So, my friend, Julie—like most of my close family and friends—is kind of a nut job. We met when I was a freshman at UC Berkeley, and she was a first-year law student.
She set me up on my first blind date when I was 18. She said to my prospective date: “You’re both virgins! You can lose your virginity together!”
“Julie!” I squealed, my face turning red.
“What? I’m in a hurry. I gotta go!”
Two years later, Julie set me up with one of her ex-boyfriends, Robert (aka, Robert the Psychopath)—a brilliant UCLA physics student, trying to find a cellular cure for death.
When I admitted to him I wanted to date his best friend instead of him, he nearly drove us off a mountainside cliff.
“But if we die now, you won’t find a cure for death,” I argued.
“It won’t matter. We’ll both be dead,” he said.
Now, 35-plus years later, miraculously still alive, Julie hasn’t given up on me yet. In her day job, Julie is a towering success-- a Joan of Arc, Atilla the Hun, Never-Loses-a-Case, Secret Weapon of the L.A. District Attorney’s Office. She has put away mass murderers, child molesters, drug cartel ring leaders, etc.
She is relentless as a prosecutor, and equally relentless as a matchmaker. She’s happily married to a saintly man who barely minds her chatting away with men on dating cites to try to find matches for her single female friends. I always feel sorry for the men Julie meets online who chat with a happy, flirtatious, aggressively friendly, game-for-anything woman and then wonder what in the hell happened when they meet the real match, i.e., me, a reluctant, guarded, depressive, taciturn, misanthrope.
There should be a court where people can sue for these bait and switch games Julie, and I like to play.
Recently, Julie and I meet a really nice guy, J, who seems to match my criteria—educated, nice, not an obvious psychopath. For our date, J shows up exactly on time, dressed in a stylish black leather jacket, clean blue jeans, hair slicked back with a handsome face. When he steps into the house, I, at 5’5” wearing ¾ inch combat boots, tower over him.
Julie and I give each other the “oh shit” look in her hallway mirror as J reaches down to pet Julie’s dog. He must be 5’2”, just a few inches shy of being a dwarf. But what am I to do? Say, you’re too short? There’s no way I can be that rude. So, I get in his car, which smells freshly cleaned and fragranced with pine-cone spray. We chat together easily, and I look at his tiny hands with tiny fingers and then down to his tiny feet. He’s handsome, like a miniature Ken Doll. I wonder what else is tiny. I try not to think of such indelicate matters.
"So, what are you looking for in a partner?" he asks.
"Mostly someone who laughs at my jokes," I say.
"So, tell me a joke," he says.
"That was the joke," I say.
He laughs. I smile.
He’s picked an expensive restaurant in Malibu overlooking the ocean. We speak of books and movies and music. I tell him I’m reading an anthology of stories about serial killers.
“That way if I get kidnapped, I’ll know how to escape. Or, if I decide to become a serial killer, I’ll know how to evade detection.”
We order vegetarian zoodles with pasta sauce, plain cheese pizza, and expensive red wine.He smiles at me widely as we eat, the Pacific Ocean glimmering in the background behind him.
“So, I peaked at your Facebook page,” he says.
Oh God. I hold my breath, waiting to see what he’ll say next.
“I love your art. How did you learn to paint like that?” he asks.
My heart skips a beat. This is what I want in a man—someone who likes my art.
Goddamn, I think. Why am I such a superficial asshole? Why can’t I like this guy?
There’s no way this will work anyway. He lives in a planned unit development with a neatly manicured lawn and HOA rules. I live in the country with a wild yard and a loud crowing rooster for a neighbor. He’s a vice principal of a school. I’m a pot smoker who often sleeps till noon.
When I tell him this, he asks, “Do you think you could cut your pot smoking in half and wake up two hours earlier?”
“Absolutely not,” I say, slurping down the last of my wine. I am far too old to start compromising and changing now.
On the way out of the restaurant, I glance at our reflections in the window. It is as I thought. I am towering over him. I look like a mother taking her teen-aged son out for pizza.
On the ride back, we talk of politics and the evils of Donald Trump. He interrupts me as I rant.
“Look at the moonlight on the ocean,” he says, pointing at the water.
“Yes,” I say, looking at the beautiful, intractable ocean.
Of course, that changes nothing. I know I'm not going to be interested in a second date with him. Dating is not about making friends. Ultimately, it's about finding someone you want to get naked with. And I'm just not feeling it.
As we pull up alongside Julie’s house, he asks, “So, how long are you in town for? Do you want to go bike riding this Saturday?”
“I wish I could, but I’m going home that day,” I say.
I squirm guiltily in my seat. I shouldn’t be this superficial, but I am. I want to put my arm around him and say, “Don’t feel bad. Dating is brutal for everyone. As Julie always says, finding a mate isn’t like finding a needle in a haystack. It’s really more like finding a piece of hay in a stack of needles.”
Instead, I tell him a lie: “I can give you a call next time I'm down in L.A. if you want.”
“Sure,” he says. “Can I at least have a hug?”
“Of course,” I say, and I lean over and wrap my arms around his tiny leather-covered frame. I wave to him from the door as he watches me get safely inside.
The I think why not?
