by Mike Stangle
Eventually, we took the call from Cameron Williams, the host. Cam was smooth as silk. The best part about the Australian Today interview was that Frank was walking on and off the set periodically, sniffing things and humping the leg of the stool Mike was sitting on. No one said a single thing. Kirk didn’t intervene or motion for us to get him to stop; Cam didn’t even acknowledge him. It was as if two drunk guys and a troublemaking, butt-sniffing junkyard dog were par for the course in every Australian’s morning.
Our Own Personal eHarmony
(Mike)
Online dating is here to stay, whether we like it or not. From now on, it will be part of every young person’s social and love life. Except Dave’s. Or mine. To this day, neither one of us has gone on an actual date with someone we’ve met through online dating. Of course, that doesn’t mean we don’t dabble. We’d never pass up an opportunity for an awkward exchanges with so many members of the opposite sex. Take a few minutes to consider the niche markets that have developed for all the weirdoes out there. It goes to show that there really is someone for everyone. If you’re hoping that mustlovevampires.com helps you find the future Mrs. You, something is probably a little off . . . but at least you know that will also be the case for whomever you get matched with, too! Have you guys seen the online dating websites out there these days?
FarmersOnly.com
For farmers, only.
YouMustLoveDogsDating.com
Their dogs can watch them hump, for a change.
Vampiresonly.com
For Goth kids who all of a sudden aren’t feeling so hopeless after all.
Tinder
For sluts.
Catpeople.com
Made that one up, but I guarantee it exists in some form, though.
Dave discovered these sites last year the week after he spent the entire Thanksgiving break refurbishing this early-twentieth-century wooden trunk he found in our parents’ attic. He was out in our garage for hours every day buffing this thing, sanding it, staining it, all that shit. It came out awesome. But the combination of fumes, metal particles, and dust ended up making Dave deathly ill, and he had to take a few days off work. But Dave doesn’t do well when he has to sit still. So instead of recuperating, he spent over seven hours creating a fake online dating profile for me on every major, minor, bizarre, and fucked-up dating website there is. He custom-tailored each profile to be different and to fit the mold of whatever that site’s fetish or theme was. He had a different, wildly authentic character, name, and set of pictures for all of them. He had a mission: he wanted to drive responses. Nobody wants to go on a date with a fake farmer. The only problem was that you could tell toward the end he started to get lazy. My BlackPeopleMeet.com profile was basically a picture of me where my skin was tinted dark and dreadlocks were Photoshopped onto my head. Also, my face wasn’t even on my shoulders, it was free-floating in front of a Jamaican flag. I’m not even going to mention the name he gave me. Horrible. But guess how many hits that got before site administrators took it down? Three! They were big girls.
For at least the next three weeks, we were spending all our free time creating online dating profiles and making sure to use each other’s real contact information. Dave’s widow’s peak and milky white skin already make him look like a vampire, so that one was pretty easy. I also signed him up for this one dating site for people who like to puke on each other. That is the one he never talks about. I secretly think he met up with someone from it and found that he liked it. Officially, though? Neither one of us had ever been on an online date. We were waiting for the right place, the right time, and still figuring out how not to be such pussies. Basically, like so many guys, we wanted it to simply fall into our laps.
When our Craigslist ad went viral, it was like God and Craig teamed up to create a custom online dating website just for us. It was free and received more attention than we ever could have wanted. The timing of it all was perfect, too. Dave and I were both single, working desk jobs in Washington, D.C., and New York, respectively, and suddenly had a fucking Rolodex of women who thought we were way cooler than we actually were. The ad first picked up steam in New York, so I did what any sensible young professional would do. I immediately left for an inordinately long vacation and headed north to Manhattan. I slept on Dave’s floor for a solid month. During that month, I was bitten by every insect in the tri-state area. One night, I had to make love with my shirt on, because I had so many bites on my back and chest. The takeaway here is that Dave’s floor was just filthy. Even after I made a fort out of bedsheets and thumbtacks, I could never hope to call it a home.
