It was 9 p.m. on a Tuesday at Tarpon Bend (200 SW Second St., Fort Lauderdale) when I popped in for a cocktail. The middle-aged cover band was grunting out Zeta ballads. Between songs, they stopped to ask if anyone listens to Paul and Young Ron in the morning. The crowd of 20 was unenthusiastic in its response, and the lead singer announced, “I guess no one in here gets up that early, huh? You’re all waiters with the night off.”
Huh? Again no response.
But there were a few rowdy fellas in the back of the bar, barking, “Skynyrd. Play some Skynyrd.”
The singer responded, “We’re gonna do another one of these new songs, and then we’ll play some Skynyrd.” While the scraggly dressed, bandanna-headed singer started up his guttural performance, I headed back to the boisterous boys to bum a light. I approached a hard-bodied man in his mid-20s who wore a dark-blue T-shirt. His sparkly brown eyes looked right into mine as the flame shot up from his lighter. I bent down to light my smoke, then said “Thanks” and slowly started to walk back toward my seat, leaving him time to strike up a conversation. “You looked like the Wicked Witch of the West over there,” he said.
The icebreaking insult. I recognized it right away. He was a cunning and ruthless pickup tactician. What was there to do but feign offense?
“Why, thank you,” I said, shooting him a cold look.
“But you’re much prettier.”
“Oh, great. Thanks — that really means a lot, you know, being prettier than the Wicked Witch of the West.”
“It’s your shirt,” he said, referring to my long-sleeved gray-and-black-striped sweater. “It looks like her shoes. My name is John.” He smiled at me with slightly crooked teeth.
“Are you from here?” he asked.
“Yes.” I replied. “Where are you boys from?”
“Virginia.” He said they were Navy sailors on a two-week voyage on the new aircraft carrier.
By this time, the band was playing an upbeat tempo, and John asked me if I liked to swing-dance. I said I didn’t know how, and as he took my hand with a sense of urgency, I realized that we needed to have a little chat.
“John,” I said, raising a finger in the air, preparing to give him the old heave-ho, “we can dance, and that’s fine, but if you’re looking to get laid tonight, I don’t want to waste your time. I’m not your girl.”
John leaned back in his stool as his body was overtaken by laughter, and he put his hand up to give me a high-five. And that, mano-a-mano, was the extent of our physical connection. He was in an amused frenzy of disbelief and told all his friends how honest I was.
It being a Tuesday night, there weren’t a hell of a lot of other prospects around for John, but that wasn’t really my problem. Hmm, I thought, or maybe it was.
I asked John why, since he was looking to land women, he wasn’t wearing his uniform.
“We didn’t know whether to go in uniforms or in civvies, but we decided civvies.”
“Do you think that will work better with the ladies?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
Didn’t seem to be going too well. Another guy in the group came over in a huff. He was a smallish beady-eyed fella who looked like he’d just been rejected. He divulged, “I was talking to those two girls, and when I told them that I was engaged, they just got up and left.”
His frustration didn’t seem fitting considering he already had a girl. “Would you ever cheat on your fiancée?” I asked him.
“Hell no. I love my girl,” he said, “but I don’t understand why men and women can’t just be friends.” Touché.
The cover band started playing some Skynyrd. John jumped up and yelled “Free Bird,” but they were playing a more obscure number that none of us knew. They were jamming classic-rock style. The guitarist stepped off the stage for a fancy-finger solo that wowed the boys. Then the lead singer came running over to where we were sitting so that we could sing in the microphone with him. We were pretending to know the lyrics, but the illusion degenerated rapidly as we were all watching his mouth and mimicking his gestures. Then he ran back to the stage, much to our relief.
After we’d had our dose of Skynyrd, I proposed that I try to help the sailors find some single young women — a scary task that I feared I would get no thanks for if I failed. I recalled hearing on the radio that morning that it was Ladies Night at Martini Bar (300 SW First Ave.), just the kind of territory where a fiery-loined sailor might shake out his sea legs, so we set out. It was one block away, at the Riverfront complex.
As we climbed the stairs to the second floor of the complex, one of the sailors said that he saw two men kissing earlier. “It’s the first time I seen anything like that,” he remarked with disgust.
“Well, Fort Lauderdale has one of the largest gay populations in the country,” I responded.
“That’s not very good for us,” John said, undeterred from his mission of getting play.
“Actually, mathematically, it works out rather well for you guys,” I replied. “The men are leaving all of the ladies for you.”
With that, they warmed up a little to the South Florida flavor. That is, until we arrived at Martini Bar, where the lights were out and the doors were locked. Aargh! I was standing in a circle with six sailors looking to get some, and rather than a facilitator, I had become an unwitting C-blocker.
Some officers walked by in white uniforms, and a couple of the boys perked up, uttering “Yes, sirs.” We were standing next to Hooters, where a tiny waitress with big boobs and long brown hair caught John’s eye.
I said, “Go tell her that you want her,” and he started to make his way over there but checked himself. “I can’t do that.”
“OK, then,” I suggested, “just go say ‘Hi.’”
“Naw, if the beautiful Wicked Witch of the West turned me down, then she’s not going to go for me.”
Aw, shucks, John.
So there we stood, as I thought of a direction to send the sailors. It was Tuesday night, after all, and if time is the fourth dimension, why not use the ultimate one-direction time travel machine — patience — and return to Himmarshee on Wednesday night, when the bars were sure to be bumping? He and his friends would still have to compete with, John claimed, the other 2,000 sailors looking to get their freak on in the freakiest of dives, but at least there would be plenty of bare-bellied fish in the sea.
I got not much thanks for that suggestion, and as the boys stood around in their civvies, I wondered whether they’d be donning white the next night. Either way, these wide-eyed Virginia boys probably wouldn’t get a taste of bootylicious Lauderdale.
The last thing John said to me before walking away was, “All I want is to get a piece of tail before I go back to Virginia.”
Yeah, you and whose army?
