The Aussie: Everything’s dandy until you find yourself with no way out

Since last Wednesday, I’ve had four dates with four different guys. Unfortunately for you, dear readers, the dates with these guys were actually decent, which makes it that much harder for me to entertain you. I’ll do my best though. (Bear with me, I’m supposed to meet up with a Republican, Catholic, anti-abortion guy next week. He promises to make for a much more entertaining post, I’m sure.)

I met The Aussie for a few beers at the Front Page Wednesday evening. We’d bonded over appreciation of good beer, our mutual disdain for discussing politics, and the fact that the two of us were members of the small rank of people in the D.C. area who weren’t watching the election coverage last Tuesday. (Admittedly, he has far less reason to be interested in the whole American political system than I do, considering he’s only here temporarily for work. Don’t get me wrong, I was thrilled with the outcome, I just didn’t see the need to spend hours watching the coverage; the print and Web stories the next day told me all I wanted to know and more.)

Anyhow, we met for a beer (mmm… beer) then headed to another locale for dinner. During the course of the meal, he asked about the people I’d met through Craigslist. I’m not sure why I thought it’d be a good idea to divulge the details of my worst dates, but I certainly did just that. I suppose I was trying to be entertaining. Perhaps he was entertained, but he seemed, from that point on, concerned that I’d be telling everyone what a horrible date he was. (Considering that I chronicle my dates here, I suppose he wasn’t far off in his concern.)

When he poured his beer too fast and it overflowed, he quipped, “Now you can tell your friends about this horrible date with a guy who spilled his beer everywhere.” I tried to assure him that I was having a lovely time and wouldn’t do such a thing. (Me, discuss a date’s shortcomings? Never!) “No, it’s okay. You can even embellish it… tell them I poured it all over you. I’d back up your story.” Ah, The Aussie has a good sense of humor to accompany that sexy, Down Under accent.

At one point, we started talking about scars, and I asked him to tell me the story of one of them. He told me of a horrible crash in his adolescence that put the driver in a coma and gave her permanent, if relatively minor, brain damage. No scars from that one, but a much cooler story than any of the ones that left their permanent imprint. He’s quite the daredevil, this one.

He also said he doesn’t see himself in the States for more than a few years at most. He’s moved around quite a bit, and travels a great deal for work and for play. He sounds like an adventurous guy who’d be fun to hang out with, but no one to grow too attached to.

After dinner, I followed The Aussie to his place for an herbal nightcap. We hung out for a while, me sitting on his bed, him sitting in his desk chair (at least he didn’t presume that me coming to his house meant I would sleep with him), talking of trivial things, as you tend to do in such situations. Finally, I noted his intensifying languor and collected myself for the drive home, he walked me out and gave me a kiss on the cheek, telling me to be safe and give him a call.*

This, folks, is what became (in retrospect) the most entertaining part of the night. I’d printed directions to get to the meeting place, and I managed to get back there from his house with no problem. I hadn’t printed return directions, though, so I was retracing my route by reversing the directions and trying to gain clues from my surroundings. This did not work. For some reason, no matter what I did (left, right, or straight at the major intersection), I kept getting put back out on one of two roads (both of which lead right back to the same intersection). I tried veering to the left at a fork, and veering to the right. Each lead me back to the intersection. I was stuck going, quite literally, in circles, no matter how much I tried to vary my course. (Thinking of it now, this is a pretty good analogy for my dating life, isn’t it?)

I couldn’t call The Aussie so soon after leaving his house. One, there was the issue of me coming across as a dumb girl who can’t find her way home, which, really, I could’ve dealt with if I’d had no other option. More importantly, though, there was the probability that he had already passed out and would not answer my call. If he awoke the next morning to a missed call from my number mere minutes after I left his house, all bets would have been entirely off.

Long story short, at least half an hour later I turned onto a completely unfamiliar street just to extract myself from the never-ending loop from hell, pulled into a parking lot, and called my friend in LA nearly in tears. Thank the gods for good friends, three-hour time differences and Mapquest. She looked up directions and got my close-to-hyperventilating ass home. (This is why I’m getting a GPS from Santa, kiddies.)

* I fully intend to devote an entire post to ranting about this trend with the boys I’ve met in D.C. Don’t guys ever take the initiative to call girls anymore? Lazy assholes.

The Perv: A legion of 10,000, you say? Bring it.

