In late 2010, when I was “putting myself back out there” after my divorce, I had a slight problem. I hadn’t much of a social life. I was driving 90 minutes, one way, to work each day. That ate into my free time. I was being reborn as an atheist, so I wasn’t really spending time with my friends from the old church. And most of the friends I was spending any time with weren’t exactly what I would describe as cooperative when it came to setting me up with hot chicks. I was on my own.
Not that being on my own in the dating environment is a bad thing, and honestly, I am pretty dubious about being set-up with someone. If someone knows a person who would be “great” for me, it’s a woman who thinks I should meet her nice friend. Nice is, well, nice, but it isn’t everything. Like, does she have a nice ass? What does she think about emotionally abusing cats? I have questions!
It’s difficult for me to just meet someone out there, even in bars. (Well, that’s not entirely true. I meet people all the time in bars, and we become fast friends.) I’d love to meet someone in a bookstore when our hands touch as we both reach for the last copy of Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, and then our eyes meet. We smile.
“I love Maugham,” she’ll say.
“Me, too,” as I show her my “Maugham” in a heart tattoo.
Then we talk for a bit, and I suggest we get a cup of coffee. We talk some more, and we agree to go see Rock on the River on the Hallowell waterfront on Tuesday. “The Scolded Dogs are playing,” I tell her.
“Oh, I love them,” she says. “They’re so much fun!”
Then I tell her how Jake, the keyboard player for the Dogs
is one of my fake adopted sons. She gives me an odd look for a moment, but when
we meet on Tuesday, it’s like our conversation never stopped. There’s no trivia
at the Liberal Cup that night, so I suggest we go there for a beer after
dancing to the Scolded Dogs’ funk on the river.
She’s never been to the Cup, so I tell her about the beers on tap. When I tell her that the Milleni-Ale Double IPA has hops that grew in my yard, we both order one. She asks where the restrooms are and excuses herself. I take note of her ass as she walks away—as I’m sure, she already has of mine—but everything has stopped. There isn’t a sound. I feel all the butts of my life flash before me, from that moment in fourth or fifth grade when I noticed a girl’s Jordache-covered butt for the first time. “Nice,” I had thought to myself back then, not understanding why. I saw all the butts, both the notable glories and the thousands unremembered, in pants and shorts and in a bathing suit or two. And even in some dresses, butts I couldn’t make out well, but I just knew were nice. I saw Kathy Ireland’s in an early 90s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, and I could feel the moment in my memory when I made note of its wonder, its Goldilocksian just-rightness. Like Sir Mix-a-Lot of Washington, I, too, have grown to like them on the big side, but in the interest of full disclosure, I am quite a fan of regular-sized butts, as well. I see them all flash before me, but not in the sense that they’re all, like, bared. There’s just a montage of all the butts I’ve ever noticed in my life, and it all leads up to this moment. This butt. This gloriously motorboatable bottom. The perfect ass . . . For the first time in my life, I feel peace in my heart. I hear a voice whisper, “It’s beautiful,” and I look around. But no one is moving or saying anything. I look back to her butt, and I whisper, inaudibly, “I like her butt.” She turns the corner, and everything is moving again. I hear the conversations around me continue. The wait staff is taking orders and serving them. I close my eyes and breathe deeply. I exhale and sip my beer.
We talk for a while, and then we decide to keep the evening going with some karaoke at Easy Street. Several months later she tells me that she knew she was going to fall in love with me when I was singing “Tedalicious” (to the tune of Fergie’s “Fergalicious”). I tell her that I knew for sure the first time I saw that ass.
However, this is never going to happen. I already have a copy of The Painted Veil. How many copies of it do I need to reach for until I meet that special, nice-assed lady? Sure, it’s an alright book. I did like the take on the bildungsroman with a young woman learning about what matters in life. And yeah, there’s some horribly cringe-worthy Sinophobia in the book, but that isn’t the takeaway, man. I certainly wouldn’t call it a must read in the literary canon, but I enjoyed reading about Kitty Fane’s growth as a woman and seeing her learn about the importance of sacrifice.
So, with the random meeting of my well-bottomed one true love in a bookstore, at best, an unlikelihood, and with my so-called friends holding back on setting me up with her, I felt that I had to turn somewhere else. Match.com.
