Pickup Lines

(from The Edge, Sept. 17, 1990)

True story (as they all are): Grade school skating party, remember those? It's the snowball skate where the girls line up against the wall and the guys skate around and pick out the girl they want to couple skate with. That's supposedly how it works. Unless you're like me. I can skate gracefully forward. I just don't have the perfect method for stopping, except the wall. Nevertheless, I circle the rink and find my target. She's tanding there alone. All her friends are already in the 12-year old arms of some other boy, making their love laps around the floor. I make my approach, prepare for my opening line and slam into the wall next to her. Impressively, I remain standing and with my arm propped agaisnt the wall I spring it on her.

"Hello." I say with the voice of a prepubsecent lounge singer. She laughs and skates off by herself. That's the last line I purposefully used. It just doesn't come natural to me.

Despite my own lack of usage, I have, through the years, heard plenty of lines. Not many have been used on me, and maybe that's a good thing, but I've been in enough bars to hear plenty of lines used on other people.

The most surprising line I've heard, which actually worked, was used in a non-pickup context. I guess the power of the line wasn't realized or perhaps it would have been saved for a more promising scenario. It went like this, "The tag on my underwear is itching, will you remove it for me." Yes, it worked. However, it worked on someone else's boyfriend, and although he did wind up with his hand down the back of her pants, it was only to legitimately remove the tag.

As for lines used on me, I can only remember two. There may have been more, who knows. But, I definitely remember these two because, well, they both worked.

The first was just a straight forward series of questions. "You have a girlfriend, don't you?" Yes. "You've been going out with her for a long time, haven't you?" Yes. "I don't care." Well, okay then. It wasn't long after that I found myself without girlfriend and without anyone living with me.

The second line which caused me to succumb to the whims of ther person who spoke it was simply an approach rooted in blatant stupidity. I was helping a friend who was a DJ in a club with a posted sign that said, ALL REQUESTS DENIED. Nevertheless, she wanted to meet me, so she caught me while walking to the bar for a beer and said, "What does that sign mean?" Hus, she caused a brief discussion to ensue, which continues to this very day. Whether or not she meant that as a pickup line, I don't know. But, at its essence, that's what it was.

The thing to remember is that everything is a line. Clothing, hairstyle, attitude, mannerisms, it's all just a different form of a pickup line. There's more to communication than just the spoken word. Duh!

One more point of this topic: The common urban myth that grocery stores function as pickup spots has never netted any dates to any of my friends, except the kind found in the produce section, if you get my drift. Nonetheless, inspecting a candidate's purchase indicates something of her substance. Women with three-wheeled, rattling metal cars loaded with chips and booze should be avoided, if for no other reason than the foreshodowing of using the bathroom after her. But a woman with a cartful of organic vegetables certainly merits approaching. If only to find out how she can afford that kind of food. In this case, I may choose to say something global. I might ask her if she would join the resistance if Canada invaded the United States. But, in plain fact, grocery stores are places where people want to get in, get their food, and get out. They are nearly as bad of places to use pickup lines as the laundromat; a place no one in their right mind wants to enter.

At any rate, if you just can't find anything that works for you, maybe you should go to Vegas and legally use the only pickup line in which you're guaranteed to score: "So, how much does this cost?"