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Date Zero With Dirty Rotten Cat Lover, Also Known As The Man Who Would Become Mr. Right-Click: Part Two

by anna on 02.11.2009

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When we left off, the Dirty Rotten Cat Lover had just invited me to join him for dinner at the Polo Lounge. Though I teased him about his supposedly cancelled “dinner meeting” and the initial invitation for “drinks only,” I was not truly offended by the Cat Lover’s excuses. Quickly upon sitting down, he revealed that he too had been burned–as I had suspected–by the online dating industrial complex.

“I just say that,” the Cat Lover explained, “Because so many times you end up meeting someone and there’s not much chemistry, and then you have to wait through the whole dinner, and I guess I’m just tired of it now.”

“Yes, I know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“One time, I met a woman for a date, and she had brought a friend with her.”
“She brought a friend on her online date?”
“Yes. She brought her friend, and then I had to buy them both dinner.”
“Both of them?! In what universe is this a common practice?”
“–But that wasn’t as bad as when I took a woman out and after dinner the waiter came by and said, ‘Will there be anything else?’ and she said, ‘Yes, I’ll have a lobster bisque to go.’”
“She didn’t eat anything at dinner?” I asked.
“Oh, she ate dinner. She just wanted an extra lobster bisque. To take home.”
“Wow. That’s ballsy.”
“I thought so.”

I took a drink of my club soda and thought about how I hate club soda, and how I should have ordered a Diet Coke. But it was easier to deflect questions about why I wasn’t drinking alcohol if I drank something that looked like it could have alcohol in it. And who drinks club soda without there being alcohol in it? Not that the Cat Lover had even noticed my drink.

“I think we should get Kobe beef hamburgers,” the Cat Lover said, gesturing toward the menu. I thought, OK, and wondered if he had seen how much they cost.
“What about dessert?” He went on. “They have a chocolate souffle, and you have to order it before dinner. I think we should get two of those.”
“OK,” I said.

I wasn’t quite sure what this was going to be. But it was turning out to look like quite something.

And then something strange happened, the kind of thing that when it happens in a novel you think, “Well that must be an event View definition in a new window that I’m supposed to remember.” Because otherwise, there would be no narrative purpose to this kind of thing happening. It just wouldn’t make sense, from a narratological point of view, to drop something like this into the plot unless it was to mark something as Significant . . . to make it clear to the audience that this was an Important Meeting that changed the trajectory of the rest of the story.

Because, as I sat in a booth facing the door and the bar of the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a man walked into the room, and I thought, “Wow, that guy looks A LOT like Brad Pitt,” the way you do sometimes. Except this time it wasn’t just a passing resemblance. He looked identical to Brad Pitt, but he was so small. Still, the resemblance was uncanny. Uncanny. But it couldn’t be him, could it? He was wearing a motorcycle helmet, and though he looked muscular and was probably just above average height, he just seemed . . . too damn small to be Brad Pitt.

While I was busy running these hypotheticals in my head, my face apparently looked a little something like this:


Because the Cat Lover said, “What happened? Oh my god! What’s wrong?”

“I think Brad Pitt just walked in,” I whispered. The Cat Lover turned around.
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“But he’s so small.”
“People always think celebrities look small because they’re so big on the screen,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“Where’s he going?”
“He’s sitting at the bar.”
“Who is he with? His wife?” the Cat Lover asked. This was back in the days of the Brad & Jen TruLuv4Evah publicity scheme.
“Ummm. No.”
“Who?”
“I dunno. Nobody.”
“Nobody?”
“Nobody recognizable. A guy and a girl.”
“You want me to go get his autograph for you?”
“WHAT?! NO! ARE YOU CRAZY?”
“Look, you’re obviously a huge fan . . . your jaw dropped like ten feet when he walked in.”
“No, I’m really not.”
“Oh, come on.”
“No, I’m really not. It’s just . . . you don’t expect to see Brad Pitt walk in somewhere.”
“Well, he’s got to eat.”

We were then interrupted by the waiter, and so the Cat Lover ordered for us. Some people don’t like that, when the man orders for the woman. Me, I love it. Any time I can avoid talking to people because my date is a gentleman, I’m all for it. Of course, the waiter still had to ask me how I would like my meat cooked, and when I answered “rare,” this apparently made quite an impression on the Dirty Rotten Cat Lover. At the time, he said, “Wow, I’ve never met a girl who likes to order their meat cooked rare.”

