Once I was at AS220 I had some time before the Revue started, so I sat down at a table in the bar area and worked on my knitting. After a while a guy came over and said, "Hey, that's really coming along great! It's beautiful!" I didn't recognize him, but I am bad at remembering people so I thought it was pretty possible that I had met him before, so I said, "Thanks!" There was then an awkward pause while each of us waited for the other to say something. I finally broke the silence with, "What have you been up to?" He showed me a Pabst Blue Ribbon and said to me, "How about I give you this and
He decided to take another tack. "That's OK, but the way you said 'I'm sorry' -- I don't want to say anything but God might not like that," he said. "Oh," I said. "I'm not making any judgment, but you might be in trouble with Him," he said. "You may well be right," I said. "God wouldn't like it," he said. "OK," I said. (This is not the first time I've been told that I might be hellbound and it didn't impress me as much as I think he'd hoped.) He went on this vein for a little while longer, I said I was sorry a couple of more times, and he went away.
Apparently he bugged someone else and it caught the bartender's attention, because she told him to leave. "What? You want me to leave?" he shouted, offended. "I've got money in my pocket and you want me to leave? You're just a college girl! Here I am, a hundred dollars in my pocket, and you're asking me to leave? That's fine, college girl! That's fine! You're a college girl! I'll take my money and go someplace else, college girl!!" He then took off, and the bartender (who is not a college girl) went next door to tell the gallery folks not to let him in if he came by again. (I filled her in on what he said to me, and she said that she hadn't intervened because it looked like we might be friends -- and when she talked to the gallery folks they said that they had thought he was someone's friend too. So that seems to be one of the more successful things about the way he operates.)
On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is the lowest possible score and 10 is the guy who every year or so tells me his mother just died and he has staples in his brain and he just needs some money so he can take a bus back to New York, I give the 'made you look' guy a 1 [he escapes a 0 because I did, after all, look] and the PBR merchant gets an 8.