When I first enrolled on Match, I didn’t feel especially comfortable with the whole process. I was a bit surprised that some women had photos that looked like they were done professionally, and not Olan Mills professionally, either. They looked like models. The pics were that well done, and the women were that attractive. It was a bit intimidating.
Well, they were intimidating to me back then. You see, for many years, until I was about 40, I didn’t think that I was an attractive man, at all. Crazy talk, I know, but as a young person, the idea that I might be good looking was completely foreign to me. And it certainly hadn’t been covered in any of the foreign languages I’d tried to learn along the way. (Maybe I should’ve studied Norwegian or something like that?) Sure, there were compliments, here and there, but they were never enough to overcome the bottomless pit of insecurity I was dealing with.
Right now, I’m working on compensating for those years of self-loathing with a measure of overconfidence that is proportionally as inaccurate as the insecurity of my youth. I want to find a balance, so I’ll have a life-long net appropriately positive self-image. Well, at least as far as looks go. I’ve always thought I was smarter than everybody, so I might have to tone that shit down a bit. At any rate, I’m looking for balance, and I’ll find it someday. Ten years ago, when I was first on Match.com, I just wasn’t there.
So, I was just awe-struck that these incredibly beautiful women with professional-looking photos were reaching out to lil’ ol’ me. It was quite a boost of confidence, at least for the moment.
Ultimately, it didn’t really help that young 40-year-old’s self-esteem because I figured out that these women weren’t local, and they probably weren’t coming back to the area, even if they were able to get enough money to renew their passports.
That’s what Mills told me. Mills Powell. She was from Milford, Maine, just across the river from Old Town, where I was still living. Her picture made me wonder A, how could she be interested in me, and B, how, the hell, had I not noticed her at Hannaford, ever. Sure, there are thousands of people who live in the Old Town area and who shop at that Hannaford. I didn’t know them all, nor would I have recalled them if I had seen their pictures. This woman, though, this Mills Powell, I would have remembered her.
Then again, maybe she did her shopping in Bangor or Brewer. I’m sure there are people in Milford or Old Town who do. I just think I would have seen her somewhere. Rite-Aid, Angelo’s. The River Fest. Somewhere. But I was keeping an open mind because she was interested in me. . . and she was super-hot, probably almost as attractive as I now believe I am. So, you know she was fucking magnificent.
Okay several days passed there, and I had been unable to focus on writing this, partly because I was sorting through some of the emails from this long-lost lovebird. I wanted to see them and pull the essence from them to share with you. Another partly because I don’t even know. I guess I feel alone. I was really inspired writing about that one really nice butt. I kept thinking that I was just lonely, destined to be alone, and that I’d never meet some super nice lady with a time-stopping butt. I’m miserable and lonely.
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| Why would I bother getting this awesome tattoo if it won't help me meet someone with an amazing butt? (And, no, I'm not a very hirsute gentleman.) |
I just have to keep reminding myself about one incontrovertible fact. That butt isn’t real. Butts don’t stop time. I’ve been reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and I don’t think he’s going to cover the stoppage of butt-time. Sure, the gravitational pull of a really massive butt may be able to bend light as it passes by. That butt might not be in my wheelhouse, you know? Sure, big butts are great, but a butt massive enough to have a gravitational field that’s strong enough to bend light might be a bit unwieldy. And not just in the sense that it might be “too big”—although, I’m sure, the lady with that big butt is wonderful.
Let’s just suspend disbelief for a moment—along with some of the laws of physics. This theoretical butt that can bend light. It would have to be massive. The only thing that I know of that has been observed bending light is the sun—seriously—so if this woman’s butt were to be able to bend light, it would—according to my meager understanding of science—have to have the gravitational power of roughly one sun, 4.2 nonillion pounds or so. Unwieldy, at best, indeed. But let’s just say that this butt is so dense that it’s on the regular to big size. Something that massive and that dense would probably be a black hole. (I’m not even going there. I’m a fucking gentleman.)
