The White Board Incident

When I was a freshman in college I fell for my first girlfriend (we’ll call her Claire) hard. I knew that she flirted around with anything that had a pulse but I was wearing love-smeared glasses with blue frames and I couldn’t see very far beyond them. So after a few months of intense drama (my friend who happened to be Claire’s roommate acted as our go-between so there was a lot of she said/she said) and flirting, we were officially dating…for about a week. The weekend our brief relationship ended we were both drunk. Wait, let me rephrase that: she waited until she was drunk before she broke up with me. Apparently she needed liquid courage to do the deed. Not only did she wait to get drunk before breaking my heart, but immediately afterwards she went in search of her crush and asked her out! Already being in love with somebody else, the other chick said no, breaking Claire’s poor little heart. (I actually didn’t find that out until two years later from a friend of the other chick. Dra-ma.)

So anyway, to the white board incident. Seeing as my first gf broke my heart into microscopic pieces, I was angry. So angry in fact that the following year I still wasn’t over it. I was out partying with some friends when I ran into a former love interest of Claire’s, whom we will call David, who was an acquaintance of mine. I asked him what was up and he was like,

“I was just hanging out with Claire…”

“What were you two doing?” I queried.

“You’ll have to ask her that,” he replied.

What the shit kinda response is that?

“I will,” I said.

Naturally I assumed they’d been having sex (which was unlikely because he had a gf at the time) and my jealousy and memory of rejection were inflamed. I went marching up to her dorm room, with a concerned friend trailing behind trying to get me not to go, spitting obscenities about Claire. When I was within earshot of her open dorm window I yelled,

“Where is she? She’s probably fucking David.”

Of course, I knew this was not the case, having just seen him three minutes ago in the opposite direction.

I managed to get into her dorm and I was in the process of writing an angry, drunken message on the white board on her door, when I suddenly found myself on my back on the hall floor, white board in hand. When I realized I had fallen and torn the board off her door, I simultaneously noticed a pair of feet standing in her doorway. They were hers. She had heard my shitty remark and was now yelling at me. I don’t remember exactly what she said but I’m sure, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” was in there somewhere. Oh, I do remember asking her what she had been doing with David and she said it was none of my business...True enough, but my heart still hurt and I didn’t know how to heal it.

I took off running in embarrassment. I called the next morning to humbly apologize but I only got more yelling and not for another two years after that did we speak to each other as friends.

That’s the worst dating experience of my dating career.

Do I Get To Be the Pitcher or Catcher?

No joke, a guy left the above note on my windshield at the gym a few days ago. It reads:

"Dude - Couldn't help but notice you as you parked here - Nice. If you interested in some discreet masculine hot man to man .... 350-xxxx"

So I've never been hit on by a dude before. How do you figure out who takes it and who gives it? Does the upside down carrot insertion of "masculine" mean he wants to do me in the butt? Or does that after-thought addition mean I get to be the pitcher?

I dunno. I've never really been into felching.

Unspoken Rules

** Editors' Note: J.Ho sent us this a few days ago. Hopefully we'll get another update about GI next week. Happy dating.

I've always had these sort of unspoken rules about dating, unspoken because they were so obvious that they didn't require articulation. There were the Don't Dates. married men, the exes of my friends, Evangelical Christians, pedophiles, incarcerated men. Men with kids and divorced men made the list too. Smokers, since I quit, have been added.

But that was college. It was easy enough to not break these rules, though were an abundance of bad seeds that probably should have made the list (alcoholics, limpdicks, men that were jealous of my career, stupid men, newspaper cartoonists).

Post-college opened me up to a whole world of Don't Dates. I met him -- I'll call him Good Idea -- while working one day. He was talking about his divorce and his kid. Kid. Divorce, which lead to the smoking. A triple-whammy. Nothin' but red flags. Somehow, he made the cut though.

