Kyle Rossdale

"Hello, all, I am Kyle Rossdale, I am 23 years old and I live here in New York City."

This is a sentence I say whenever a new semester begins. I do tours for freshmen around the campus where I study. Kids, I would say, not much younger than me, coming from various cities and why not to say... from various countries. Scared faces, in desperate search of a familiar face, of someone that lends a hand. Mostly.

During the tour last semester, two girls approached me while I was giving freshmen a chance to see the library. The blond one seemed to be less shy:

- Hi, I am Kelly, this is Tracy, we're from Kansas.
- Nice to meet you, girls. Enjoying the tour?
- Not really... Kinda boring...

I blushed. One of those awkward moments when I was not sure of what to do. My friend Michelle would have given quite an answer, but she was in Law School and she didn't care a lot about what other people thought of her, meaning she was good in situations like that, putting the perfect combination of irony, sarcasm and anger.
I am a writer. And as such I belong to a group of needy careers, in the sense that we need to be accepted and loved - actors, writers, bartenders etc. No hard answers... just couldn't do it.
Well, I blushed.

- How can I make it more interesting?

Good answer. I had to be superior, accept the critics were good and helped me be a better person. Or so I was taught during the Creative Writing Program I was attending.

- Well, we want to look at bars. - Kelly said.
- Are you old enough for that?
- We just want to look.

I laughed. Some of them were not scared. Some of them actually wanted to live the New York City that they see in movies, and in tv shows like "Friends" and "Sex and the City". Kelly and Tracy wanted a bar. And I could only think of one place to take them. And to make it more interesting, I needed my wingman Theo.

I promised to take them to a bar after the tour was finished. I needed to complete this task, after all I had a special discount in my tuition for helping out in the University. I still had to walk that small group of 20 teenagers to the streets of the Greenwich Village, show them where famous writers have lived. And of course allow some of them to take a picture in front of the 'Friends' building in the corner of Grove and Bedford streets.

The discount... Well, although I live in the Village, I'm not rich. Far from that. But I had my days of waiter and delivery boy and saved enough cash to complete this extension. Money for graduation in English and American Literature came from my mom. I'll tell you about her next time. Actually there's a lot to say on the story of my family. And my friends.

Just to give you a heads-up on my friends. I've mentioned Michelle and Theo before, but I need to add 2 girls to this list: Andie and Lynn. Let's say that we had this big group of best friends in high school - aren't we all best friends in high school, specially in Manhattan? College applications came and the lazy ones (or would it be "the smart ones") were accepted in NY universities. From the big group, only the 5 of us were left here (Andie, Michelle, Lynn, Theo and myself). Looking back, we're the ones that mattered the most, or maybe it's just because we're the ones who stayed. And odd as it may seem, we're still each other's best friend, despite all the ones we've met in our jobs, in our graduate programs and in Manhattan's best night clubs.

To be fair, there was Rick, but his departure was not college's fault... I'll tell you about him someday. Big trauma here...

And to finish what I can no longer call a simple "heads up", there's Junior. Japanese descendent with an unspeakable first name, Junior met Lynn in May 2004 and they've been together since then. So, although he doesn't have a lot of history with us, he is part of the group now.

Before I let you go for today, please allow me to write just one more paragraph. I am a writer, that's what I do, I write. And this is our first contact, so if you don't get the most important things now, there's no guarantee you'll come back and follow-up on our story. Why "Six Pack"?

Well, we're a group of six people and there's one thing we really like to do: have a beer now and then. There's this bar in the Village, close to where I live - it's called "The Bossa Nova Point" and it's managed by this Brazilian dude, who we call Tony (unspeakable first name). By the way, that's where I intend to take the Kansas girls Kelly and Tracy. Andie, Lynn and myself have taken summer jobs as waiters at the Bossa throughout the years. So we hang out there a lot and most times, there's six of us, so we order a six pack in which Tony gives us a discount. A couple of years ago, Tony started calling us "the six-packs", which we find really tacky. But hey, I'm not rich, actually I'm a bit cheap, so any discount is welcome. "Tony, a six pack please" is another sentence that you'll hear a lot from us.

Cheers,
Kyle