I began to think that anything I said or did would be A-OK with the Cat Lover, and perhaps that’s why I then told him, “Oh yeah, I used to eat handfuls of raw hamburger meat when I was a kid. My mom would always get mad at me,” which was–admittedly–both a very strange thing to do and a very strange thing to share. What I didn’t know is that in that moment the Cat Lover would decide that I was definitely the girl for him, maybe forever, all because I liked to order Kobe beef cooked rare. Yeah. Hey, people have made decisions based on less. Try not to hate.

But we should not dwell too long on the odd mating rituals of postmodern carnivores, because Brad Pitt is still seated at the bar of the Polo Lounge with two unknowns, the female of which is–WAIT, HOLD THE PHONE–IS THAT WOMAN CARESSING BRAD PITT’S THIGH?!

“WAIT, HOLD THE PHONE–IS THAT WOMAN CARESSING BRAD PITT’S THIGH?!” I exclaimed.
“What?” the Cat Lover turned around. “I think she might be caressing more than his thigh,” he decided.
“But. But.”
“Yep. And that’s definitely not Jennifer Aniston.”
“But–wait, what? Well, I always heard their marriage was just an arrangement,” I said knowingly.
“I never heard that,” he argued.
“Well, how do you explain that,” I said, gesturing to the display at the bar like it was so much trash.
“That’s Hollywood,” the Cat Lover said.

Strictly speaking, it was Beverly Hills. Still, we ate our Kobe cheeseburgers and made small talk on a variety of subjects. I don’t remember them all now, but I remember walking away from the evening thinking that it had gone much better than I had thought it would, and was impressed that the Cat Lover not only picked up the tab for the whole evening but also went the extra mile by taking my ticket, paying the valet, waiting with me for the car to show up, and opening the door to see me off. It might not seem like a huge gesture to you, but this is a Los Angeles love story, and the gestures a suitor makes in the service of making the driving experience of a Los Angeles woman easier or more comfortable translate the same way as might walking a girlfriend’s dog in Manhattan or shoveling snow in Minnesota. After he closed the door to my car, it would only take about fifteen minutes for the Cat Lover to call again–I didn’t even make it past Hollywood and Highland before my cell phone rang.

And I remember worrying that there was no way I would ever live up to be the woman that this Dirty Rotten Cat Lover seemed to think I was based on his first impression. But as it turned out, we had the rest of our lives for him to prove me wrong.

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Date Zero With Dirty Rotten Cat Lover, Also Known As The Man Who Would Become Mr. Right-Click: Part One

by anna on 02.10.2009

OK people, couple things . . . Saturday of this week is Valentine’s Day, and in case you haven’t heard, Valentine’s Day 2009 is also known as the day I feature my first bonafide guest post here on ABDPBT View definition in a new window. Because of course Mini has guest posted all over this “shiznit,” as the kids like to say, but that doesn’t exactly count–look, I’m not going to spell it out for you, but suffice to say that if you believe that Mini knows the history of Van Gogh’s relationship to the Impressionist Movement, then I also have a bridge to sell you, &c. Anyway, Mr. Right-Click has requested that he be allowed to guest post on Saturday and although handing over the admin login makes me somewhat nervous, I’ve decided to be sporting about it in the name, as the poet Bono writes, of love.

Since Mr. Right-Click will be guest posting, and because a delurker recently revealed that she would like to hear about when Mr. Right-Click and I met, I figured it was as good a time as any to tell you the story of our first date. I should preface this story by saying that by the time Mr. Right-Click’s and my paths were to cross, I had about had it with online dating. I had gone on about 100 first dates (or dates zero, as the message boards referred to them), had tussled with my fair share of wink wankers and poofers, and was ready to throw in the towel on this whole virtual dating reality once and for all. Which is what everyone tells you if you ask them about how they met their husband online–it’s always right about when you are thinking that another date sounds about as appealing as pulling out your own toenails that you meet someone you really like. Of course, it didn’t seem that way at first . . .

[screen goes wavy]

As a policy for online dating, I did not make it a practice to write to suitors first. I would wait for them to write to me, and after weeding out the sundry JoinPornGirls6969, “you-are-very-sexy-American-girl,” Nigerian princes, and “Well-if-you-want-to-go-dutch-on-coffee” emails, I would then write back to the prospects that seemed like they had promise. But I had hit kind of a dry spell and started searching one day, and found a guy from Santa Monica who seemed like he might be a good fit. True, he seemed to like cats an awful lot and he was a member of a certain profession, but I was willing to cut him some slack, I decided. There was something I liked about him right off the bat, though I am not sure specifically what it was–just a general likability. So I fired off an email to him, and he responded, and I responded back. Things were progressing, it seemed.