He was interesting, and sexy, and crazy. The perfect rebound from the square who broke my heart not too long ago. He's a spectacular photographer and had just returned from being embedded with U.S. troops in the Middle East. I was intrigued. It was rough on him. During his second tour, his wife left him. His wife left HIM. He can't be too bad, right?

And anyways, two of my good friends have dated almost-divorced men. Because legal documents are just a formality, a complication. Because almost-divorced, in this litigious world of ours, is the new single.

The date with Good Idea began normal enough. Mediocre tapas at an overpriced Spanish place. Drinks. Then we headed to a concert he was photographing and he introduces me to a Pretty Thin Girl. PTG and GI had a tryst a few weeks ago at GI's house. They basically fucked, for a week straight, while her boyfriend was out of town. He buys PTG and her friend drinks, so they linger. Red flag: he has trysts with women who are attached, and now he's buying her drinks. I bounce and go and talk to the opening act.

PTG and her friend follow us after the concert gets out. I walk fast until they finally head their own way, to meet up with PTG' boyfriend at another bar. GI and I sit down on a patio, meet up with a friend of mine, and chat. I learn that he lives with his wife. His WIFE, because they're not divorced. Red flag. No, papers haven't even been filed. But he's sleeping in the guest bedroom, he says, even though they've been split for a year. Something to do with the mortgage. When she left him, she apparently didn't leave, physically. PTG reappears and GI informs me that her boyfriend wants to kill him. Great, wonderful, so there's been a hit put out on my date?

We get a hotel, because my house is being fogged for pests and its either that or the couch at my friends un-air-conditioned apartments. He's also got work early the next morning and his house is a long drive. It's nice, it's fine. I wake up the next morning, and it's more of the same. Then, there is the jolting sound of the hotel phone. It's the loudest thing I've heard all morning, and I jump a little. It's his wife. Fuck. FUCK. She wants to know what he's been doing. He rushes over and closes the curtains, because she could be watching us he says. Our voices drop to a low whisper. She could be right outside the door. This is more mortifying then when my mom walked in on me post-coital when I was 18.

"She's fucking crazy," he tells me. How does she know he's here?

"I paid with cash," he says. "I don't know how she found me."

What?

"She has access to my online bank account. Maybe she saw that I put down a deposit here."

I throw my hands up, "I'm not doing this. This is too much. Nope, I'm walking home. No more." I'm a good hour away from home, through Uptown, where I could get mugged. The sense of resolve I exhibited, it's a little intoxicating.

We check the hallways and I scurry out and march indignantly up the street, in yesterday's clothes, with yesterday's smells. He picks me up 10 minutes later.
He later tells me the phone call from the wife was no big deal. Evidently, she had lost her phone. She knew he was there because she saw his car in the parking lot of the hotel. She had spent the night there with the man she left him for. Yes, totally normal, the separated-but-not-divorced-but-still-co-habitating couple had left their infant son with GI's mother to go out and hook up with other people in the city for the night.

This guy is nothin' but trouble. I'm seeing him again this week.

perhaps a dating chronology would be interesting...