The icing on the Craigslist cake was that we were a package deal. That meant every date was a double date. It was like Double Dare with Marc Summers, except boobs poured over our heads instead of green slime. Before that, neither one of us had been big daters. These dates, though, they were an experience. For very silly reasons, women were knocking down our door to meet us. What an opportunity. We went on twenty different double dates in the span of twenty-one days. And since I was on a “work hiatus,” Dave was forced to pick up the entire tab. The dates were crazy. We didn’t quite do our due diligence, but we did use Facebook. It was integral in our formula to select a date for that night:
1. Add the gals as friends.
2. Click on their profile, then on “Photos.”
3. Browse through albums and look for key phrases such as “Spring Break,” “Summer Lovin’,” “Summer Dayz,” “Summer 2011,” “Summer 2012,” “Summer 2013,” or “Me and my bitches.”
4. Look at every bikini picture available. Pass harsh judgment. Find the hard bodies.
Unsurprisingly, this incredibly shallow vetting process did not result in normal dates. We picked a lot of psychos. Most of them were legitimately “run for the fucking hills” types, and we translated that into “drink your way through it, then run for the bedroom.” But they were all babes. We weren’t going on these dates to find love. We wanted to get weird and maybe have a couple of ’gasms along the way. It was mostly about entertainment and pushing it as far as we could every night. Dave began telling the girls about our childhood and how we grew up, except he was completely deadpan explaining that we were interracial adopted brothers who were also cops with a penchant for robbing New York City subway cars. He was essentially reciting the plot of the movie Money Train, without anyone catching on. When we would get really messed up, one of us would find it hilarious to call dibs on one gal while her friend was within earshot. That move never worked out for anyone, but it did make us laugh.
Double Datin’.
We went to the same exact bar on every single date: Whiskey Town. It was close to Dave’s apartment, we knew the fellas in charge, and there was a back door that was perfect for Irish exits. More often than not, there was a Beautiful Girl and her Okay Friend. I think Okay was out there looking for Mr. Right and having no luck, so Okay’s mom emailed her our ad after watching the Today show. Okay took it as a sign and put together a creative response, then convinced her hottest friend to let her slap some Facebook photos in the response. And it worked, too. Dave loved calling dibs on the hot one. My response to this cheap shot usually depended on my level of intoxication. If I was in decent shape, I’d act offended in front of the gals, appalled at Dave’s dick move. If I was drunk enough to be jealous, I’d spend the rest of the night trying to sabotage him until the girls were disgusted enough to leave.
We had only one date that went so terribly that we had to bail midway. We just couldn’t handle it. The Okay gal was absolutely nuts, and her hot friend wasn’t far behind. Okay gal actually started eating the flowers I brought her (flowers are my calling card—Dave’s is keeping his socks on during sex). We snuck out when they went to the bathroom to freshen up. When we got a few blocks away, we stopped under some scaffolding to discuss just how crazy Okay gal was. Suddenly, she came sprinting out of nowhere and grabbed Dave like a spider monkey! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Next thing I kn
ow, Dave is screaming, “Get it off me, get it off me!” and the girl is wrapped around him with her head up and inside of his shirt. He finally pushes her down his legs and off his body, but she is really holding on. Without warning, she sprints off into the night screaming “I need to see you die!” For a while, Dave and I just stared at each other. Dave lifted up his shirt to check out the damage to his chest. She had bitten him right between the nipples. I didn’t know there was enough skin there to bite on to, but she’d done it. I could see her incisor imprints. We called it a night.
We were starting to notice some issues with our version of “online dating.” These girls weren’t looking for love or companionship; they were looking for publicity, sex, free drinks, and a story to tell their girlfriends at their next bottomless mimosa brunch. After the chest-biter, we started to prep a little more.
