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.
|
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.