To start with, I am aware that 95% of all flirtation bartenders receive are a poorly planned attempt at getting a free drink. That leaves the 5% that are genuine, and there are few things less appealing than being chatted up by someone who’s on their ninth drink of the night and clearly usually only makes it to drink six. This story happened on Friday night and depending on when you’re reading this might be wrong or right, but oh well.
Twerking, Grinding and generally ‘Dropping Low’ is common practice for girls on nights out since the turn of the century and the correct answer for “does this make my butt look big?” went from no to yes. But to see someone grind on a guy while Footloose is playing doesn’t quite meld together. The woman in question, Katie, had been grinding on a regular of the pub for the past half hour, before her and her friend, Jane, tried their first attempt of flirtation towards myself and the other bartender, Bill.
Bill and I were stood behind the bar as the two women started to lean over, in an attempt to not having to yell everything they said to us. Jane leant in and called Bill cute, he didn’t not like the compliment but the awkward feeling of when someone you don’t feel attracted to hits on you seemed to get to him and so went off away from that part of the bar. To which Jane turned to me and said how I was cuter. I also left the area after that, pretending there were glasses to clean.
The two of them continued to grind and mimic the women in music videos of rappers but instead of a beach in Cali they were in a small pub in an English town. They returned to the bar sometime later for drinks, with Katie asking me if I had a boyfriend, I said no and Bill said how I was married. Or at least had a Mrs. To which Katie said, “It doesn’t matter whether you have a girlfriend, I can still say I think you’re fit.” I left once more after this, after thanking her for the compliment and leaving to the glasses that didn’t need cleaning.
They continued to look over to Bill and I with facial expressions that could be classed as seductive attempts, as long as both of your eyes were closed and weren’t near them. But it wasn’t the events and attempts so far that really screamed a lack of subtlety, they were forward but reserved. Until Bill started to do his best impression of Tom Cruise in Cocktail. Throwing and catching an empty wine bottle with an impressive amount of precision and speed, just quite fun to witness until he dropped the bottle a couple of times.
It was once Bill had decided to stop his impression of the Mission Impossible actor that Katie air of mystery fell to the ground. She turned to me as Bill placed the bottle on the back of the bar, and simply said while fluttering her lashes, “I heard you can do that with your d*ck.” It took everything not to laugh in a response, simply at a purely impractical look at it. I could tell if she meant I could flip my ‘member’ like the bottle or flip a bottle with it, both seemed painful and pointless. But she must have thought it was working as she bit her lip and looked me up and down after she said it.
My only move was to awkwardly smile and move away from Katie and hope she would find someone else to make her advancements towards. She and Jane were not in the pub when Bill and I were closing so I could only be thankful for her disappearance and wish whichever guy who liked her attempts at flirtation a turn on luck with their… adventures. What happened to courting, dating or even just a flutter of the eye behind a handheld fan? Maybe I’ve just studied too many Victorian novels.
The Nerdy Bartender 