Many Love
Page 8
the Hornets (I have hella tickets for this season),
The Hornets were the New Orleans basketball team at the time. The name has since switched to the (menacing-sounding) Pelicans. I like basketball okay, but it certainly wouldn’t rank on a top-one-thousand list of my favorite things. I did not have “hella tickets” for that season, but I knew one could easily buy them on Craigslist. I clearly had a good working knowledge of Craigslist.
Scott Pilgrim and kin,
Scott Pilgrim is an indie comic-book legend, and I do really like the books. The movie hadn’t come out yet, so this was still a cool thing to write. It was maybe a little too cool, because I didn’t get a single response that referenced this talking point.
things related to birds,
True.
eating out,
False—I like to cook. I especially hate eating out in New Orleans because I’m a vegan, and when you say that at a restaurant there, the waiters think you mean that you want the seafood platter.
Charlie Parker,
This was a time when I thought hot girls listened to bebop-era jazz music exclusively. I don’t remember why I thought this.
pie,
True.
catching lizards and/or frogs.
What?! No! I have never done this and will never do it. Leave lizards and frogs alone! I think I was trying to get across that I was boy-like in that I could abuse animals. But I’m not, and I can’t.
I dislike: sloppy drunks (I kind of am one, though, so I’m a hypocrite),
See, gentlemen? I can be cool and easy-to-sleep-with if you need me to be.
super-lowbrow humor, crime drama shows, plain Hershey’s chocolate, people who chew too loudly.
All of these are true.
Note the pie. I really like pie, and I like to make it for my friends. Lately I have had very few friends because I just (read: five months ago) moved here from Portland, Oregon,
Actually it was Walla Walla, Washington.
and things swing differently down south.
I thought this was a fun and quirky thing to say.
But maybe you’ll be one?
Please answer.
Do you know who wrote back to that Craigslist post? Hundreds of totally creepy, weird dudes. What made them creepy and weird, you ask? Seventy-five percent of them attached pictures of their penises to the first email they sent me, and the other 25 percent offered. Well, no, that’s not true; one guy was married and said that he and his wife were into bird-watching, but that they were also potentially looking for a third.
I didn’t write back to—let alone meet in person—anyone who responded to my Craigslist ad. After about a month I stopped getting responses to it, and I decided I was done with online dating forever.
A few years later, when I actually decided to start dating around, I did attempt to do it in the old-fashioned, non-computer way. I figured out a trick to lure single people into bed with me, and I felt that it was basically foolproof: aggressive eye contact. I called it “aggressive eye contact,” but really it was more like insistent eye contact, or persistent eye contact. Here’s how it worked:
You found a person you wanted to kiss on the lips. You stared at them for as long as it took for them to notice. Then you locked eyes with them and tried to convey a look that was simultaneously shy, awestruck, and a little horny. That sounds complicated, but for me it was just a wide-eyed stare that I held for a full beat before lowering my forehead a little and doing an Audrey Hepburn–style half smile. That this blunt mating tactic worked so well for me is no coincidence: data from experiments that have been conducted since the 1970s backs up the notion that women who make the first move in a romantic encounter are usually rewarded for it, even if they’re proverbially batting out of their league.
Women have trouble asking for what they want. That idea is the hallmark of Sheryl Sandberg’s provocative Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, and she made millions of dollars from it. In 2013 (when Lean In came out), the notion that women don’t ask for what they want merited feature-length stories in Forbes and Fast Company and on NPR. The stories are always in partial listicle format; they lead with some kind of sociological study that suggests women are socialized to be “nice” and to not “ask,” and follow with a sea of bullet-pointed advice: “Get good counsel,” “Know your bottom line,” “Do your homework,” etc.
I don’t love the Lean In mentality because it suggests that in order to make the business world better, women have to adjust to a culture that has been created by men. They must adapt to a male-dominated structure in order to get what they want. In dating, however, I wish women would ask for what they wanted. In the world of love and sex, asking for what you want—not demanding but asking—is not a game; it’s the definition of communication.
