Mr. Unavailable #79: The Other Bartender

This is a Mr. Unavailable flashback circa 2002

Vital Stats: 6'2", 33ish, NYC High School Teacher. Tall, dark, lean, handsome, great smile, thick, wavy hair, I could go on... Aesthetic: Hotly normal with rolled-up plaid shirts and jeans. Demeanor: So damn smiley.

First Impression: "Who's the hot guy at the end of the bar?" Met him at the local dive in Brooklyn in 2002, where I was a regular. I first spied him when he was a customer. It was a Sunday afternoon and he was sitting down at the other end of the bar shrouded in cigarette smoke and haloed by the bar's ten-year-old holiday lights. I was enthralled. Naturally, you can imagine my thrill when, a few weeks later, I saw him behind the bar.

First Date: I'm not sure if one could really call it a date. I was writing restaurant reviews for Time Out New York and needed people to come with me to sample the fare. I'd been assigned a bunch of restaurants but strategized my asking-out of him by picking the one restaurant I knew was in his neighborhood--Cafe Habana in Soho. He'd also been to Cuba, so I knew he be interested on a secondary level. I only found out later about the tertiary level.

Signs of Hope: He said yes to the date. It was actually kind of thrilling at the time. I casually asked if he wanted to go on a restaurant review with me and he replied eagerly and then happily wrote his phone number on a napkin and slid it across the bar to me. I called a few days later and we set up the date. The date went fairly well, if memory serves, but my level of awareness at that point was so basic and I was so blinded by the fact that I was on a date with the hot bartender that I wouldn't have been able to tell if there was any true connection.

Red Flags: Someone mentioned at one point in time that he might have had a girlfriend, but he never mentioned one, so we all kind of forgot about it. He had also never really expressed any interest in me on his own--via asking me out or other such overtly flirty behaviors.

Turning Point: We went for a bunch of drinks at various bars after dinner and I broached the subject about what was going on. He said we were just hanging out, having a good time. I knew on some level that this meant we weren't actually on a date but I wasn't sure yet what we were on. I asked him about the possible girlfriend and he said that, yes, the possible girlfriend was more than possible. This confused me even more. I don't know if it was then or at the next bar where he ran out of money and I was buying the drinks, but he said the fact that he had a "girlfriend" didn't mean he couldn't go out and have fun with other people. After all, he said, why did I think he had just run out of money on drinks for us: "You have to admit we've got some physical chemistry here."

When I was in my twenties, sometimes it took me a while to get something, but when I got it, I really got it. At that point, even though I knew what was going on, I continued to play dumb. Finally, I said I had to go. I think he let me get away at the entrance to the subway with a kiss on the cheek. When I told my friends later what had happened, one of them exclaimed--in a perfect encapsulation of what went down: "Oh my god, the schoolteacher's a perv!"

Diagnosis: The schoolteacher's a perv. It happens. I saw him at the bar for several months after that and he continued to be his smiley, unflappable, unfathomable self. Eventually, I stopped going to the bar and never saw him again.