I dug up a slice of my personal pizza and glanced back to Mark, who wore a nervous smile on his face.

"So.... " Mark asked. "...You're like, ... a film student?"

"Oh, no. Well, I mean, I was a student. I dropped out. Now I work as a barista."

"What were you studying if you don't mind my asking?"

"Uhh, Classics."

"Wow, uh... I didn't expect that."

"Why?" I asked.

"Well most of the people I know who studied Classics were like... I don't know... Kind of snobby. Stuck up. You don't seem like that at all."

"Well like, Latin literature is nothing but fucking and sucking. The poetry is filled with elaborate dick jokes. When you're reading it in the original it's doesn't all seem so uhh... austere"

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And with perfect timing the waitress returned to leave another glass of ruby red wine at my side.

Mark stabbed his plate of spaghetti with his trimurti and twirled it around like Shiva dancing with his serpent. "So how do you go from trashy movies to the cornerstone of western civilization?"

"Well I see myself as an archaeologist of sleaze, really. Like, the culture critic Walter Benjamin observed all art ever produced is like, imbued simultaneously with the sum total of its perceived past and inscribed with a glimpse of its imagined future. So sleazy movies are kind of like this weirdly subversive glimpse into the primordial libidinal soup that our society and our parents and all the authority figures around us decided to repress, to get really Freudian about it.

Grafitti on the walls of brothels at Pompeii, Weird genre porn from the '70s, It's all the same! That's why I like wallowing in the gutter. At least it's honest!" I shrugged theatrically before gulping down more wine.

"So anyways, why did you decide to go out with me in the first place?" I asked, midway through finishing the last slice of my pizza.

"Well" he said. "I have a thing for weird girls."

I laughed nervously and downed the end of my second glass with the inevitable sense that tonight I was either getting laid or murdered.