New York Love Story. Part 2

Now these blog posts have ranged from killing mice, to riding roller-coasters, to singing karaoke. However one story has garnered the most interest and that is my New York love story.

It all took place over a month ago and I had moved on from everything (I couldn’t get the girl to come for a second drink with me!) So imagine my surprise when I arrived home from work on wednesday afternoon to find a box from the same flower company I used for Project Valentine addressed to me. Inside where a bunch of Sunflowers with a note that said

Robert Gilbert:

Because Valentines Day is just one day of the year.

Love is still out there.

Keep the romance alive. (The Girl)

Needless to say I was completely flummoxed. I worked out that the flowers had to be from someone I had invited to my housewarming because they knew my address. So i narrowed it down to my friends Nicole, Victoria or Dena. All three are very sweet girls and loved what I did for Valentines Day so it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility.

I called Nicole who within an hour had schlaped to my place from new Jersey to inspect the flowers and the letter. It wasn’t her.

I text Victoria who was as intrigued as the rest of us. However due to her law school commitments it was pretty unfeasible that she had set them. So that left Dena. I sent her a text asking if they were from her....... No response.

Nicole and I brainstormed a while and thought maybe..... just maybe The Girl from project Valentine felt bad and had sent me some flowers. I doubted it. However I needed to cover all bases. Her best friend was then called upon for her input. She knew nothing of it.

Then my phone beeped, Dena had replied and said they were from her. Case closed. Nicole went to work and I had a nap. Then Dena text me back saying she was only kidding!!!!! Case wide fucking open!!!!!!

With all the subtlety a Hippo ice skating Nicole decided to ask The Girl from Project Valentine if they were from her. She claimed they weren’t.

Hmmmmmmmm.

Then I received a message on Facebook from a mystery person called Amelie. Who asked if I liked the flowers............

I added her immediately and she popped up on my facebook chat. I launched in with a million questions. Who is she? Was there more planned? What was going on!!??

She said she wasn’t playing a joke and I had to work out who she was. What followed was the most intense version of the Yes/No game I have ever played.

Slowly but surely I deduced that she was lived in New York, but hadn’t been to my apartment and wanted to be an actress. She then showed me a picture of her chin.... well that didn’t help at all!

After an hour of persuasion she told me that this was a fake facebook profile (obviously) and we were actually facebook friends.

A light went off in my head. A week earlier I had been added by a random girl who I had one friend in common with. I stabbed in the dark and asked if it was her. It muthafuking was! her name was Maria.

So now I needed an explanation. Did I have a stalker? Would I have to move? Was this all a joke?

Maria very slowly explained what this was all about...

She had read my blog and loved the Valentines Day story. She thought it was so romantic and when she read the last part she couldn’t believe how it ended. She didn’t like the fact that I had done all of this stuff only to get rebutted at the end of it all. So she sent me flowers, she told me that she wanted to give me the happy ending my story deserved. There was no agenda attached to this, she just thought I deserved better.

So I just want to take this opportunity to say to Maria, thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart because that is the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me... ever.

And just very briefly for those following my acting career, I managed to book a part. Shakespeare nonetheless. I’ll be playing the part of Costard in Love’s Labour’s Lost..... He is the Clown, how apt!

The Young and Coned

I awoke this morning with a cone in my room, one of those big orange ones. I had stolen it from the street to impress a girl. This story is about how I met a racist in a bar, stole a cone and kinda got the girl.

It was tuesday, that legendary day of drinking when I decided to go out with my new wingman, Fred. Let me preface this by saying that Dylan is an excellent wingman however he has upset the airplane gods and apparently is never in New York these days. So Fred and I trotted out, he a mixture of mustache and pop culture tattoos, me all dimpled and messy haired. We are quite the pair.

