

“Excuse me. Do you know where I can buy some cocaine? Do you sell cocaine?”
“Sorry, my dear,” I said. “I don’t mess with that stuff. I’m just a straight-up alcoholic.”
“Oh,” she said. “So you don’t have any cocaine for sale?’
“Nope,” I said.
I turned back to my cellphone, and she walked back to her table.
I couldn’t figure if it was some kind of prank. “Hey Heather, we dare you to go up to that weird old guy in the corner and mess with him.”
Or if she really thought I looked like some guy who would be hanging out in a bar at 1am selling cocaine to total strangers.
Or maybe she was a freshman and this was the first time she’d ever gotten drunk in a bar so her thinking was a little loopy.
The fall semester starts on Monday. So this is the first big weekend of partying for all the new, in-coming freshman. And it’s kind of a rite of passage. An annual tradition where you see all the novice drinkers getting drunk for the first time in all sorts of strange ways. After midnight they’ll always be a couple of scantily-clad young co-eds puking in the gutter or being carried off by their friends. I guess everyone at some point learns the valuable lesson that there’s a right way and a wrong way to consume whiskey and gin and vodka and the other hard liquors. And they usually learn the hard way.
So it was probably that with the cocaine girl.
.
…or she was a DEA trainee, a Federal trainee polishing up her skills as an undercover agent. Ya never know?