Just a Little Piece of Something

I had been talking to a black girl at the bar, who called herself Yellow, but whose real name was Cat, supposedly, or Kat, or maybe Katrina, and yet I found myself now at a table of Filipinos (and Filipinas), because it was Asian Night at this particular nightclub (although Cat, the black girl, was always there).

Really, there was no ‘official’ sort of ‘Asian Night’. Things just turned out that way. Everyone knew that Thursday night was Asian Night, and Tuesday Night was black night. But, again, Cat was there almost every night.

The last thing I remembered about Cat was that she had spilled three drinks, one after another. She had asked me to buy her one. It turned out to be three. Is that why I had ended up at the Filipino table? Because Cat had become too expensive? I had known her for quite a long time – as time goes in the bar scene, anyway. Let’s say three months or so. But that’s about all. I really didn’t know anything else about her. Except that she seemed hilariously sad, and sometimes painfully angry.

Sometimes Cat would call me up at my apartment in the middle of the day. Who knows why? She would say Hi. What you doin? And I could hear a washing machine running in the background and sometimes a baby crying. She would say Are you coming out tonight? Which made it sound almost like a date, but it was never a date, never like that. We just met up if we happened to both be there, and we would sit together at the bar, just because. The only thing we had in common was a preference for vodka. And we were both divorced. Several times over. But neither of us cared about that anymore. Not in public, anyway. We never sat around and talked about someone else’s old times and past hurts. We didn’t really talk at all.

So, it’s not like she’d be angry if I ended up with the Filipinos.  Or rather, the Filipinas.

Come to think of it, I had danced with one of the girls. That was it. A petite girl with very nice white teeth and long black hair and high heels that somehow failed to make her any taller, which was fine by me. Her name was . . .

Well, never mind. It didn’t seem to matter. What I wanted, having found myself at the Filipino table with whats-her-name, two other girls and two other guys, was to get her phone number. She seemed like a really nice girl.