I never posted my horror story in the dating threads on Gawker because it was too long. Even though the date happened in the 80’s, the horror is still fresh today.
Gather round, kids, and let me tell you about the worst date in the history of the world. Grab a drink and maybe a snack. Maybe a pillow for biting if you’re reading this late at night and don’t want to wake up the people you live with.
The year is 1988. It’s my favorite time of year, early November. I had moved into boystown in Chicago early that year, in hopes of finding friends, a man, and a new life. In fact, I was really following my suburban friends into the city. They all had groovy studio or one bedroom apartments and I wanted me one of them too. They didn’t live with their parents any more and they were independent. I wanted this for myself as well. I am 22 and about as savvy as Sarah Palin.
Since it’s 1988, the Chicago gay bars have finally broken free of mafia ownership, but have not improved their decor or sanitation. Being used to frou-frou suburban establishments, I am less than impressed by walls, ceiling, floor painted matte black with a 19-inch magnavox in one corner showing some porn loop or maybe a paula abdul video. I don’t feel comfortable in the bars like I did when I was a teenager, maybe because I am a little older and now have zero self-confidence.
So, week after week of not fitting in at any of the bars in the neighborhood wears down. I’m not meeting anyone at the grocery store, the flower shop, friends’ parties, the post office, the coffee shop, the book stores, the bicycle stores, the video rental place, the various local restaurants I visit. Just… no luck. Nothing.
So, I look in The Reader at the personals ads. Most of them are very specific as to what’s desired and what’s expected and I am either not interested or frightened, depending on the ad.
Then I find an ad from a “normal Joe, except my name is Larry”. The guy sounds normal and not psychotic. Sweet, even. This is before the Internets were invented so I write him a letter and he writes me back. I send a picture and he sends a picture. His letter with his picture is very enthusiastic. His picture shows someone who’s not ugly but definitely not a “looker”. He’s kinda short, but I like short guys. Why isn’t Larry the man I saw on Broadway a week before wearing the gray cotton lycra tights that showed his beautiful muscular legs and ass? Ah well, we go with what’s in front of us.
In our next round of letters, Larry and I exchange phone numbers. We talk a few times, and we each decide that the other is not a lunatic. We learn that we work not far from each other downtown, so we plan an after work cocktail. All very safe and sensible for this early AIDS era get-together. He looks just like his picture, which is not bad but he’s not winning Miss Junior Come And Get It Boys, that’s for sure. We decide to ride the bus home together and Larry is very flirtatious. Very. Like scaring the straight people very. I ask him to tone it down because hello you don’t know me like that and so he does. Satisfied he’s not like some of the crazies I’ve met in the past few years, I decide we can see each other again.
In the next week, Larry sends me letters. Every day. With pictures. Explicit pictures of Larry. Again, not bad, but it seems a little … like we’re rushing things here. We do live on opposite sides of the same neighborhood, for gossakes, already.
We talk on the phone and decide to do dinner and dancing. I will come to his place to pick him up and meet his room mates, and then we will go over to my dyke friend’s place and the three of us will hit the town.
I arrive at his building and go up to his apartment. Cue the ominous music. He lets me in his apartment and his two male room mates are entangled on the couch, not completely undressed but mostly undressed, and obviously in the way of getting busy. Look away, Dixieland. They ask if I want to join them. I declare, then I decline. Seems rude to do this in front of Larry, no? They are muy bonito, but no, I’m a good boy, so let’s bundle Larry up and get moving. While he’s getting ready, the boys on the couch ask me when Larry is moving in with me. Turn up the ominous music a few notches, will you?
Walking over to my friend’s building, Larry tells me he has a surprise for me. I tell him I’ve already had my surprise quota for the night, thanks. He laughs and says, “you’ll see…” Note that this is pre-“Silence of the Lambs” so I did not think he was thinking about making a skin suit or anything.
We get to my friend’s place, and go upstairs for a drink and to give her the required eight million hours that lipstick lesbians require to prepare when leaving their apartments. She immediately does not like Larry. This is not a good sign. Ominous music gets louder.
We go to dinner at a Chinese place I’ve never tried because it’s outside the neighborhood. The food is good and Chinesey. Ominous music gets quieter here, what with the pre-dinner drink and food calming jittery nerves.
After dinner, we head over to a for gosh sakes real live discotheque. You know, the kind where you have to pay at the door and then go up about 40 stairs and then there’s a coat check and then you’re allowed entry into the actual space? Yeah, that kind.
Oh my. Disco balls and a huge dance floor and varilights or whatever they had back then and smoke and So. Many. People. We get drinks at the bar and survey the room. We can’t talk because the music is being propulsed out of speakers the size of my 1976 Chevy Vega. So far the songs are early 80’s dance music fare, a little New Order, a little Jody Watley, that new Rick Astley song, and some unknowable Madonna twelve-inch remix that no one could move to. Oh, I hate it when DJ’s get all esoteric with their songs.
And then —
PUMP UP THE VOLUME, PUMP UP THE VOLUME, PUMP UP THE VOLUME, DANCE DANCE hits us as if a wall of well-cemented bricks moved sideways across the floor. Larry seems super-excited to hear this song. I was not a fan. At all. Something about this song just didn’t sound right, and I never got into it. But mister Larry, oh my, this was his raison de etre, yes indeedy. He flung his drink on the bar and ran to the dancefloor. My lesbian ladyfriend and I exchanged glances.
Larry began doing a jig on the floor. An Irish jig. On the dance floor. My heart bottomed out like a 73 Impala going over a speedbump. He had a huge grin on his elfin face as he segued into some sort of hoedown jiggery pokery knee-slapping hee-haw chassée which caused the dance floor to become ghost town. No one wanted to be on the dance floor at the same time as this spectacle of Elaine Marie Benes dance supremacy.
By now we’re at the point where PUT THE NEEDLE ON THE RECORD AND THE DRUM BEAT GOES LIKE THIS hits us and some random singer’s glossolalia wails out of the compact car speakers and attempts to shatter the barware.
Larry is now combining the jig and the hee-haw square dance moves with absolutely no regard to the rhythm of the song. I begin to suspect he is experiencing an epileptic seizure and wonder if everyone saw me walk in the door with him. They did. They’re looking and pointing at him and then they’re looking at me and my sapphic ladyfriend. I realize the jig is up (literally) when the song ends. I go on the dance floor, collect him, and we leave. Much to his bemusement.
My tribadic friend ditches us at the door and goes to her gurls-only bar. I walk Larry home. Ominous music is deafening at this point.
On the way home — on a busy main thoroughfare full of cars and people — at 11 pm on a Saturday in Boystown — Larry drops to one knee and opens a small red velvet box. Inside I see two gold stud earrings. Managing to contain my horror, I tell him I cannot accept his gift, because I don’t wear gold (true). He says he wants me to keep the earrings anyway. I tell him I cannot. He wants me to come back to his place for nookie. I tell him I cannot. He offers his room mates to me (“ooh they really thought you were hot”) and he will watch from the sidelines.
I have finally had enough. Using all the powers of invective at my disposal, and trust me they are many and legion, I tell Larry in no uncertain terms that his performance this evening, and the performance of his room mates, has convinced me that I would like to never see him again ever, and that would be too soon.
Larry doesn’t believe me. He thinks I am playing hard to get. I inform him that it’s not hard to get, it’s impossible to get, so forget we ever met and just move along.
Before this becomes street theater (more than it already has) I bid him good night and walk quickly away. Larry is left on his knees, crying. End scene.
