Bounced! Chapter 3
Idecided to do it right. That was my first mistake.
Though in fairness, it’s the mistake I make about everything.
Give me a problem and I’ll over-prepare for it.
I’ll read the manual, buy the correct tool, measure the space twice, and arrive so ready that the problem, sensing a professional, flees for its life.
Dating, I figured, was a problem like any other.
I’d simply been going about it wrong, wandering into steam rooms and coffee shops with no plan and no equipment.
Benji had handed me a tool.
All I had to do was use it correctly.
So that night, I sat at my kitchen table, opened my laptop, poured a beer I intended to nurse, and prepared to build myself a dating profile the way I’d build anything, from the foundation up.
The website did not exist.
I typed the name I’d seen on the back of the local gay magazine, or the name I was fairly sure I’d seen, into the search bar.
What came back was not a homepage with a friendly log-in section or a form to fill out.
What popped up was a page telling me to get the app on my phone.
I tried three different spellings on the assumption I’d misread the gay rag.
Each one redirected me to the same place, which was my phone, which was sitting across the table judging me as only an iPhone can.
I didn’t want to use my phone.
On a laptop, I had a full keyboard, a larger screen, and the dignity of a man doing a task at a desk.
On a phone, I’d have two thumbs the size and dexterity of bratwurst and a keyboard built for a child.
Unfortunately for my nail-clad sausages, the website was immovable on the subject.
Reluctantly, I retrieved my phone and began the long, humbling process of doing everything wrong one letter at a time.
“Fine,” I told the phone.
The phone said nothing.
I downloaded the app, and a little yellow mask logo appeared.
I didn’t think too hard about it, because a mask seemed like a fun, mysterious, date-night sort of thing, like Mardi Gras but online.
It asked for my location, which I granted, because how else would it find me the nice, single men of Tampa?
It asked me to make a profile, and here, at last, was familiar ground.
It gave me a form. I love a good form. I cracked my knuckles, which on a touchscreen is an entirely ceremonial gesture, and got to work.
I want to be clear that I put real work into this. I’d watched every person I love fall into something good. I’d watched Benji coach half of them through their profiles. I’d absorbed, I thought, the principles:
Be specific.
Be warm.
Show, don’t tell.
I wrote three careful sentences about owning a bar with my best friend, about fixing things with my hands, and about being a homebody who’d been told he should get out more and was, as evidenced by this very profile, doing exactly that.
It took me nine minutes to type three sentences, because my thumbs hit the wrong letters with the consistency of a curse.
I wrote “bra” for “bar” twice. I wrote “hlmebody.” The little autocorrect, trying to help, changed “fix things” to “fox things.” I didn’t catch that until I’d already read the whole thing back once, at which point I had to hunt down the tiny word and stab at it repeatedly while the cursor leapt around like it was avoiding me on purpose.
But I finally got it.
I read it aloud.
It was honest, a little dry, and sounded very much like me. Oddly, I was proud of it. I nearly texted it to Finn for approval, then decided a man should be able to describe himself without a committee.
Then the app asked for a photo.
This took forty minutes.
The problem with photos of me is the same as the problem with the rest of me. I photograph like a mugshot of a man who’s done something illegal to a smaller man.
I’m aware of this bug in my system.
I’ve spent my life aware of this.
I didn’t want the first thing a potential date saw to be a wall of graying menace. I wanted something softer, something that said, “yes, I am large, but I have a beagle-shaped hole in my heart, and I’ll remember your mother’s birthday.”
I took eleven photos.
In the first ten, I looked like I was about to repossess someone’s Oldsmobile. In the eleventh, I caught myself half-laughing at how badly the other ten had gone; but my face had done something human, so I used that one.
Then there was a field, a little box, that said, “Looking For.”
It was a dropdown.
I clicked it, expecting the usual descriptions of relationships and dating: Long-term, Short-term, Friends, something like that.
The options were not those.
I stared at the options for a while.
I didn’t even know what several of them meant.
I searched for the one that seemed most like “a nice dinner and seeing where it goes,” which was none of them, so I left it blank and told myself blank was mysterious.
When I hit “Done,” the app took my careful little foundation of a profile and dropped me, without ceremony, into the grid.
It was a wall of torsos.
Not faces.
Torsos.
A tiled mosaic of them, each one with a little number in the corner that I initially took for a rating and then realized, with a slow, chilling horror, was a distance.
Fifty feet.
Two hundred feet.
Nine hundred feet.
These weren’t men across the city I might drive to meet for coffee on Saturday. These were men near me, right then. The number said exactly how near, which meant the whole thing worked less like a dating service and more like sonar.
I sat back and sipped some of the beer I’d been nursing. Then I downed the rest of it, because the nursing plan had clearly been drawn up for a very different evening.
