Up in the Air

It's not all TV stars and small town business-owners. There's also the workaday types like the business travel affair boyfriend (which is not a boyfriend at all, clearly) and not an Up in the Air George Clooney. A few notches down. Originally, I thought it would be a peer-colleague, but that's just too similar and would never be the case because frankly, my male peer-colleagues just don't cut it in that department. No, it would be a sales guy, essentially a grown up frat who lives uptown or NJ or if he's trying hard/flying high, brownstone Brooklyn. Never mind the khakis and the wedding ring. There's a confidence and ease with conversation, even if it's all artifice, that's appealing with this kind of guy. It almost ties into the alcoholic/drug addict small town Robert Downey Jr. , which I'll save for another day.

The sales guy boyfriend occurred to me a few weeks ago when gearing up for a work-related conference, but it turned out to be even more fruitful in reality. This Laguardia 7:50am Delta Shuttle waiting area is practically a pick-up scene. So many looks up and down, not-so-furtive glances, assessing. I've gotten more glances from men in this leather-seated purgatory than in all Brooklyn bar visits combined to date in 2013. I think the secret is the suit jacket, which I don't normally wear (and don't really need to, but wanted to get in the right mindset–gotta show what's what). So many laptops, carry-ons, charging phones, rumpled navy suits. I think there is potential despite not digging the 25-year old douche with big eyebrows scarfing a breakfast sandwich and taking up two chairs with his armspan, or the prematurely graying overgrown child in pinstriped navy khakis and tennis shoes with a Mormon face, that showed up in the taxi line in front of me at Ohare, despite being on the flight to Chicago that departed 45 minutes earlier, definitely not polo and jeans. No, someone confident and atypically salesy.

Fourteen hours later, after multiple glasses of Chardonnay at a natural museum gala that forced me to depart after playing Nu Shooz (I won't stand for that aural nonsense in Williamsburg or at a Chicago cultural institution) I ended up at a fake speakeasy party sponsored by a vendor where sponsors names were embossed an faux aged mirrors to look old-timey. After an Aperol-based cocktail and some beef carpaccio I ignored my above-mentioned instincts for the straight and narrow schmoozer and decided to hone in on the bearded, plaid-shirt guy in glasses. Despite probably being at least five years younger, he was married with children and a dead-end dud. That is not a business travel boyfriend in the least. He was married to a librarian, by the way. Of course he was. Lamb chop, eggroll, crab cake, mini bread pudding, a fat glass of pinot noir, and back to the Hilton, thwarted.