Our first (and eventually our only stop) was The Watering Hole, you of course know my disdain for this place so I didn’t plan on staying for long. Once inside Fred started talking to Bruce, an older guy who loves opera and talks with Fred about it for hours on end. After a discussion that was more akin to my Grandma’s taste we went and said hi to a girl who worked at our favorite bar and was sitting at the end of the bar with a friend. Her and her friend were being hit on by a gross, overweight lothario. We said hey to the girls and suddenly big fat gross man became all defensive and started ranting and raving about how we had ‘broken up then band.’ After five more minutes of huffing and puffing big fat gross guy decided to leave. He leant in slowly to the girls and after realizing he wasn’t going to be able to kiss them he made a beeline for one of their hands, perhaps in an effort to look classy. She immediately retracted her hand with a squeal before big fat gross guy once again got all upset and said ‘It’s not like I’m trying to sniff your fingers!’ It was at that point BFGG turned to me and Fred and gave us a giant bear hug. After releasing us from his iron grip he looked us both in the eye and said ‘we should start a band.’ Here’s the thing, Fred and I have a pact that if we start a band we will call it ‘Crazy Japanese Gameshow Audience’ so after BFGG suggested forming a band we started to tell him about Crazy Japanese Gameshow Audience. He got all excited and said he had a better name for the band, ‘The Racists.’ I wasn’t so keen on that one but before I could object BFGG drunkenly shouted at the top of his voice ‘Lets just call our band The Niggers.’ Silence. Wooooooah. BFGG had just become BFR(racist)GG. Slowly we turned away and he slunk out with all the finesse of an elephant giving birth.

After he left the girls said that their friend Stacey was coming to the bar and when she walked in we should all shout her name really loudly. Banter innit. So she walked in.... and guess what, we all shouted at the top of our voices ‘STACEY!!!’ The little slut lapped it, she loved it. We drank some more, but it seemed the more we drank the more friends walked in and the more we would shout out their names. Now I was drunk so all I remember is shouting ‘BLAH BLAHHHH!!!!’ So myself, Fred, Stacey, Blah Blah and the girls were by now pretty hammered and we all know what happens when I get drunk.... get hungry. And when I get hungry I get Blue 9 Burgers. So I suggested to Stacey (who had been throwing herself at my testicles) that we grab some food. She was up for it, however because it was Greek Easter she couldn’t eat meat or any food from an animal. What! Greek Easter..... Greek fucking Easter. I was gonna miss out on Blue 9 because of Greek Easter! I went to the toilet, gave myself that drunken pep talk in the mirror that all guys do, sung the hook-up song and decided to bite the bullet.

Walking through the street to a supposed killer falafel place on St. Marks Street I tried to suggest that maybe Stacey would enjoy watching me eat a burger. She wouldn’t. Halfway through our discussion about late night snacks I spied a large orange cone on the pavement. I don’t know why I picked it up but I did and before I knew it the cone was now being held by both of us.

It was a good job I picked up the cone because after 30 seconds we both realized nobody wanted to walk the cone all the way to St. Marks. At that point I spied a Falafel stand on the corner of where I live......

Cost of Falafel - $3. Extra Tahini - $1. Paying the $4 and looking like a gentleman..... priceless.

I must warn you if you are a family member and still remember me as the innocent spikey haired dimpled boy you love then don’t read on.... it gets weird.

So we’re back at mine eating falafel and drinking beer, a healthy combination. The cone is neatly positioned next to the TV. Of course we finish the food and drink and move to my room, away from the cone.

We begin kissing and suddenly ‘ol Stacey gets a bit amorous and bites my lip. I think nothing of it (I’m a good kisser, I bring it out in people). After a minute or so she does it again, this time longer and harder. I manage to turn my pained ‘owww’ into an ‘ooooh’ so it sounds as though it didn’t hurt. I stand up to turn the light off and Stacey straight up bites into my stomach. What the fuck! She had drawn blood! I was now in pain and bleeding. She told me that ‘that’s how real New Yorkers kiss.’ I really had no response that. I weighed up my options and decided to keep going, but with the light on. I told her no more biting. After another minute she couldn’t contain herself and bit my neck. Right, that was it. It was all good and well biting above the belt line but what if she got carried away with Rob Junior!? I have future generations to father with that guy. Scarily she told me she wanted to see me on Friday, I’ll be watching Twilight in anticipation.

