Cocaine, Tequila and a Trip To Atlantic City – Happy Birthday To Me

“Will I die if I do this?” I whispered frantically into the phone from a toilet stall in Long Branch, New Jersey. “This” meaning the little packet of white powder I nearly dropped into the bowl. 1970. 1990. 2020. Some things never change. People are still clumsily dropping little packets of white powder into toilet bowls, especially after several double shots of Don Julio.

“This guy is crazy,” she said. “It’s a Tuesday during a pandemic. I’m frightened for what he’s like on a Friday.”

 “I don’t think it’s his typical Tuesday,” I said, although how much do you really know about someone you met a half-hour ago? On Tinder?

“What happened to the anesthesiologist? Did he dump you for yelling GET ME THE MICHAEL JACKSON DRUG”

 “No, and that was a joke. He’s on his boat. He’s always on his boat.

This boating thing is like a rich white people epidemic. All summer, I was turning down boat invites. I get seasick and not in a cute “baby, please get me a ginger ale” way. In a “horking over the side of the boat while praying for death” kind of way. I didn’t understand half of what these guys were talking about anyway. Boat-speak sounds like Klingon. The only thing I know is, “I like the cut of your jib” and “Chips ahoy!” which I’m pretty sure doesn’t even count.

I had just started dating again, after taking off 18 months. Anyone who online dates will understand why I needed a break. It’s emotionally draining. For every fifty people you match with, you will find one plausible candidate. Online dating, however, is quite convenient during a quarantine. You can lose your faith in humanity in the privacy of your own home.

Online dating hadn’t changed, only this time I was different. I was selfish about who I gave precious free time to. I won’t spend time with douchebags, when I have important things to do like watch Mark Maron talk to his cat on Instagram.

Now when they annoyed me, I deleted them rather than date them. They revealed themselves early in the conversations:

“Are you bikini ready?” – Sexist asshole. Delete

“Let’s meet at Home Depot” – Is this a date or an episode of Design on a Dime? Delete

“What are you cooking?” – For a second date? Delete

“There really is no pandemic. This whole thing is a hoax.” – Scary Tinfoil Hat Conspiracy Guy. Delete and Block.

“I think Trump is fantastic” – Block, delete, and wish him dick cancer.

The man I was out with hadn’t said or done anything annoying, and furthermore, he wasn’t afraid to make dinner plans. So many men are scared they’ll get stuck picking up a dinner bill for someone who isn’t Playmate of the Month. That’s a man’s biggest online dating fear – that the woman will be 20 pounds heavier than her pictures. My biggest online dating fear is that I’ll end up in trapped in a cage by a psycho who’s dancing around with his dick tucked in while cutting a McCall’s sewing pattern to make a dress out of my skin. But this guy made reservations at a swanky lobster place on the beach, and although he didn’t know it, it was the night before my birthday.

My date was funny, confident, talkative, just like someone with a snout full of cocaine should be. He threw around hundred dollar bills like they were condoms at Planned Parenthood. He tipped the waitress $100 before we even ordered. He’s that guy. I know, I know, things are really BAD for people these days. I shouldn’t be condoning such a vulgar display of reckless extravagance, but I found him highly entertaining. He had that “joie de vivre,” which is French for “Republican tax loophole.”

When we first sat down, I ordered white wine, but after he ordered a double shot of Don Julio tequila with lime juice, I caved. Tequila is my kryptonite. Over dinner he showed me a bag of edibles he had gotten in California (did he fly home with those? Are edibles easy to smuggle? Asking for a friend). He also presented me with my own little baggie of cocaine (he had 10 of them) and suggested I go into the bathroom to powder my nose.

The problem with being a degenerate is that it’s impossible to turn down drugs, even when you’re middle-aged and at a five-star restaurant. No one would ‘just say no’ to blow while watching the sunset over the beach, eating lobsters the size of puppies. Well, maybe some people would, but those are people with 401k plans. My financial plan is “work till I die.” Which brings us current to my phone call from the restaurant bathroom. No, gentle reader, I did not have a heart attack. What I did have was a trickle of white snot dribbling out of my nose onto an upper lip I couldn’t feel, and the ability to drink myself senseless without passing out. Remember those days?