Anyway, this theoretical 4.2 nonillion pound butt would likely have the natural gravitational force of a black hole. It would destroy the earth and probably a great deal of the solar system, which would then revolve around this butt. Light wouldn’t be able to reflect off it—because the reflected rays wouldn’t be able to escape this butt’s event horizon—so I wouldn’t even be able to see this butt. What would be the point? Even if this butt could be carried on human legs, this poor woman’s knees would be shot. She’d never be able to take an elevator. Can you imagine her? “No, I weigh 4.2 nonillion pounds. That elevator has a 5,000-pound limit. I’ll just take the stairs.” And that would be even worse for her knees, man. And the calories she would need to carry that butt around, she would have to eat around 2,790,951,575,999,999,934,310,907,904 calories per day, just to maintain. I’m sure she’d try to keep it around 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, so she could drop a few pounds, maybe make her most recent knee replacements last for more than a year. Her grocery bills would likely not be affordable on a middle-class salary.
Let’s be real. This butt would not be practical, and as dense as it would have to be, it definitely wouldn’t be motorboatable. And let’s say she finds out that I’m the one who came up with the idea for this beautiful, massive, and incredibly dense butt, do you think she want to even consider letting me motorboat it? No fucking way.
This whole butt thing raises a variety of concerns, I'm sure.
But you know whose butt didn’t raise such concerns? Mills Powell’s. I never saw a picture of her butt. However, if the pictures from the front were any indication, her butt likely did not have its own gravitational field. She may as well have, though, because she likely wasn’t real to begin with, but let’s move on.
She sent me a message through Match. It’s long gone, but she gave me her email address. She had it disguised, for some reason. I saw that quite a bit. I don’t know if it had to be disguised because Match wouldn’t let you transmit an email address or what. But that doesn’t make sense because I’ve exchanged phone numbers and email addresses with real people whom I’ve actually met. Maybe they just wanted to get it out there as quickly as possible. I don’t know. The disguise was simple, though. They just wrote the address out and used the words “at” and “dot.” I could probably do some research or something, and I could come up with a reasonable explanation. Here’s the thing, though. I don’t give a shit, and I’ve already thought about it more than I care to.
Anyway, she wrote back pretty quickly. “How are you doing, Hope everything is cool.. And am so sorry for not replying you fast....I was so amazed after i saw your mail I never thought any man would be interested in a lady who is just trying to find love on the internet” Can you believe that? Who uses such inconsistent ellipses? It doesn’t look very good for the English Department at the Dr. Lewis S. Libby School in Milford and the Old Town High School, where, I assume, she completed her secondary education. Then again, she could have gone to Orono or Brewer. I think Milford kids get to choose from a few different high schools. It doesn’t really matter. I can always ask my two grandsons who go to the Libby School. Maybe one of their teachers remembers Mills.
“Hey, Mrs. Harrison, did you ever have a girl in your class named Mills Powell?”
“Mills Powell, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. Do you know Mills, Keegan?”
“No, she just tried to catfish my Papa.”
“Oh, that Mills! She always was a scoundrel. I wonder if she ever got the hang of using ellipses.”
That’s probably a dead-end for me, though. I’m sure all of Mills teacher have retired by now.
But those emails from Mills, man, they’ve been pretty hard to read. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I’m grieving that loss, the opportunity to have a wonderful relationship with an incredibly beautiful woman who just wanted to find love again and who was “. . . so greatful to God that once in the journey of my life I met a sweet, loving,caring and very handsome man like you and If I die now I will still be happy that when I was in this world I feel in love with you. For almost the past days, you have brought so much joy to me that words can never explain.”
Then again, maybe the writing is a little over the top.
Or maybe, that was just her way of communicating. Maybe she was just a fountain of, you know, words. Words that didn’t always make sense or seem to work with any of the words around them. Words that didn’t seem to overtly demonstrate a native fluency of the English language.
She said a lot, and what did I give her? “Wow, that's a pretty complex picture of love you painted, but then it's a complex subject. If you're ever back in the Bangor area, let me know. Maybe we can get together for coffee at Ampersand's in Orono or something.”
She wanted to know things like, “What do you seek for in a relationship? What are the basic qualities you seek for in a lady? What sort of relationship you seek for? What interests you? What do you do for a living? What is love to you? I'll hopefully want to know what your consent is about these questions. I want to get to know you and meet you soon....I will be waiting to read from you Soon.”
I gave her “I'd love to have an opportunity to get to know you. You're swell. Tell me, what's it like in Nigeria?”