Granted, all this speculation is very heteronormative. Women flirting with other women likely have different success rates (oh-so-shockingly, there’s basically no long-term research on this subject), as must men flirting with men. And also, “batting out of their league”? Come on, researchers. That’s not a real thing.
But for our purposes, let me just say that in my single life, I did very well with prolonged, engaged, and complex eye contact. I did so well with it, actually, that it had a 100 percent make-out session success rate.
I bragged about this while visiting my uncles in San Francisco over the summer. They told me I would have to prove myself, because they found my claim hard to believe. I said I would do it at the upscale vegan restaurant we were going to for dinner. (People who frequent upscale vegan restaurants are worth kissing: they usually have very shiny hair, possess an uncommonly self-actualized—if somewhat arrogant—moral compass, and never get sick.) At dinner, my uncles and I collaboratively picked out a guy with a (shiny) bun whose job it was to bring out the drinks and the salads. When he brought the salad to our table, I leaned forward and fixated on the side of his head until he noticed, and then let the eye contact begin. It was really good eye contact. It seemed to last for an hour. Eventually he shook his head as if he’d just woken up from a dream (such a good sign), and retreated to the restaurant’s kitchen. This was going to be a success.
I would just have to wait until he came out again in order to try some flirtatious conversation. (In truth, the eye contact move is a one-two punch: you get the eye contact, and then, later, you make a kind of snarky comment. It’s helpful if the comment is something that proves you’re funny, cool, and dryly referential, such as: I like the music they’re playing here, but it makes me want to call myself in 1993 to tell past me to save my drop-crotch culottes; I had no idea the sounds of MC Hammer would be reincarnated so far into the future. You’re welcome to use that if you want.) But the salad guy never came out again! We even ordered dessert, thinking the salad guy might also be the dessert guy, but he wasn’t. I was very disappointed to have to head back to my uncles’ house rather than to the apartment of a bun-wearing salad server.
I was not about to have my record tarnished; and so I launched my second-ever online dating attempt. I went on Craigslist again and posted a Missed Connection titled “Your Hair Was in a Bun,” and listed the location as the name of the restaurant. The message itself was short:
I was sitting with my uncles. You brought out the salads. We made eye contact, right?
No one ever responds to Missed Connections, but I’d never posted one, and it felt like a rite of passage I’d so far missed out on. There used to be a dozen or so listed in the back of the alternative weekly newspaper I read in high school, and I cut out the good ones to keep in a box as inspiration. (I don’t know what I was trying to be inspired to do. I’ve always had a habit of collecting things “for inspiration” that end up in dusty piles in a basement or an attic.) The bun guy offered an opportunity, so I wrote my Missed Connection and then flew back to New Orleans and forgot about it. But a week later, as I sat in a professional development session on how to teach children to read the short e sound (apparently
, it’s not as obvious as the other vowels), I received this email:
My coworkers brought this to my attention. It brought mirth to the eventless duration of our services this evening and flattered me quite.
You were sitting in a booth near the host stand, right? If you’re who I think you are, then it’s a funny coincidence: I forgot until now, but that evening I almost considered mentioning to a certain one of the uncles sitting closest to the aisle that his sincerity was remarkable. Some people try to thank one for bringing salads and things but can’t manage it without affectation. He had simplicity.
But enough about your uncle. (Are we the people we think we are?) I would be delighted to meet you sometime. I’ve acquired the happy habit of stopping in to hear jazz at a place near my apartment, Club Deluxe. We could meet there an evening soon; or somewhere else—wherever.
I know, right? This was straight-up Hollywood romance material. Premise: Missed Connection is connected via the Internet. Conflict: But the girl got on a plane and flew across the country! How will these two lost souls find each other? Hijinks, maybe? A scene with a dog? Anything’s possible in the world of major motion pictures starring people like Meg Ryan.