We closed down the restaurant at 10pm, and he said,”LET’S GO TO ATLANTIC CITY,” and because I’m me, I said “SURE” Which is how I wound up hurtling along the New Jersey Turnpike at 11 pm on a Tuesday in a spaceship disguised as a Mercedes. When we got in his car, we face-timed with his two teenage sons so I would know he was not a serial killer, but don’t serial killers have families? I would have gone anyway. Who am I to turn down an opportunity to gamble in Atlantic City in the middle of the night with a cokehead Tinder date on a random Tuesday? You don’t just walk out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. 

On the two hour drive down we ate edibles, and he was playing Grateful Dead live concert tapes, which, if you know the Dead, contain no songs. Just long drugged-out jams which went perfectly with driving 90 miles an hour on a deserted highway in a posh Benz he had taken back from his ex-wife after she fucked the pool boy. The seats were massaging me – did you get that? The SEATS WERE GIVING ME AN ASS MASSAGE –  and the instrument panel was flashing and beeping like we were on the deck of the Starship Enterprise. The whole experience reminded me of tripping my ass off at college, except in a car that cost more than my education. Very surreal.

Midnight, speeding along the New Jersey turnpike at 90mph, and I fantasize myself as Jackson Pollock. Drunk, angry, careening down the road in East Hampton, losing control at a curve, car plunging into the woods rolling over and over. Pollock at the driver’s seat, decapitated. A death like that is cinematic enough to suit me, except it’s only an artist’s death if you’re an acknowledged artist when it happens.

1:00 am on a Tuesday, and the casino was packed with debauched gamblers. Why? How? For what reason? I was filled with questions that I answered by ordering more double shots of tequila. “I’ll only blow a thousand dollars before I call it a night,” he said and began stuffing fifties into the slot machine.

And that’s how I wound up playing Wheel of Fortune in an Atlantic City casino till the sun rose into a gray milky dawn, the morning of my birthday. By that time, the edibles had kicked in, the room was breathing, and I was certain I’d find the meaning of life in the patterns in the carpet.

Please don’t think I have an exciting life. I was so bored during lockdown I started teaching my dog to do new tricks, only I don’t have a dog, so what was that about? I spent the last six months quarantined with a teenager. With a TEENAGER, people. The most dangerous thing I did was eat a gently expired cantaloupe.

This was a night reminiscent of the old days before I’d moved out of the city and become a Mother and a Responsible Human Being. It was an attempt to recapture something that I know is long gone, if only for a night.

I’m friends with my date, who I affectionately refer to as “The Human Snowblower” but I haven’t continued dating him because I don’t want to die. We text occasionally and when he mentions getting together, I make excuses, like “I can’t because I don’t want to die.”

But damn, that night was fun.

And I’ll never be that young again.

It’s been a minute, and I’ve missed all of you. Talk to me. 
I’m listening…

The Phone Call

 

“So, basically you just said anything so you could fuck me, is that it?”

He answered without hesitation.

“Yes. Of course!”

His blunt honesty dumbfounded me momentarily, the way an oncoming headlight blinds you. Disoriented by his unabashed admission, I blurted out a rhetorical, “But why?”

“Why do you think?” he said. “Because that’s what men DO. We tell you what we want to hear so we can have sex with you.”

I wanted this to not be true, despite the fact that I believed it was. I should have hung up on him right then. But now I felt like I had stumbled upon a tunnel into a secret room where All The Questions would finally be answered truthfully. And I am a truth seeker.

“All men, all the time? Or just you, because seriously, you were relentless!”

“Oh, you were definitely work,” he said, “but I knew if I kept feeding you what you wanted to hear, I’d get you eventually. But yeah, all men, all the time. Married, single, whatever. We say what we have to say so we can get laid. It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to work.”

I needed air.

