Objectively hilarious, subjectively creepy.

Magazine street is lined with antique shops and thrift stores. I must be getting older; my interests have shifted to looking at furniture, imagining what I'd like in the house years distant in my head.

I wandered in an out a few of them, most of them closing by 5pm on Saturday. The last one I had time for was nothing special, and the man running it was in his 50s, unattractive. A bit of a belly, and that bushy backcombed hair that mobsters have in the 80's movies. He was taking a phone call, and spoke each keyword into the receiver three times. "It's in storage, storage, storage. No, you can come get it Tuesday. Tuesday, Tuesday." I took a slow lap around the big store. Compared to the others, not much caught my eye.

As I approached the door he cut the voice on the other end off, said he had a customer, and hung up. He stood right by the door, not quite blocking it but not quite giving me enough space to leave, and he asked if I needed help finding anything, and how long I'd been in New Orleans, a smattering of other questions to make conversation. Almost immediately I started to suspect I was being come on to, and when he'd mentioned a gay bookstore on Frenchman street, mmmmy suspicions were confirmed. I told him that I stumbled upon it and saw the fiction section right up front and had been duped, that I moved a shelf too far and began to realize this was not the kind of bookstore I first thought it was. I left in a hurry.

He talked about his ex-wife briefly and how he'd been caught with another guy while he showed me around the antique store. He said that with all the work we do rebuilding the city, we must get very sore, and that I should come back to his house with him for a massage sometime. I told him my teammates were probably expecting me for dinner about now.

I left almost instantly after he laughed, touched me on the shoulder for just a second-- but still a second too long-- and noted that my Americorps situation sounded like it lacked privacy, that I probably didn't ever find the time to jerk off, and that I must be very horny.

I was out the door in about five seconds or less, a polite goodbye and a swift walk down the block while calling any of my teammates I was out with to find out where they were and tell them about this, the most forward anyone's ever been while hitting on me.