I replied immediately that while jazz sounded great, I had only been visiting and was now back in New Orleans. But did this guy want to be my pen pal? He said yes, that sounded great. I got a postcard a week later; I sent off a package in return (I’m an overcompensator when it comes to mail); and we were off.
Craigslist waiter and I corresponded for a year, and finally I decided that we should rendezvous in person. I bought a plane ticket to San Francisco and met him at midnight at a downtown BART station. He was beautiful, but not as great as I had remembered. His hair was still in a bun (male buns were all the rage in my circle of friends, so this was a plus), but I could see now how he was balding a little in the front. He had one of those hunky cleft chins that are good in theory but which over time can start to remind you a little of Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. He was also not as tall as I was. Otherwise, though, he was dreamy, and he was reading something distinctly masculine: Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace or Jack Kerouac or something.
After confirming that yes, we were the people we thought we were, we walked to his car and he drove me to his house. That’s not quite right, actually; he didn’t live in a house, or even an apartment. Craigslist guy lived on a boat in the Berkeley marina. You’d think that in a year of handwritten correspondence this boat-living thing would have come up, but it hadn’t. I’d always sent my letters to a PO box and never questioned it.
On the boat, the Craigslist guy talked about how depressed he was, how meaningless life was, and how much he missed his ex-girlfriend. He played me songs about his ex-girlfriend on his acoustic guitar. I told him sad stories about teaching in New Orleans that I thought would impress him. He didn’t seem all that interested in them. He wanted to know if I wanted to know how he had met his ex-girlfriend. I didn’t, but he told me anyway. He’d seen her on a bench and simply had to sit down next to her and tell her how beautiful she was, and then they fell in love.
We slept in the tiny triangular cabin with a hospital cot–sized mattress inside. I made out with Craigslist guy, and he was a wet, clam-tongued kisser. Later, I went down on him, still holding out hope that our romantic comedy potential was greater than the so-far misfire that was our rendezvous. After I was done, he said, “Whoa. I didn’t think that was going to happen.” And then he fell asleep.
The next morning, he let me buy him breakfast, and after that I never saw him again.
When I got back to New Orleans, I decided to give online dating a try in earnest. OkCupid was more of a thing at that point, although none of my friends used it. I did know that, of the online dating sites, OkCupid was “the free one,” so I signed up for an account. I set up a profile that was very specific—maybe obsessively so—about how I wasn’t looking for anything serious right now and just kind of wanted to hook up with people in a fun and respectful way, and how, no, really, I wasn’t kidding, I really was not looking for something serious right now. This was an attractive quality to a lot of men who were very unattractive to me. I got a lot of messages from guys who opened with “Hey, Little Tits, I’ll fuck your brains out tonight if you want.” (Or some iteration of that. Men online loved to tell me how small my breasts were and how they would still, heroically, have sex with me.)
I sent messages to two men and two women. The men were both musicians and played multiple instruments (one played jazz, the other mostly punk). I had never dated a musician before because I had read in plenty of books and magazines that it was bad news to date musicians. But I got on OkCupid because I was finally looking for a bad-news kind of person—insofar as “bad news” meant someone who didn’t want to settle down. Plus, I was, like, a 96 percent match with both of those guys, and this was an era in my life when I naïvely trusted the Internet to provide conclusive algorithms concerning dating potential. The women were more interesting than the men (one was a burlesque dancer with a penchant for adopting rescue cats; the other was a former biology major who studied moss and loved The Wonder Years), but neither of them messaged me back. I could comfort myself with statistics on that one: OkCupid says that while 30 percent of straight men respond to initial messages they receive from women, only 25 percent of queer women do.1
The punk musician was out of town for a while, but he promised to get in touch with me when he got back. The jazz musician had stated in his profile that he was in a polyamorous partnership with a gender-neutral person. This was one of the first times I had seen someone use the word “polyamorous” in a real-life context, and it was very interesting to me. I wanted to know how that worked, and if he ever got jealous, and if he felt happy in his relationship or if it was lacking, and if he was dating anyone else. He patiently answered my questions via OkCupid messenger: it worked great; he got jealous sometimes; he loved his relationship; and he wasn’t dating anyone else, but his partner was.
