Some more Bad, Bad Love this week…with Valentine’s still in the air, no less.

It might have been him. Really, truly, might have been him. It was the 90s. Chronologically, maybe even geographically, it was within the realm of possibility.

It wasn’t. I knew that. It couldn’t be. Not in a down-at-heel dive bar just off Canal Street.

But there he was, it was him. Or close enough to him for me.

He sat at the bar with two equally scruffy buddies whose faces I instantly forgot, if I saw them at all, all of them swimming in a sea of empty Corona bottles, working on three more. The only one I saw was the blond one, in the middle. Honey-haired, square-jawed. He looked just like Kurt Cobain.

My heart-throb, at an age (very early thirties) when I was kind of too old to have one.

And Heart-Throb, NotKurtButMaybeKurt (hereafter, NKBMK), was looking at us. At me and at my witchy friend with her flat black hair and black velvet choker and vampiress nails. Her name was actually Wanda, true story. And she was a witch. Or at least she was really into santería, and she was very, very good at it, but that’s another story for another day.

At first, he was looking at us. A glance sideways, a turn of the head to take us in.

And then—I could feel it, shifting and then focusing, his gaze like little electric shocks pulsing throughout my entire body—just at me.

NKBMK was looking right at me. Like he’d like to rip my grunge-slut clothes right off. Right then, right there.

And that would have been fine by me. Clear the bottles from the bar and let’s get this done.

That night, that’s all it was. Looking. NKBMK left with his two friends, looking over his shoulder all the way. And I looked right back. I don’t think I even blinked until he disappeared around the corner.

Then we haunted that bar. I even haunted it a couple times by myself, without Wanda. Just being safe, taking necessary and prudent precautions. Wanda was cute, and unpredictable.

But the haunting was in vain, and the months went by. I started to think I’d imagined him. Or conjured a vision out of my beer bottle, and then he’d snuck back in there to hide. Out with the post-last-call recycling, never to be seen again.

Until. Until… You knew there’d be an ‘until.’

I’ve mentioned, in an earlier installment of this Bad Love blog that, in the 90s, edgy people did not trawl around on Tinder looking for love, because edgy people did not have cell phones. We put ads in the personals section of the Village Voice. I had a running one, a metaphorical revolving door of candidates. Because I was tired of not meeting anyone in bars worth taking home who wanted to come.

One or two I let love me, or lust me, or whatever, for a time, because it’s nice to feel wanted. I was catering and adjuncting for a living, and it was nice to have someone else paying for the drinks. So one night I was in an East Village dive with one of them, with whom I was planning, finally, to go home, because it was the fourth date, because I was bored, because why not. We were on our third drink, and the obstacles posed by the several reasons I wasn’t particularly attracted to him had begun to seem less serious. I could do this. He was a good-looking guy, definitely good-looking enough.

He wasn’t Kurt. But then, who was?

Answer: the guy sliding onto the stool next to me. There he was, Mr. NKBMK himself, revenant and sans friends.

I did a terrible, terrible thing that night. And it was terribly, terribly fun.

Of course I let NKBMK pick me up, right there in front of my date. Of course I left with him. You know that.

But what you maybe don’t know, is everything his hands got up to, one stool over—it was summer and the dresses were short—leading up to us walking out of that bar together. Went on for half an hour, maybe more, before the date started to get suspicious. Which, in my twisted little mind, meant that he deserved to watch, open-mouthed, as I turned around and left him with the bill. And with Kurt’s too–I think date was wondering if maybe NKBMK was really him (which was a much better story for the date, maybe he told it. Maybe he’s still telling it).

Any of the three of you who read my post from two weeks ago will be thinking you see a pattern here. A pattern of (bad) behavior, spanning at least two continents, and you would not be wrong.

If you read last week’s offering, you might be wondering about the order of events—people with unresolved trauma, like, say, a rape drowned inside a succession of vodka bottles and never examined by a therapist, often act out. Or up. A lot.

So yes, this was after—maybe you have a point. But let’s stick with the fun side of this. Because acting out (and up) is fun. That night being an excellent case in point.

This, by the way, is not the last we’ve seen of NKBMK. Whose name, it turns out, was John.

He’ll be back. Not likely next week, but he will be back.