Hunting In NYC

Puffins and I went to a Japanese fusion restaurant in SoHo on Saturday. There we witnessed an Asian call girl in leopard print leggings, paired with a white, crocheted bolero. Not to be outdone was the older woman in a silk, teal colored Chinese print shirt sitting at the table beside us, who, after dessert, took out tarot cards to awe her friend in the little black dress with red pleather hooker-thigh-high boots.

The miso soup was delicious, the warm sake smooth and aromatic. I wasn't too happy with my Japanese pancake (okonomiyaki), nor the grilled squid appetizer Puffins ordered. The sweet red bean soup for dessert was particularly well received. But I wasn't really there for the food. I was there for the company.

After dinner conversation (which was occasionally interrupted by a loud *CLANG* and "HEYYYY" from several celebrators), we headed to a birthday party at a chic, little, one-room beer bar. We were in the midst of an Urban Outfitter's Frat House party, it seemed. Twenty-one year old boys, donned in cheap cotton blazers and jeans, desperately trying to find a drunk girl to take back to his dorm, swarmed the place. But what was particularly attention-grabbing was the 5'11" Brooklyn woman, looking very out of her element, in a zebra-striped, wrap dress. She claimed she worked at Ralph Lauren. I excused myself to find my hunting rifle.

As the night dwindled, I found Puffins speaking to two homely wallflowers in the corner of the bar haphazardly designated as the "coat room". I could hear his inflection rise and fall, and the subsequent laughter of the girls mingled through the crowded room; lost somewhere between shouted orders for Red Stripe and the serpentine queue for the bathroom. His gay charm pervaded as he griped about what women were wearing, what men were wearing, what they were saying when they weren't saying anything. He ascribed it all to being gay. It struck me as false advertising, because what defines Puffins as a person is not his homosexuality. It's not his aspiration for the AMEX Black card, or his funky metro-casual attire. Puffins is one of the most genuinely wonderful people to be around that I know. His complexity in character, his humor, intelligence, the way he lives and the people he loves...they all have nothing to do with him being gay.

I wish I could have told the wallflowers this, but out of the corner of my eye I saw zebra-woman slowly plodding to the bathroom line, trying ever so hard not to get her stilettos stuck in the groove between the wooden floor planks. Were this National Geographic, African drums would be pounding in the background; I slowly raise my arms and look down the barrel of my imaginary .22, following my prey. Pow. I pegged ya', honey.