I had brunch yesterday with Sully, who is still plowing through his mid-life crisis. Steak and eggs, baby.  Goes well with everything.

We went to Charley's on Newbury, where they give you a sirloin, not a skirt steak, and sat at the bar downstairs.  Everybody was all about the Boston Marathon, of course. 

After a drink or two, this wiry little chap with big mischievous eyes and a ready smile ambles in obviously looking for trouble, and sits at the next bar stool.

He looked familiar somehow.  Cute, but not hot: obviously a local.  A little North Endy for my taste.  Butch but a little too Guido.  There seemed to be some irony in his presentation but it was still all a bit much.  There was something about him, though. First of all, he was pretty brash, but didn't seem to rub anyone the wrong way. First thing he does is barks over at the bartender to change the TV station to Fox Sports. 

There'd been a loudmouth at the bar a few minutes earlier who, whenever the hostess came to call a party for their table would shout the party name and size for her, unprompted.  At first it was kind of funny – because she was having trouble being heard over the crowd, and he did have a big, booming voice — people laughed.

But after three or four times, everybody was kind of getting annoyed.  It was like he was auditioning for hostess or something, just waiting for her to come down so he could shout out the party name and size, maybe get another chuckle or two.  Life of the party type.  The kind of guy you don't want to get stuck in a bunker with during the nuclear apocalypse.  In fact, if you see him running for the bunker, close the door, throw the latch down. Future generations will thank you for it.

But this kid, he shouts across the bar and the bartender cheerily obliges.  I mean, the place is packed.  It's not like the bartender's just standing around with his thumb up his ass.  If I had asked — never mind Sully — for a channel change — to Bravo or whatever — the guy would totally have ignored us.  I mean, right to our faces. Like we were talking Swahili.  So it was obvious from the moment the kid sat down that he had a gift.

The bartender was equally enthusiastic about taking his order, while we sat waiting patiently for a menu to be proffered.  You'd think the kid was a celebrity.  I was like, did Shia LaBeuof just sit down next to me or what?  And everybody thought he was in town for the Marathon.  I mean, the kid comes in alone, dressed in running gear, head to toe, and then he orders a water, a dry baked potato, and some steamed vegetables.  I don't know if marathoners eat like that but I know people who aren't marathoners don't.  So everyone assumed he was running, and started chatting him up about the race. 

The bartender, a cute Irish kid with that sexy Southie drawl, even went so far as to introduce himself to the kid, whose name we all then learned was Nino, and shakes his hand.  The bartender!  And after ordering a glass of tap water! 

I was intrigued, but on the DL. 

I'm always fascinated by people who manage to get good service, but to get the bartender going gaga over you after all you've ordered is tap water?  I'm thinking, I gotta get me some of this juju.  But being involved in a somewhat serious conversation with Sully, I didn’t dare comment or give the kid an opening.  I knew eventually he'd pry his way in on his own anyway.

We had a barmaid who was very pretty but having a bad day, and our food was delivered without  condiments or cutlery. I asked the busboy to get us some, and when he didn't return immediately, Nino went to work.  He hollers over to his new buddy the bartender that we didn’t have cutlery, and jokes that our food's getting cold and we should get brunch on the house, and on and on. 

And the bartender and barmaid are eating it up, laughing cheerily, hustling over with the silverware.  How was Nino doing it?  I mean, usually, if they forget your cuttlery and condiments, you can count on them being all bitchy, all but blaming you for not bringing your own.  So something was up.  Had he hypnotized the lot of us?  It remains a mystery.

He just had that kind of face.  Some people have the kind of face you want to smack.  Others just make you want to smile. Those gimlet eyes.  That mischievous grin. Still, despite my wanting to like him, Little Voice  was asking, "why the hard sell?" I mean, he was trying too hard.  Like an Amway salesman who'd left his sample case at home. 

Still, he'd found his opening — we could hardly ignore him after he'd gotten us forks and knives, rescuing us from eating with our hands — and was off and running.  He asked us where we were from, and then volunteered that he had recently moved to Back Bay from the South End. 

"Too many couples in the South End," he put in, an obvious gratuitous reference to the de-gaying of the neighborhood that he was hoping would light a sparkle in our eyes.

I didn't take the bait.  I wasn’t giving him anything. I knew now why he seemed familiar.  He reminded me of every sociopath I'd ever met, and one in particular I met years ago in Morocco who ended up robbing me.  Which would not have been such an inconvenience if he had not been so tedious and awful about it.  It took him all day. 

I mean, he acted like he was going to sleep with me, once he sussed out what I was about.  But if you're just going to rob someone, you can probably go ahead and skip the romance.  He only got away with fifty quid, and it was a whole day's work — for both of us, when he could've had fifty quid and a handjob and been on his way in fifteen minutes. 

To me, Nino seemed to have some sort of angle — maybe it was purely personal amusement — but I was wary of getting sucked in to his sales pitch.  I mean, next he was asking us what we were doing later in the day.  That kind of thing.  If he was gay he was flying under my gaydar.  My sociopathometer was going crazy, though.  All of his forays were couched in rather drab double entendres — not the fruity, flirty, fun ones we gays use — but the ones sociopaths who target gays use. 

I'm not saying he wanted to pick us up, beat us to a bloody pulp, and tie us to a fence post, but I've dealt with my fair share of ostensibly straight dudes who get their jollies luring gays into fruitless flirting.  True, they're usually drunk at the time, but I don't suppose they'd necessarily have to be.

Sociopaths are a third — or fourth — sex (depending on who's counting), and they're often indiscriminate in the application of their energies.  Not that all bisexuals are sociopaths, but all sociopaths are essentially bisexual.  Like an Amway salesman, they don't really care who's buying what they're selling.  If they see see a glimmer of hope that they can hook you, they're all over it.

After revealing his sneaker fetish, in the hope that we would interpret all his double entendres as a sexual advance, so that he could then act like they hadn't been, the waitress comes over to ask after us, and he starts telling her how beautiful she is (she looked like a slightly younger version on Edie Falco in her "Nurse Jackie" incarnation), how he's been admiring her looooong legs.  She was as cheerful and unaffected as before.

He asked her if she was running in the marathon.

She said no, and was he?

I butted in.  "Look at what he's eating!"

And with a big grin and those gimlet eyes, he looks straight at me and says, “naaaw, I'm not running.  You crazy?”

Seems he'd gotten one over on all of us.  Now we could have what was left of our brunch in peace.

Shortly after, he called for his check, paid up, said goodbye to the bartender like they were old war buddies, and was gone.

"Check your pockets," I told Sully.  "Make sure you've still got your wallet.”