We would hit Whiskey Town early, much earlier than we told the gals to meet us there, because we had learned to get a little destroyed predate. One night, I swear the girls were juniors in college (but read at a senior level). We decided not to ID them—we’re not cops, okay? They had gained entry into the bar, and that was good enough by us. They were college hot. They were the type of girls who would not have given us the time of day back in school. They were even too hot for us with the older-guy card in play. We did have something, though, and they were here for a reason: we had quickly fading Internet popularity and the good sense to exploit it.
Love was in the air at Whiskey Town that night. The simple and ever-reliable formula of bourbon, slim-fit shirts, and smooth talk was all it took. Even my excessive armpit sweat didn’t deter them. The four of us were crushing drinks, snapping selfies, shooting suggestive glances. Our sobriety wasn’t helped by the arrival of our friend Anthony, who had a house account for shots. Soon Dave started in on a shtick that became way too familiar in the coming weeks. He drunkenly explained that we needed to go to our place to let his adorable bulldog out to poop. Hook, line, and sinker—Frank, you old son of a bitch! I realized this wasn’t Dave’s first rodeo using Frank as his wingman-in-waiting.
We all agreed to finish our drinks and head toward Dave’s apartment. Cheers! To Frank! Exactly ten seconds later, a few bouncers came over and caught us singing “Closing Time” into the security walkie-talkie we had stolen earlier. Apparently they had been scouring the bar trying to figure out which dickheads had taken it. We weren’t even really hiding it, hadn’t moved from our booth the whole night, and we have very conspicuous singing voices, so the joke was really on them.
On the way home, we walked by our buddy Jay’s apartment. He had a second-floor apartment that sat above a storefront with a fire escape hanging right over the street. One of our female companions happened to be a Division 1 cheerleader and all-around badass. Dave and I promptly convinced her to let us boost her up to the fire escape, so that she could break in and scare our friend Jay. We really wanted to see how Jay would react to a sultry five-foot blond cat burglar breaking into his place. Would he attack her? Would he run? Would he get a little boner? Time would tell. Dave and I warmed up thoroughly, in preparation of collectively lifting ninety-five pounds over our heads. Her friend prepared to film the whole thing for a Vine post later on. These girls were typical college. We had learned earlier that they were going through a phase where they thought it was hilarious to talk in Australian accents all the time. The novelty wore off quickly, but it did make her commentary on the resulting video pretty incredible. Anthony had followed us home in a classic fifth-wheel move, and he was unsuccessful in talking us out of boosting her up. She was wearing a short skirt and Dave was staring straight up it. But I wasn’t, just so you guys know. She used our boost to do a triple-cork front flip up onto the fire escape, piece of cake! After a quick bow to the crowd that had formed on the street around us, she walked over to the window to pop on in. It was locked. Shit. The jig was up!
The small crowd let out a disappointed sigh and started to dissipate. The only thing left to do was for Alex to gracefully hang off the ledge and fall delicately into our capable, waiting arms. It would’ve been a lot less expensive if that had been the way things went down. Dave and I stood with arms linked in textbook base-cheerleader form, waiting to catch Alex. This girl is a collegiate athlete and gets thrown in the air and spins all over the place, too. This was not her first rodeo. She’s cheerleading at football games on fucking Saturday nights, not basketball games on Tuesdays.
Anthony took a few steps back. Dave and I waited for our gal to do the hang down and drop, but instead she leapt like a deranged lunatic. She flew fifteen feet and completely overshot our waiting arms. Calamity ensued, and there were legs and pea coats everywhere, as Alex landed in the capable but unsuspecting arms of Anthony. Unfortunately, Anthony was not ready for the combination of Alex and fifteen feet of downward acceleration. Based on a slow-motion playback of the video, we can see that Anthony was absolutely crushed. He probably could have pressed charges. Alex, on the other hand, promptly stood up and walked off unharmed. We picked Anthony up and dusted him off, but he wobbled violently and crashed to the ground. Suddenly an (actual) Australian off-duty nurse came running over. Den’t git up, ya need to ring an ambo to the doc shop stat, love! she shouted. Dave was so happy a real Australian had appeared that he just started screaming at our girls, THAT’S HOW AN AUSTRALIAN SOUNDS. THAT’S HOW YOU SHOULD SOUND IF YOURE GOING TO DO AN AUSTRALIAN ACCENT THE ENTIRE FUCKING NIGHT!
