughing off the stress of another long week.

We're just complaining about the song selections this evening -- everyone seems to want to sing depressing ballads, and we're not in the mood to cry into our cups -- when the heroine of the night stands to take the mic.  She's a girl about our age, and she's going to do Goodbye Earl, by the Dixie Chicks.

We instantly appoint ourselves her unofficial backup singers.  We wave our glasses and, from our table, join in the chorus:

Goodbye, Earl!

Those black-eyed peas?

They tasted all right to me, Earl.

You feelin' weak?

Why don't you lay down and sleeeeeep, Earl.

Ain't it dark?

Wrapped up in that taaaaarrp, Earl....

Adam and a couple of his buddies are there, too.  They stare at us, then start edging away uneasily.

Concern written all over his face, Adam's friend asks, "Why does every girl know every word to that song?"

talisman

It must have been sometime in July. Maybe that night when he turned up at the dive bar down on the corner where we were, as usual, nursing beers and playing Photo Hunt. We'd been there all night, but he was a little drunker than the rest of us. Embarrassingly, he kept trying to kiss my neck, in a very non-PG manner. I was hoping my roommates would be too fixated on the screen to notice. Of course they weren't.

But later that night, we were lying in my bed, sober again. The walls in that apartment were paper-thin and everyone else was asleep. So he was talking right into my ear, low and soft.

"Don't answer. Just let me say this," he told me.

"You need to know that you're amazing. You are sexy" -- he ran a hand down the flat of my stomach -- "and funny, and so smart. And you have a good heart. I can tell." He was a deliberate person, but that night he spoke more deliberately, more earnestly than usual. "I hope you know that you deserve someone just as amazing. And...and even if that person isn't me, I hope you never settle. You deserve someone who appreciates what you are."

I was quiet for a minute. My instinct was to say something self-deprecating, deflect all the compliments. But he'd already told me not to answer. So eventually I just whispered, "Thank you," and pulled him closer to me.

That was Adam. There were any number of reasons why Adam was not the one for me, and vice versa. But eight months later, I realize how grateful I am for that little speech, even if I still don't know why he felt compelled to make it. Truth be told -- and what is this blog for, if not the truth? -- there have been one or two nights since then when that memory has been my talisman.

Sometimes I'm almost positive that the universe is making sure I have everything I need.

vices

"What are your vices? The things you wouldn't want to tell someone on a second date," he asks.

We're at a very nice restaurant in Brentwood, jazzy and loud on a Friday night. The table between us is small and crowded with crab cakes, steak, a really good bottle of red wine. It's unclear how much my mood has been affected by the heavily poured gin and tonic I just finished, but I'm enjoying myself.

I chew, think about it. "Inertia," I tell him.  "That's my big vice." It's an honest answer. It's why I'm still in Los Angeles at all to have this dinner with him.

But he pulls a face, dismissively. In a minute I'll understand that he was hoping for something a little edgier out of me. "What about you?" I ask.

He smokes, he says. Cigarettes, plus weed a couple of times a week. And he likes to gamble. Regularly, at the casinos. In case any of that is a dealbreaker, he wants me to know up front. Then he stares at me and waits.

The truth is that any one of those three is a dealbreaker. I tell him this. But I can't remember the last time someone was so frank with me, not on a second date, and I'm impressed. I tell him that too. There's a brief minute of awkwardness, both of us considering the wall we've hit. And then (is it just the wine?) the conversation sweeps on with a life of its own. We've written ourselves this policy of suicidal honesty. Now we can say anything we want, pick up any subject, and we do.

Later that night, we end up at a dive bar somewhere in the Valley, listening to a cover band play surprisingly great rock and roll. We drink beer and shout the lyrics to Jet's Are You Gonna Be My Girl at each other, my hand keeping rhythm on his knee. With my big black boots and long brown hair, they might be singing about me.

Later yet, still fully committed to honesty, I say, "I want you to kiss me goodnight."  He lights up like a Christmas tree.

I drive home wondering if I'll see him again. He's already told me that he likes me, wants to see me, but he's leaving the decision up to me. And right now, on this drizzly February night, all I can think about is how attractive it is when someone tells you the truth.