Craigslist New Year's Eve, Part 2 - On the Road #30

Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay 

Alicia was exactly what you would expect from a woman who had built her social life around the Internet and who was not a total psycho-freak.  

She was a kind, warm, sweet woman, and so shy it hurt. I could easily see her being petrified in any social occasion where she would have to step forth and put herself out there.

"I got hooked on chat rooms back when you had to pay for them," she said. "My credit card bill was at least 300 bucks a month because of it."

And that was when Alicia met her best friend, David - the guy who wouldn’t stop messaging her until she met him for a drink.

David was the only good-looking man in the room, not that handsomeness did him any good. On paper, he seemed all right. He was an artist and a carpenter.

But anger emanated off of him in waves. I was uncomfortable being in the same room as David, and if others hadn’t been there, I would have made my excuses and left. 

In short, his story was such that David had been married twice and begat three kids upon his wives by the age of thirty-six. He was in the throes of an ugly divorce from his second wife.

“David was stupid with that one,” Alicia piped up. “They had problems from the first week on.”

And here’s the kicker. He met her through Match.com.

I never met someone who actually married somebody they met on a dating site.

(Remember this was New Year’s Eve, calling in 2006. Online dating was fast becoming the norm, but it wasn’t yet.)

So why did David marry the Nightmare on Match.com?

He had no problem answering my question. 

"She had perfect tits," he said. "And cute freckles."

He said that with a straight face and his bestie, Alicia, backed him up.

"She fit his pre-conceived idea of what he thought he wanted," said Alicia. 

So why did Freckles & Tits marry David?

"Biological clock," said David.    

David suspected that his soon-to-be-second-ex-wife was about to become a lesbian.  

"She had a friend who looked like a lesbian and Freckles & Tits swore she wasn't," he continued. "But now she's hanging out with another who also looks like a lesbian.

David paused.

“After New Year's I'm not drinking and I'm not having sex anymore."

In this room of motley strangers, everybody looked at David like he was nuts. I thought it was the first sane thing he’d said all night.

"I need to heal from all this," said David. "This month I decided that Jesus really is my lord and savior and to let him into my heart.”

Oh hell. Never mind.

"You won't heal if you don't have sex," said Alicia to David, the voice of reason that David lacked.

To the rest of us, she explained further.

"The problem with David is that he can't find girls who can separate sex and love, especially with him. They take one look at him and peg him as the boyfriend type."

I wonder if David would have fallen for Alicia if she hadn’t been so motherly. On the other hand, Alicia was pretty matronly. Since perfect tits and cute freckles were enough of an incentive to ignore problems coming out of the gate and actually GET MARRIED, I doubt David had the sense to be attracted to depth and character.

And then there was the man of the hour...our host, Mike.  

When I later told this story to a friend, she asked me if Mike had been attractive.

"No.”

No, Mike was anything but attractive. He had a vague resemblance to Mitch McConnell.

To be more exact, Mike had no chin, a prissy mouth that he pursed throughout the night, a doughy face, and the soft formless body of a man who took no advantage of the outdoors that Colorado was famous for.

But his lack of good looks paled in comparison to Mike’s personality. Bitter, rude, unpleasant, pompous – I could go on and on. But the truly sad part was that Mike had no idea how disagreeable he was.

In the original Craigslist post, Mike had said several friends were coming over. And there were no friends there because…drum roll…he didn’t have any. I’m pretty sure the date that had fallen through was also a fiction.

After a couple of hours, I could understand why. I knew I never wanted to be around Mike again long before we called in the New Year 2006.  

According to Mike, he had no friends after 5 1/2 years in Denver due to the manipulations of his evil ex-wife. 

A woman he had been married to for only nine months, she'd tried to kill him twice – according to Mike - and had used him as part of an immigration fraud scam she had going on with her family.

I don’t know how this happened, but I ended up telling a story to this group – the first chapter of Ella Bandita.

Mike extrapolated from that.

"You want inspiration?" he sneered. "Generations of dysfunction and evil run in my ex-wife's family."

That was a good moment to smile and nod.

Mike also claimed more horrible first dates than everyone in the room combined. He was also an aficionado of which internet sources were good, and which ones were awful.  

It was a shock to my system being in a room full of people whose main source of social interaction was through a computer. 

David and Mike exchanged horror stories of shrewish con-women, heifers, bitches, dykes, and other undesirable and highly suspect females they had met while looking for love online. 

Mike really wanted to talk about his psycho marriage and his ugly divorce all night, and he interrupted conversations that were enjoyable to do so.  

He also had this beagle, Dakota, that was so hungry for affectionate attention, it was pitiful.

"Love me," the dog’s eyes pleaded as Dakota humped people's feet. "Please..."

"Dakota!"  Mike would shout.  "Dakota!"

“He has a foot fetish,” Mike would explain to his guests, two of whom were allergic to dogs.

The courtesy of putting the dog away didn’t occur to Mike. And Dakota wouldn’t listen in his relentless search for someone at that party to take him away.

Because I’m pretty sure that’s what that dog wanted.

Eventually, midnight happened. We called in the New Year, and all of us hot-hoofed it out of that house by quarter past twelve.

By the time I got back to my hotel, it was around 1am – that had been a long, sober drive back. The bars were pouring out and people were cheering, hooting, and hollering Happy New Year in giddy, drunken joy.

Lesson learned.

If I’m ever in an unfamiliar city for New Year’s where I don’t know anybody, I’m going to bite the bullet, down 2 or 3 shots of tequila and party down.

Because that was the weirdest New Year’s Eve of my life.

Peace,
Montgomery

To read Part 1 of Craigslist New Year’s Eve, click HERE.