The Perv responded to my latest ad (I’m skipping ahead for this one) on Halloween. He didn’t offer much info, and I got an overall creepy vibe from him, much of which I attributed to him sharing a first name with this guy and my overactive imagination. (I should trust my gut more.) The Perv asked me out (well, more accurately, asked me to come to his house) in his first or second e-mail and in almost every one thereafter. These were one- or two-line messages, for the most part, and, like I said, he’d creeped me out, although I can’t pinpoint exactly why. He was pressing for a meeting yesterday or today.

I finally told him I wasn’t inclined to go out with guys who wouldn’t tell me anything about themselves. He wrote back that he had a boat, a house, two cars, a dog and a cat, and that he has “it goin’ on.”

--- Let me pause at this point to say it’s pretty much a given that anyone who uses that phrase to describe himself does not, in fact, “have it goin’ on.” ---

Attached at the bottom of his next message, which just asked when we could meet for a drink, perhaps him cooking dinner for me (another supposed chef), there was a photo attached. In the picture, The Perv is standing in a shower, drinking a beer (Q: Who drinks beer in the shower while having his picture taken? A: A perv. Q: And, if you’re going to go to all that trouble, why would you be drinking shitty beer? A: Because you’re a perv with shite taste in beer, which only reinforces your pervi-ness*). The picture is from his pelvis up, so none of his nether regions are visible (yes, there is something redeeming in this, after all; I didn’t have to see a picture of this perv’s penis!).

Anyhow, when I saw the photo, I responded with this:

Did you just send me a picture of you in the shower drinking a beer?
No. We will never meet. Don't send me any more messages.

Perhaps I didn’t express what I was really feeling well enough, which was not that the beer offended me, but that I couldn’t fathom why The Perv thought it appropriate to send me this particular photo while asking me out. If, say, one of my friends from college sent me a similar photo, I probably would’ve laughed and made endless fun of him for the rest of our lives. But this guy on the Internet sending it to me gave me one crystal-clear message: RUN! (Unfortunately, my knee-jerk reaction was to erase all traces of The Perv, so I deleted his wonderful photo, or I definitely would’ve posted it here so you could laugh along with me.)

This is what he sent in return:

yes i was in shower and it was a g rated picture, how old are you?
think about your age and look at picture, all you can see is a beer.
be an adult, stop with the mommie shit, u wanna see how bad this gets?

Did you catch that threat at the end? So we went from “I wanna put you on the moon” (yes, he actually wrote that. It baffled me, in so many ways) to “u wanna see how bad this gets?” in a matter of a couple hours. (I didn’t respond to this message. We do not negotiate with terrorists.)

A few hours later, he sent this:

If you get this message i sent your email too 10000 perverts, time for you to grow the fuck up.

NEWS BULLETIN: Perverts have a network, kiddies! Apparently, they’ve got mailing lists and newsletters and monthly support meetings and spring retreats. Oh, wait…

I wasn’t too worried. I use a junk account that doesn’t have my name or anything remotely close to identifying me for most of my Internet dealings. I do so for this specific reason. Yeah, so aside from a little early-morning shower plotting on the off chance that my inbox was deluged with messages from perverts, I didn’t think much about it. Has my e-mail been accosted by 10,000 perverts? No. Just the one.

But the plot? It’s grand, if I do say so myself. If I do start getting messages, I’ll wait three months (thanks, JW!) and then use The Perv’s e-mail address (which is connected to a name, though I can’t be certain it’s a real one) to sign up for every conservative, religious group I can find. Mailing lists, newsletters, prayer chains, you name it. Then I’ll tap into my gay friends’ collective pool of knowledge (or willingness to help me get revenge) and sign him up for every gay mailing list and dildo-touting Web site I can find. (Of course, there’s always the possibility that he’s into that sort of thing, but I’m fairly certain the religious stuff would be about the right equivalent for him.) And if I could somehow be certain that this particular perv is in fact the same guy I found an address and phone number for this morning, I'd put him on the Focus on the Family and American Family Association mailing lists, along with any others I could come up with, so he'd have to deal with that garbage, too.

In the meantime, someone has suggested I report his ass to MSN for e-mail abuse. This was, after all, a threat. Thoughts on that, anyone?

* I make no claims that this is a logical argument, kids.

Booty-Call Bob*: What, exactly, are your intentions, Sir?