A message arrived.
My heart, God help it, actually lifted.
Someone had seen my carefully crafted bio and my hard-won eleventh photograph and reached out. I opened it, ready to be charming, ready to ask what he did for a living and whether he liked sunset strolls.
The message was from a gentleman whose name had me spitting my beer.
Fck4Eva: Sup?
That was the whole message. I read it several times, in case there was more to it, some subtlety I was missing. There was not. There was only “Sup,” glowing up at me from a man three hundred feet away whose photo was of his own shoulder.
I wrote back, because I’m a person of manners.
Me: Not much. Just got home from work. How’s your night going?
It took me a minute and a half and one autocorrect incident in which “night” nearly went out as “ninja.”
The three dots appeared, then disappeared, then appeared.
Fck4Eva: U host? PNP?
I considered this.
Host?
It was a hospitality word. I latched onto it gratefully, because hospitality was a language I spoke.
He was asking, I decided, whether I liked to entertain, whether I was the kind of man who had people over.
I didn’t know what his little acronym stood for but assumed it involved charcuterie and wine. I typed, sincerely,
Me: I do, though not as much as I’d like since we opened the bar. I make a good short rib and my back patio’s nice this time of year.
He blocked me.
I did not, at the time, know what blocking was. I only knew the conversation vanished, the shoulder-man erased from my screen like he’d never existed. I sat there feeling like I’d said the wrong thing at a party in a language I didn’t speak.
It went like that for a while.
I’ll spare the full transcript, but I want it recorded that over the following hour I offered to buy three separate men a coffee, asked one about his dog after he mentioned, in passing, that the dog was on the bed with him, and told a fourth that he seemed nice but I wasn’t looking for anything at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday, which apparently was the only thing anyone on the entire application was looking for.
My thumbs betrayed me the whole time.
I told one man I found him “intruguing.”
I congratulated another on his “acomplishments.”
Every heartfelt sentence I sent went out pocked with typos, because the keyboard was built for a hummingbird, and I have the hands of a man who once bent a rebar tie by accident.
Eventually, the penny dropped, and it dropped the way pennies do, all at once and too late.
A man four hundred feet away, after I’d asked him a warm and genuine question about his weekend, sent me a photograph.
It was not of his weekend. It was not of his shoulder, either.
It was a full and frank and well-lit account of exactly what he was hoping the evening would hold, composed with a confidence I could almost admire.
I set the phone face down on the table.
“Oh,” I said, to my empty kitchen. “Oh!”
The gay magazine had not advertised a dating app. It was sending me back to the bathhouse, only now the bathhouse was in my pocket, where it could follow me to the grocery store or the bar or wherever I might go—and it knew exactly how far away everyone was at all times.
The mask logo made a great deal more sense then.
I’d built a heartfelt little profile about short ribs and belonging and put it up, earnest as a church flyer, in the one room in America where nobody had come to read—or barbeque.
I did, in the interest of due diligence, go on two “dates” before I gave up.
The first was a man named Grant. In his messages, he’d had seemed normal to the point of being a miracle. He typed in full sentences, had a face in his photo, and suggested we meet in a wine bar, an actual public establishment with tables and lighting. I’d shown up, hopeful in my one good shirt.
Grant was pleasant for eleven minutes, then he asked what I did for work.
I told him I owned a bar, and something behind his eyes began to compute.
By the time the wine came, he had a business proposal for me involving his cousin’s tequila brand and a “very simple” distribution arrangement that would “basically run itself.”
I left before the second glass.
He texted afterward to ask if I’d at least think about the tequila.
The second date was worse, and I only have myself to blame.
His profile had a red flag I chose to read as charming.
He’d described himself as a “high-energy connector.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I found out over dinner.
It meant he didn’t stop talking, not once, not to breathe, not while I answered a question he’d asked, not while the waiter tried four times to take our order.
I deleted the app in my driveway, thumbs and all. It took me four tries to find the delete button, because my hands were too big for the screen even at the end, even in defeat.
Then I sat in my truck for a minute, the way I’d sat in my truck outside a bathhouse a week before, and I noticed I was in the exact place I’d started.
Only now, I’d confirmed it with data. I’d run the experiment properly.
I’d used the tool, and the tool had told me, in a wall of torsos and a man selling tequila, that the thing I was looking for wasn’t out there in the numbered dark.
I picked up my phone.
It had twelve percent battery, no notifications, and a contact list I already knew by heart.
There was exactly one place I wanted to be, and it wasn’t a date or scrolling through an app or in steam room. It was a bar in Ybor with a broken ice machine and a pelican problem and a man who read Tolstoy by the door.
I started my truck, because the one thing I still knew how to do, reliably, at any hour, with hands too big for anything delicate, was drive myself back to the people who already knew me.