1. freshman year in high school i had my first girlfriend. we rode the bus together. she was a sophomore and my dad warned me about those "older women" when i told him about her (my mother is one year older than him, they met in high school). her and i made out in the baseball dugout one night when we were supposed to be attending the friday night football game. when she would call me after school she would chase her younger siblings into their bedrooms so she could quietly exhale I love you...s into the phone. it lasted for three weeks. i didn't know it was over until week four when she was making out with someone else on the bus but, apparently, she left me a message about it.
two years ago i ran into her while her kid and i were looking at the same video game in the electronics section of Fred Meyer. she didn't recognize me.
2. sophomore year in high school i dated a young lady who had an ambiance of slutdom about her. we met in the eighth grade--- she sat next to me in art class the entire year and once touched my hand when she told me how great a drawing was... but she didn't remember this. we only started talking those three years later because she needed to copy SOMEONE's homework in science class. we talked about the future: getting our driver's licenses and leaving town for weekends. every date was at the theater seeing movies we didn't want to see to make-out thru... TO WONG-FU, THANKS FOR EVERYTHING, JULIE... something.... that was one movie we went to. people moved from sitting around us as our slurping on each other was louder than the speakers. my parents picked us up from the theater one night and drove her home while we did the same thing in the back seat. my sister was sitting back there, staring open eyed--- five years younger. afterward, my dad didn't know if he should have congratulated me or taught me about tact; he never taught me about tact. it lasted three months. mostly it consisted of love letters handed off between classes. at christmas i bought her a teddy bear and a silver ring of two intertwined dolphins and she came over somewhen in that break. i felt her ass and fingered her cleavage as tho it were something more erotic--- then wrote her a three page letter of apology for being so crass. somewhere in there i panicked and stopped returning her crying calls (it established my precedent of break-ups which, really, seemed to be taught to me from the previous one).
didn't see her much thru the rest of high school and no time thereafter. somehow i found her e-mail around '01 and sent her a line. we talked for a bit about how she was engaged and living in NY... then she asked to read some of my poetry so i sent her some of my Bukowski wanna-be sex poems when drunk one night. seems i hit "REPLY ALL" to a bulletin of hers and the poems went out to her entire family, her co-workers and her employer. never heard from her again.
3. junior year was busy... i was expelled and all of the good girls who wanted to piss off their parents wanted to take me out for at least a night or two. the few that stand out:
a. girl picked me up and took me out to a movie--- the daughter of friends of my parents. it was our third date. we sat in the back and before the credits started her parents came in to the same movie. we still made out thru the flick as they turned around from time to time to watch. she wasn't allowed to see me again after that.
b. another girl picked me up to take me out to a movie (i was a mooch, didn't get a license or a car until the end of the year) and she hit a car when she pulled into a Mountain View Mall parking spot. her parents owned a restaurant downtown and we ate well and often. i made my best friend drive me to her house one night and i climbed into her window and made out with her while he waited in the car. a couple days later we were grinding against each other and i had my first ejaculation ever at 16. she gave me a coat to tie around my waist as we walked into town.
c. movie theaters were replaced by parking out off tumalo reservoir road (where the was never any water--- just a sea of sagebrush. to this day, i still don't know why it has that name) when i got my license and another girl who rode the same bus with me--- this time a year younger ---went out there a few times with me. the last time she let me see her entire body and play with parts of it.
4. that summer i went to art camp up on OSU campus. stayed in the dorms and fell in love with a girl who was also in the camp. i would sneak out of my dorm and stay in hers. a lot of girls would do the same thing and i would often be the only male in a room of seven or eight girls. while professing love for this girl, another gave me a handjob as i slept between the two of them. when camp was over i would drive to McMinnville daily to see her thru the summer. three hour drive there, two hours to see her, three hours back. once she kissed me but only once.
5. senior year of high school i dated the french exchange student. i bought a 280 SE Mercedes Benz over the summer with mural painting money and felt manly enough to be dating the french exchange student. we went to homecoming together and i lost my virginity in the back of that car that night. it was before i had discovered masturbation and it was a very sorry performance. even for 17, even for the first time... premature ejaculation is too long of a phrase for such a thing. prema--- would be a better description. i was embarrassed; it was only the second time i had ever come... stopped talking to her after that night but didn't have to avoid her for too long since she was kicked off her exchange for cocaine abuse.
next year a friend of hers told me that she got pregnant that night; the kid was sucked out of her in a Marseille clinic with a sea view.
6. my parents took me to Disney World for a week in February of my senior year. first night there i met a 23 y/o romanian woman who was the nanny for a well-to-do family. we made out in the Epcot Center and i had her disrobed in the bushes around park rides... nightly, when her babysitting chores were done, we would fool around. one night she took me back to that large room while her employers were at a show and she violated me in a beautiful way. it is still my fondest one-week relationship.
6. in spring of that same year i dated a 25 y/o deli worker at Safeway. she thought i looked like Leonardo Di Caprio from Titanic and wanted me to sketch her nude one night; so i did. that was the beginning of our month together for the three days a week her daughter was at the father's house. it was my first blowjob. it was my first time feeling proficient at sex because it was with a stretched out mother--- and i would test that proficiency at least once a week while skipping math class. a friend of mine, slightly older, went to a party somewhere some night when i was elsewhere. he watched her fuck another woman and i stopped talking to her... out of jealousy, probably, of not being there to watch.
six years later i saw her at Papa's Pizza when i was working. talked to her for a bit in the playground area and said hello to her daughter... asked if she was babysitting because there were two younger boys i had not seen. she said, Uhm... there's someone you should meet... and introduced me to the older of the two--- five-plus ---who was such a good artist and the brightest kid in his class and looks just like my uncle and me when we were that age.
7. after learning the value of one-night-stands thru the summer, i went to college. lived in the dorms. tried dating my first not-so-attractive woman. her sister performed in live sex shows and she was about as interesting in private--- but i couldn't stand being seen with a not-so-attractive person so i ended it in the no contact way which, really, is hard to do when you live on the same floor in the dorms.