I cracked my car window open and the cry of cicadas suddenly filled my car in surround-sound. They were louder than usual, and harsher, as if their haunting vibrato was the audio manifestation of my inner despair.

I was in my car driving home from open school night when I had called him to tell him that no, we weren’t going to be seeing each other anymore and that I didn’t like the way his behavior had changed. That he had gone from months of constant dogged attention to a more disinterested and sporadic communication.

After we had sex, that is.

Now I was pulled over on an unknown street, my car idling in the dark. Up ahead, I could see the lights of the stores still open on Route 9, and I fought the intense urge to drive to a nearby 7-Eleven and buy cigarettes. I hadn’t smoked in years, but suddenly I really, really needed one.

“So that whole first conversation we had, when we were on the phone for hours – was everything you said designed to get in my pants? I wasn’t even going to meet you, but you convinced me to have dinner with you that first night with all the shit you laid on me, about how women are emotional and sensitive and men need to be strong and supportive for them.”

“Yep. I knew that’s what you wanted to hear, so I said it. We had a great dinner didn’t we? We must have, because look where it led. I thought of it as an investment.”

“Dude, that is fucking cold! I mean, I’m jaded as fuck, but really?”

“Really.”

Fuck cigarettes. I needed tequila and opiates.

I said to him, “I don’t even want a relationship! Not a romantic relationship, but just friendship. So when I told you that I couldn’t commit to a relationship, but that I did want a man who would be there for me as a friend, you said you wanted to be that man just to fuck me?”

“Yep!” He laughed. “Why does this surprise you?’

I hated the way he sounded. Cold. Detached. The cruelty tingeing his voice gave him a hardness that didn’t even sound like the man I had spent time with.

“It doesn’t surprise me, ” I answered. “It’s just disappointing. Despite the fact that I think most people suck, I still want to believe that there might be a few decent human beings left. But this is exactly why I don’t get involved. This.”

“I thought you said you wanted to have this discussion in person,” he said. “Why don’t you come over?”

“Come over??!” I was aghast at his inane suggestion. “Because my kid is waiting for me at home, and also, I’d punch you in your face now if I came over!”

He chuckled. “I doubt that. How tall are you? I’m 6’4.”

“Are you drunk? You’re just shy of six feet! What, did you suddenly grow four-”

I stopped.
“Who is this??” I demanded.

“This is Michael. Who is this?”

I looked down at my phone.

I had dialed the wrong number.

 

Did you ever dial a wrong number and have a wake-up call?
Talk to me. I’m listening. 

 

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Samara In Tinderland

Tinder – lowering sexual standards since 2012.

Tinder is the fast food of online dating – quick, cheap, and temporarily curbs your hunger. Although I’m sure people have met their significant others on Tinder –  just given the sheer quantity using it – it has an undeniably sleazy quality to it.

No judgments here. I like the sleaze.

Tinder combines everything that is wrong with society – hook up culture, chatting with people without real interaction, the desire for instant gratification, making snap judgments, rejecting people solely upon their looks – into one convenient online shopping-type app!

A veritable smorgasbord of single (ha!) people! Swipe and go!

 

In a recent article that I made up, the CEO of Tinder argued that Tinder is a progressive social construct which gives legitimacy to the online dating phenomenon.

They left out the part where you don’t need to have even $5 in your pocket to leave the house and purchase a beer somewhere. Or the ability to hold even the most rudimentary of real-life conversations.

And yet, people everywhere are getting laid off this app. It’s the cyber version of grunting, clubbing a woman over the head, and dragging her back to your cave for hot troglodyte sex.

It’s also free. That gives you an idea of the financial status of many Tinderonis. I’m not saying it’s teeming with broke-ass motherfuckers, but apparently, I appeal to a great many of them.

Perhaps because I look kinda funky in my profile pics, and am holding a guitar in one, I attract a lot of artist-writer-musician types. No one should give up his dream. However, if you’re approaching 50 and your artsy dream doesn’t include being able to afford a studio apartment, perhaps it’s time to modify your dream? To one that includes a steady paycheck, and perhaps a dental plan because OMG are you kidding with those teeth?

