I’d been bar-hopping with several friends, and they’d headed home, leaving me in the last bar. As I was getting ready to leave, I saw a guy come in and make his way through the bar, just surveying the scene. There had been a table of college girls toward the back, and I realized that all of them had left except for one girl who was obviously intoxicated. I was in my mid-twenties at the time, and the guy was probably the same or a little older, but the drunk girl was obviously a second year student, maybe even underaged. While I watched, the guy sat down at her table and attempted to talk to her. She was so drunk she could hardly interact with him. I went over to the bartender and asked if he knew where the girl’s friends had gone, and he shrugged, saying that they’d left earlier. While I was standing there talking to him, the strange man got the college girl on her feet, half carrying her, and started toward the door.

Me being me, I intercepted the guy, and asked him if he knew the girl. He insisted that he did, but refused to tell me her name. Then he produced a first name but no last name. Her purse was hanging on her outside arm, just a wristlet around her wrist and I snatched it off her arm, and pulled out her college ID and it was a totally different name than the one the guy had given me. Now that I had the girl’s purse, he started to get angry, but he couldn’t tell me where she lived, or anything else about her. He kept insisting that he was just going to give her a ride home, and I kept refusing to let them leave. The entire time, the bartender just watched, like he didn’t know what to do.

Finally, the guy let go of the girl and kind of shoved her toward me (she could barely stand on her own) and then he starts telling me that I should mind my own business, and that I’ve got some nerve insinuating that he was anything but a good samaritan trying to make sure a drunk girl got home safely. I informed him that I was going to call a cab for the girl, and he asked me if I was going to call one for myself, because it was late, and “not very safe for single girls with bad attitudes to walk anywhere alone” I have never been easily intimidated by anyone, and I’ve grown up working on farms and training horses, so physically I’m very fit and strong even though I’m only 5'5. I told him I’d never met anyone I couldn’t handle yet, but that he was welcome to step up and try me. He blew me off and left the bar in a huff.

I called a cab. The bartender asked who was paying for it, and I told him I would if the bar wouldn’t, and then wondered what it would do for their reputation if people found out this was how they treated college girls in a college town. After that, the bartender offered to pay for the cab. I called numbers in the girl’s phone (she just sat there in a drunk stupor) until I got ahold of her roommate (who hadn’t gone out that night) and explained what had happened. The roommate gave me their address and told me that she was going to go out front and wait for the cab. When the cab got to the bar, I told the driver where to go, and that I had his cab number, and the girl’s roommate was waiting for him, and that if anything went wrong, it was going to be his ass. He was dubious, but left with the girl, and within 15 minutes the girl’s roommate texted me on my phone and told me that she’d gotten her friend and everything was fine.

Then I started to walk to my car, which was a few blocks away. And there was the guy from the bar, actually waiting around to try and scare me. He honestly thought, after all of that, and even after I made it clear that I wasn’t afraid of him, that he could intimidate me. He started to cross the street my way, saying that I should have taken him seriously when he warned me about how it wasn’t safe to walk alone and that I’d better be prepared to make up for getting in his way earlier. I thought he might attack me, but instead of backing off, I headed right for him, reiterating that I’d be happy to take him on if he wasn’t afraid of getting his ass kicked by a woman. I was honestly ready to fight him, but he abruptly backpedaled calling me a “crazy bitch” and saying that I “needed to learn how to take a joke” and then he left, yelling back over his shoulder that “There aren’t nosy bitches in every bar, but there are plenty of drunk ones in this town.” I’ve never seen him in the decade since, but I never go out that I don’t think about that asshole, and wonder how many girls he’s carted off from bars and raped or assaulted.