If you walk down any Parisian boulevard and inadvertently stumble across a movie theater, you will, without a doubt, see a poster for Gaspar Noé’s Love, yet another explicit French “love story” meant to celebrate mildly disturbing sexual encounters between barely post-pubescent pretty young things. This time, the French had truly outdone themselves, throwing a 3D component, a transsexual encounter, and a threesome into the mix.
Once in awhile, I get a (worrisome) sign from God that I’m progressively becoming French. This time around it came in the form of the Backstreet Boy, a character who merited his nickname via his fly Mohawk and tight, cuffed Levis that took you straight back to the days when 5 man-children would croon “I want it that way” through your Discman headphones. Anyway, more on his formidable style later. Lets start with how we met.
Just when I thought it was all over and you guys would never hear another decent dating disaster again (my new sober streak is resulting in a serious lack of Dbag luck – I’m starting to see a correlation here! ), I found it, sitting smack in the middle of a “Potential” folder on my desktop, perfectly edited and yet never posted for reasons I cannot recall. Without further ado, here is the story of the Man who Went Commando.
Last Thursday, I was working from home, when I realized that I had lunch plans with La Yummy Mummy. With about 20 minutes left till our rendezvous, I ran a brush through my dirty hair, threw on the same black men’s cashmere sweater that I had been wearing since mid-March, and jetted out the door. Since I had ignored physical activity for about as long as showers, I grabbed a Vélib and pedaled all the way to the 1st Arrondissement. Not only was gross and sweaty and late for lunch, but I also had no idea where to park the metal monster. Spotting two guys sitting on the Bread & Roses terrace, I politely asked them if they would mind keeping their eye on the bike for a few minutes. Five minutes later, I came back out to park the bike, and one of the guys, to my surprise, started chatting me up. He was a cute, preppy-looking French boy, cleaner than the type I am normally attracted to, and even sufficiently successful in his semi-creative endeavor. (Yep, definitely not my type.) He asked me what I did, and I randomly told him all about my blog, which he looked up immediately and seemed quite entertained by. He then asked for my number, which I promptly handed over, quipping something about him wanting to be on the site.
Ever so often, people ask me whether I think all men are douchebags. Let me set the record straight immediately by stating that this is not the case. It is my strong belief that there is a douchebag in each and every one of us, and I am most definitely not excluded from this equation. Sometimes it is the man who is the douchebag, sometimes it is the woman, and sometimes, it’s the seventeen year-old girl who is the biggest douchebag in the room.
Let’s backtrack a bit. You see, sometime around Christmas, my teenage niece came to visit me in Paris. The unfortunate state of my love life being a family concern, she immediately began interrogating me on whether I was dating anybody at the moment. Luckily, I was ready, having prepared a perfectly decent option that I assumed would earn her approval and ensure a positive report back to the homeland. As usual, I thought wrong, which is how we arrived to the disaster that now goes down in history as the most awkward night of my life, aka the Date with the Old Flower.
When I was twenty-two, I graduated to the shittiest economy known to man and was forced to take a job for some crook who was trying to launder money under the pretense of a luxury consulting company. Said crook needed a team of employees to keep up the facade, so he rented an office in Chelsea and hired myself and a few other innocent kids to back the whole thing up.
One day, I was sitting in the office, sending out bogus emails, when a man came in to set up our brand-new (contraband) iMacs. His name was JP, he was the owner of some shady software installation company, and he was fascinating. About 7 feet tall, he was dressed like the most badass b*tch you’ll ever see: leather jacket, layers of black, tattoo sleeved, black nail polish – a real Rick Owens man in soul and spirit. After two hours of watching me crawl on the floor in leggings-as-pants in an effort to “assist” him, he eagerly asked me for my number, which I just as eagerly gave to him.
