Last Friday Night

I recently had a Friday night like that song. You know the one. No, not Rebecca Black. Katy Perry. "There's a stranger in my bed. There's a pounding in my head. I smell like a mini-bar. Think the city towed my car." And so on and so forth...

It started out innocently enough. This guy, let's call him A, asked me to meet him for a drink. Well, one drink turned into 17. We were downing shit I hadn't ever expected to drink again after high school: whiskey and cokes, Long Island iced teas, Irish car bombs. It was out of control. I think our bar tab was like $90. At some point I realize neither of us is in any condition to drive. But I still want to get him to come home with me. So I start texting my friend and harassing her to come hang out with us. I figure she can give us a ride, or at least help me brainstorm a way to get him back to my lair.

So she arrives and is pretty instantly fed up with our drunken shenanigans. Turns out we weren't nearly as funny as we thought we were to sober people. So while A is in the bathroom, my friend whispers to me that when he gets back, she's going to announce she's bringing me home and that if he would also like a ride to my house, then jump on in. Brilliant. And he totally fell for it.

So she drops us off at my house and I realize I've forgotten my keys. No big deal, there is a spare one hidden in the garden. Except that while I'm stumbling through the backyard, knocking over garden gnomes and stepping on tomato plants, my dog is inside barking his head off. (I had always wondered if my dog would react to an intruder in our yard, so this came as something of a relief and a welcome surprise. For a second.) Then I realized he was going to wake up my roommate and I would be caught bringing a boy home. In the year I had lived there, no one had ever brought a random home. I was about to be busted as the house slut.

As I'm turning over stones in the garden trying to remember where the key is hidden while simultaneously trying to get the dog to shut up by yelling "It's me, you fucking idiot!" A decides this would be an opportune time to pee in our raspberry bushes. "What are you doing?! We have toilets inside!" I yelled just as my roommate opened the back door to see what the shit was going on. She said later that she was confused to see a burglar in the backyard start waving and walking toward her. We stood there awkwardly in the kitchen, with me not introducing anyone. I apologized profusely, grabbed A and ran to my room.

Skip over the good parts...

The next day, feeling like a total asshole, I apologized some more to my roommate for waking her up. Then I started to tell her the story of how I met this guy and the crazy night I had. "Wait," she said. "You mean that guy last night? That wasn't S?"

S was the last guy I dated. We had stopped dating, oh, about 24 hours before I had started dating A. Not overlap exactly, but... pretty close. In her sleepy confusion in the dark, my roommate had mistaken the new guy for the old guy. In a momentary panic, I racked my brain, trying to remember if she had addressed A as S the night before. I couldn't be sure, but I didn't think so. Whew. That was close.

The Manimal

Somehow I always knew this one would end up as a blog post... So I started dating this guy, the manimal. The manimal was a term he came up with to poke fun at himself for being so hairy. He was hairy from head to toe, but he had the worst back hair I have ever seen on a human being. It was like head hair, but on his back. Remember Austin Powers? Now double it. He called it a full-body sweater. I know that sounds exaggerated, but just suspend your disbelief and go with it. It was true. Sadly, ironically, the poor guy was going bald. That has got to be frustrating when you have full, luscious locks everywhere but where you want them. I empathized with him and imagined it must be like when you gain weight and none of it goes to your boobs...

So anyway, the back hair was not really a problem for me because I like my men manly. We even went swimming in a city pool and I allowed myself to be seen in public with him without his shirt on. And although I'm not sure any of it actually penetrated through that forest and made contact with his skin, I put sunblock on his back. Plus, he had an awesome beard and I figured it was a trade-off for the back.

The problem was that the manimal was a child. A 33-year-old child. And I think he might have been dumb. Either that or all the years of drug/alcohol use had whittled his functioning brain cells down to four.

The first indication that he may not have exactly been on my (or anyone over the age of 10) intellectual playing field was when he started complaining that a salty salad at lunch had hurt the roof of his mouth. As a person who puts salt on everything, including salads, and probably eats three days worth of their recommended daily allowance of sodium in one sitting, and NEVER had it cut up the roof of their mouth, this statement was beyond ridiculous. I told him to think real hard and try to remember if perhaps he had had a toasty baguette or Cap'n Crunch cereal in the past few days...

Then he made some comment about how colds are not airborne. You don't say! So you mean we don't need to cover our mouths when we cough or sneeze after all? Hooray! And all that fear of getting sick on airplanes? No need to worry about your Typhoid Mary neighbor breathing on you anymore. You won't get sick, unless you make out with them, of course. Um... I'm pretty sure there is actually a cold remedy called "Airborne."

Anyway, the manimal was starting to annoy me. He didn't get my jokes, pop-culture or current event references or movie quotes. He wasn't real quick on the uptake. If things I said were over his head, what else wasn't he getting?

I began to worry about how I was going to end things. (I'm a bad breaker-upper, I won't deny it). So when things began to fizzle, I didn't try too hard to rekindle them. Then, apropos of nothing, he said he wasn't ready to be my boyfriend. I smiled on the inside and thought to myself, maybe this problem will just take care of itself. I told him (and meant it) that I didn't want him to be my boyfriend either, but if he wanted to continue our twice-weekly sex sessions, that was cool with me and in the mean time I was going to look for a boyfriend. He asked me if I was using him for sex. I said no. Oddly, I never heard from him again...