Love Bipolar

The following Saturday night, in a desperate bid to outdo the pensioners, I headed into town with a friend to claw back my, now rapidly vanishing, social life. It was a last minute decision fuelled by the unfortunate ingestion of a fluorescent-looking shot delivered to us across the bar in a test tube. And so it was that my friend and I arrived in the centre of town, dressed in jeans and trainers and high on E numbers. Now, when deciding to leave my job and pursue a more exciting and fulfilling path in life, there were a number of things I wasn't prepared for. The thrill of the local library service was just one bonus prize. The second was the cruelly reduced pool of relationship potential. This had been an oversight indeed. You forget just what fertile ground the world of work can be for single people. And not just the bit in between arriving and leaving the place of work; there's the commute, the bar after work, the conferences. The world opens up. Without work, the world shrinks back into its hole to leave you with the bare bones: food, water, shelter..and the comfort of regular access to a social networking site.

I had already had one brush with a desperate situation as a result of this newly contracted life. It was a week or so after arriving back home. After sharing a bottle of vinegary wine with a friend on a Friday night, she suggested we try out a local place called The Hotel California. I knew the one. I'd driven past it many times. Always past it. The building itself reminds me of something out of a horror film, save for 'Hotel California' written in strobe lighting across the top. It sits incongruously on a roundabout next to a McDonalds and a PC World. Personally, I find the retail park more frightening. I'd heard it was a rock music venue and so was intrigued. Inside, it did not disappoint: biker men, goth women, and some risk-taking old people who obviously didn't fancy this year's Rumpelstiltskin production. There was a sort of Battle of The Heavy Metal Bands going on that night. Heavy metal has never been my thing but after half an hour in that place the music became strangely intoxicating and I wanted to fling MY head around and jumble up MY brain cells along with the rest of them. But I didn't. The furthest my friend and I went was tapping our feet in appreciation. It was at this level of musical inebriation that a band by the name of 'Iron-On Maiden' took to the stage. Oh how greasy and long-haired and dirty and...attractive they are.. Suddenly the night took on a very different face. We watched them thrash around the stage, long hair sticking to their faces, for another ten minutes or so. And then it was over. Applause, yelling, beer sploshed on the floor as bikers clapped with little regard for the pints they were holding. I snapped out of the trance. Yeah, the music was OK, but that was about it, surely? I made a mental note to check the heavy metal aisle in HMV next time I was in but thought that that would be the extent of my curiosity for this new genre. Until.. "Oh look there!" Tapping on my shoulder accompanied my friend's mischievous tone of voice. "That's the guy from the band." "What?" I looked and it was indeed the hairy metal man. "Oh yeah.." I replied. "And?" "Well...go and talk to him!" "What?? Are you INSANE? Honestly...OK then." I watched my feet walking confidently towards him. I was not nearly drunk enough to be engaging in this sort of brazen activity. But I was walking. Walking right up to him. Inches from him I stopped and turned to my friend pleadingly but was met only with a shooing of hands and eyebrows raised as if to say 'You cannot turn back'. So I tapped a sweaty black t-shirted shoulder. He didn't turn round. Shit. Unbelievably embarrassed and wanting to swallow my own head to avoid witnessing the scene before me, I tapped again and accompanied it with some words. "Hi, are you the guy who was playing just now?" "Yeah", drawled the Brummy accent. "Great set. It was really good. Really enjoyed it." I couldn't have sounded more bland if I'd tried. Silence. Shit. Then, noticing his arm was hanging in a skull and crossbones print sling, I remarked, "Ah didn't notice you had your arm in a sling up there?" "I didn't. Took it off to play." "Ahh, right, I see!" I exclaimed with the kind of surprise that suggested I considered this some kind of medical miracle. "Yeah," he said, smiling. He was enjoying this. He knew exactly why I was there. "What's your name?" he asked. I told him. "Yours?" "Steve". He put his hand out to shake mine, but, remembering that it was bound up in a skull and crossbones sling, and that he had a drink in the other that he was not willing to part with for the sake of a greeting, he laughed and lifted up the sling-wrapped arm as if to demonstrate his predicament. And that was when I did it. Standing there in TopShop jeans and lovely shoes that were at this point covered in biker beer, I felt like a 50-year-old mother at a rave. My brain just fogged over with embarrassment. I stared at Steve, the long-haired lead singer of the Iron-Maiden tribute band and I made a fist. I made a fist and I lightly punched the pirate chic sling. In the way that I imagine Puff Daddy greets his...homies? I stared at my outstretched hand and up to the face that belonged to the sling to be met with Steve's awkward grimace. So he's definitely not very 'ghetto' then, I mused. And, evidently, neither am I. Exit, emergency exit, NOW! I screamed internally. Eyes roving for my friend, I spotted her. "Have a good night then," I said, while already on my way over to the other side of the room.

So, by the time I arrived in Liverpool with my friend on that January night, dressed down but high on sugary shots, I had forgotten all of the social elegance I had developed while at work; the low-key after-work drinks in the nice wine bar and the flirtations that had to be subtle enough not to crack the cool, mysterious facade I was close to perfecting. Admittedly, cool and mysterious hadn't got me that far but at least it had kept pride intact. On this night, however, there were no such delicate rules. No more false impressions in an effort to secure future relationship bliss. I just wasn't cut out for it. A boy would only complicate the already complicated process of finding a job. Emboldened by this new and rather aggressively feminist attitude towards the opposite sex, we headed for our favourite drinks-promotion-and-cheesy-music sweat-pit, affectionately named The Raz. This underground lair is so dark that you only catch a glimpse of your fellow revellers when a disco light flashes in their eye. It was just what we needed; to flail our limbs around shamelessly and not to have to see ourselves doing it. By the time Katy Perry had begun warbling something about having 'love bipolar', we were already making crazed, excited faces and jumping around everywhere that there was floor space - to the horror of the emo students who were awaiting something far cooler. An hour later, the only thing more important than dancing was not missing a single line of Britney Spears's 'Womaniser'. I'm sure Steve wouldn't mind if I by-passed the heavy metal aisle and spent my tenner on Britney's new album instead.