Wow. What the hell is wrong with me? Why is it so hard for me to communicate about love? I thought I’d come a long way, but here I am, alone and questioning my every motive. In her last email, she told me she needed a couple hundred bucks to have her passport revalidated. I gave her another heartfelt response, “About the money, we really don't know each other, and I don't think it would be a good idea for either of us to lend the other money. For all you know, I'm just some kind of internet predator/scammer. By the way, do you have $350.00 I could use to get tires for my car? Just kidding! Lol.”
There she was, stuck in Nigeria, caring for her poor mother who’d had a fall, and all she wanted was $200 to revalidate her passport to come see me. She could have paid me back when she sold the house her grandparents had left her and started her business. She had ambition. She wanted to “. . . own a big clothing line in future.” I think I need to be a little more generous. It was just $200. I could have made do. I could have put my new tires on a credit card. It’s just so confusing now. Deep down, now, I understand why she never emailed me again. I’d broken her heart.
Around this time, I told a couple of the kids about my Match.com exploits and the word got to my youngest, Amber, about how I was back on the scene. She asked me about “these girlfriends” she heard about. I explained that they were just my Nigerian girlfriends, and we were really just exchanging emails. I think she was a bit disappointed, perhaps because she just wanted me to be happy, you know, with a real relationship with a woman.
The real disappointment, though, the disappointment I’ve been carrying like an albatross around my neck or a cross on my shoulder or a monkey on my back—or really like any heavy or awkward thing that one might tote around as a metaphor for one’s guilt or whatever—over the last ten years or so. The real disappointment, my badge of shame, my scarlet letter—ooh, that’s a good metaphor for shame—the real disappointment, the burden that weighs on my heart still, is that I was two-timing Mills Powell with another lovely woman named Rita Campbell, who just happened to be working in Nigeria as a fashion designer.
How did a fashion designer in Nigeria find someone in Old Town, Maine, on Match.com? (Or is the question, how did someone in Old Town, Maine, find a fashion designer in Nigeria on Match.com?) It’s an old story. I’m sure you’ve heard it before. Her profiled showed that she lived in Appleton, Maine—or some other town in Maine that began with an “A” and was outside my reasonable search radius. But her search radius was much wider—much, much wider, as it turned out—and she found me. (So, I guess this nullifies the whole “Or is the question, how did someone in Old Town, Maine, blah, blah, blah” bullshit question. I should just delete that sentence—and this one.)
Anyway, she sent me a message on Match that had her email address, for some reason, disguised in it.
Appleton, or wherever, was a bit far from home for me. It was only about a half-hour from where I was working at the time, but still pretty well outside my radius. There were, however, a couple of things that moved her up toward the head of the line. She was hot, and she was interested in me. . . not an incredibly high bar, in retrospect, but I was feeling lonely. Don’t judge me!
We quickly started emailing. She never really explained her connection to Appleton, nor to Maine for that matter. Indeed, she never really answered any of my questions, but who cares? She had so much to say! What was she going to do? Take an extra minute of her time when she telling me about her exciting life as a fashion designer to answer basic questions about herself? That’s a good one, Ted.
She had been all over the world for her work. Sweden, Japan, the U.S., Germany. If she’d had more time, she could have told me where in Germany after I asked about it, and we could have bonded over a common experience because I had been in Germany when I was in the army. Hell, we had the rest of our lives to do that. We were connecting spiritually via email. We didn’t need to get into the weeds about what we’d actually done in places we’d both been any further than “live” or “design fashions.” The same goes for Texas. She had apparently been raised there—and not Appleton, Maine, but who cares—and my last duty station in the regular army was Fort Hood. Had we been in Texas at the same time? I don’t know, but her granny, who raised her after her parents died when she was 12, she lived in Texas. Rita was sending all the money to her granny that she could to pay for her radiation treatments.
That was just so beautiful to me. I mean, not the part about her granny needing radiation treatments, that’s a frightening view into the gaping maw of existence just waiting to consume the ones we love and hold dear. Yeah, we all will die, but will it all have been worth it? Will we have made a difference in this world? Will we have atoned for the wrongs we have visited upon others? I’m sure that’s what Rita’s granny was thinking about. She’s probably dead now, you know. I hope she was able to answer those questions and find peace.
Sorry, I kind of took a turn there.