Two hours later, we found ourselves in some midtown hospital. Anthony was sharing a room with a really upbeat gunshot victim. He was such a good sport and was very talkative, relative to the number of bullets in his body. Anthony wasn’t going anywhere for a while, so Dave, the girls, and I left him and his new buddy to get some rest.
Dave tried the bulldog-apartment line again and our cheerleaders obliged immediately. This seemed strange. Ordinarily, we would expect these girls to be running away from us as fast as possible. Then it hit me. These girls had nowhere to stay. They were gambling on this date more than we were! These girls were worried about securing the basics: they were after food and shelter and we were their providers. At some point on the walk home, I pulled Dave aside and explained my theory to him. We were responsible for these gals! We got them home safe and tucked them into Dave’s bed and retired ourselves to the floor fort, where we woke up to some nice insect bites. The next morning, we bought them breakfast and went back to the hospital. Alex had ruptured Anthony’s patellar tendon. One major surgery and eight months of recovery later, he was good as new.
The Purge
(Dave)
So much of where Mike and I come from is our old man. I like him a lot. I admire him very much. I respect the hell out of him. I don’t want to be like him, though. No way. I want to have the good and righteous qualities he does, but I don’t want to be like him. That would require me to change my entire personality, and I’ve been working on my personality for years.
We’re different. John Stangle boasts a puritan work ethic, whereas I regularly introduce myself as “Snake” to parents I meet for the first time. My dad and I love each other. We always have. He is a great dad and a great man. He makes my mom happy, he fixes stuff, and he drinks Busch heavies. What’s not to like? We haven’t always liked each other, though. Some parents don’t like their kids during the teenage years. Is this surprising to anyone? Teenagers are fucking shitheads. They think they know everything. I thought I knew everything. My dad actually did know everything, and he didn’t like that I was sure I did, too, despite the fact that I was obviously a fucking idiot.
These days, we’re a-okay. I’m thirty now! I have a job, I’m no longer a financial burden on him, and I haven’t gotten any chicks pregnant. (Just need to confirm this one—does the publisher provide fact checkers?) If my relationship with my dad were a credit score, I’d be in the 700s. I attribute a lot of that to his attitude shift once all the kids were out of college. If I had three male shithead kids and one female diva kid to put th
rough grade school, high school, and college. I’d be a hard-ass too! Tough luck, old man. You shouldn’t have been humping mom so much back in the eighties. You signed up for this.
Since we’ve all become young adults, he has mellowed in a noticeable way. Things that used to set him off now just escape his body through a shoulder shrug. His skin is thicker than leather. He is now a wise old sage, relaxed and comfortable in his life, and a great time to hang around with. Most people think of their “prime” as occurring somewhere in their twenties, physically speaking, or their thirties, forties, and fifties, professionally speaking. Papa Stangle waited to peak until after he knew his entire flock would make it into the real world alive and in at least decent condition. By 2008, the Stangle kids had shown enough promise for my father to take a breath, have a drink, and actually go at it with his wife for the first time since Bush #1 was in office. “Nineteen nineties Dad” was the absolute polar opposite of “Golden Age” Dad. Nineteen nineties JT Hard-ass stood over us on Saturday afternoons as he took the role of Chore Czar while we scrubbed the shit out of our bathroom floors. Golden Age Dad hangs out in the hot tub he built (literally), a cigar in his mouth and chuckling at the off-color stories his kids tell him. Before, when going out at night, I’d regularly hear a solemn “Behave” as I would run past his chair with booze hidden in my back pocket. Nowadays, Golden Age Dad tells me to “wrap it up.” Talk about progress! (Also, ew Dad. No!)