And then I heard nothing. For like a month. And this seemed odd, but then this was part of why I didn’t usually write to people–I preferred to have veto power, rather than to be the pursuer. Lesson learned–I moved on.

Then about a month later I got an email from this cat loving dude again, demanding to know why I had never written him back. I said, “Huh?” and explained that it was he who never wrote me back, and he assured me that I must be mistaken, and I countered that no, I can show you the entire conversation on gmail–gmail? what is that, he said, and that was how Mr. Right-Click first learned about gmail, by the way–and he said, “No, no, I’m sure you are the one who is wrong but anyway would you like to go out for drinks?”

OK, I said. And started obsessing about what I would order when we got “drinks,” since I don’t drink, and hate having to explain this on first dates.

But I gave him my number–this Dirty Rotten Cat Lover, and we made tentative plans to meet for drinks. He wanted me to come to Santa Monica, which I assured him was out of the question. You see, at the time, I lived in Hollywood, and though it’s only a distance of like 7 miles, it can take over an hour to get from one place to another in Los Angeles at certain times of day. And I had been on enough of these “meet for drinks” dates to know that the drink was just an audition–if the guy liked you, you’d get a call-back in the form of a dinner offer, but if he didn’t, then the whole date would be over in less than 30 minutes. And no way was I driving all the way across town at rush hour for this privilege.

At length, we hashed out a deal: we would meet at the legendary Beverly Hills Hotel (which was located about halfway between our respective homes) and “have drinks” at the Polo Lounge, which is the site of many a power breakfast and clandestine celebrity tryst. Dirty Rotten Cat Lover made a point of saying, “I have a dinner meeting, so I’ll already have eaten,” as if to underscore the fact that this was just a tryout date. I knowingly responded, “Yeah, sure,” and expected that we would be eating dinner if he decided he liked me, “dinner meeting” or no “dinner meeting.”

When it was time to meet I was in a foul mood. I almost didn’t go to the date, just out of annoyance with the whole process of online dating and because of Dirty Rotten Cat Lover’s presumed fib about the “dinner meeting” on the phone. At length I decided I had to go, since we had agreed to it, and besides, I couldn’t really blame him. These dates could get expensive and were mostly pointless, I could see wanting to iron out the details ahead of time, however crass it seemed. He had probably been burned just as many times as I had, and been stuck with the bill, to add insult to injury.

So I went. I got there, parked with the valet, and waited outside of the Polo Lounge. And waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, I decided to go inside and get something to drink, because if it was going to take forever for this dude to show up, I might as well have some concessions. It seemed unlikely that he would totally stand me up, but then that hadn’t happened to me yet, so perhaps it was my time. So I sat at the bar, drinking club soda, eating the tri-colored tortilla chips and guacamole that they give you to snack on at the Polo Lounge, when out of the corner of my eye I sensed that I was being watched.

And, sure enough, I was. There was the Dirty Rotten Cat Lover himself, paused in the middle of the restaurant, staring at me with the look on his face that my friend L and I used to describe as the “baby gas” look. Like he had walked to the middle of the room and somehow Hiro Yakamoto froze time and that was where he was stuck. If this were a Harlequin romance, then I suppose that it was one of those moments in which time seems to “stand still,” except the rest of us weren’t standing still. We were watching him suspiciously and holding onto our purses tightly.

And there was a sound, probably inaudible to everyone else but me, but present nonetheless–the sound of the power shifting out of the Cat Lover’s grasp and into mine, as he approached me at the bar.

“Will you make fun of me if I order a girly drink?” he asked, when he finally walked over to me.
“Not to your face,” I promised.
“I’ll have a Midori sour,” he told the bartender.
“What’s the alcohol content on that–like 2%?” I asked no one in particular.
“I think it’s less than that,” the bartender said.
Laughter ensued.
“Are you hungry?” The Dirty Rotten Cat Lover asked.
“Oh, I thought you had a ‘dinner meeting’,” I said.
“That, oh–it was cancelled,” he explained.
“I see.”
“Let’s get a table,” he suggested.
“OK,” I said, and got up and started to walk towards the table seating area. The Dirty Rotten Cat Lover got out his cell phone and said, “What’s your number again?”
“Don’t you have it?”
“I want to make sure.”
“Seems like you must have it, since you called me.”
“Humor me.”
“When did you decide you needed to ‘make sure’? Was this before or after the ‘dinner meeting’ that ‘got cancelled’?”
“Just now,” he laughed, and opened up a menu.

