speed dating

The dawn of internet dating has led to more people wishing a first date would end quickly than had previously occurred in the entire history of human courtship. I dabbled in online dating myself, always careful to avoid women using head shots as their photo and always wary of words like ‘vegan’ and ‘cat’ in their profile. However, despite these precautionary measures I still got taken on one of cupid’s little joyrides because no one actually puts the words ‘speed freak’ in their description.

It was a grey December that year in Los Angeles and like many previous holiday seasons I found myself mateless. The difference was this year it bothered me. Perhaps it was the life in transition moment that had really protracted into an ongoing theme or maybe it was that the 30 year milestone was poking its head up from my next birthday. Regardless, I felt a distinctly intense feeling of loneliness. I was meeting women from time to time – boozy surf girls or bohemian cheese lovers or even gals who knew nothing about South Africa, but there wasn’t anyone I felt like sharing a cup of eggnog with or who inspired me to stand outside her window holding a radio above my head that played Christmas carols.

Obviously, I had been leaving my romantic life in the hands of chance and circumstance and it was time to take it into my own. Online dating gives you a snapshot of a person before you ever talk to them and I liked that idea. Who do they say they are? How do they express themselves? What are their interests? Is there anything annoying that pops out immediately?

There are all kinds of things that can happen once you actually meet someone face to face and I had a couple of meetings in which the girl wasn’t remotely like her profile or had used a picture from a few years before she discovered she had a profound love of deep friend Twinkies. However, from time to time you meet someone who looks exactly like the pretty girl in the photo and is ever bit the saucy and witty woman with whom you exchanged emails. She may also be a recreational amphetamine user who got a little nervous before the date and so she dosed and is amped out of her mind by the time she meets you at the bar, but those kinds of little peccadilloes are never included anywhere under a person’s Interests or Hobbies.

Julie and I met online. She picked the Bar Marmont, at the Chateau in Hollywood, as the place we would first meet face to face. She said it would be a good backdrop for her sinister sense of humor. The hotel may very well be one of the most famous in the world as it has been frequented by legends of the LA scene ranging from the Doors, Rock Hudson, Sam Shepard and Johnny Depp to Hollywood’s latest pantyless trollop du jour. It will mostly though, be a bar full of people trying to pretend they are too cool for the scene and thus utterly unaffected. I have no desire to go there. She does. I lose.

Julie was pin-up girl pretty with generous curves and, with her straight black hair, porcelain skin and flair for slightly dramatic make-up, just a touch of goth. She was a few years out of Cal Berkeley and working for an agency, reading through scripts and fetching agents the things they wanted fetched. She would come home from work and plow through four or five scripts a night. She was a machine.

I saw her waiting for me at the bar when I arrived. She popped out of her seat and bounded my way, wrapping me in tight hug. I got a small peck on the lips as well and she said ‘Thank god you’re cute.’

I reciprocated with something similar and was going to make a quip about truth in advertising but I never got the chance. She was shot out of a canon and had a lot to say. I wondered whether she had recently completed an oath of silence as I actively struggled to keep up. By the way, which was ‘btw’ to her, Julie was Jewels to her friends – that was her spelling not mine since she believed she was a treasure. I would have gone with Jules, as in Jules Verne, since she already was making me wonder whether I might prefer drowning under 20,000 leagues to finishing the date.

She talked fast and she often spoke as if she were a teenage girl texting me. Everything was abbreviated and ‘btw’ was just the beginning. She had a terse, Hemingway-esque delivery but sputtered on with the endless flow of thought reminiscent of Kerouac. During her diatribes, she was also constantly swiveling her head around and checking out the scene. She didn’t want to miss a thing happening around her but she wouldn’t let that interrupt her flow.

The bar wasn’t all that busy but the mingling was gaining speed. She asked me if I thought we might see anyone famous but before I had the chance to say ‘probably not’ she was telling me about the time she met Jon Favreau at a bagel place in Santa Monica and said he was just like he was in his movies, which I can only assume meant a little rotund with a diminishing hairline since conversation with Jewels didn’t contain many details.

She was drinking vodka sodas and I was nursing a Jameson neat. I tried to make eye contact with her and nodded along with her stories but keeping pace was exhausting. I didn’t know I could be fatigued from listening until that night with Jewels. I would have thought that not being expected to respond might be an easy task but it was more like being on the hood of someone’s car while they tore through Lombard Street in San Francisco and trying not be flung to my death.

