Boys on Friday Night

Mission kids. We move to San Francisco from all across the country, hailing from small insignificant places in search of something bigger, something more exciting. And all we want to do is party. Well, this is the perspective of some bitter long-time San Franciscans who have a lot better to do than go out after work on a Friday evening for a beer. Hey, we have a lot better to do as well. Because, yes, we are artists, those downwardly mobile dirty hipster bohemian types who write poetry and engage in conceptual art, or the creation of theoretical works of creativity that no one can understand. The rest of us have normal jobs, probably as web designers--or something else flexible or freelance. I don't know where I exactly fall into all of this. What I do know is that I found myself sipping a margarita out of a pint glass last Friday with a few co-workers who I never actually talk to. Of course, I have exchanged a few words with one or two of them, but I couldn't call them friends. We are sitting in this patio filled with picnic tables overflowing with hipsters and their bicycles. Everyone is drinking beer. The place is absolutely packed. I suppose it could be deemed interesting in terms of a Friday evening activity. After a bit, people began to filter off in other directions, heading toward new destinations to continue their evenings. I remain in this crowded patio. This guy approaches my co-worker and I and in a over-dramatic display of false shyness, asks us if he could buy us some drinks. Our conversation, or merely our presense, is the currency in this exchange-- Beer for conversation, beer traded for proximity, with the hope of a little something more. The exchange went on for too long--down the street and into the next bar: some pseudo-punk haunt where hipster kids bounced to bad 80s tunes encased in cigarette smoke in the back room. I played along with the activities of the evening. I had nowhere to be. I am young, and this sometimes necessitates risky behavior. The boy was convinced he had me for the night. He was convinced even in spite of this brief exchange:

He surveyed the crowd with approval, then leaned over to me through the haze of smoke and yelled over the din of some New Wave madness, "What kind of guys do you like?"
"I like girls."
He was good at masking the disappointment, mostly because it is difficult for any man to take this comment seriously. Mostly, it is a dangerous thing to admit in their presence because it immediately conjures up images of threesomes and tacky porn flicks.
"Who do you think is hot in this room?"
I looked around the room. Everyone looked tacky in their faux hipster apparel and badly dyed hair. A gaggle of girls sat at the other end of the room giggling to one another. It was obvious that he found them all attractive in his somewhat inebriated state. His friend was trying to ply them with conversation. They didn't look too impressed. He probably wanted to ditch me for one of them as well, because they looked easy. I suppose that I had looked the same way earlier--some innocent new to the ways of The Mission and nightlife in general. They had assumed that I was just barely old enough to be granted entry into the place in which I was standing. The music was loud and everyone was dancing, so we rose too to writhe to the beats. But it was getting late. I wanted to go home. We all finally managed to exit. And the boy refused to speak to me. He was throwing a silent tantrum--the kind that small boys throw. He wanted a girl to go home with him. And I was not that girl. So as he sulked under a street sign, I headed off in the other direction, towards home.