scott. (nyc, circa 2001.)
Shortly after the disintegration of a quickie one-month relationship with a man I’d met (where else?) online, I headed back to Nerve.com to peruse the personals. I arranged a post-work happy hour date with Scott, a cute blond filmmaker who seemed cool, but quiet. His profile wasn’t very fleshed out. In retrospect, I should have taken the cues and run for the hills.
On the Tuesday afternoon we arranged to meet, I got to the Beauty Bar first, so I grabbed a booth and a Corona and waited. And waited. And waited. Twenty minutes later, a disheveled-looking dude with shaggy blond hair, a 5 o’ clock shadow and a halfway-unbuttoned ruffled white poet’s shirt (!!!) strode toward me confidently. Half his chest was hanging out; I could see one of his nipples. He wore baggy olive cargo pants and mandals. He looked like a grungy pseudo-hippie who had doused himself liberally in false bravado. “Hey,” he muttered. He ran his hand through his stringy hair, which looked like it hadn’t been washed in a week. “Sorry I’m late; I overslept. I just got up.”
It was 5:30 pm. On a Tuesday. “You just woke up? What do you do?” I asked, incredulous.
“I’m a filmmaker,” he said. …But of course.
“Mainly documentaries.” Even better!
I hated this guy’s guts. The following 30 minutes were among the most uncomfortable in my long and storied dating history; I really and truly had nothing to say. He was pretentious, arrogant and dull. It was like talking to a rock pretending to be something…other than a rock. He was wearing a poet’s blouse, for Chrissakes! Where were we, a Renaissance Faire?!
After an extra-long bout of silence, he huffed, “You seem bored. If I’m boring you, I’ll go.” I played polite – I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. “No no, I’m just tired,” I said.
He wasn’t buying it. “No, you seem really really bored. Whatever. I’m gonna go.” And without a spare word, the half-dressed filmmaker swaggered out of the Beauty Bar, into the summer evening. I was left to finish my Corona alone. Less than 45 minutes after he had arrived, and only an hour after he had woken up, he was gone.
And good riddance.
