somewhat respectable

This weekend my friend Richard was in town from Chapel Hill. On Saturday we went to Bar Reis in Park Slope and took up about four seats in its colorful garden. That was possible because Park Slope is cool/uncool like that. As Richard's tourguide I taught him things.

Glenna: First of all, everyone is a lawyer.
Richard: Ha, ha. Sometimes I feel like everyone I meet is a doctor.
Girl 10 feet away: Blah BLAH blah law firm blah blah motherfuckers...

She had been heckling us periodically. For example as I'd walked between the table and the bathroom, she suggested to Richard that he break up with me.

Glenna: Hey, what law firm?
New Friend: White and Case. You're a 2L summer? What school?
Glenna: NYU. You?
New Friend: Penn. What law firm?
Glenna: None. I'm just working for a professor.
New Friend: OoooOOOH NYU over here is going to help people! Everyone look at NYU here, she's better than us. She's going to help people!

The people in her party didn't look. I denied that I would ever help anyone and then we played the name game. She invited us to her table and we dragged our chairs over happily.

NF: [places hand in my lap] You're really skinny. You must be the type who doesn't eat when she does coke. [I nod.] Fuck you. [To Richard] You have jagged teeth.
R: Really?

Our new friend pulled a black high heeled flip flop from her bag and replaced her right shoe (a silvery high heeled flip flop) with it.

NF: [to me] This one is not so quick. You are. You're NYU, okay? But like what's this guy, Binghamton?
G: Worse. He doesn't even go to law school.

Her upper lip jerked and the lower one stayed relaxed. By this point New Friend's friends had evaporated. We were finally alone. The waitress moseyed by and New Friend ordered a line of coke.

Waitress: Cooooke
NF: Um HELLO, cocaine, BLOW, fucking, lines, rails, hello anybody home?
W: We don't sell... coke...
NF: What the FUCK, fuck you.
W: A drink...?

I interrupted to ask for a seabreeze. Richard ordered some kind of beer for himself and New Friend settled for the same.

NF: Why are there TV shows about black people? Like, I'm sorry, I'm sick of people being so fucking PC. I am not PC.
Her hand was in my lap again. I moved some hair behind her ear.
R: That's kind of...
NF: What, oh, I'm sorry, you're black aren't you. Yeah you're black, or Jewish, because you have curly hair.
R: No...
NF: It's okay, it means you're good at cunnilingus.
Etc.

New Friend pretended not to hear several invitations back to my apartment, which pissed me off. She was all talk. Talk and touching, anyway. New Friend was not an exciting discovery. She was the same type of person I meet a dozen times a day during the school year: verbally aggressive, worldly, and risk-averse. The only difference was, I happened to meet her at a Brooklyn bar instead of in the vicinity of authority figures.

The next day I shared the story with a friend and classmate of mine.
Old Friend: It's because she goes to Penn. Those second and third tier schools have trouble weeding people out.
G: But Penn is only two spots below NYU.
OF: Doesn't matter. Like there's this guy at my firm who always says weird homophobic stuff to me when no one else is around. And guess where he goes? Duke.
G: Oh, actually you might be right. Duke really sucks.