 

There are men who actually open with gross sexual overtures, like “Hi! Spit, or swallow?” Oh, WOW, it’s like Sophie’s Choice, how can I make that decision?! I will probably want to do both, you suave devil, you!

Some men are either trying desperately to be quirky, or English is not their first language. I don’t want to meet “I’m half a camel, I once tipped a stripper in McNuggets.”

There are quite a few men with that “restraining order” look in their eyes. Their profiles tend to go something like, “BOOM! YOU BITCHES CAN’T HANDLE THIS. THE PARTY’S ALL UP IN HERE. POW!” (And other cartoon fight sounds. Kapow!)

I don’t understand what motivates someone to pose shirtless in a club, guzzling a bottle of vodka, with his arm around another chick. The 1995 rave called, it wants its sweaty chest picture back.

Some men put up only picture of their face, then FIVE pictures of random objects. Like, 5 car pics. Their profiles say things like “Love cars, weed, partying.” Fabulous! Let’s get stoned and DRIVE AROUND, SHALL WE? I would love to court death with a guy who describes himself as a “SWAGASAURUS.”

 

I may need to join a different online dating service, one that costs actual money to join and requires that you have reasonable proficiency with the use of your opposable thumbs.

I did meet a handsome, sweet, funny guy. He made me laugh, which is always a plus. I was about to give him my number when he asked me if he could tell me about a certain “fetish” he has.
I’m pretty open, so I was curious.

He has a “crush” fetish. DON’T GOOGLE THIS. YOU CANNOT UNSEE THIS.

There are two levels. Level 1 is getting turned on by insects and other invertebrates being crushed. Level 2 is getting sexually turned by small vertebrates, like kittens or bunny rabbits, getting crushed to death.

WTF? Is this Tinder, or an episode of Criminal Minds? That night I wept for humanity and slept with a Bible under my pillow.

 

There are so many bizarre encounters on Tinder…

…people MUST be using it for the entertainment. I know I do.

This dude is one of my favorites. His picture is from a Purina Puppy Chow ad. He loves to hold conversations with me that make ZERO sense. He rarely responds to anything I say, so I’ve just begun saying random things – to see if he’s even reading what I wrote.

I’m pretty sure he’s a bot.

Another man rambled on and on about what we would do, once we were a “couple,” despite the fact that we hadn’t even MET yet. Here’s an excerpt:

What a fun-filled night! Perhaps I’ll even get to squeeze a few of his blackheads!

 

Despite the fact that Tinder is yet another nail in the coffin of Western civilization,

it’s a fun app and I’m keeping it because hey – I’M on there, right? So it can’t be ALL bad.

Now I just need to find the male version of myself. Although, some might argue I’m already the male version of myself.

It might be the fast food of online dating, but I won’t deny that even I crave some Micky D’s once in a while.

Of course, McDonald’s won’t give you herpes…

 

Have you been on Tinder? Or other online dating services?
Did you meet your significant other that way? IS THERE HOPE? 

Talk to me. I’m listening. 

 

Join me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, so I can have friends without leaving the house. 

Spring Fever

You know that thing where you’re walking down the street and men can tell you’ve just had sex? They must have some kind of fornication radar.

If I leave a friend’s apartment in the city, after we’ve had some #sexytimes, and walk a little ways before catching a cab, men will follow me down the street. Not in a scary way. In a “Hey baby, I don’t know you but would you like to come back to my apartment even though your head might end up in my freezer?” kind of way.

Okay, that’s pretty scary.

Guys are very forward in New York. It’s an urban thing, I think. You don’t get ogled as openly in the suburbs as you do when you stroll through Lincoln Center after two hours of hardcore car sex.

Not that I have done that.

Car sex is the suburbs dirty little secret. All those minivan-driving soccer moms and dads don’t tell you the real reason they bought that Honda Odyssey is, back row comes out, middle row folds down flat, voila! it’s a bed.

The parking lot at the gym is like a scene from Caligula.

