I knew we were in trouble when the rotund, middle aged woman who bellied up to the bar upon our arrival at 3:30 p.m. consistently slammed countless Jack and Cokes as afternoon gave way to dusk, and dusk gave way to night.
Our story actually begins Thursday night when Matt’s cell phone alerted him to a phone call from a woman, the likes of whose name I still don’t know and don’t care to know. She claimed to be the host and sole proprietor of a rock radio station. The woman requested a lengthy phone interview with Matt on the spot (at the time it was from the back hallways of the Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa) in advance of his band’s Fourth of July performance at the Roadhouse Garage in Grand Island, Neb. She would meet Matt and his jovial band mates IRL (for the non-savvy Internet users, that stands for “In Real Life”) the next afternoon as guitars, mics and stage lights were checked, checked and re-checked for the night’s performance.
The woman, Matt surmised, seemed harmless enough on the phone.
Not long after the sight of her bottle-blond hair and inebriated grin did Matt and the band realize this “radio host” was anything but she initially portrayed. Truth was, her radio station needed no radio to be heard, but a merely a computer with speakers and an Internet connection.
As she sat the bar, mentally undressing the band members, curling her creepy lips over missing teeth and ordering Jack and Coke after Jack and Coke, she pestered Matt to yet another “interview.” His patience grew thin by then and, without much thought, agreed to a next-day interview that, the woman said, would last two-hours. She offered to meet Matt at his hotel room, but Matt quickly negated that frightening option.
As the band worked through difficulties with their sound equipment, the woman, who claimed to be an expert in these sorts of matters, bleated her unsolicited opinion over the din, only to be met by unwelcome glares from the band. (Later, she also claimed that one of the members of L.A. Guns hit on her for two weeks following a show.)
She mentioned to several members of the Garage’s wonderful staff how she couldn’t decide if, at the end of the night, she would “take home” either the band’s drummer or bass player. What she lacks in personal hygiene and appropriate social behavior she certainly makes up for in persistence!
After several attempts to chat up the band members proved unsuccessful, she offered the opportunity of marijuana after the show. And wouldn’t you know it, it still didn’t work.
I knew it would be only a matter of time until I was identified as The Girlfriend and the woman would attempt to find in me an ally. I’m sure sitting near the stage in an empty booth that seats four, surrounded by discarded band gear probably didn’t help my camouflage, but I’ve attended enough of Matt’s shows as a Fan of One not to mind the intermittent comments from guys who assume I’m Fresh Meat for the evening.
Not before this very night did I consider the female of the species more deadly than the male.
The woman from the Internet shimmied her portly self across the bar and slid into the booth next to me. Her glassy eyes and droopy mouth were all the evidence I needed that I was, indeed, trapped. And as the music blared, the band grinned from the stage as they took childlike delight in my current state of horror.
She knew Matt, the lead singer, was off limits, given my presence that evening. But the drummer is what the woman still yearned for. At 37 years old, she informed me that she recently ended a relationship with a 21-year-old (the same age as our aforementioned drummer), proof positive she could carry on relations with younger men. She mentioned to me the delightful offer of marijuana that went unrequited and still hoped for a shot at something before July 4 became July 5.
She also sought my assistance to get the bar’s patrons on their feet, but, again, her request was denied. After so many head nods and adverted glances, she made a quick exit to the restroom, after which I even more quickly darted from my booth and thanked the gods who shone on me that evening that our encounter didn’t last much longer.
But before she left for the restroom, she mentioned that the two-hour interview scheduled for the next day was, indeed, cancelled. She blamed the cancellation on the delay at which she received a free copy of the band’s CD and her denial to “get off” that night from the drummer, “even though he has been hitting on me all night long.”
Matt took the woman’s bizarre and unsightly infatuation in stride, when later in the night he dedicated AC/DC’s “The Jack” in her honor. And in true form, as the band played on, she leapt to the front of the stage and danced and twirled to a song about a woman and a certain venereal disease.
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