This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 8:44 pm and is filed under General Word Vomit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Why is it that people continue to exist after I discard them? Barring their spontaneous combustion upon my saying, “So long, jackass,” couldn’t these individuals at least be vanquished to some alternate universe where our paths are sure to never cross?
Considering that the number of people I’ve dated (in this state, at least) is reasonably small, I don’t think this is too much to ask, particularly when the lot of them is a freakish collection of unfortunate tools.
I ceased contact with these people for a reason; I don’t need confirmation that I made the right decision. Yet they continue to pop up in my life regardless. The other day, in fact, my personal space was invaded by The Count. Just a glimpse of this perv was enough to make his memory rise up in my throat like a bad shot of tequila, ruining what had been until that point, a perfectly lovely cup of tea.
He was another of the winners I had met on Match.com; a good-on-paper guy whose façade rapidly scabs and crumbles with the slightest bit of picking. Not that I knew this at the time. I was a newbie to the world of internet dating and was naïve enough to think that I’d scored the one intelligent attractive artist in the pool when his introductory email arrived.
He certainly had an impressive range of interests: French poetry (that he had actually read and not absorbed from reading books about Jim Morrison), Italian art, photography, motorcycles, and travel. We’d even read some of the same obscure philosophers, which is what clinched the deal for me when he asked if we could meet for coffee. I reasoned that if the guy could discuss Schopenhauer at any length, he couldn’t be harboring too many worrisome latent issues. Ahhh, youth.
The guy I had hoped to meet was a worldly charmer, the kind of guy I’d find in a dusty bookstore in Italy. I fancied him a combination of Johnny Depp (from The Ninth Gate) with a bit of Thomas Moore, Val Kilmer’s alter identity from The Saint thrown in. What I got was the Match.com version of the fantasy: an amalgam of Bella Lugosi and the Dracula from Sesame Street.
The Count had an odd aura about him. Initially I thought I was just reacting to his accent – which seemed a forced combination of several European inflections – but the more we talked over time, the more his disturbing traits oozed out. I have to give him credit though; he certainly managed, deliberately or otherwise, to mask all of his bizarre leanings into a quixotic package.
But his waters definitely ran more filthy than he let on. My first tip off came with his answer to a completely casual question about his painting.
“How do you handle artistic block?” I asked. “I know as a writer I can stare at a blank screen for hours.”
“Aaahhaaaa, yeeaaa,” he drawled. “I, too, have that problem. But I try to work in small bursts, and reward myself with an onanism session whenever I accomplish something.”
I don’t know if he was banking on my knowing the word “onanism” or not, but a quick check in Webster’s at home that night confirmed my suspicions: The Count had, on our very first meeting, told me that he jerks off whenever he paints.
I was both repulsed an intrigued. It was such an unusual way of saying it, I honestly couldn’t decide if he was being sleazy or just exhibiting some kind of European honesty. He wasn’t American by birth and had spent a great deal of time traveling abroad, so what I imagined to be a culture gap made it hard to make a judgment call on his motives.
Because I was still clinging to the morbidly romantic hope that we could share a bottle of wine in the rain while trading Baudelaire quotes, I accepted his offer for a second date.
He picked me up at my apartment and greeted me with a small stack of papers. “For your reading pleasure,” he said. “But do not read them now. I cannot bear for you to read them in front of me.”
Whatever, buddy. I grabbed my coat and let him take me to an art museum for the afternoon. It was such a surprisingly pleasant time, I saw no reason not to invite him back to my apartment after for a drink. Mind you, I had no intention of having sex with him. I really just wanted to sit and talk to the guy, which I told him explicitly before I even let him in.
“I understand [insert French word here that likely means “you unsuspecting little tramp”],” he said.
He turned down the glass of wine I offered, effectively killing one part of my fantasy by telling me he doesn’t drink. At all. Though I didn’t say it, I wondered how anyone who had lived in Paris for three years could return to the U.S. having not drunk a single glass of wine.
Then I learned that he was 35 and still living at home. By choice. And enjoying it.
“My mother,” he said. “She is a beautiful woman. You remind me of her.”
With that, every single internal alarm I had ignored up to that point began screaming in unison. What the hell was I doing? The Count wasn’t an international man of mystery; he was a creepy artist-in-residence looking for his own personal Madonna to defile. He started inching closer to me on the couch.
“Tell me about your eroticism,” he said. “I believe under your demure exterior, you are something more. Tell me, have you ever been D.P.-ed?”
Though it went against all my better judgment, I had to ask, “What is that?”
“Aaaah, my [insert French word that means “girl I am about to seduce with my seedy foreign charm”], I mean, have you ever been double-penetrated?”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. And he had the cheek to actually look offended, as if I had blown off a serious and thought-provoking question that would illuminate the depths of my soul. And who knows, maybe to him I had. But there was no way I was going to keep him there to bridge our cultural divide.
“It’s time for you to leave,” I said.
“But why?” he asked, brushing a lock of hair from my face. “I would like to lay with you on your bed. We do not have to be physical.”
As if that makes it okay. I pushed The Count out the door and sat down with my head in my hands. So much for my foreign fantasy man. As I walked to the kitchen for a healthy shot of vodka, I noticed the papers he had left me. It was ten random pages taken from a book he was writing about the loves of his life. The first two pages detailed how he got over his fear of urinating in public.
That was more than enough for me. I blocked his e-mail address and added his phone number under the “do not answer” entry in my address book.
The whole ordeal was enough to turn me off dating for several months. It took me that long to scrub his oily fingerprints from my skin. That’s why, three years later, seeing his smarmy figure greasing up the doorway of my favorite café was enough to make me want to bolt from the room.
He looked the same as he had before, and was even wearing the same motorcycle jacket he had on when we first met. The way he was scanning the room made me think he was meeting a date, and I prayed he wouldn’t notice me.
“Aaaaaah, you are Juliette, are you not?”
Damn. I wish I could say I had some brilliant retort that sent him sniveling back to his mother’s house. I wish that I could say that I slapped him the way I should have that day back at my old apartment.
“I’m not anyone who wants to talk to you, that’s who I am,” I said. He walked away, and I later saw him seated at another table with another girl. For her sake, I hope she’s never seen The Saint.
May 10th, 2007 at 9:38 pm
I’m crying over here! remind me again why i should do match.com? see ya soon!
May 11th, 2007 at 4:36 am
It’s the legs, Juliette; you have sexy legs. I remember you from your “Wild Side” broadcasting days. There’s no justifying the way that jerk(off) behaved, but if you, at any time, afforded him a nice gam shot, you may have (inadvertently) triggered the lech response.
December 26th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
“Why is it that people continue to exist after I discard them? ”
I thought I was the only one who felt like that. There is no sentence I have ever read that more closely connects with my private thoughts
December 28th, 2009 at 7:51 am
Glad you can commiserate. Thanks for reading!