As Bad As I Want To Be

I'm not sure if I should be repeating any of this in a semi-public venue, but it was almost too good to keep to myself. Here's the story, and I'll keep it brief.

Background information: I'm a bit of a weenie. I've always been the one to run behind my friends and say, "guys, are you sure this is a good idea? Aren't we gonna get in trouble?" Whether it was making bike jumps with my brother or getting drunk during 4th period spare ... I chickened out, terrified of somehow being discovered as anything other than the perfect child. I've always been good. I've never stolen anything, smoked anything, been horribly drunk or basically, according to some people, had any fun in my life.

So tonight I go out with three other girls from work for Greek food and drinks on the Danforth (I've also never gone out for Greek food - seriously. But that's beside the point). When Michelle and I show up to meet the others, we find our boss sitting at the table (our 40 year old BOSS!). Apparently she ran into one of the girls downtown and invited her for a glass of wine, which ended up being almost 4 bottles by the time we arrived at 7:30. In short, my boss and two of my co-workers were shitfaced at a very nice restaurant where being shitfaced is probably not very attractive. I ordered a Diet Coke, mostly because I'm too broke to drink. My boss proceeded to tell me I was like a "kindergarten teacher", needed to "loosen the fuck up" and "fuck some guys". In my honour, she took it upon herself to open a bar tab for the table and supply me with as many drinks as I could polish off over dinner. I got called out - my own boss was calling me a goodie-goodie. A girl I worked with told me that she thought I would be "so fun" to get drunk with. Not wanting to be too 'good', I start drinking.

Fine. Fast-forward one hour. My boss is drunk, my friends are drunk, I'm quickly getting out of control. Our poor waiter has fielded slaps on the bum and questions about his sexual history and preferences from our embarrassingly loud table. We finish dinner, all paid for by my boss. Then things start to get sketchy.

She suggests that we all go down the street to a bar called "Jilly's". "Sure, I think. This is a great idea. Let's go to a bar called Jilly's." It's 9pm, I can barely walk straight, I have NO idea where in Toronto I am and I don't have any money. If I had lived in Toronto longer, I might have known that "Jilly's" is actually a seedy, disgusting strip club with old women who have pancake boobs and back rolls dancing onstage, and the men have greasy hair and wear trench coats and touch themselves underneath the table. At some point, I call Steve on the phone and yell to him "I think we're going to a strip club!" (which his mother, sitting next to him heard ... but that's another story).

We're ushered in. I'm literally scared. I start to wish that I was curled up in my PJ's reading a good book. Everyone has another drink. At this point, I have no idea who's paying for any of this anymore. My boss, without any warning, announces that she's better looking than the dancers who work there, climbs up onto the stage and starts to STRIP OFF HER CLOTHING. I see boobies. I start to worry that we're in trouble. She argues with the bouncer that she "can't control herself when Barry White music is played" ... she promptly gets kicked out of the club. The atmosphere is getting tense here, folks. My girlfriend and I head to the bathroom, where two strippers are smoking up. I decide to hold my pee, or wet my pants. 20 minutes later, my drunk boss resurfaces with another server from the restaurant I work at (I have NO idea where she found him), and he, apparently, has brought cocaine with him. Like, seriously. Cocaine! I start shaking. Off they go to the bathroom to do a line, and I immediately have this conversation with myself:

"Self, this is very, very, very bad. We are going to get in trouble. Good girls don't hang out in strip clubs with coke heads. Especially not 40-year-old drunk boss coke head strippers. I am good, and this is bad."

Game over - my girlfriend and I mumbled our thanks and some lame excuse that we had somewhere to be, make our way to the subway, and wondered what work is going to be like tomorrow night. Awkward? Embarrassing? Funny?

The moral of the story is this: I really am more straight-laced than I thought, and I'm totally fine with that. I like having movie nights, going for walks in the evenings, playing with dogs and spending afternoons in chapters. I feel like there's a whole underground world out there that I'm both not invited to and not interested in; if that's what it means not to have any fun in my life, well I guess I'll take it. I've never been so happy to be me as I was tonight. Boring, frumpy, head-on-straight me; who would have thought being good could be so nice?