8. that girl above? what number was she... number 4? the one i fell in love with in art camp? she was going to school down at U of O and was lonely for about a month... depression at a new school and all. so she invited me to drive down the 45-plus minutes every day after school to stay with her for the night and leave after we had coffee and cigarettes in the morning. she was still the only woman i had ever loved and i was blissfully happy... singing MARY POPPINS songs while balancing on curbs instead of sidewalks... i sang everywhere i went. i was pleasant. you wouldn't have even recognized me. then, randomly, one night she said, Sleep on the floor and never call me again. a perfect quote. you don't forget a sentence like that when you were just singing a MARY POPPINS song in the rain ten minutes before.
six months later she would let me finger her in my car while driving to McMinnville repeatedly to see her again.
two years after that she would let me kiss her after a bad break up.
five years later, after an especially bad break-up of hers, she would invite me to live on a herb farming plantation with her and be with her again... three days later she changed her mind.
9. same year i dated an Ecuadorian Catholic who didn't speak much english and we agreed only to talk in my broken spanish--- all our te amo talk for two months until i told her i once made out with a guy. she used the no contact method, too. good to know it is universal.
10. end of the year in the dorms i met a girl who had just turned 21 and was from Virginia... educating herself on her fiance's dime. i lived with her in her one-bedroom apartment as she asked her man for more and more money to take care of us both, saying she took in a homeless artist. she would let me finger her but she wouldn't touch me or let me touch myself. the neighbor kid sometimes watched thru the window as we watched him in the reflection of the unlit television. when she would climax, she would shove me off of her and say, I'm a taken lady! and run into the bathroom. when he came to visit, she said it would look weird if i didn't stay with her... so i stayed in the same one-bedroom apartment and she used it as an excuse not to sleep with him, either. our last night together i tried to say, I love your pussy while fingering her but only got out I love-- before she freaked out, shoved me off of her and locked herself in the bathroom crying.
she came to visit me with her newest husband last year. i gave her a fishnet dress and wished him luck.
11. that summer i went to europe and came back poor. living in a house with three other guys who were not there--- i was in charge of electricity since i was the only one who would use it. every breaker in the house was shut down. i lived off of the apple tree in the back yard, the grapes in the back yard, the neighbor's plum tree i would pilfer in the night, the blackberries that were rampant--- and the kindness of a coffeehouse employee who would give me all of the day-old food. she was 6'2" and 125 lbs. she kept me alive while she looked like an albino african child that should have been spoon-fed paste. we dated. my roommates hated her, she hated them and probably me.... but we moved in to our own place anyway. a two bedroom place on the river in Shedd, OR. it was beautiful. i got a dog. we lived like that for about a year. she would cry a lot and only eat Doritos Cool Ranch Nachos. we decided to break up one day and we fucked one last time--- the phone rang all thru it but they kept hanging up on the answering machine. before either of us could finish, the message was finally left: Hi Honey. Sorry to tell you like this but your Grandfather just died. she moved in with her mother and still paid half of the rent on my pretty place by the river.
saw her two months ago at a poetry slam for the first time since then. she was two months out of her divorce and looked... old.
