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My Year in NYC Dating
part one: Obsessive Hot Guy |
| by chumwater |
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This year a particularly bad Valentine's Day drove me to crawl under a table with a bottle of scotch, where I was able to peacefully contemplate a year-long circus of romantic disasters and all-around dating suckyness. Several days later I emerged from my sanctuary to share this story; journey with me now as we revisit the endless freak parade that is my dating life. Don’t fret, this isn’t some hackneyed Sex and The City-like whining exploration of oversimplified relationship issues, nor is it some Friendsian gee-I-can’t-believe-I-dated-your-sister routine. These, friends, are the inexplicably bizarre situations that result when chumwater enters the dating pool. And to those who keep saying if you just stick with it something's bound to work out, I say read on.
Obsessive Hot Guy
I met Obsessive Hot Guy at a fashion week party; he was the hottest thing not modeling Gaultier. A magazine photographer, irresistibly drawn to the gravitational pull of Hot Guy's hotness, zoomed over and snapped our photo. Only fifteen minutes ago I’d pegged him as the hottest guy in the room and now we were exchanging numbers; it was too good to be true.
On a side note my new mantra is "Be careful what you wish for".
Two nights later he shows up fifteen minutes late to meet me at a Chelsea restaurant. He stands by my table and somberly asks if he can see me outside; as I follow him out I assume something awful has happened and the date’s off. Instead he hands me a bouquet of flowers that he’d left on the sidewalk, his way of apologizing for the lateness. Then he curses his stupidity for creating the embarrassment of burdening me with flowers in public. I’m not embarrassed, but I can see he’s really distressed so we go back to my place, drop off the flowers, then walk back to the restaurant where the waitress is wondering what happened to me.
He puzzles over the menu for a curiously long time, then asks a series of questions from the waitress, including "Can you see the onions in this? I’ll eat onions but I won’t eat anything where you can see onions" and "Does this come with a sticky brown sauce? I don’t like anything with a sticky brown sauce." After carefully negotiating the pitfalls of potential sticky brown sauces and visible onions, he fidgets anxiously while we wait for his order. Glancing nervously at the next table he expresses concern over the possibility that what they were eating might be what he just ordered. "I really hope not," he explains, "because that smells like cafeteria food and I can’t eat things that smell like cafeteria food." He doesn’t drink and now I’m too afraid to ask why.
His pulled chicken sandwich and mashed potatoes arrive and after meticulously dissecting everything on the plate with the back of a fork he sighs, proclaims that he can in fact see onions, and, dejected, sends everything back to the kitchen. I decide it’s time to leave, drop a big tip on the table, and coax him outside.
He wants me to find another restaurant. Against my better judgement I reluctantly ask what kind of restaurant he likes. And here is what kind of restaurant he likes: "Not too dark and not too smoky, not too crowded and not too expensive and not one where the tables are too close together, not too brightly lit and not too trendy and not too loud and not a place with too big a menu but one that has good choices." This guy’s like a coked up Goldilocks with ADD. He’s just eliminated every restaurant in Manhattan in a single breath so I suggest he pick a place instead. He chooses Big Cup, a tacky Chelsea coffee shop, where he orders a grapefruit soda and the biggest rice krispies bar I’ve ever seen. When he’s done he asks if I want to go somewhere else for coffee.
I’m torn between the conflicting desire to sleep with him and the increasingly strong desire of pummeling him into unconsciousness. And don’t think I didn’t consider that the two aren’t mutually exclusive. In the end I got him home and we fooled around until 2am when he abruptly jumped up in mid-fondle and announced he had to be somewhere. He was in the middle of tucking in his shirt and telling me what a great time he had and that he was going to call me when I slammed the door in his face and bolted the lock.
A week later the experience was immortalized in print when we turned up on the photo page of a local magazine, arms around each other.
Next time: Adventures in Digital Dating |
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| March 28, 2003 |
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