It was a derelict barfly's perfect Christmas Eve. Slumping in a booth of my favorite dive bar, nursing a beer and a free hotdog. No family to bug me asking how/what/why/who I'm doing. No friends to buy presents or drinks for. Just me and pretty stranger wanting to check her email on my old powerbook.

Molly's email must have been good news because sighed a big sigh, which drew my attention once more to her red bra, which was really improving my Christmas spirit.

Hey, I know I’m a dirty old pervert derelict barfly. I believe having dirty thoughts, especially those not expressed, are one of the perks of being a pervert derelict barfly of a mature chronological age, if not a mature mental age.

She looked at me like the malleable sucker I am, and asked if she could download a sound file, which she said might take a little while.

“Take all the time you want.”

I was lucky. It took a while for her to linkup to her ftp site, mainly because of my help.

Just to delay her from hooking up, I said, "Before you came over, I thought I saw you checking your iPhone. Doesn't it get email?"

"It's not an iPhone. It's a little bit more specialized."

"Really? What's it do?

"It's a inter-dimension time and space locator with multi-target acquisitional GPS."

I laughed. She smiled. She had a nice smile.

"It plays compressed mp6s, too."

"You mean mp3s."

She frowned as she scoped out the bar as if to determine where she was, "Oh, right."

I saw she was downloading an .aif file rather than an mp3. Watching someone download an aif file isn't exactly riveting. For the first time, I wished Rudy's had a slower internet connection, or he song was longer. I took a sip of beer and watched her instead.

"Is your download important?" I asked.

“Only to me. And to the group. I recorded a rap for a new Christmas carol, and I haven’t heard it mixed.”

“You’re a rapper?” I asked.

“I'm still going to grad school, but I guess I am a singer-rapper, too. I sing with the BuddaBings PartyMob.”

“Oh,” sez I, in my most non-committal manner, “I don’t know too much about gangsta rap groups.”

“We’re more gangster than rap.”

The download was almost complete when I accidentally hit the power key with my elbow as I reached for my beer, which actually isn't as easy at it sounds. OMG, we had to restart my Mac.

"Gosh, I'm sorry."

She just smiled at my blatant dishonesty, as if she approved of it.

I stuck out my paw. “My name is Paddy.”

“Molly.” No last name. What? Do you think New York women give their last names to strangers as strange as me in dive bars in Hell’s Kitchen?

I glanced at my Mac’s screen. Still rebooting. Cool.

“What are you studying?” a lame opening I used to use ineffectively back in the last millennium. At least it was better than 'what's your sign?' or 'do you come here often" or "didn't I abuse myself to your photo on the cover of Maxim?'

“I'm studying theoretical physics."

My eyebrows made a question mark. Well, not an actual question mark. If my eye brows could do that I'd be on America's Got Talented Eyebrows.

"M-theory is really wild, don't you think? All the dimensions and possibilities.”

Okay, this was not a conversational gambit I could field. I wondered if it were true, or she used it as a conversation stopper.

“Can I hear your song when it downloads?”

She turned a color red that went neither with her hair, her bra, the stripes on her thigh-high stockings or her mini. She nodded, not quite gulping as she did so. The last shy New Yorker. I liked that.

"That was good."

"You really think so?"

I looked into he big green eyes and nodded. Of course, I would have told her it was good if it were atonal Rap Opera in Swahili built on truck engine loops.

As I glanced up, I noticed the old bad-asses at the bar were giving me dirty looks. Eat your hearts out, barflies!

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