I responded to Booty-Call Bob’s ad, which listed random things about the man himself (and, by now, we all know how I’m attracted to randomness). When he wrote back, he said mine was the best response he’d received by far (thank you, thank you). We started e-mailing one another regularly throughout the work days, talked of meeting very early on, and exchanged numbers. Work called him out of town on-and-off for several weeks, and, on the rare occasion he was in town during that time, I already had plans, so the meeting was postponed indefinitely.

Late one Friday night, as I was chilling at a new “buddy’s” house, my phone started ringing. It was Booty-Call Bob. After racking my brain to figure out who, exactly, was calling me at the forbidden hour, I finally realized who it was (his real name is identical to another guy I’d actually been out with once, and I first guessed incorrectly). I ignored his call, for several reasons.

1. We’d never spoken on the phone before.
2. I’m not inclined to take calls from people I don’t know in the middle of the night unless I’m drunk or sleeping. (I was neither.)
3. A call at 2 a.m. on a Saturday morning is the epitome of a booty call. (He hadn’t earned the right to a booty call, friends.)
4. I was at another dude’s house and having a lovely time. Accepting the call wouldn’t have been kosher behavior.

That call was immediately followed by a text message, to which I did not respond. The text was followed a few minutes later by another call. And then another call. And then another text.

All this pretty much infuriated me. Yeah, I’d been corresponding with this guy for several weeks. And, yeah, we had a good little banter going on (he’s a witty and sarcastic prick. We got along well). But what the hell did he think he was going to accomplish by calling and texting me a total of five times in 10 minutes in the middle of the night? I knew chances were high that he was smashed, but I still didn’t like it one bit. By this time, the dude I was hanging out with had witnessed me silencing my phone several times and had probably seen my jaw tighten with each new ring. He was giving me strange sideways glances, and I felt I had to say something. Rather than get into explaining the whole thing, I just told him that the person who was calling didn’t have sufficient friend privileges for me to answer a call this late. He thought that amusing, and the night progressed without further interruption.

When I checked my inbox the next day, there were two e-mails from Booty-Call Bob, both timed within 10 minutes of his texts/calls from the night before. That really did it. I responded to the e-mail with a terse, “Just got your missed calls and messages. What’s up?” He wrote back a couple hours later with this: “Haha yeah I was being an idiot. Sorry to bug ya at such a late hour. Few too many drinks I feel...”

Looking back through my e-mails, I was surprised (and quite dismayed) to find that I’d accepted this half-assed apology/excuse and continued to correspond with Booty-Call Bob, albeit with less frequency. I’d even talked with him about meeting up for drinks. This was one of many times, looking back at our correspondence, that we discussed meeting, and it never panned out. One reason is that he’s repeatedly insisted I come meet him out in Bumfuck, Va. (read: beyond the Metro) to go to a bar (read: either drive home drunk or stay the night with Booty-Call Bob). Another is that the only time Booty-Call Bob seems to want to talk to me is when he’s smashed and (all signs point to) looking for a fitting tail for the end of his evening.

A couple weekends ago, Booty-Call Bob started texting me during the forbidden hour, this time persistently requesting that I drive on over to the bar he was at (again, in Bumfuck, Va.) and hang out with him. When I informed him his request was ridiculous and that I didn’t appreciate him contacting me like I was at his disposal for a booty call, he feigned innocence and again asked me out for sometime later in the week. Of course, he informed me, I’d have to come to him. All attempts at contact stopped on the part of both parties that night. Perhaps, upon reviewing our text conversation at a more sober hour, Booty-Call Rob realized he’d been busted.

I know I’m no saint in the casual sex department. I’ve had my share in the past, and I’ll likely have more. I’ve had arrangements that worked, arrangements that didn’t, arrangements that weren’t arrangements at all but repeated encounters of the drunken (and sometimes regrettable) variety. But, excuse me, Sir, if I gave you my number so you could call me for a date, that’s what you should use it for. Not to call me for some ass and then claim that isn’t why you were calling at all.

* Names have been changed -- for the innocents and the slimeballs alike -- because, hell, I’d want my name changed if someone were putting me in a blog. (And who’s to say any of those were their real names anyway?)

Pushy Pete: Five Easy Steps to Ensure You will Not Meet Belle

I’m honestly not sure how Pushy Pete and I began talking, exactly. I think he posted a “bored, wanna chat?” one night when I was drunk and home too early, and I responded. I only have one e-mail exchange with him, so I’m thinking this must be the case.

Consider what follows to be the Pushy Pete Guide to Ensuring Belle Won’t Meet You.

