Last night I stopped into Mullanes on Lafayette Street to watch MNF with Irene. The young poetess was seated with two friends. I thanked the redhead for letting me stay at her place several nights earlier.
“Why you stay there?” the young bearded man asked with indignation.
“I lost my keys and Irene was going to her parents.” I figured that he was her boyfriend. “She did me a mitzvah.”
“Mitzvah?” Bob obviously wasn’t a scholar of Yiddish.
“Yes, a blessing,” said Irene, smiling that a goy knew the old lingua franca of the wanderers.
“And I got to try on her underwear.”
Irene and her girlfriend laughed, but Bob scowled and left abruptly. Irene’s Saints were getting annihilated by the Seahawks. She reached for her phone. Someone was texting her. She smirked with contentment, “That was Bob. He wrote that he didn’t like you at all and that I shouldn’t trust you.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“I guess he was being protective.”
“Of you? You’re not danger. You’re my friend.”
“You’re right. I am no danger.” Other than to myself. “But tell Bob I said ‘thanks’.”
61 was not 16 and it was nice to think Bob considered me dangerous.
Maybe I am too.
But only to myself.
“I will,” Irene said, then groaned, as the Saints gave up another TD.
She was happy someone cared enough to warn her about me.
And I was happy Bob was a nice guy.