quizzical pussy

I, skeptic, have what can only be described as a “lucky shirt”.

One night I walked into my favorite karaoke dive wearing this shirt and two guys immediately approached me and sat down at my table. Every time one got up to put in a song or take a piss the other would jump in and try to make increasingly awkward conversation. Later they retired to a corner and seemed to be discussing something with drunken intensity. “They’re fighting over which one gets to ask you out,” my friend Miriam, who is wise in the ways of men, whispered.

In the midst of all this, a guy leaned his chair back and asked me if I was single, which I was at the time. “My friend is in love with you,” he informed me, pointing to an entirely other (intimidatingly good-looking) guy besides the first two, and asked if I could introduce myself because his friend was shy. (Which, if you read my blog, you know I’m too chickenshit to ever do.) Then, as I was leaving the bar for the night, still another guy asked for my number.

This sort of thing never happens to me. I was completely nonplussed. This was almost two years ago, and I still wonder if the bar had coordinated a “Let’s Fuck With Quizzical Pussy!” night.

About a year later, I was on a road trip. I met up with a bunch of friends in a little college town across the state, and we decided to go to the local gay bar (like you do). It was Drag Queen Bingo night, which is another way of saying the place was packed. I happened to be wearing the shirt. A cute lesbian couple sat at alone at a table with an empty chair, and I asked to join them. We talked a little, marked some bingo squares, they asked if they could buy me a drink, and I told them thanks, but I don’t really drink. They bought all my friends a few rounds instead, still seeming genuinely distraught that they couldn’t get me anything.

After bingo, we all danced for a while, and at least three people came up and told me I was cool for absolutely no reason. This particular college town is either some sort of uncanny hellpit of friendliness, or all this had something to do with the shirt. Yes, those are the only two options.

Okay, so those are just two examples, but it truly seems like when I wear the shirt I have more social success than usual. People find me just a little hotter, more approachable, intriguing, something. Maybe. I don’t really know.

But here’s the thing you have to realize about this shirt: it is completely and utterly unsexy. It offers no cleavage, hugs no curves, and accentuates no waist. In fact, it’s a little boy’s polo, size large, bought at an unfashionable big box store. It has horizontal stripes (which I can say about roughly half my shirts, because I like them). Actually I have this striped boy’s polo shirt in several colors, but the blue-on-blue version is the only one that has ever given the faintest hint of being special. The green/green, the yellow/gray, the white/blue: they hold no mystery.

Last Friday, I saw an actual little boy wearing the same shirt, same version, and I wonder if it renders him magically chaseable to all those little playground vixens.

Now, I know it’s not truly a lucky shirt. It’s likely all down to coincidence or the Dumbo’s feather effect or some such phenomenon. It’s silly to think otherwise. But still, it has gradually become the shirt I tend wear when I’m planning a day that might well turn nerve-wracking or awkward. Some superstitious, primitive part of me believes it might give me an edge.

So, although it’s not one of the sexier pieces in my wardrobe, it’s what I put on when I was dressing to go to my first foursome last week.

(image source)