Rita, yes, Rita was working so hard to take care of her dear granny, now that was beautiful. I could learn a lot from her. I know Rita doesn’t have to worry about whether she made a difference in this world. She did, with her granny. . . and with me, that’s for sure.
Rita’s emails, though, man, they were long. She told me about how she wanted to bring her fashion design business to Florida—again, not Maine—and she never answered me about whether she was going to come to Maine at all. So, I didn’t know if we were ever going to be able to grab a cup of coffee sometime, in Maine. She was so goddamn busy.
So busy, indeed. Once, she typed the exact same message to me two emails in a row. Exactly the same. It’s weird how she was thinking the exact same thing, twice. The good thing about it is that when I got the second message, I remembered to add something to my previous email. I cheated, though. I copied my previous reply, pasted it into a new email, and just added one sentence. She had talked about how touch was important to her, and she looked forward to when we could hold and caress each other, and stuff. So, I added this, “Also, speaking of touch, I do like hand-jobs.” I’m sure she filed that one away for when we were going to meet, which we totally would have, if I hadn’t—spoiler alert—ruined everything.
Usually, though, she liked to write about what our time together would look like. Me coming home from work to a hug and a kiss. We’d just hold each other for a moment to reconnect before we got ready to go out. She said she liked “. . . to dress in a classy way with my best pairs of pumps on, my hair and nail done very nice and I love the man I am with to be dressed looking totally hot in his suit and tie with a very nice look and warm smiles. I do want us to compliment each other when we go out.” So, I’d be all, like, “You look nice,” and she’d be all, like, “Thank you. You also look nice.” Such a nice-looking couple, though, right? The suit and the dress and stuff would have been a bit much for Applebee’s by the Bangor Mall. (Maybe Chili’s?) Perhaps we could have just gone some place downtown. I don’t know what’s in Bangor anymore, but we would have looked very nice when we went out.
Everything seemed like it was moving along so well, if not merely quickly. She seemed great. She was incredibly ambitious and very into me. “I am thinking of you and I want you to go and delete your profile on the dating site and am not here to play games here.” She was also super-hot. I don’t know how her butt looked, though. She never sent me any pics that showed it off. All I knew for sure is that she was beautiful and into me and was an upwardly mobile fashion designer, in Nigeria, and who wanted me to reel it in on Match.com.
I mean, even if she had a marginal butt, I would have been fine. I’m not, as the kids say nowadays, all about that ass. It’s not the most important thing. A great butt is the dream, man, but a woman is more than just a butt—indeed, and more than the sum of her butt plus the rest of her parts. I know this in my heart.
I wish I could tell you that Rita had a great butt, and that I fell in love with her and her butt after we met. . . and that we are married and living happily ever after. It would be pretty weird, though, if I said that because none of my friends nor family have met her. “Wait a minute,” they’d all be saying, “Ted has a hot wife with a nice butt?”
“I don’t know,” someone who wasn’t in on the initial “wait a minute” stuff would reply.
“Where does he keep her, in the basement?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been to his house several times, and there’s no indication of him having a wife. I heard he banged what’s her name.”
“With his wife in the basement?”
“I don’t know where his wife was.”
First, no, I don’t have a wife, in my basement nor anywhere else. Second, what’s her name and I are consenting adults, and what we do in private during our special time together is none of your business. But no, we were never an “item” and we’re just friends and she’s not even real.
With Rita Campbell, though, everything was great until she asked me for money to help pay for her license renewal, so she could keep working out her contract in Nigeria before coming back to the states.
“You need a Nigerian designer’s license?” I asked, my incredulity probably—somehow—making it through to the other end.
“Yes,” was her simple reply.
“I don’t think I can spare $350 for you to renew your license,” I told her, “But I’d love to meet you when you come back to the states.”
Not surprisingly, I never heard from her again. I’m such a fool. I let love go twice. I know I was two-timing them, but maybe they would have been “cool” about it. We could have made a reality show about Tedwives or sister Tedwives or whatever. Now, we have nothing because I’m selfish.
I just emailed Rita to see if she ever got her license renewed. The message wasn’t deliverable. I have failed at love.
Will I be able to find a way to work it out with catfishers from Russia? Will I find a way to test catfishers knowledge of American English in a hilarious way to see if they’re being dishonest about living here? Will I break down and send money to a catfisher? Keep your eyes peeled on this space to find out.
