So, I’ve been trying to break up with this guy, Mike OkC for the past year-and-a-half. It hasn’t been going so well, though. When he told me last year he was “in love with me”, it was a bit of a shocker, being that we had only met once in real life and had not even come close to engaging in carnal relations.
So, when he said he loved me and wanted to marry me, I set him straight. “I don’t feel that way…at all,” I said.
Months later, he wrote back. “You set down a pretty hard boundary, and I respect that. But I still love you. You are funny, witty, amazing, creative, beautiful. I’ll always love you.”
It was everything I ever wanted to hear—but from someone else.
MOkC is nine years younger than me, so I started thinking maybe I should go off in search of another starry-eyed younger guy. So, I went to an older women/younger men speed dating event.
I was flying pretty high on edibles and the vape I smoked on the subway platform before I arrived. No way was I was showing up to this event sober, which was held at an Indian restaurant with a fully stocked bar in the lower east side of Manhattan. I ordered a cold white wine. The barman, seeing my nervousness, kindly poured me a double, which I quickly gulped down.
I was curious to see who these young guys were, and more importantly who these older women were who I thought I might have something in common with. Perhaps, I thought, I could become friends with these women, and we could go off and have bold, daring adventures together.
The women were a sight to see. Neatly manicured nails, not a hair out of place, perfect makeup—if not a little overdone---skintight jeans, tall, black, leather boots, perfectly sculpted bodies with not an excess bit of fat. They all looked like they worked out 10 times a day. I was sufficiently intimidated. The men, meanwhile, had thick glasses and awkward hair arrangements. In short, it was the women from Petyon Place vs. Revenge of the Nerds.
I had a strong desire to leave, but I was sucking wine down at such a rapid rate, I knew I needed to steady myself before stepping out onto the streets.There were 10 men—if you can call them that—and 10 women, which meant there were 10 dates, and 80 whole minutes of talking, which, when I thought about it afterwards, was about 60 minutes too much talking time.
The first guy who floated up to my table was cute. He looked kind of like a frat boy. When I asked him how old he was, he leaned toward me and whispered, conspiratorially, “I lied about my age. I’m only 29, but you’re supposed to be at least 30.” I was horrified. He had the good sense not to ask my age.
The next guy, a nerdy East Indian computer scientist who looked about 22, started drilling me with questions like I was a suspected terrorist at Guantanamo Bay. “How was your day? What are your hobbies? What are your plans for the summer? What will you do this weekend?”
What weekend? When you’re a stoner like me, floating through the days in a strange city, all the days are the same. What could I tell him? I certainly couldn’t tell them—or anyone—the truth, which is that I fall asleep at 3 a.m. most nights, crawl out of bed around noon, that I spend most of my nights watching serial killer movies so I can avoid becoming a victim or else evade detection in case I one day decide to become a serial killer myself.
And on other nights when I’m tired of serial killer movies, I watch tv shows like “My 600-pound life”, so I don’t have to feel so bad about the 15 pounds I’ve gained post menopause.
There’s no way I can explain to any of these guys that I spend most of my days getting high and riding aimlessly around the subways, pacing up and down on the platforms, ranting and raving into a tape recorder to myself, taking notes for stories, I mostly end up not writing.
Most of these young guys, I noted, were from somewhere else—India, Mexico, Ecuador, Russia, Ukraine. Borris, the Ukrainian Jew with the one-inch-thick glasses looked like he was about to slit his throat. Bald-headed Viktor from Russia with the bright blue eyes, stared at me silently, with a cryptic smile on his face during our eight minutes together. I thought he might leap over the table and strangle me.
Desperate to fill the conversational void, I began asking, “So, what do you do for fun? Any plans for the summer?”
When I asked these guys why they liked older women, they said: “Older women know what they want, they’re more self-assured, more confident.”
“What do you like about younger guys,” they’d ask.
“I don’t!" I’d say. “I’m just tired of being objectified by older men my whole life—men 20 or 30 years older than me. Yuck!”
I didn’t bother to acknowledge the irony of that statement.
When the hostess—thank God--finally rang the silver bell, signaling it was time to leave, I rushed out to the street, dazed and full of relief, and began searching for the subway.
“Excuse me, did you just come from the event? How was it?” a young guy on the street asked me.
“It was… a bit…. lukewarm, I’d say,” I said.
“Would you go out on a date with me?” he asked.
I eyed him skeptically. He was handsome enough. “Well, you can help me find the subway station, if you like.” He must have been standing out on the street, hoping to meet whoever came out, like a grizzly bear standing in the stream, catching salmon swimming upstream.
And I, if nothing else, was definitely swimming upstream. We chatted along the way, and I told him I was a freelance writer and a college English teacher. He said he was a freelance writer, too, but mostly wrote a kind of science fiction which sounded quite dreadful.
As promised, he walked me to the subway, and I gave him my phone number. “We’ll go on a real date,” he said.
“Yeah, we can hang out sometime,” I said.
“No, let’s do a real date,” he said.
Oh, no, I thought. Another stalker, as I descended the subway steps.