I get lost along the way, so I ask a city groundskeeper, a middle-aged Black man for help. “Sure, I’ll show you,” he says.
We walk around, trying to find the entrance when we spot a group of schoolchildren being led by two orthodox Hasidic women, dressed in long sleeves, their hair wrapped in turbans
“You going to the zoo?” the man asks. “Can she come with you?”
The women ignore him, like he’s not there. When I ask, they point to the entry way.
“You see?” says the man, “That’s what it’s like to be a Black man in America.”’
“Yeah, that’s bullshit,” I say.
“Like I want to steal their kids. What am I going to do with a bunch of kids?”
I laugh. “Yeah, I don’t want those kids, either!”
Inside the zoo, I buy a pack of potato chips and sit at picnic table under an umbrella. A young orthodox Jewish woman with her head wrapped in a teal blue turban and a baby in a carriage asks if she can join me. “Sure,” I say. A peacock, approaches us, its face looking like a prehistoric dinosaur, its beak coming dangerously close to us, demanding potato chips. We laugh and give him a few crumbs.
The woman tells me her 42-year-old husband just suffered a heart attack. She says she thinks his ex-mother-in-law put a curse on him, or perhaps it was something bad he did in a past life—“if you believe in that sort of thing,” she says.
I laugh. “I’m from California We all believe in that sort of thing.”
We discuss the best way to deflect the mother-in-law’s curse. When she gets up to go, she says, “I’m going to give you a blessing. For safety. And clarity. Especially for clarity.”
Clarity? What is it about me she knows that I don’t?
It’s a small zoo and not much to see, but the baboon exhibit fascinates me. I watch a mother baboon nurse her baby and yank him back by its tail when he tries to run off. A junior male walks up to the alpha male, shows him his red-cheeked butt, and the alpha male gives him a back massage and picks bugs out of his fur. Apparently, that’s what baboons do when they greet each other—they show each other their butts as a way of saying, “here’s everything you need to know about me—nothing to be scared of.”
Tonight, I’m meeting James in East Village in Manhattan for drinks and karaoke. We had a great time on our karaoke date last year, so I’m excited to see him again. My train is late, so I text my sister—a realtor—who can do criminal background checks and ask her to run his phone number. I didn’t ask her last year because he seemed so nice. I’m shocked with what she sends back: A sexual felony assault for sex with an 18-year-old girl when she was a student, and he was an educator back in the early ‘90s. They were close in age, so there’s a good chance it was consensual sex. Plus, the case was dropped. Then there’s the heroin/cocaine charge which he plead guilty to.
I don’t know what to make of this. All this happened 30 years ago. My friend, Rosemary, later, will argue that people change. But I don’t know. I’ve seen people change for the worse, but rarely for the better. I’m on the train now, 15 minutes away from him. Do I cancel, do I show up and whip out his arrest record, and demand answers?
I decide to play it by ear. I meet him at a bar called One and One. It’s a beautiful Manhattan evening, the skyscrapers casting a mountain-like alpine glow as the sun sets. He sips his beer. I order a wine. I don’t know how to bring up the disturbing text, so I don’t. He marvels at my adventuresome spirit to leave my small town. We talk about our brilliant fathers—my world-famous chemical engineer father, and his dad, a brilliant physicist.
“Wait a minute,” I say. “This is the same conversation we had last year."
He pauses. “Yeah, you might be right. But I don’t remember it,” he says.
So, we continue our conversation—the same one from last year-- like we’re riding a train at Disneyland, stuck on a preset, track going round and round on a track that keeps leading us back to the same place--nowhere.
At the karaoke bar, I chat with a young Black guy in a red dinner jacket, sitting next to me. He leans into me and says, “I’m so excited I’m dating a normal/healthy guy. It’s the first nontoxic relationship I’ve had.”
“Good for you!” I say. I want to hug him.
He points to James, “Is that your boyfriend?”
I grimace at him conspiratorially and give my head a slight shake “no”.
James notices I’m quiet. “Is everything ok?” he asks.
“Yes, I’m just a little tired,” I say.
I’m trying to have fun, but I feel deflated after my sister’s text. Are there no good guys out there? My ex-husband who seemed like a dream come true turned out to be a white- collar predator.
James asks me again on our way back to the subway what happened with my husband. I tell him he was arrested for allegedly bilking innocent people out of millions of dollars. “He was completely different than who I thought. Has that ever happened to you where someone was completely different than who you thought?” I ask pointedly.
“No,” he says.
It’s the perfect time to ask about his past, but it seems weird bringing it up now. He’ll wonder why I didn’t ask him earlier or why I went out with him at all. I’ll have to admit I snooped into his past --that I know things about him he doesn’t know I know. It’s almost like sneaking a peek at someone naked without them knowing. It feels wrong somehow. How would I feel if someone confronted me about the worst thing I’ve ever done on our first or second date?
Even if I asked, he’d just lie. No one tells the whole truth about themselves. Ever. It’s not like we’re two baboons showing each other our red-bottomed asses, saying, "here’s my deepest, darkest secret. Tell me yours and we can give each other back massages and pick gnats out of each other’s fur.”
When we reach my stop, I give him a quick hug good-bye, and walk past the zoo. I think of the baboons snuggled in for the night and make my way home alone.