As for the cone, it’s still here as a reminder that sometimes you bite off more than you can chew.

Snowballin'

Let me start off with he disclaimer that I am very bad at sports, rarely do I win. So last week when I won the Ultimate Snowball Fight I felt the need to gloat. The other snowball fighters fail to see how I won, but I will now explain how victory was achieved.

First off lets introduce the players

Robert Gilbert - 5 foot 9 1/2. Special skills; Dimples and accent.

Fred Nicholson - 5 foot 9. Special skills; A mustache that can shoot rainbows.

Nicole Patterson - 5 foot 5. Special skills; Like any good football team, a great pair upfront.

Ashley Herring - 5 foot 8. Special skills; A secret past as a Philadelphia Eagles cheerleader.

Katlin McGrath - 5 foot 2. Special skills; The loudest voice in the world.

Before I tell you the story I need to explain one thing. Recently I have undertaken a mission to phase out Katlin’s name and replace it with a combination of her name and what she is doing. For example when she is drinking I call her drinklin, if she is yawning then I call her yawnlin, if she is throwing a long pointy stick then she is javelin and so on and so on. For the remainder of this story she will not be called Katlin.

The 5 of us were at a bar to celebrate the lovely Kellan’s birthday, however an evening of a few drinks quickly turned into a lot of drinks. We all decided enough was enough and it was time to leave. As we walked out the bar we saw that New York had been covered in a blanket of snow. Our joy was cut short pretty quickly as we were confronted with an elite team of snowball throwers lobbing grenades our way. Ducklin got out of the way pretty fast leaving the 4 of us to take some hits. We of course responded in kind and suddenly the great snowball fight of 2010 was on. After 2 minutes it was off. Our foes had decided they had had enough and left.

Now there is a big question as to who threw the next snowball or who it even hit. We have our suspicions, personally I think it was turncoatlin but before we knew it someone within our group of 5 was firing snowballs not at the enemy but at their own side. It was time for all out carnage.

Left, right and centre snowballs were being catapulted skywards and falling on unsuspecting heads. As the 5 of us pelted each other with snowballs many other men, lured in by Ashley’s cheerleading skills and Nicole’s breasts, would try and participate but we were far to professional for them and they soon faded away. My cat like skills were ensuring I was pretty much remaining dry and un-snowed throughout this exchange but it was time for me to step up the game and manipulate my friends...

Ashley lives on the Lower East Side, Katlin lives in the East Village, I live by Union Square, Fred lives in Brooklyn and Nicole in Hoboken (stop laughing). Whoever gave up and went home first would lose and right now we were standing exactly in the middle of all 5 locations. I decided I didn’t want to walk home by myself in the snow so lagged behind the group and threw snowballs from the back. Unbeknownst to my friends I was the rudder of this proverbial motorboat, directing them to my apartment to I had an excuse to go home and not have to walk by myself. Genius.

However the shit then hit the fan. Bitchlin suddenly stopped in her tracks and picked up a big lump of snow, walked straight up to me and from 5 inches away threw a combination of snow and ice into my face. She had broken the universal rules of snowball fights; No Ice and no throwing from point blank range. The bitch had to go. I picked her up and threw her over my shoulder (not that impressive, she’s tiny). Flailin was complainlin but I was having none of it. I threw her headfirst into a huge pile of snow. Cheatlin was now soakedlin. She tried to stand back up but I just pushed her over. An undisputed victory for Team Rob. Confusedlin was then too disorientated and lamelin to hit me with snowballs anymore, thus eliminating her from the competition. I returned to my position of boat rudder and slowly but surely directed everyone to the where I needed to be.

After ten minutes we were standing outside Blue 9 Burger..... well whaddyaknow! It felt like the right thing to do and finish the fight and have a burger. Blue 9 is less than a block from my apartment. As everyone finished their burger they all realized they had to jump in cabs (hard to come by in a snowy New York) or ride the faltering snowed in Subway home. I walked for 2 minutes and was in my bed whilst everyone shivered and waited for cabs.

And that’s how you win a snowball fight.