KISS, my arse!

During my twenties, I was a successful commercial photographer living in NYC. I was working with top of the line photographers as well as doing my own photo shoots for various international publications. Then, in 1997, a car hit me on 14th Street and Irving Place and my life was forever changed.

Since I had spent most of my years cultivating various talents and pursuing my artistic dreams, I gave little attention to my personal life. After I got back on my feet, I made a promise that I would try to live a more balanced life. I was thirty and trying to figure out how to throw myself into the dating game.

To pay the bills, I worked in computers for a while. While working in the Operations Department of a prestigious entertainment management company, I noticed that the other employees in my group spent most of their time conducting personal business on the computer. One person emailed his girlfriend all day, while another used the company computer to search for better employment. Then there was Roy. He was a pip. He spent most of his free time—which was most of the time—on a website called Edwina. This site was synonymous with Match.com, except it was for gay people.

Roy met a couple of nice people on Edwina, and kept prodding me to create an account and ‘search for love’ online. I didn’t like the idea at all; not only because I was taught to fear the unknown when I was a kid, but because I thought meeting someone online was rather artificial. It’s usually something unexplainable that attracts me to someone: maybe an interesting nose, beautiful hands, and a wonderful mind that I could sink my brain into. How could I possibly write a ‘personal ad’ and explain what I was looking for in a person when I didn’t even know what I was looking for myself?

One day, I threw caution to the wind and created an account. I don’t even remember what I wrote about myself. I probably mentioned the fact that I played guitar and that I love music, photography, reading, and writing. Within a day, I got a response. The woman’s name was Kate.

Kate said that she was in her late twenties. I must have mentioned my early childhood obsession with the rock group KISS, because the first email that I received from Kate outlined her obsession with KISS, too. She said, like me, that she had all of their albums when she was growing up. Unlike me, she was even a bonafide member of the KISS ARMY! I remember emailing her back and asking her who her favorite member of the band had been; mine was Ace. She wrote back that she liked ‘the guy who blew the fire and spit the blood.’ I thought it was endearing to have met someone who sounded really ‘with it’ and adorable, and who shared a common childhood passion.

We emailed each other for a couple of days, talking about what books we were currently reading, what movies we’d recently seen or would like to see, and what CD’s we’d most recently bought. I was in heaven—Kate loved everything that I loved! She was into everything that I was! She loved Frank Zappa, she said Albert Camus’s writing couldn’t be beat. Moreover, she was in the middle of reading The Brother’s Karamozov, just as I was!

She said she was ‘hip’. She explained that she had long brown, flowing hair. She said most people thought she looked like Veronica Hamel from Hill Street Blues fame. (I LOVED Veronica Hamel when I was a kid!)

Kate was perfect. There was just one more thing I had to find out: was she spiritual? I spent a lot of my time meditating and doing Tai’chi, not to mention that I played guitar at church on Sundays; I just wanted to know that this wouldn’t turn her off. “No!” she said, “I’m very spiritual!”

We decided to meet for a beer. I wanted to cut to the chase and ask her to meet me for dinner; however, Roy explained that it is better to go for drinks on a first date. That way, if you don’t ‘click’, you can excuse yourself after the first drink. Smart thinking on Roy’s part, but I had it in my mind that I would be calling a moving van after the first sip of beer!

I chose a bar in the East village for our rendezvous. At first glance, this bar looked like every other watering hole in the East Village, except it had an upstairs furnished with plush couches and chairs, and floor to ceiling windows. I went to the bar early and sat upstairs; gazing out the window to the sidewalk below, trying to guess which stranger was Kate.

Our date was to officially start at six o'clock. Six o'clock came and went. I walked downstairs whereupon I saw a stodgy woman in an army jacket sitting beneath the dartboard. She smiled at me as I walked by. I didn’t smile back. I was perturbed. I gave my empty glass to the bartender and walked towards the door. I turned around and looked back at the woman sitting beneath the dartboard. She smiled once more, and raised her glass. “Come here,” she said.

I put my hands in my pocket and walked over to her. She asked if I was Marcy. I nodded.

“I’m Kate. I’m sorry I was late.”

I pointed upstairs. “I was upstairs looking out the window. I guess I didn’t see you come in." I sat down at her table and stared at her for a while. There was no way she was in her late twenties. Her hair was long and brown, but it was also tangled and sprinkled with tons of gray. If this was her idea of ‘hip’, I would hate to see what her idea of out-of-date looked like. She ordered me another pint of Bass.

“So,” I said, trying to start some kind of conversation. “You’re Kate.”

“Yeah,” she mumbled as she scraped the beer label off the bottle.

“Have you ever been here before?” I asked, looking around the bar.

She looked up at me and then back at her bottle. “No. I’ve never been to the East Village.”

I knitted my eyebrows. “But, I thought you said that you loved the Ramones, and that you used to hang out down here back in the day?”

“No…I’ve never been down here before.” She looked at me and smiled. “You have beautiful eyes. They’re like ice blue, or something.”

“Thank you.” I looked at the stripes of gray in her hair. I didn’t have an aversion to gray hear, it's just that she didn't mention it while describing her long brown, flowing hair. She didn't fit her description at all.

“I don’t really look like Veronica Hamel, do I?” she inquired of me.

“Well,” I said, trying to let her down easy. “Not really, I suppose. So,” I said, as I crossed my legs and leaned in closer to her, “How did you get into KISS? My cousin gave me a double cassette of KISS ALIVE II when I was about 11 years old.”

She blushed and fidgeted her hands a bit more. “Well, I never really liked KISS. My brother was in the KISS ARMY, not me. He used to play his stereo really loud, so I always heard their music.”

“What? But…you said-

“I know, I said that I liked KISS because I knew that you liked them. I wanted to have something I common with you, you know, so you’d want to meet me.” She smiled. I looked down and noticed the antiquated peace sign she had sown onto the pocket of her olive green Army jacket.

I sat there in silence, cursing on line dating. I should have listened to reason and never created an account on Edwina, I thought to myself.

“So,” I let out a long sigh, “Was anything that you told me true? I mean, do you even like Albert Camus or Frank Zappa—“

“I like to read, and I like music. I am planning to read The Brother’s Karamozov soon. I just haven’t had the time. It’s a big book.” She took a swig of her beer.

It’s not like me to be judgmental, or cruel. However, I sat there judging the hell out of Kate and decided to be, what I would consider, cruel. I took another sip of beer, got up, said goodbye to the one who showed up late and littered my brain with lies, and walked out the door.

During the entire walk home, I kept thinking to myself--"KISS, my arse! It was all a bunch of lies. All of it!"

I contemplated my next move in the fierce domain of dating.

tags: humor, about me, sexuality, A Little Bent

©2006 Marcy_Peanut. All rights reserved.