[To Be Continued]

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Date Zero with GrecoMorgan, If Greco Were a Character in Novel, and I Was Much More Interesting Than I Really Am (Part II)

by anna on 11.25.2008

The following is the second part of a fictionalization of my first date with GrecoMorgan, of the Online Dating Chronicles fame, written way after the fact, but way before the Advent of Mr. Right-Click, and with only a very vague commitment to verisimilitude. Still, if you recognize some resemblance to real persons alive or dead, it is probably not coincidental. But we sha’n't speak of it.

. . . and this is disturbing, because although Jane was very annoyed with Frank for his behavior about canceling, on the phone and over the internet, she had already felt so close to him that she wanted to meet him with an eagerness that she could not explain. In that moment, when she first saw Frank and thought “GAY,” her heart sank. This possibility was over. She could not date a gay man, why in the hell was a gay man trying to date her? Was it true, then, her hypothesis that only people who are attracted to men (i.e. gay men and straight women) were attracted to her, that somehow she emitted something akin to testosterone, and so gay men went out with her when they were trying their best to pretend that they weren’t gay?

Jane looked at him pointedly, as he almost walked past her, and he pointed and smiled, hugging her in greeting. Immediately she started wondering why he had hugged her, what that meant, did it mean he was attracted, or was he just friendly, she did not know men who hugged. What was this behavior?

“Hey, have you been here long?” he asked.
“No, just a couple of minutes,” she lied, putting her cell phone away.
“Sorry, I was on the phone,” he said, leading her into La Poubelle.
“The trashcan,” Jane translated, “how appropriate.”

How dare he talk on the phone when I’m waiting for him. Who is this guy? They sat at the bar, and since it was too late for dinner, and since Jane knew that Frank knew she had already eaten, she decided to not take his lack of a dinner offer personally. They sat down and Frank looked at a menu, the bartender asked them what they would like, and Jane ordered the usual Diet Coke, bracing for the Moment—the Moment being that in which the man figures out that she is not drinking, and starts to wonder about it, ultimately culminating in an uncomfortable question and the revelation of the dealbreaker to end all dealbreakers, Jane was an alcoholic—recovering, yes, but it was worse to have to admit this than to be a practicing alcoholic, she sometimes thought, although only in this context. If she were still drinking, she could order a glass of wine, and white knuckle it through the date so that she didn’t order another, successfully hiding her neurosis until it was too late for the guy.

But Frank didn’t seem to notice, he was too busy asking about the wines they had.

“I’m sort of a wine snob,” said Frank.
“Ah,” said Jane, thinking, Wine? what kind of a man chooses wine and not beer? A gay man, that’s who.
“So, you sounded pretty pissed at me on the phone.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, I’m actually kind of surprised you’re even here.”
“I’m not pissed, I’m just—”
“Frustrated?”
“Yeah.”
“Where did you eat dinner?”
“Oh, it was crappy.”
“Where were you?”
“Los Feliz.”
“Where did you go? The Vermont?”
“Oh, no, we went to—have you ever heard of Mimi’s Café, it’s this crappy place, kinda like Denny’s—”
“Oh yeah, I know Mimi’s Café. We put together a deal for them.”

She liked the way it sounded, putting a deal together. She never had been with a man who spoke this way. The men in her past, such as they were, had nothing to do with business, there were a couple lawyers, but for the most part it was academics and more academics, there was something interesting about being able to talk to them about her work, but as her work became less and less interesting, so they became less and less valuable to her.

The letdown of Frank’s physical presence could not be ignored. No, Frank Christakis was not gay, but he had struggled and lost with appropriate fashion choices, and the trace of a cold he had been battling gave his voice a nasal quality to it that night, making him seem that much more anal retentive. The conflicting elements of his dress confirmed his heterosexuality—his jeans were somewhat dirty, she could tell even with the blazer that he wore that he had a fat, womanish butt, two things that a gay man would never allow—but she could already see in him the shadow self of an old balding Greek-American patriarch, despite his clear efforts to outrun his ethnicity.

