Competing to be picked up

Quite a few people I know met partners in 'pick-up' situations – bars; restaurants; one couple I'm friendly with even met on a bus. I don't recall ever really having been 'picked up' – the closest I came to it was someone noticing me at a football match and calling me up later. That didn't end very well, though; I vaguely recall him taking me to an animated movie for our first date, where he softly crooned ALL the songs in my ear throughout the movie, much to my irritation and that of the other movie-goers.

There was one incident that may well have turned into a pick-up if I hadn't nipped it in the bud. It happened at the tail end of the longest cross-Atlantic flight in the world. I was returning from San Diego at the end of a summer vacation, and stopped off in London before going home. I had taken an afternoon flight from San Diego to Los Angeles and the red-eye to New York. Then, after a four-hour wait in New York - spent nodding off on the floor of the airport since all the seats were taken - I spent another six hours on the flight to London. Needless to say, by the time I arrived at Heathrow I felt like death warmed up, and wore a look to match. The next part of my journey consisted of an hour-long train ride to East Finchley, so I dragged my two suitcases and hand luggage onto an empty compartment in the train, then proceeded to undress to the absolute lower limit of public decency, as it was steaming hot and the ventilation was less than ideal.

Within five minutes of embarking, a pretty English girl and two European-looking guys in their early twenties joined me. She sat next to me and they sat across from the two of us. They were talking in a foreign language, and it took a few minutes for me to come out of my jet-lagged funk to realize that they were talking Hebrew and I could actually understand what they had to say. I was not in the mood to chat and certainly didn't let on that I understood them. Not that what they were talking about was particularly interesting anyway – discussion mostly focused on the 'action' they were planning on getting that night, where they were going to find women and how lucky they assumed they'd be. The English rose to my right kept quiet, and I concentrated on not falling asleep, out of terror that I'd miss my stop and drag this night out a minute longer than it absolutely had to be.

A few minutes into the ride, it became apparent to me that the conversation across the aisle had moved from the 'generic' to the 'localized', and the guys were making a blatant comparison between the beauty to my right, and me. The odds were against me – I hadn't showered for 30 hours, I was rubber-necking (the movement that takes place when you fight sleep and your head keeps dropping onto your chest, only to be ripped up in sudden jerking movements when you realize you nodded off…). She was lovely – milky skin, freckles, slightly ginger hair (instant aphrodisiac for Israeli men), and she was clean and made up, ready for a night on the town. When she realized she might be the topic of conversation across the way, she gave the guys a shy glance through her long, mascara'd eyelashes, and I didn't stand a chance.

Under the assumption that they were speaking a language neither of us girls understood, the guys were fairly brutal. To start with, they went into a scathing analysis of how I looked like I hadn't slept for a week, and started taking bets on how long it would be before I fell asleep completely. They also joked about a few of the 'favors' they'd be 'willing to perform' for my seat-mate, and just when I thought they would not find a single redeeming feature in yours truly, their eyes moved past our faces to our upper torsos. Time for me to make a comeback. The girl next to me had not been blessed with any breasts to write of – in fact, I think G-d gave her a lovely face in the hope that it would stop men from looking any further. The boys across the way picked up on this, joking about her 'flapjacks' as opposed to my 'round buns'; how she had nothing to grab whereas I could give each of them a breast and there would still be 'leftovers'…It was when they started discussing specific acts they'd like to perform with my bosom that I decided it was time to let them know that I did, in fact, understand what they had to say.

So following on their comparison ("girl on right, pretty; girl on left, has had better days"; "girl on right flat as a pancake, girl on right perfectly endowed"), I retorted, in accented – but perfect – Hebrew. All I did was add another feature to their comparative statement, informing them in Hebrew that in addition to the obvious difference between our faces and our breasts, there was also the fact that her Hebrew was non-existent, and mine was perfect.

They hot-footed it out of the carriage and the rest of the trip was spent in silence.