She wobbled uneasily towards my table and unceremoniously plopped down across from me. Even three sheets to the wind like she obviously was, she was still ridiculously gorgeous. In fact, if twenty-year-old me had sat down to design my most perfect woman, Weird Science-style (and I did. Oh, did I), she would have looked exactly like the angel who now sat opposite me.
But twenty-year-old me was thirty years gone now, and women like her approach fat fifty-year-old men for one of two reasons. I hooked my thumb into my wallet pocket to forestall the first; as for the second, well, maybe I could buy her a drink and see if we could come to an agreement.
"I'm not that kind of a girl," she opened, with an unusually steady voice given her obvious state of intoxication, "In case you're wondering, which you are. What's your name?"
That was unexpected and kind of unnerving. "Uhh, Steve."
"No, it isn't. It's Sean Patrick Fitzgibbons, which is about the Irishest name that ever Irished. You couldn't be more Irish if you were born next to the Blarney Stone. Which you weren't, but your grandfather was."
Alarm bells were starting to go off now. This woman, who appeared shit-faced but sounded sober as a judge, knew my name and the circumstances of my grandfather's birth, and I had gone from unnerved to borderline freaked out. I took a deep breath and tried to come up with a logical explanation. I'd told the story more than once of how my great-grandmother went into labor while waiting for my great-grandfather to finish kissing the Blarney Stone, so she could have heard that from someone. Or a friend could be using her to play a joke on me.
"You have me at a disadvantage. What's your name?"
"Gabriella. Descended from Heaven with an important message for you. And get your thumb out of your pocket - you look ridiculous, and it wouldn't stop me from pickpocketing you if I were so inclined." She handed my wallet back to me.
"OK, good one," I replied as I put my wallet back into my pocket. I looked around the bar for likely suspects, but nobody was paying any attention to us. That in itself was unusual - every guy in that bar should have been staring and drooling. "Who put you up to this?"
"I'm here on my own. And since you're going to take some convincing, here goes: you dated three women simultaneously in college without any of them finding out about the other two. You told no one, not even your roommate. You broke it off with two of them and married the third, and you live in fear that she might find out, even though you've been married for almost thirty years. You picked this bar today at the last minute rather than Zeke's Tap Room because you remembered that they had a Sunday special on Sam Adams. You developed a hole in your left sock as you were walking in here because you cut your big toenail funny last night."
"But... how..."
"We see everything. Hear everything. Know everything - past, present, and some distance into the future. The phone behind the bar is about to ring. The woman behind me turning towards the restroom will collide with someone exiting the restroom. Tony Romo is about to throw a pick-six."
"Well, that last one is a gimmee. This is December, after all."
"Point taken. But do you believe?" Gabrielle got the waitress' attention and signaled.
"I don't know," I replied, as the phone behind the bar rang. "I might just be the target of the most elaborate episode of Punk'd ever."
"So elaborate that they cancelled the series eight years ago just to throw you off the scent?"
"Point taken." Behind her, I could see two women colliding and apologizing to each other, followed by an explosion of cursing from the knot of Cowboys fans at the end of the bar. "Aren't you supposed to have wings and a halo?"
Gabrielle rolled her eyes. "That's just how the old masters decided to portray us. Fine. Here."
She opened up her purse so I could see inside. It was like looking out an airplane window into an infinite cloudbank. I could see a glowing tiara and a miniature pair of fluttering wings, as well as something else I couldn't make out.
"Where's your flaming sword?"
She sighed. "Catholic school, right. By the way, those were some very impure thoughts you had about your tenth-grade English teacher. You abused yourself forty-seven times thinking about her."
She reached into the purse and pulled. I saw the pommel of a sword for a split second, then just a pillar of flame.
"OK, OK," I said hurredly as I pushed her arm down, extinguishing the flame as the purse closed. And not a moment too soon, as the waitress arrived right then bearing a tray with at least a dozen shots on it. Gabrielle flipped her a gold coin that looked for all the world as if it had been minted in Julius Caesar's time. Surprisingly, the waitress accepted it with a smile and sashayed away.
"Did you just pay her with a gold aureus?"
"You know I did. And she knows I did."
"I collect coins as a hobby - "
"I know."
"- and I know that coin will fetch somewhere between -"
"$80,000 and $650,000, depending on the vagarities of the auction. She's a smart one - she'll find a good broker and net $585,233."
"Fine. You're an angel, descended from heaven. Why here, why now, why me?"
"Because" - she flipped back shot #1 - "the tequila" - shot #2 - "in Heaven" - shot #3 - "is" 4 "complete" 5 "SHIT!" 6.
"Seriously?"
"Seriously? No. Who do you think invented tequila in the first place? I'm here, now, because I need to tell you something. Something vitally important that will completely change the way you look at... everything." She motioned me closer and leaned in herself. "Pro wrestling... is real."
And then she passed out, face first, angelic head bouncing off the table twice before coming to rest.
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