bookstores, martinis and dirty talk

In this post I will portray the hipster in me.

It all begins with something corporate, emo and hipsteresque: A Bookstore.

Now, this is not an ordinary bookstore, in fact, let’s talk restaurant-jazz bar-bookstore called: The Bookstore. Let’s throw in some prohibition themed atmosphere, dim lighting and menus that are presented in actual books.

The book my lovely friend, Carol, is holding titled: “Respiratory Disease”? A menu. Heavy as shit. And that’s one hipster-ass joke to hand a customer a textbook unexpectedly, smile and say: “Your menu, ladies.”

Glance down and bam. Respiratory disease all up in my face. 

Silence. 

Carol: “Ew.” 

I opened it and of course delicious appetizers such as chickpea popcorn (deep-fried chickpeas), Gorgonzola and honey-soaked fig bruschetta and sweet potato chips with onion-mayo dipping sauce set my stomach rumbling. Get too far, the menu stops. Then I’m reading about mucus clogged in the lungs. 

Let’s flip to the cocktails. 

Cockteases every last, intoxicating one of them. $12 a pop, so you better believe I’m agonizing over which one to choose like a sixty-year-old virgin in a Chippendales.

Burlesque Berry. Death in a Bookstore. Streetcar Named Desire. True Death. The Gloom Chaser. Crap in a Toadstool. Whatever. On they went. To the point where I couldn’t choose—but that’s fine. They even have one that can make the decision for you.

Yup. Decision made.

Moments later, our girl Jess is back with our drinks. I take a sip. It isn’t sweet. In fact, it tastes strong and feisty. No bitter bite at the end, sickly sweet tingle or cough-inducing meanness. Just a flirty little slap in the mouth. 

I ask what the Shirley is to my Doom. 

“Something, something, tequila,” Jess, our waitress, says. 

Tequila. It’ll be a good night. 

A game of twenty questions later, two burlesque berries, and a dirty martini the entire, cramped, moody and jazzy establishment knows: 

1. What body part we’d have altered with plastic surgery (I chose an ass-lift) 
2. If we’re down for threesomes and if so, boy or girl (…Oh, I’m sorry, you’re expecting an answer?) 
3. What superpower we’d have and why (I’d fly because legs suck at transportation. Sorry, legs. ) 
4. Dream jobs (I’d own a house on the beach and be paid millions to write whatever the fuck I wanted. Hopefully, with a smidgen more talent than  E.L. James.) 
5. How we’d commit murder and get away with it (this part gets all a little hazy. Carol may have used poison and Jenn got a little too detailed and excited, while enthusiastically editing and critiquing my murder plans) 

By the end of the night, half the bar knew our sexual preferences, our plans for plastic surgery and our strategies for murder. It was some dark, prohibition-era version of “Desperate Housewives”.

I remember this photo—Down the hatch goes Shirley (pictured to the far right, in a pink-ringed hand)

I may have humiliated myself by boldly talking about threesomes and murder, but at least I did what I wanted: Check out a bookstore that serves a hell of a cocktail. 

(Best of both worlds)