There are a lot of things I've never done in my life. Picking up two women in one night ranks is on that list, though now I can cross it off. For whatever it's worth. When I was thirteen I used to tell my friends that I was a "honey magnet." I had no idea what I was talking about and I couldn't even look a girl in the eye for longer than a few seconds, much less serve as some kind of magnet to which honeys would gravitate to in some kind of knee-buckling frenzy. I had a mullet when I was thirteen. As far as I understand, mullets are the diametric opposite of magnets.

 

I didn't fare much better as I grew older. I was a "serious" boy with "serious" designs on becoming a poet, a composer, a philanthropist; I wanted to transform myself into some austere lover from a Michael Ondaatje novel. Surprisingly, this persona went over about as well as a mullet at college parties and the bars I skulked through in my formative years. It's a nice trick of age that you can take yourself less and less seriously as you inch towards death.

I'm thirty-one now and, somewhere along the line, I've managed to lose that fictive chip on my shoulder. I'm generally able to provide for myself all that "serious" intimacy that I sought so urgently in someone else as an angry fifteen year-old. Now I just want someone who'll tolerate my dirty jokes and lick me without prompting. Which is to say that I don't have expectations of people anymore. Combining that with my emotional unavailability at the moment has made me a much more appealing option for women than I've ever been.

To wit, I went to the park the other night to meet a woman I'd been chatting with online. My tack with dating since I stuck my toe back in the water has been entirely based on form. I don't want to meet new people and I'm not particularly enthused about using online checklists and form responses to cull my evening's companionship. Accordingly, I met H in a park with a bottle of wine near sunset. Whether or not the company turned out to be amusing, I was going to have a pleasant night getting drunk on the grass with the SF skyline blinking on in slow motion as the sun dropped behind the western fog.

I showed up early to find a nice spot with a good view, uncorked the wine, and then H arrived. I had an immediate agenda when I saw her. I recalled she had listed herself as an "occasional smoker" on her profile. I list myself as a "non-smoker" but this is a lie. I don't generally buy cigarettes but I lie silently in wait for someone else to produce a pack and then pounce on their stash for my three-minute fix. I wanted to see how long it would take for H to produce her cigarettes. Would she avoid smoking in front of me since I had listed myself as a non-smoker?

I was attracted to H as soon as I saw her. She had a pretty face, an ebullient smile, and seemed like one of those special people who is permanently tanned. We had boring conversation about work, the past, and all the regular checklist bullet points. I laughed lots to cover up my boredom. I think we had been together for 45 minutes before I got sick of talking. I looked away from her for a few seconds to create a pause in the conversation. It worked, she took a breath and looked out at the skyline. I turned back and stared at her face in profile, wondering what it would taste like. I leaned in so she wouldn't start talking again. She saw me coming and turned into me and we kissed. It was soft and nice. I pulled back to catch her eye for a moment, then kissed her again, working the tip of my tongue just inside the rim of her upper lip.

After a few minutes I sat back. "Now's my chance to get a cigarette," I thought. I asked if she smoked as nonchalantly as possible, and soon we were huffing away on her menthol 100's. The sun was almost down and shimmered in the glass of the downtown skyscrapers. There was a soft Indian summer breeze. I was on my second glass of wine, the hint of someone else's saliva on my lips. Things were nice.

We spent the next couple of hours kissing in the park, hardly talking at all. It was fun, like playing a pickup game of basketball in a schoolyard with some strangers. It was improvisatory and athletic and surrounded in relative anonymity. I have no idea what makes me attractive to women. I have no concept of what I must look like through their eyes during a conversation or at close range. H was nice enough, but I had little interest in her. I laughed when she told funny stories, but I didn't go out of my way to offer many of my own. I sat by passively, smiling here and there, quipping along every now and then, but I was wholly unengaged. I was a counterweight to the conversation, but I wasn't ever present in it. I was just propping up my end.

We both had outs for later in the evening, though we both fudged until 11 or so, when we finally retreated to our separate corners. I went out for another drink with a friend afterwards. We wound up in a quiet bar and had a man chat about women, work, politics, and commuting. Then another woman, a sparky brunette with short hair and profligate freckles, came up to me with some line about a bet and wondering if I was a furniture designer. She was cocky and well-rehearsed and even dropped a well-timed negative on me with a disappointed pout when I told her I was a writer.

We thrusted and perried for a few more minutes and then she retreated back to her friends. Before going home I ambled over to her table and we exchanged numbers, I'll see her again sometime next week. I genuinely could care less about meeting women at the moment, for once in my life. True to form, this is when I've suddenly become most attractive to them, when I care the least. I'm sure there are people out there for whom hooking up with one person in the evening and then being picked up on by another person is de rigueur. For me it's absurd. It's a delightful ego stroke, and absurdly fun to experience. But it's about as gratifying as the aisle of Twinkies in the 7-11.

And still, my inner thirteen year-old is gloating like a stuffed pig.

 

 

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Date Machine: Kissing on the First Date 

Hooksexup Confessions: Rate My Penis Size 

Celebrity Confession: Tom Brady's Love Handles 

Date Night: The Wine Bar as the End of Civilization 

Crying In Public: The Sichuan Night Train

Love machine: How I Date On The Internet

Sex Machine: Zeitgeisty's Ass Bangin'

Sex Machine: Rate My Blowjobs

Crying in Public: My Cubicle