I’m at JFK, “ghost tweeting” while I wait for my flight to Fort Laudy. (Yeah, ghost tweeting is my job. You can laugh—heck, I’m laughing—but I’m paying my rent. So suck my dick, haters.)
I wanted to take a photo of myself at the JetBlue terminal, because the terminal plays Cyndi Lauper and The Cure nonstop. But I look like shit, so I hid behind my gross Dunkin Donuts black tea and skeletal hands. I used to hate my boney ass body, but lately I’ve been loving it. People starve to be this thin, plus I just saw Fiona Apple—her boney fingers are hot.
After a year of dating forty-year olds, I decided to only date and fuck guys my age. Casual sex has been boring lately. I at least want to be able to talk to a guy. But finding guys to date and not just fuck is hard when you’re gay. Everyone just wants to get banged. Everyone fills their loneliness with seemen instead of conversation. Andrew Holleran has made a living writing about this for thirty years. He’s seventy now and still single. I tried to meet a guy in a club. Too bad Usher is a liar: Nobody finds love in the club. I tried OKCupid, but it was a disaster because my stripper BFF Ariel made my username “Puppy Store Heiress,” and there’s no way to change your username. Who the fuck wants to date a puppy store heiress? Everything was going terribly, so I used Grindr. Which is so illogical since that bullshit is just about sex. Not even that I-pretend-to-date-you-but-really-just-want-to-fuck-you bullshit. It’s just about sex.
This cute poetry student from Eugene Lang messaged me. He was thin with long hair—my type. At first he wanted to just chill on my roof at 1 am (booty call). Then he wanted to get dinner before we did that (date). We were supposed to chill after Gov Ball, but it rained. (Fuck the rain.) So we decided to chill after I got back from the Rookie Roadtrip thing yesterday. I went there with Chelsie, Faith, and Faith’s boyfriend Cal. We felt old. Besides the other twentysomething liberal arts students who wished we had Rookie instead of poorly written livejournal posts in the tenth grade, everyone was fifteen. But I guess early online honesty paved the way for a site as honest as Rookie, a gathering of hip teenagers in Gowanus, a gathering that looked like a healthier version of the “Miss World” video. It just would have been nice to have been fifteen and have a well written site that said, “IT’S OKAY TO HATE EVERYTHING. YOU ROCK. WE ROCK. LIFE IS JUST LIKE MY SO CALLED LIFE.” We were jealous of today’s sixteen year olds who are way cooler than we were four years ago.
It was really funny to watch Cal stand in the back of the room. He looked like those Dads whose seven year old gay sons drag them to Britney Spears concerts—basically, my Dad circa 1999. At one point he asked me, since I was the only guy besides the Asian dude drinking beer in the corner (who may or may not have been Tao Lin), to walk with him to the Gowanus Canal. I obliged. I don’t have that many guy friends, so it’s nice to just chill with a guy every now and then. I honestly prefer to hang out with straight guys. There’s no awkward pressure or sexual tension. We can just talk. I love my girlfriends, but I do need to be around guys every now and then. I am male. There are certain things that happen to boys (pressure to look muscular) that don’t happen to girls and certain things that happen to girls (pressure to be thin) that don’t happen to boys.
After I said bye to Anaheed, we walked to my apartment in Park Slope to finish the wine jug we bought a few nights ago. My roof overlooks all of Manhattan, including the Statue of Liberty; it’s basically the greatest place to get wasted. By the time Grindr Boy showed up, we were drunk in my kitchen talking about Kitty Pryde. Grindr Boy stood against my wall, cardigan draping the pile of recycling that lines my kitchen floor, as I said bye to my friends and poured more wine.
He sat across from me at my small white kitchen table. He listed the books he liked. I told him I liked Bennett Madison’s YA novels. He pulled out a short story collection and told me to borrow it. Madison wrote a story for the collection. I started talking about the Rookie event; he said that Lesley Arfin’s Dear Diary was his Rookie in high school. I felt the same way. I started to think I finally met someone I was both physically and emotionally attracted to. It was great—I haven’t been attracted on both levels to anyone since Harvard Boy—but it was odd. He was a vegan libra—shy with plans to become a pre-school teacher. I’m a Sagittarius from a doggy dynasty—hated by animal activists and very, very loud.
I think my personality undid everything. At the table and later, walking down fifth avenue to Snice, I overshared. He said he never partied in high school, so I said I went to orgies in high school. He brought up his parents, so I mentioned my parents’ battles with drugs. After dinner, he said he wanted to take a walk. After I went to the bathroom—a five minute event—he changed his mind. “I want to go home,” he said. “I have plans.”
On the walk to the Prospect Park train station, he brought up some joke I made about being on a date. He said that we weren’t on a date. That he was going to Paris in the fall and not looking for anything serious. I wasn’t either. I move to England in three months, I said. He said I should visit him in Paris. Which made no sense. I had clearly scarred him in someway that made him no longer want to touch me. He clearly was looking for a hook up or something in the beginning: He sent me shirtless photos on Grindr.
I don’t understand why he invited me to Paris though. He said he wanted to be friends, but did he really? Isn’t that just away not to fuck me?
Who knows what went through his brain. I just know I immediately assumed that my brashness—my oversharing, my openness—scarred him away. I thought that because my big fat mouth is why most people hate me. Perhaps, he didn’t really ever think it was a date. Maybe I’m just not confident about my supposedly worst—and supposedly greatest—quality: my big fat mouth.
