"It's feast or famine, baby," he said, his eyebrows quietly innocent above his sparkling eyes. "You're just having a dry spell." This from the man who can't be alone for more than five minutes. He smoked his cigarette and we both looked around the bar. I know Sean. He's looking around for someone he could set me up with. "I'll sell ya like a used car, babe, " he said when trying to get me to join his dart team at the bar--where he's convinced that if I just hang there for a while, I'll find someone to hook up with. But all we see are the same old same olds.

According to Sean, I haven't reached desperation yet, because if I had, I would not keep saying "no" and "no" and "no," over and over again to the toothless old white men at the bar. I wouldn't say "no" to the shifty-looking dark Mexicans who recognize me as one of their own and proposition me in drunken Spanish.

So according to Sean, I haven't had desperado tattooed on my forehead yet. That's what happens when you've reached a sufficiently miserable state of loneliness-you no longer resemble a rational, attractive human being-in fact, someone who maybe a few months ago was a king (or queen) feasting at a table of sexual or romantic delights with wondrous magnanimity to all-is turned into an obviously ruined individual. Poor. Poor. Poor. Poverty of human contact stares out of your eyes. Pitifulness oozes out of every pore.

In this state, any attempts to look your best are useless. Wear your favorite shirt, favorite jeans, buy some new outfit-but nothing, nothing can hide the obvious fact that you've been reduced to a desperate person; eyes shifting back and forth searching for a new partner on the line of horizon. Others can see this about you. Attractive, together, with-it people have a sixth sense about people like you and they can sniff you out like a dog sniffs out fear. Possible attractive mates part like the Red Sea at your approach and run the other way in mad terror. There's nothing you can do about it.

That's the famine.

"It's feast or famine, babe. You're just being picky." I see what he means. He thinks that if I just break the cycle of famine-it doesn't matter with who, as long as the cycle is broken-then things will start looking up. But I look around me and think, 'you are what you eat.'

If you are what you eat, then Sean is a greasy skank who showed up at the bar complaining that her panties were bothering her. So like the true gentleman that he is, Sean leaned over and whispered in her ear, "Take them off, then." And since she didn't push him away or nothing, he put his pudgy hand on her thigh and said it again. So she did.

She looked up at him without lifting her face. She just shifted her eyes up at him, hopped off the barstool, hitched up her skirt to her crotch and bent forward a little, slipping her hands under the stretchy fabric of her mini skirt, then hooked her thumbs into the elastic and pulled them down quick, shimmying them down to her shoes, where she stepped out of them and lifted them up to him-an offering. They were a pair of purple satiny panties, the kind, being a woman, I can attest to as being profoundly uncomfortable with scratchy seams and lace, that men of course, with their cruel desire to see women uncomfortable, love.

I bet he thought, 'Now, some pussy,' when he took her panties in between his thick Eskimo fingers and brought the purple satin and lace to his nose. He buried his face in the material and inhaled deeply. This was not just an empty gesture, but a test to see if she was rotten inside or good enough to eat.

She must have been good enough to eat or maybe after a few vodka tonics it didn't matter because she sat down on the bar stool again, her legs opened enough to flash a sight of creamy white and he breathed heavy animal breaths while he stood in front of her, slipping his hand under her skirt and up till his fingers reached her moist folds.

Later, Sean liked to claim that he was so talented that no one in the bar even noticed. I mocked him, "Not even purple-panty-chick?"

He said, "I tell you you're funny?...Funny-lookin."

I kicked him in the shin.

You are what you eat.

So Sean's some chick with purple panties who went into the bathroom with him so he could set her up on the sink and dive in face first to lap her up.

"Mmm. Mmm. Good." He says and I think of Campbell's Soup and I marvel at how I'm not a desperado yet and so not ready to feast with anyone either. I am unfit for human consumption. And I have another drink.

Germania is neither hither nor thither. She will be splendid to short the next time you see her...