I went on a date last night with two guys at once. The date was meant for one man, but his pal was in town, yada yada yada, long story short that I’ll manage to make long: he asked if it was okay to bring John. I shrugged and said, “The more the merrier.” It was a blind date. Most of my dates are blind; I’ll explain that later. I saw them, we hugged, we had good conversation. Then, mid convo, John said, “And there was this huge…”
I couldn’t resist the pause.
“That’s what she said,” I said.
My date blinked at me.
John laughed.
My date is a transplant from Valencia via Oregon, Hawaii, and Costa Rica. He works as a waiter while he’s putting himself through school for photography.
John is in California to work for an organization that brings food to different events. Most of the events are non-profit such as the event he was managing on this trip. He and his crew are traveling with cyclists who are doing an AIDS bike-a-thon from San Francisco to San Diego, stopping along the way, and feeding the cyclists. When the trip ends next week, he returns to Northern California to wait for fire season. If there are fires, he and his crew travel to the hot spots and feed fire fighters. After this, he’ll be in Boston feeding volunteers at the Susan G. Komen organization.
John has a scar over his right eye about 1 inch long. It looks like a fingernail moon. He’s skinny. Good, strong arms. Glasses. Plaid shirt. Brainy and funny. He laughed at my jokes about human trafficking. And when I told him he could get raped in the trailer he sleeps in, he asked me to go into further detail. So I started singing “Behind Closed Doors” by Johnny Paycheck.
Even better? The scar over his eye was the result of a recent camping trip, when a tent pole flew out of a zipped pouch and hit him in the face.
Oh, how we laughed. Dirty humor: check!
After this they asked me to take them to a dive bar, so I brought them to the Big Dog: The Star Lounge. The only place on Main St. that happily smells like puke.
I didn’t intend on drinking that night, but John bought me a PBR long boy, then made me split his Jaeger bomb. My date doesn’t *have* to buy me a drink–I don’t believe in the conventional rules of dating all the time, but I know that John probably shouldn’t have been the one who *did* buy my drink.
After the game, we rotated over to The Dume Room, a cute little joint that had really bad stand up comedy. Sweet-nerdy John kept looking at me and smiling. I smiled back. Curses.
I have never experienced anything like it. I could have slipped him my phone number, but that seems rather classless to me. And, as KME reminded me last night, “John is only in town for a few days. What would it have mattered anyway?”
I liked my date as a human being because he had a good heart, but I wasn’t attracted to him. Maybe it was the cigarettes, or the fact that he admitted he’s not good at saving money; therefore, there will not be a date #2.
It’s true. Romances *can* be very fleeting… they can last years, months, days, a night… even a few minutes. You pass someone on the bus and have a short conversation, and then they say, “Here’s my stop.” And you never see them again. It happened to Redford.
…When Robert Redford was young, in his teens, he used to ride the New York subway to and from work. One night, he took a different route, and on that route he saw a girl who wasn’t particularly pretty, but there was something about her that he thought beautiful. Her stop came, she hopped off, and he said he kicked himself for not saying anything to her. He decided, that next day, that he would take this strange route again with hopes of seeing her. He took that route for an entire month and never saw her again. What happened? Maybe it was her only night in the city? Maybe it was an odd route for her, too?
Sarah Conner and Kyle Reese had a One-night-romance in the Terminator–minus the hard-core hot piston injection Kyle gave Sarah in that sleazy hotel room, when he buried his seed and left her a single mom, it was two people given the opportunity to dive below the surface for a brief wink in the expanse of life. None of the weird quirks or bad habits could come to the surface because Kyle was killed in a pipe-bomb explosion… before Sarah had to walk in on him sniffing his dirty underwear to see if it was clean enough for a second go because he was too lazy to do laundry.
At the end of the evening, I said goodbye to both men, hugged each goodnight, and walked the 1 block to my apartment. As for John, I probably won’t see him again. He will be the subway girl to my Redford. He will be the Kyle to my Sarah. And as for my date, I didn’t feel the click-click-click of all the chambers falling into place. I happily move along.
Printed by permission. Visit Mari's blog at http://www.mari-go-round.com/
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