By Gayle Carline
I later found out her name was Barbara LeFang. I met her last week in, well you know, one of those bars. Business had been great and I wanted to celebrate. Honest, I had only a couple drinks when she walked by my table. Little did I know she wasn’t like any other woman I’d ever met in one of “those” bars.
Although alcohol has been known to enhance someone’s looks, this gal didn’t need any help from my martini-colored glasses. Long-legged and curvaceous, her picture belonged in the dictionary, next to the word voluptuous. Ink-black hair hung in loose, messy curls, as if she’d just risen from bed, probably a bed of silk sheets and rose petals. She fixed her large blue eyes on me as she passed my table, and then did the most amazing thing.
She stopped.
For an average Joe like me, it was like having Ed McMahon show up at my house with a check for ten million dollars.
“Eddie?” she asked, in a deep, husky voice that made me want to cry thank you, Jesus.
Too bad my name wasn’t Eddie.
“Eddie Singer?”
God, I wanted to be Eddie Singer, but I hadn’t had enough alcohol to trade my honesty for a beautiful woman — yet.
“No, sorry,” I told her. “I’m Kevin.”
She smiled, her full, pink lips parting to reveal a slight overbite that made her even sexier. “Oh, you look like a guy I went to high school with. Do you mind if I sit down?”
Did I mind? Was she crazy? “No, please do.”
“My name is Babs,” she said, and sat down in my booth, on my side — on my freakin’ side!
“What would you like to drink?” I asked as the waitress came over.
“J.D. on the rocks,” she told the girl. “And give Kevin another — dirty martini?”
I nodded.
“My treat,” she said, flashing that smile at me again, “for sharing your booth with me.”
We spent the next two hours drinking and talking, although after all of the martinis I had, I’m not really sure what we discussed. I remember something about the Boston Red Sox, and Weird Al Yankovic, but the rest is a blur.
Mostly, I remember her hand caressing my arm when I said something funny, and apparently, I was a freakin’ comic. And the way her body slowly leaned into mine as the evening progressed, until her toes were massaging my legs and I was one step away from taking her in that booth, right there, in front of God and everybody.
After she had me good and hot, and I mean microwaved through and through, she told me that she needed to use the little girl’s room and did I mind? With a smile and the tenderest of kisses on my cheek, she got up and disappeared.
I was imagining how the evening would end, when two policemen entered the bar. They looked around the room, looked at me, at each other, and then came over to my booth.
“Could you stand, please?” the taller one asked me.
Being an agreeable drunk, I did as I was told. They turned me around and placed my hands on the table, then a pair of hands patted me in some most private places. I saw them place a big stack of money on the table, and a big gun.
“Wow!” I said. “Where’d you get those?”
“From your pocket, Eddie,” the short, fat officer said. “If you’re gonna rob a bank, three blocks is probably not far enough for a getaway.”
“No, no,” I corrected them. “I’m not Eddie. It’s an honest mistake. I look just like him.”
“Yeah, right,” they said, and handcuffed me.
I woke up in jail the next morning, called my buddy who’s a public defender and finally convinced the police that I wasn’t Eddie Singer. We went out for coffee and that’s when I saw it on the news: Eddie Singer and his partner, an attractive grifter named Barbara LeFang, had ripped off the local branch of the Bank of America, and were still at large, as they say. I had been Barbara’s stooge, her red herring to ensure Eddie’s escape.
As I thought about the evening, the smell of her perfume and touch of her hands, followed by my night on a cold, hard cot, I tried to feel angry and used.
Too bad I couldn’t.
THE END.
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