We both danced around the idea of maybe meeting up sometime, but neither of us had ever used the Internet to date before, and we both had trepidations. Rather than make a date, we engaged in an ever-swelling email correspondence. He told me that he lived in Mid-City, he was allergic to cats, and he was somewhat desperately applying for day jobs; I told him that I taught at an elementary school in Mid-City, I had two cats (named for jazz musicians), and I played the piano. (I acted like I played it well. That’s what you do when you’re trying to seduce a musician.)
My job at the time had me out of bed at 4:00 a.m., out the door by 6:30, home around 6:00 p.m., and preferably asleep by 8:00. This was not the schedule of a casual dater. Deep into our increasingly platonic email correspondence, I resigned myself to never meeting the jazz musician in actual life. During recess at school I sometimes daydreamed about going over to his hypothetical house that was, in my mind, teeming with brass instruments piled on top of each other. I imagined him making me sweet tea and then picking any old saxophone up off the floor to serenade me with something slow and sexy like “Satin Doll”—a sultry-sounding title for a song I had never heard played but had seen listed in books of jazz standards. This fantasy, I assumed, would begin and end my romantic relationship with the jazz musician.
But then during one Morning Meeting (an ugly ritual wherein all the teachers at school stood in a circle and did team-building chants), the vice principal announced that our school was pairing with a local arts organization, and a visiting artist—a musician—would work with a few teachers for a month to design a unit plan that integrated reading and music. That kind of thing was right up my alley, so I was the first to sign up to work with the musician. By now you’ve correctly guessed what I never would have guessed in a million years, because life is not usually You’ve Got Mail: of all the musicians in the city, our school had partnered with my OkCupid suitor.
Because we had never seen each other in person, and profile pictures can be deceiving (al
so, OkCupid has its participants go by only first names and southern elementary schools require only last ones from their teachers), it took a comically long time for us to realize what had happened. We sat down together in a tiny room with buzzing fluorescent lights to go over the teachers’ edition of the reading manual. Then we started to piece things together:
We laughed about it, traded quips about fate, and made a date to get a drink on Friday to celebrate Sidney Bechet’s birthday.
The date went great; we hit it off beautifully and made out on my front porch after he rode his bike all the way back to my house with me. The next weekend I met a cute special-education teacher from another school at a housewarming party. He talked at length about Weird Al Yankovic’s movie, UHF. I took him home to fool around. That was also great. And then the OkCupid punk musician came back into town, and we went on a date to see a campy horror movie at an old puppet theater. We had a great make-out in the middle of a bright-lit street before parting ways to head home in opposite directions. I have to tell you: I was pretty proud of myself. I was having a lot of emotionless, super-great make-outs with three separate dudes, and none of us were getting into “relationships” with each other. I was hooking up! I was in the culture! I was loving it!
Except I wasn’t just having great make-outs with these guys; I was accidentally really enjoying their company. The jazz musician parted ways with his partner a few days after we met, and he was devastated. After that, we spent most of our time together talking about heartbreak and listening to moody jazz records with our eyes closed. The special-education teacher was one of the funniest, weirdest people I had ever met, and we decided to join a Dungeons & Dragons campaign together. And the punk guy showed up at my house one day wearing a suit and holding a box of Popsicles to share with me on a bridge. Very quickly, my careless hookups became meaningful relationships I felt invested in. Eventually I stopped physically hooking up with those guys, but I remained close friends with all of them. This infuriated me. I didn’t think I needed more friends; I needed more sex!