Love Monkey by Kyle Smith Page B

boyfriend get you for Valentine’s Day?” I say. All casual like.
    â€œNothing,” she says.
    I look at her. She looks at me. She doesn’t elaborate.
    There’s a scene in Fort Apache, the Bronx (number four on my list of Greatest New York Movies, right behind number three, The Warriors ; number two, Midnight Cowboy ; and of course number one, Dog Day Afternoon ) where Paul Newman is sitting in a car in a crappy neighborhood in the Bronx with this lady cop (who turns out to be a junkie, of course) he’s been flirting with. She asks him why he hasn’t hit on her. “I don’t go to parties where I ain’t invited,” he says. “Do you want an engraved invitation?” she says.
    The mail has arrived.
    Shooter’s ninja combat training is kicking in. Shooter say: As soon as you get a Moment, get her out of there . Just leaving a place and going to another place with her raises the stakes.
    â€œI told a friend of mine I’d stop by his bar. Do you want to come with?”
    â€œYes,” she says.
    Well that was easy.
    On the way over she casually drops in a mention of how she “and my boyfriend” used to work at the Bridgeport, Connecticut, paper. It is unclear whether going out with the boyfriend is part of the “used to.” And Bridgeport is like the Bronx of Connecticut. So I just say, “Uh-huh.”
    Shooter say: All hot girls have a “boyfriend” hanging around somewhere. Ignore this information. The brain of the hot girl is not wired to handle the concept of being without a boyfriend. So they hang on to the old until they begin with the new.
    She doesn’t elaborate. I don’t press her.
    Luck is on my side again at South, a ramshackle underground alcohole on Forty-ninth. Pete is on the door. He acts like a big friendly slobbering bear, as usual. Gives me a manhug (no contact below the chest, which necessitates sticking your butt out, which is an incredibly gay-looking pose, which is why the straight manhug is an exceedingly rare beast, the did-you-see-it-or-didn’t-you Sasquatch of social gestures). He’s the only bar owner I know in this town. Julia doesn’t know that. Pete loves journalists, always treats us to free drinks. We treat him to free stories in our papers. We would do the same for any saloon keeper. Why haven’t the rest of them figured this out? I get some drinks. Pete won’t let me pay. I don’t try very hard.
    Time to show her the back room.
    Hardly anybody hangs in the desolate overlit back, the empty place where the barbershop and shoeshine stand used to be. I let her pick three songs from the juke (an obscure Nirvana track, some Nick Drake, and Jane’s Addiction’s “Then She Did”). It won’t occurto me for months that two of these songs are by dead people and the third sounds like an extremely exhausting heroin trip.
    We sit on a tattered orange sofa big enough for two, and only two. The light is garish but we’re completely alone in the room.
    â€œWhat were you like in high school?” I say.
    â€œI was such a dork,” she says. “No guys would ever go out with me. Till I was, like, fifteen .”
    â€œYou seem like a loner,” I say.
    â€œI always have been,” she says. “I’m just, I don’t know. A geek.”
    â€œYou have very nice eyes for a geek,” I say.
    She smiles. “I don’t know if I’m ready for the city,” she says.
    â€œWhere do you live now?”
    â€œIn South Norwalk. Connecticut.”
    Wow. Now that’s a commute. “You can’t do that much longer,” I say.
    â€œI know. It takes me an hour and a half to get to work. This week I’ve been staying with that girl who works in reception.”
    â€œYou can find an apartment here,” I say. “Just so long as you’re okay with urban squalor.”
    She laughs. “That’s the thing. I don’t mind