She was in the middle of a soliloquy about her growing up in New York City when there was a gasp, followed by a noticeable pause. In any other conversation it would be a fleeting second but in Jewels speak it was a pause worthy of Laurence Olivier. This was followed by a staccato of rapid succession “OMG! OMG! OMG!” and her bouncing her hand up and down on my thigh.

Her eyes widened and her mouth opened slightly and she then attempted a subtle point in the direction of a man walking by. It was Skeet Ulrich. Jewels gasped slightly and her pupils dilated a tad more than one might have liked to see. A schoolgirl smile spread across her face and I fully expected her to say “Isn’t he dreamy” at any given moment. She unabashedly followed him with her gaze as he made his way past us.

Things I started to realize about Jewels: potentially stunted maturity, questionable taste in celebrities, possible speed user, definite starfucker.

Jewels was a little flustered by her near encounter with the B-list actor and turned to the barkeep and asked for a shot of Patron tequila. I was content to continue nursing my Jameson but hoped that a shot of tequila might slow her pacing down a bit. Be very careful what it is you wish for.

She did one shot and immediately ordered another. She smiled at me and told me how excited she was. As I had quickly become accustomed to not responding I merely smiled. She again told me I was cute and leaned over, kissing me in a way that made me speculate she was projecting her Skeet Ulrich crush onto me. Despite my embarrassment with making out in bars, it occurred to me that the more I kissed her the less I would have to listen to her talk. It then occurred to me that a blowjob would be an even better solution but I quickly determined that I draw the line at making out when I’m in a bar.

Her next shot arrived and she threw it down with zest and placed the glass back on top of the bar with an alarming amount of vigor. She smacked her lips and then looked my way and batted her eyelashes, giving me her best coquettish visage. She was very pretty and if only she were incapable of talking we might have had a future. She stood quickly, grabbed my face in her hands, gave me another kiss intended for Skeet Ulrich and then went to the restroom.

I was a little confused as to what to do. There was a red light going off in my brain telling me to pay the tab and make a quick exit, but there was also a vestigial amount of my southern manners left in me that told me a French leave was inappropriate on a first date. Internally I groused about the unpredictability of my conscience but I ordered another whiskey, deciding to weather the storm.

She returned and a cycle developed. A shot was ordered and slammed, lips were smacked, I received another one of Skeet’s kisses and she made a bathroom break. She didn’t excuse herself after every shot, it might have been every other, but the rest of the cycle was pretty consistent. Her kisses started lingering a little longer and were soon accompanied by giggles. She kept telling me I was cute and then batted her lashes, an act that looked increasingly more appropriate for a dust storm than the bar.

Normally I would have pointed out that she might want to ease up on the shots but as her speed-talking was nearing more tolerable levels, I selfishly remained the silent benefactor of her Skeet crush.

During one of her forays into the ladies room, I was exchanging text messages with my new friend Ike and making plans for the rest of the evening when the bartender, a young woman with reddish brown hair and pink highlights and extremely perfect olive skin, poured me another whiskey, which I had not ordered, and said to me in what can only be called an admonishing tone, “Please tell me this is a blind date and you won’t be seeing her again.”

I looked up with a slight surprise, “Yes, blind and rapidly getting blinder.”

“You should pay the tab, pay for her cab and then come back in for another drink.”

It was like providence was stepping in. The barkeep, the sole voice of reason in a bar, was advocating raising the white flag. Coincidentally, I received a text message from Ike saying he knew of a great Christmas party in Beverly Hills we should crash. I looked at the message and back to the bartender who was cleaning up a spilled beer a few seats down. I flagged her down.

“Ok, here’s what I’m thinking. Oh, what’s your name, by the way?”

“Summer.”

Yes, there in the winter of my discontent I met Summer.

“Ok, Summer. Here’s my card. Let’s close the tab. I am going to leave some money for her cab with you, if that’s ok. Maybe you can give it to her and let her know I had to split. Also, I would like to buy a drink for Skeet Ulrich and tell him it’s from her. She likes him a lot and who knows where it could lead.”

I expected Summer to at least be surprised but she took it in stride and told me she would make sure my blind date was taken care of, one way or another. She asked me if I was coming back and I told her most definitely, just not tonight. She said she worked Thursday and Saturday nights and it was understood I would be returning.

Summer wrapped things up quickly and I saw her taking a drink over to Skeet as I was making my way out of the bar. I felt a little slimy but a little liberated as well. As I walked into the cool LA night, the accompanying silence was a welcome friend.

There was a taxi parked on the street and as I walked over to it I received a new text message from Ike:

Let’s ride a mechanical bull before we head to the party.

I felt as if I had just gotten off one but wasn’t opposed to trying it out.