BABES and BRIDES
Hello, She Said
CHARLIE

I’ve never been here before, quite a place. I’m running into every single person I’ve ever known in my entire life. You ever have a day like that? They say if you stand in one place long enough you’ll run into every person you know. But, hell, I thought it’d take longer than a couple of hours. And I thought they were talking about, you know, Penn Station or something. Disneyworld. A place people GO to. Who comes here? No one. But I guess I’m wrong, because I’m running into every SINGLE person I’ve ever known. It’s a very small world. Very small. I ran into some girl before, she comes up to me like we’re the oldest of friends. Her name’s Joan, Jane, John, something like that. You know who she turns out to be? She’s my… wait, wait, I want to get this straight. She’s my ex-girlfriend’s sister’s friend’s older brother’s ex-girlfriend. Is that stretching it or what? And here I am talking to her like I may have at one time saved her life. “Hi, how you doing, been a long time, yeah.” I can’t believe I recognized her. What, did I see her once, maybe twice? Maybe said five words to her. And two of them were “Gesundheit.” And the damn thing is, it happens all the time. Makes me feel like I’m losing my mind sometime. I pass people out on the street, they say hello to me, I say hello to them, I walk away saying, who the hell was that? It gets to the point that I say hello to every person I make eye contact with. I mean, I don’t want to seem unfriendly, so instead I seem homosexual. No, no, that’s not true, sorry. I’m getting drunk. When I get drunk, I babble. I don’t know why I babble when I get drunk, it’s just something I do, I babble. My friends all say “You babble when you get drunk,” and they’re right, it’s something I do, I babble. Because I don’t care too much when it’s a guy says hello to me and I don’t know who he is. I mean, it bothers me a little, but I’m not going to spend the day agonizing over it. But the girls, I get these pretty girls who are just so happy to see me, and I’m happy to see them too, and I’d be even happier if I knew who the hell they were! But, you know, you can’t ask, right? You can’t tell some girl you don’t know who she is, she’ll be insulted. Right? Right? See,. I’ll prove it, who the hell are you? See, you’re insulted, right? Everybody wants to be remembered but no one does anything memorable.