The Surprise Prowler

For some reason I sure her name was Donna. She just had a look about her - early sixties, steel grey hair tied up in a bun, a decorative, folkish skirt (that my date would later tell me was Argentinian) with cowboy boots and a hat to match. A perfect Donna, in my mind, so I was a little shocked somehow to find out that wasn’t her name at all. Not even close. But it wasn’t the last thing I’d be surprised about.

She had a famous last name, she said, that belonged to a long ago president and a former staple of Hollywood. “Gay as a goose,” she said. “But that was back in the day when they didn’t talk about it.”

That’s not how she started things off, but it was pretty close. We had originally been sitting at a table outside the cafe and tap room, and had already noticed Donna (as I refuse not to call her at this point) once before, when she came out of the bar briefly, loudly remarked on how good I was looking, and then went back inside. My date informed me that Donna had already greeted her with some sort of flaring gesture when she was inside ordering a beer, so it was clear that we were already dealing with a real character. And when we moved from the table to the bench in the smoking area, that’s when Donna decided to invite herself out and join us.

“I am a fabulous artist,” was one of the first things I heard when I came back outside with two beers for my date and I. “I have my shit all over the place. People love my stuff.”

When my date asked her if she had ever had anything in the local gallery, she seemed to never had heard if it. “I have a couple pieces hangin in the Buffet though,” she said without missing a beat. “At least I think they’re still there,” she said. “They 86’d me about five years ago, and wouldn’t let me back in even to get my stuff.”

The Buffet, to be clear, is one of the diviest of the dive bars in a pretty dive town, so much so that it’s pretty famous for it. It has the din of all the most fabulous characters coming and going all night and all day, and opens at 6AM for the overnight crowd. I knew a bartender told me there had been an elderly alcoholic who would show up first thing in the morning, drink until she fell off her stool, and leave a puddle of old lady pee each and every time. That went on for years, apparently. And they kept welcoming her back, and taking care of her. So getting banned form the Buff seemed to me like getting ejected from the Indy 500 for driving too fast - I just didn’t think it was possible.

But as we sat there trying to have a private conversation and she went on and on about herself it began to become evident that just about anything was possible with this one.

“Never been married, never will. Men just cheat. But you can’t stop ‘em, it’s just in their nature to plant that seed,” she said. Then she steered to conversation abruptly to Trump, and how unfair it had been that he’d exposed for cheating on his wife. “Love that man,” she said. “Best thing that’s ever happened to this country. Just too much drama now though.”

The hard turn towards right wing politics took both my date and I by surprise, but Donna didn’t seem to notice, and just went right on talking about Florida, the recent hurricane, how great Ron DeSantis was, and - oddly enough - how she’d had sex with a Mexican and how his gold chains kept hitting her in the face during the whole process.

It was all quite entertaining for a good 45 minutes or so, but my date and i were there to talk, and when she went back inside to order us another round of beers I asked Donna - in the most polite and respectful way I could - if shew wouldn’t mind giving us a little bit of privacy.

Donna took a puff off her cigarette and looked at me steely-eyed, held up her other hand and rubbed her thumb against her fingers in a gesture. At first I had no idea what she was getting at, so I asked her.

“Money,” she said. “This is a public place. If you want some privacy, it’s going to cost you.”

I looked at her a good long moment, and realized she was serious. When I asked her what the fuck was wrong with her, she just responded by saying that money made the world go round, and a host other cliche’s about money that she seemed to think justified her position. It clearly didn’t register with her one tiny bit that the question had far greater implications than just about her bizarre social exploitation scheme.

But by the time my date had come back I’d settled back in my chair and Donna could read on my face that her time with us was pretty much up. She put back the rest of her cocktail, left us with some closing remarks, and strode back inside, like some kind of predator starting off on a new hunt.

My date and I talked it over a few minutes, in a bit of disbelief about the aggressiveness of the total martian that had just left our midst. It had not been a very happy day in a whole, but Donna - at the very least - offered some comic relief. And a little sliver of enlightenment too, I guess. I cold see now, anyways, how getting kicked out of the towns biggest dive bar wasn’t such an impossible thing after all.