Ian sighed again. “What women gamer group protests?” More muffled man yelling. “Well, we actually do have a pro-woman game that is being led by a girl . . . I mean female employee. Its working title is, uh, Ultimate Apocalypse.”
Oh. My. God. He was pitching my game idea!
My satire/joke/parody game idea. I almost popped up from my seat to yell at him, NOOOOOOOOOOO! but my circumstances were precarious at that moment. What good reason did I have for why I’d been in my car with the seat fully reclined during work hours?
“I loved the idea when it was pitched to me!” Ian exclaimed. “It’s a shooter game, but it’s an all-male team of, um, strippers, fighting off zombies, vampires, aliens, and guys like Kim Jong-un. We want to get more women playing shooter games, and we think sex appeal is the way to do it. We may make it a mobile game instead of a console game, to help us diversify.”
The yelling subsided and the man on the phone talked for a while. What was he saying? Hopefully he was giving Ian a sorry, it is with mixed emotions that we need to fire your ass speech. Pitching the world’s most absurd game idea to a key member of the board out of sheer desperation could be grounds for termination, right?
“You think the other board members will go for this strategy, too? We want to diversify, for sure, especially if it draws in a bigger female audience. I’ll make sure we have our female producers lead this effort and get some good PR out of it. Thank you so much for calling. We can’t wait to get started! Goodbye!”
After a few seconds of silence, Ian screamed, “Shit! Fuck me! Fuck-fuck-fuck!,” which echoed throughout the garage. He paced around his car a few seconds and cussed all the way to the elevator. It dinged open, and Ian’s grating voice finally faded away.
Well, fuck me, too.
The only good thing to come of this was that I wasn’t tired anymore.
THE FIERCE, HAIR-TANGLING wind nearly pushed me into the Belle Towne Tavern. For once, I had arrived early enough to be the one to negotiate our trio’s seating situation. Belle Towne had become our regular stomping ground because it had everything we wanted: Candace had her complimentary serving of truffle-salt popcorn, Jane got a wide selection of top-shelf imported vodka for her martinis, and I got what I wanted most out of a bar experience: half-price happy hour till nine P.M. And bonus, they had five stalls in the women’s restroom. For me, just this warranted an automatic five-star Yelp review.
The hostess seated me near the front window at a small circular table with barely enough room to hold a tealight candle.
“This table looks a little small for three people. Any chance we could get seated over there?” I asked, nodding my head toward the side of the room with several empty booths.
She glanced in that direction and then looked back at me. “There’s less ambiance there. And it’s dark.”
I didn’t think I looked like an ambiance kinda girl. I grabbed the tiny tealight. “This’ll help. I can bring it over.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself. You’ll get less action in a booth. But the seats are more comfy.”
Before I could ask her why she thought I needed some “action,” Candace breezed through the door and chirped, “Oooh, good job on the booth!” while Jane slid in across from me.
Candace and I had gone to college together and were best friends then, and had been since. Jane was Candace’s childhood friend and former postgraduation roommate, which was how I had come to know her over the years. Jane was like the Anti-Candace, an ice-queen-triathlon-foodie-juice-cleanse type who worked at an investment bank. Candace, whose cheery demeanor and warmness made you feel good as soon as you saw her, took Jane under her wing and over the years had managed to soften her to the point of tolerability. We were all three just so different. We probably looked like a band of misfit superheroes whenever we walked into any downtown bar.
We peeled off our wet coats and the hostess handed us dinner menus. “Could we have the happy hour ones?” I asked.
She shrugged apologetically. “New owners, new hours. Happy hour ended at seven.”
I looked at my watch. It was 7:01.
Before I could protest, Jane said, “We’ve been coming here for, what do you think, two years now?” She glanced at Candace, then me, then at her Cartier