1. Get really comfortable really quickly.

Almost immediately when we started chatting, Pushy Pete said he felt incredibly relaxed with me and that we would be good friends for a long time. I felt no such thing. I’m honest with all the people I meet online (okay, maybe the other night I did tell one guy I give excellent blowjobs, but I saw no harm considering he’s on the opposite end of the country and that’s exactly what he wanted needed to hear), just like I’m honest with all the people I meet in life. Pushy Pete got my utter honesty, but I’m no fool; I don’t expect that any given virtual acquaintance is telling me the truth and nothing but, even when they insist that’s exactly what they’re doing. That’d just be ridiculously naïve.

2. Put a great deal more stock into our relationship than I do.

Unlike most guys I talk to who demand photos pretty much immediately and want increasingly more thereafter, Pushy Pete waited a long time to suggest the photo exchange and didn’t ask for more than one. He was, he insisted, more interested in me as a friend than in me as a potential lover. He acted like it, too, for the most part.

I’m not sure how long we were talking before he asked for my number, but we spoke on the phone a few times. He talked freely about pretty much anything and everything, all the while reminding me how comfortable he was and that he found it very easy to talk to me. And that we were, according to him, friends and would be such for a long time, no matter what I thought about it.

I didn’t mind killing time talking to him, but I didn’t make any such assumption of friendship. I don’t have online friends. Acquaintances, sure, but my friends are not people I know only virtually. I don’t use the term ‘friend’ freely; it has meaning in my life. And that meaning does not encompass someone with whom I share no past that doesn’t involve a phone or a computer screen.

3. Make demands of me. Repeatedly.

Pretty soon, Pushy Pete was pushing for a little get together. At this point, he was definitely flirting with me and wanted to take me out. I politely (and repeatedly) reminded him that he was the one who set the just-friends status, and that was perfectly fine with me. He slowly backed off the date invitations, but not the invitations in general. Unlike some of the other guys I’d met within a few days of beginning to talk with them, Pushy Pete gave me an uneasy feeling that lead me to back out of meeting him a couple times.

One afternoon, he’d pretty much convinced me to come into the District that night to meet him for drinks, despite it being a weeknight and me being unsure of my best transportation options (moving to Virginia made going out a pain in my ass). As I was trying to figure how to get there, he was on IM hounding me to give him a specific time. Finally, I told him I wasn’t coming. He’d pushed just a little too far, and I suddenly remembered I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to do. Meeting him was pretty high on the list of things I would rather eat live beetles than do.

4. Assume that telling me to do something I don’t want to do will result in me doing it.

When I backed out, he asked why. That damn Southern politeness overruled the overwhelming desire to tell him exactly what I thought, and I simply told him transportation was an issue (yes, EG, my townhouse is “inconveniently located.” Bite me). This, of course, prompted him to tell me he’d pick me up.

The conversation that followed had this flavor, if not these exact words:

PushyPete: I’ll pick you up and bring you home.
Belle: No, you won’t. I told you I think it’s a terrible idea to drink and drive.* Plus, I don’t feel comfortable getting in your car. I don’t even know you.
PushyPete: Get over it.
Belle: Um, No.
PushyPete: Um, yes.
Belle: Your telling me to ‘get over it’ shows a complete disregard for my need to feel safe and in control at all times. I will not be going anywhere with you. I have the right to say where I’ll go and with whom and how I’ll get there. You are not in a position to make those decisions or demands of me.
PushyPete: You’re right. I’m sorry. (Blah, blah, blah. Apologies. Whining. Blah, blah, blah.)

After this, Pushy Pete asked when I would meet him and apologized profusely for “messing up” with me. I told him if I did meet him, it’d have to be during the day, in an extremely public place, and not until I felt completely comfortable doing so. He laid off asking me out for a while, although we continued to chat online, and he called a few times (none of which I answered or returned).

5. Let me know it’s probably not just me who thinks you’re a knave.

Several weeks later, though, he was at it again. This time asking that I meet him and a bunch of his (male) friends out in Dupont one night. When I refused, he pressured me to tell him when we could meet. I told him he sent up major red flags and that I probably would never meet him. His response? He asked me to tell him what he’d done wrong so he wouldn’t send up red flags with other girls. My thought? Creep-y.

* Yes, I know. You know I drove after having too much wine with The Mexican. It’s still not a good idea, obviously, to drink and drive, and I do avoid such situations (as both passenger and driver) as much as possible. That night, I was stupid in more than one way.