Opening The Box

A small group of the guys from work decided to have a team-building dinner at an Indian restaurant tonight, organized by our infrastructures lead. I wasn't apart of their team, though we share the same open-bay office space, but they invited me along because I was working late, and they caught me on the way out the door.

During dinner, their team joked around and cursed and insulted each other's mothers. Their team has seemingly better chemistry than mine because the majority of them are relatively young, whereas my own team is composed mostly of older, more serious guys. The kind of cats that pop Centrum pills and test their blood sugar after every meal.

We had pili pili, goat curry, and a sampler plate with chicken, beef, and lamb kebabs.

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After dinner, one of the consultants from Seattle asked if I knew of any good hookah bars. He and the guy from Austin thought it was too early to head back to their hotel rooms, and the guy from Austin, though living in a college town, had never smoked a hookah before.

The infrastructures lead joined us, and I showed them to a little joint on The Strip that I knew about because it was next door to a bar I regularly visit for happy hour. By the time we arrived, it was pouring a storm, but we took a seat on the patio under a curtain-drawn gazebo-looking structure anyway because they were blasting loud club music inside.

A cute, petite girl came out to wait on us; she wore large neon green hoop earrings and a necklace of colorful beads. Her hair was tied on both sides into little tails with more neon colors. She looked like the kind of girl that loved getting smash and using it as an excuse to do dumb things -- but very cute and petite, nonetheless.

I playfully gave her a hard time with the drink orders, requesting Stella and Amstel and other beers that I knew a dinky shack of a bar like this wouldn't have. After a few runs back to the bar to check on my beer orders, she came out with a bottle of Dos Equis and declared, "You're drinking Dos Equis, man, I don't care what you want. I'm not doing this anymore."

We laughed, and I told her, "I'm just giving you a hard time, dear, Dos Equis is fine." Then, I followed up, "I feel kinda bad, sending you running around like that. Why don't you just sit down and chill for a bit? There's nobody here, anyway, and it's raining."

She acquiesced.

The girl was not the least bit shy, and she began leading our conversations, diving into topics about drug-induced adventures and sexual experiences. She revealed herself to be a marijuana-enthusiast former college track runner -turned- skater and surfer.

She badgered me for my age, and I refused to answer seriously. I insisted that I was nineteen, and predictably, she knew I was lying. I was self-conscious because my co-workers were present. Since working at the new gig, I made it a point to not time-date myself because I knew that I was the youngest person on the team. I was staffed on a project backed by a multi-million dollar business proposal, and there would be meetings where I might voice my opinion, possibly make corrections or suggestions, and even criticism. And being so young and briefly removed from school, I did not want to have my youth become a hurdle.

So throughout the night, she tried to pry my age out of me, and I kept telling her that I was nineteen.

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Sometime in the night, her manager stepped outside, looking for her, only to find her loitering about at our table. He came over to figure out why she wasn't working.

The guys and I started talking up a clamor, telling him about how great of a waitress she was, how she was so much fun and making the bar a better place to be, and how drunk she was getting all of us. So he cheered up, told her she could stay and even drink with us.

And so the girl started to drink with us. That was all it took for me to throw inhibition out the window. The whole table of us drank ourselves beyond professionalism, and stories began to leak out -- the kind you don't share around the watercoolers at work. The kind that'll make you want to avoid eye contact the next day.

Then, she asked me again about my age. She said that everybody was already drunk and telling embarrassing stories so I didn't need to try to hide things about myself anymore. I agreed, but still didn't give her an answer. So she took a guess, and she guessed my age exactly. "On the dot," I said. She replied, "Good. That's how old I wanted you to be."

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At around 11pm, we decided to disband. We thanked her for her company and went our separate ways. Unsolicited, she wrote her number on a blank order slip and said to give her a call to hang out sometime.