Spring fever. It’s totally a Thing, and I have it. It makes me want to do crazy things, like jump in my car and drive 13 hours straight to Nashville, to hang out with my college bestie who now lives there. Even after the debacle we had there last year.

This past weekend, one of her fave bands came in from Columbus, Ohio to perform and they crashed at her house. Six guys. They were perfect gentlemen, by the way, those Midwestern boys. They drank two cases of beer and put every CAN IN THE RECYCLING BIN and no, that is NOT a euphemism for sex.

 

So, getting back to spring fever. It’s Monday evening and all I can think about is how much I love tequila. I would love to knock back a couple of shots of Patron this very minute, but that would fuck up the whole homework vibe.

Today, I had my annual gynecological exam. We ladies have to get our vajetable gardens rotated once a year. I used to see the female doctor in the practice until she impersonated female SS guard Irma Grese and tried to electrocute me from inside my smush mitten during a routine “procedure,” so now I see the doctor who delivered my kid.

The thing is, the doctor is really good-looking. He was cute back then, but 12 years has made him much sexier. Which is something that ONLY HAPPENS TO MEN. He’s now ‘handsome in a late 40’s man’ way, instead of ‘cute in a boy’ way, and he has a great personality, and I have spring fever and did I mention how handsome he is?

He was all up in my bajingo and asking personal questions about my sex life, and the next thing I know I was saying flirty things and batting my eyelashes at him.

I have no idea how that happened. Yes, it was sort of surreal. Plus there was a woman in the room, she’s always there and she’s about 100 years old. I think she might be his mother?

No, that would be completely weird. But she’s old and motherly and she’s always there when he gives pelvic exams but she really didn’t interfere with our flirty flow and I’m suddenly very, very glad I’m anonymous.

 

After that, I went to the supermarket and within 12 seconds, some dude was hitting on me at the deli counter. And I never get hit on at the supermarket. The gas station is usually my jam. Yeah, I’m like Miss America in the Field of Dreams at the ol’ gas station, and those attendants are typically delighted with me. Or maybe it’s my red hair, which in their country means that I’m a prostitute.

The point is, Supermarket Guy knew someone had just been all up in my business, even in a routine medical way.

 

Is online dating for the dregs of humanity, or is that just my experience? So far, I’ve had a guy ask me about wearing diapers, and another one inquire as to how much I enjoyed doing laundry. One man in his mid 40’s told me he was a freelance “painter/filmmaker/writer” which is code for “waiting for my parents to die.”

The most recent man online sent me pictures of the trophies he earned as champion of that card game “Magic: The Gathering.” He’s hoping I will accompany him to an upcoming comic convention, and as enticing as that sounds, I’m busy that weekend shaving the lint off my socks.

Those were the good ones. One man messaged me “I WILL PAY YOU $2 FOR YOUR SOCKS I WILL LITERALLY PAY YOU TO PEE ON A SOCK WHY DOES GOD HATE ME SO MUCH I AM SO FUCKING LONELY.”

 

Online dating is terrifying, because when you meet these people they want to have actual conversations with you about the healing properties of bone broth popsicles which is why I prefer to meet where the music is VERY LOUD.

I become even more non-filtered when I’m feeling socially anxious. While in Portland with my college bestie, I was doing my best wingman for her while some dude chatted her up at a coffee bar/drug dispensary.

I’m not sure how the conversation turned to her being a cancer survivor, but he refused to believe it. He started out flattering, telling her she was so full of life and energy and zeitgeist and joie de vivre and KonMari. Then he became super annoying and finally I interjected with, “What are you saying? CAT Scans or it didn’t happen?”
I guess you had to be there.

*This blog post brought to you by one long, continuous unedited stream of consciousness at the behest of my girl GKelly who suggested I write about flirting during a pelvic exam, after I posted it on Facebook.

Do you have spring fever? Have you had some weird online dating experiences?
What about weird gynecological experiences?
Talk to me. I’m listening. 

Join me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter  so I can have friends without leaving the house.