to some chick with short hair and a pretty face who’d sidled up to our conversation while I was pipe-dreaming. Grateful that the mood had been murdered, I backed away real slow, pivoting just in time to catch Baldilocks giving me the squinty face from the bar. Again, I didn’t know whether to be horny or horrified, so I chose both, but kept moving just in case.

Hillary, always anxious to set people up (for failure, I think), wanted to know what I thought.

“Of Weirdo McFeirdo over there?”

“He’s been eyeing you all night.” She was squealing.

“And this is a good thing? Please tell Rasheed that he’s an epic failure and should log off of life immediately. What the hell was he thinking?”

“He said that you wanted a dude who, and I’m quoting you here, ‘would punch me in the throat and say let’s fuck.’ So there you go,” she said, making her arm into a teapot spout, boiling in the direction of Bald, James Bald.

“I can’t begin to define sarcasm in a bar. Plus, if this cat wanted to grab my throat he’d have to leap like, I don’t know, three feet. Raj could’ve at least picked someone who can give me a good thrashing on his own hemisphere.”

To take my mind off things, we slurped down more frozen primary colors and talked about the debauchery waiting to happen. Dee was sharing a hotel room with Stu, who was presently getting a lap dance from someone who was not Dee. Apparently, Justine was a “squirter,” which didn’t surprise me, since I’d just witnessed her demonstrating what a “scorpion” looks like in cheerleading, gymnastics, and now dive bars. In brief, it is when one reaches behind one’s back, grabs a foot, and pulls it up to one’s head. Right. Squirting seemed like just another mundane display of physicality she’d share with the class. At least that’s what she told Doug, who, despite his diminutive size, would hook up with three different girls that weekend. Derek? Zero. A fact that supremely vexed him and Courtney, who secretly hated me because she had a none-too-secret thing for Derek. We’d met more than once, and she always introduced herself anew like an amnesiac, thus proving the hatred theory, because I hate when people do that because you know they’re just doing it to infuriate you, unless they, in truth, suffer from amnesia. Then it’s just sad.

Truly pathetic was the fact that I treated these people like glitches in the system despite being right there with them, fucking up the connection with my supposed awesomeness. And still, I was the one walking to the train alone an hour later, deftly ignoring the “hey shawtays” of men eight feet tall sporting wife beaters that could hardly contain their protruding pecs. I wanted everything, but really only one thing. Sparks! “You just wanna be all up Dex’s booty,” was Adrienne’s analysis. I had my doubts about the prevalence of sparks in there, but saw her point. It took another year for me to get my head out of his ass and back to where it all started.

Took me a year to remember the truth behind Rasheed’s very first note. The list of the reasons why it was hard to be bourgie and black. No. 5: The clusterfuck. “And even more common is the fact that we’ve often developed platonic relationships with opposite sex folks, who if we were just meeting them, we might pursue amorous intentions with, but because we’ve been friends for so long, that’s off the table. Or we already dated their monkey ass, and it didn’t work out.” RBBDA became required source material. If I was going to get a life, or at least get some (since everyone else was, even Justine, the high-kicking squirter), I’d need some guidelines.

I reread the old post, “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” which attempted to spell out the ABCs of turning a homey to a husband. Scrolling through two pages of responses, I was surprised to find my own name among the “experts.” What I had to say was profoundly pointless: “There’s a fine line between putting yourself out there and playing yourself.” No shit, Sherlock. Last year’s me had nothing but craptastic advice for this year’s version, because it never works that way around, except for in Encino Man.

I needed advice, because there was this new guy, Jake—an old friend I met through older friends, who after several thousand lines of chat, finally delivered a jewel, “I