12. the above break-up began to go badly when she felt used on the rent. my sister stayed with me to pay for part of it. the X and i would yell at each other over the phone some nights... accusing one or the other of us of having something that didn't belong to them. when we met to trade things off i put one of my sister's bras in the box and when she saw it and said it wasn't hers i played it off as a, Oh, really? I don't know whose it is, then... she carved FUCK YOU!s into the CDs she returned. so i hit on a co-worker of hers that she was always jealous of. a BEAUTIFUL goth girl who had just broken up with her man--- and since i didn't have enough money to pay the part of the rent my X wasn't paying any longer, i moved in with her work-rival. she liked to be choked and she liked to be fake-raped and she liked to be cut and she liked to be beat. and i liked to pretend i didn't like doing all of those things as much as i did... she worked two jobs and i lounged around--- mostly in her clawfoot tub. would have dinner ready for her when she got home then we would fuck more. went on like that for months--- me being supported. until she one-day lost a job and we had to spend more time together... then we realized we hated each other. i moved in with one of my old roommates and she soon-after became a prostitute in PDX.
13. there really is no number thirteen. i became celibate for five years after that last one--- for several reasons.... one was because i kept trying to choke the women i was with as foreplay and not ALL of them (a good majority, but not all...) were into it. and some dumbass friend of mine said that if you are celibate for 7 years then you just forget about sex and, oh, imagine the work you could get done if you forgot about sex! he is a liar, for the record. and it wasn't that i didn't try to have relationships but... it was difficult with no sex. oral. lots of oral. but you can only finger and taste a woman for so long before she wants more...
14. my roommate couldn't pay rent and we both became homeless. this was about a year after the cut-me, beat-me, rape-me girl and i met a pretty lady about 31 in a class of mine... it was my last term of school and i was tired of living in the basement of the art dept--- showering at the rec center and only have a couple changes of clothes... and not enough money for wine. so this pretty blonde lady took me into her house--- because she collected weird beasts. she had a license to house dangerous reptiles and amphibians--- so she had a 10' boa that roamed the house and was friends with her dauchsund. every plant had some gecko or something ready to spring out of it onto you--- there was a tortoise in the back yard you could ride like a pony. she even had an entire room FILLED with poison dart frogs--- FUCKING FILLED. and every wall had an aquarium embedded in it. she was engaged to a man who was in prison. was on probation for assault charges but they got into a fight one night and she pulled a gun on him and shot--- missed, but broke their window and hit the neighbor's house. he pulled a gun and shot it up into the ceiling--- when the cops came, they determined he was at fault because he was on probation... so he was in jail as i fingered and tasted his fiance. but we never left the house. well, we went to class but we never went out and did anything... just fooled around a bit in that house smelling like the reptile tank of a zoo. so, one day, my sister came into town and we all went out for chinese food--- but my girlfriend freaked out. just talked to the fish. couldn't talk to the waiter--- i ordered for her but she just came over and poked at it for a bit before going back and carrying on a conversation with the coy--- they were talking back to her. my sister found it hilarious... repeating over and over, She's cute. Fucking crazy, but cute.

--. that's really about it. i'm sure there are a few i forgot and a dozen i omitted because they weren't worth talking about or were just a repeat of one or another before them. and that last one was... five years ago? there have been dates... one or two with hundreds of women in that time who are no more or less sane than the women i was with before. all of which i forget to call as they forget to call me. because dating is more than weird--- it is an exercise in futility.

**Editors' Note: This was originally posted by c.vance. Someone put a comment on c.vance's post that was not relevant and purely to promote his/her web site. We frown on solicitations at our front doors and our blogs. Don't do that shit.