Besides, she could tell immediately that he was in the midst of The Crisis, that five-year span in a young urban professional man’s life in which he waits for someone or something to send an unmistakable sign, assuring him that he Had Arrived, finally, at what he had worked so hard for, that this was It, this was as good as it gets, it was time to Settle Down and Start a Family because he’s Not Getting Any Younger. Jane made a point of avoiding men in the midst of The Crisis, which effectively eliminated most successful men from ages 28 through 33, and breaking this rule for Frank seemed absurd, not to mention risky.

[click to continue…]

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Date Zero with GrecoMorgan, If Greco Were a Character in Novel, and I Was Much More Interesting Than I Really Am (Part One)

by anna on 11.19.2008

The following is a fictionalization of my first date with GrecoMorgan, of the Online Dating Chronicles fame, written way after the fact, but way before the Advent of Mr. Right-Click, and with only a very vague commitment to verisimilitude. Still, if you recognize some resemblance to real persons alive or dead, it is probably not coincidental. But we sha’n't speak of it.

At 30, Jane Fairfax was a spectacular disappointment to men and women alike. This was not her fault. It was just that the disparity between her ethereal appearance and her Mephistophelean personality troubled people. She was not As Advertised. Oh sure, people like to say you cannot judge a book by its cover, but even these very people tend to make a practice of doing just that. Let’s face it, there is a certain comfort in the practice of judging books by their covers, and the faith that the contents match the binding is a hard thing to let go. And the fact that her content was usually at war with her cover was a problem that had followed Jane wherever she went.

But Frank Christakis totally got Jane. It was his single recommendation.

Unlike most people, Frank knew immediately that there was nothing sweet about Jane, and if you had asked him why, he would not have been able to answer. But he knew it and he craved it, and he thought of her in the same way that one thinks of two Jack ‘n’ the Box tacos (only 99 cents!) at 2:00 a.m. after a night of drinking.

Which is to say, just enough.

For this was the sort of woman that had only entered the realm of possibility for Frank since his foray into investment banking post-Berkeley, post two years in the boiler rooms of JP Morgan, back in Manhattan, where people actually knew what investment banking was, and six foot models flanked the arms of tiny swarthy sweat hogs for the price of a Fendi purse. That was a world that Frank could get behind, he had thought, when he first picked up a copy of Liar’s Poker at age 16, hot off the press, the book that would become the blueprint for his life’s work, when it all seemed so glamorous back in Claremont, when he was fenced in by the walls of his decidedly Greek middle class home, under the tutelage of his intellectual, but overly traditional parents. That was the kind of life he could get behind.

There was much ado about nothing in the planning of the first date between Frank and Jane. Frank’s pursuit of Jane was lackluster from the start, he Could Not Commit® even to email her regularly, after initially responding to her ad, Frank had disappeared for weeks at a time, always resurfacing once she had officially given up on him, with a half-offer of a date of the variety that would have been deemed ‘gay’ by Jane’s friends because it was so noncommittal. Move on, date others, said the Chorus, and she knew they were right. Frank’s behavior had been decidedly gay, but she had some kind of resilient interest in him, and it frightened her, it encouraged her to overlook things

It was highly unlikely that Frank Christakis was in fact homosexual, his admittedly faggy approach to dating aside. But by the year 2000, it had become decidedly difficult to accurately predict the sexual orientation of a man in the under 40 age group within the city limits of Los Angeles, since everyone was on a diet, everyone went to salons, even many men were getting manicures and working out with personal trainers; but, at the very least, Frank was metrosexual in the interest he took in Jane, and Jane was disappointed in herself for agreeing to meet him after the barrage of stupid attempts and last-minute cancellations he had felt comfortable subjecting her to.

At long last, Jane had agreed to meet him at the last second at a bistro in Hollywood, where she was pointed in telling him that she would not be changing from her work clothes, as if this meant something to him, and so Jane showed up there, three minutes early, wearing a black v-neck sweater, a Banana Republic flounce skirt, mary janes, and the every present L’Artisan Tubereuse perfume. She looked OK. She didn’t feel gorgeous, but then, Frank was nothing to write home about. Naturally, Frank wasn’t there yet, so Jane did what any insecure person left waiting alone in Hollywood would do, and got on her cell phone, leaving messages haphazardly for friends of hers throughout the country. After checking her voicemail, and her watch, and beginning the descent into real annoyance with Frank, there he was, walking towards her, a man much darker, much swarthier than she had imagined. And that thought–the thought that goes through a woman’s head when she sees a man, that classifies him irrevocably, but that she will then spend at least three dates trying to battle–that thought, on this night and at this time, was “GAY.”

[To be continued . . .]

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