Badly Parked

(4 November 2003)

One of the great advantages of online dating is that most of it remains just that: online.  No one gets turned off by the fact that I’m falling down drunk, because they can’t see it.  No one can hear my slurred speech—if they request to cam I just tell them that I don’t have one which is the truth.  However, I’m still confronted by the fact that I come off as quite flirtatious when drunk, even when it’s not my intention.  I got bombed at a party recently and the man standing next to me, with whom I’d been having a long and enjoyable conversation, felt the need to remind me several times to remind me that he was gay.  The last thing I had in mind was hitting up on him, but that’s how I came across.  The keyboard filters slurring but it doesn’t filter a flirtatious manner.  Fortunately I generally manage to a strict rule of not going out once I’ve started drinking.  Going out drunk is an invitation for trouble.

There are hordes of men who do their best to get me to take a taxi to their place at all hours of the night, for their instant gratification.  Now in theory, that’s mutual gratification, but when after a short dialogue they’re trying to get me to take a taxi, my first question is: “What are the preliminaries going to be like?”  And since they’re skimping on the preliminaries, “what’s the main meal going to be like?” 

There seem to be three categories of men that I’m running across.  The first are the hopeless romantics.  Their profiles are almost invariably long, poetic, finely crafted expressions of desire for domestic bliss, which generally end with an idealized breakfast scene.  No, they’re not making breakfast; the delicious smell draws them out of the beds to the breakfast table, where the newspaper has lovingly been set out.  What year of the century is this?  All too often the sexist tone of their messages becomes even more blatant by the warning that they don’t want “preneuses de têtes.”  The literal translation is “head takers,” and I imagine that it has something to do with their feeling that their heads are being held hostage.  Whenever I ask a man what he means by that, it stops our dialoguing cold.  So I’ll have to check around and get back to you with a more precise definition.  The second category of man is the one who looks quite promising, has long, regular, and interesting conversations with you, and then cuts off all communication just when it comes time to meet in real life.  The number of men who hide behind the screen is stupendous.  The third category is the one I mentioned earlier, the man in search of instant gratification.

Today I got a phone call from a man in the third category.  We’d actually met once months ago at a café in the early evening.  I arrived first and had two beers on an empty stomach, which I usually wouldn’t even notice, but when I got up to kiss him on the cheeks, I lost my balance slightly.  He immediately announced that he was “badly parked,” which is a standard code phrase for: “I’m splitting, and you’ll never see me again.”  So today he said he wanted to see me again.  After a meeting that lasted less than a minute, and months of silence!  When I declined, he protested: “But I thought you wanted to suck my cock!"

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