BELLS AREN'T RINGING

As per my last post, it should be no surprise that I didn’t remember a so-so date from at least six years ago with Mr. Ten-Year-Old Photos. That guy seems stuck in the past, but I typically have only fuzzy recollections of things that have brought me to where I am today. It amazes me when someone writes a memoir detailing not just decade-old conversations, but the color of their date’s socks and the patterns of drapes in the hallway they momentarily passed through. Good god. Embellish much?

 

Really, why would a so-so date linger? My brain has to be brutally selective in what it holds onto because I can’t go freeing up space by chucking random facts I yell at the TV while watching “Jeopardy,” even if such “facts” regularly put me in negative territory. I didn’t want to play Final Jeopardy anyway! (“I’ll take Sore Losers for $1,000, Alex.[1]”)  

 

As I searched “Victoria” on my blog for any mention of Mr. So-So, other posts came up. Pre-COVID, I went to Victoria a couple times a year. I skimmed but didn’t feel like reading them since that wasn’t my purpose. But then I came upon a December 2014 coffee date with another guy, Saul, who’d just moved to Vancouver from Victoria. 

 

Now THAT was a coffee date! 

 

There was something adorable about Saul. I could tell from what I’d written that we’d clicked. The coffee date continued and evolved into dinner and, during dinner, “I reached my hand across the table and held his.”

 

WHAT?! 

 

I like physical affection, but it’s hard for me to do in public. Maybe things would have been different if I’d made a habit of that early on, but my high school years in East Texas didn’t involve dating a girl, exchanging class rings, letting her wear my letter jacket and fawning all over each other in the courtyard like everyone else seemed to do as a rite of passage. Later, after escaping Texas, I still feared I’d be gay-bashed if I held hands with a guy or so much as pinkie-swapped. For me to take initiative and hold a guy’s hand—ON A FIRST DATE!—well, I’m glad I wrote that down because otherwise I’d say that could never have happened. Pure fabrication like the pattern of those hallway drapes from yesteryear.

 

And that’s the thing. Did it happen? 

 

Not just the hand holding but the entire first date. Logically, I know it did. I could never have made up that date. I’d have never put in the hand holding moment because I would have known it defied credibility. Fictional me would have to be something like me; otherwise, I’d just post shirtless shots of Matt Bomer, saying I’m his doppelganger and writing about my orgies with at least five of People magazine’s Sexiest Men Alive. (I’d uses aliases, of course. Names like, oh…Bryan Reynolds and Huey Rackman and Ritchie Gear.[2])

 

I LOVED rereading the account of my delightful date with Saul, but I don’t remember anything at all about that. Being as it was a hand-holding first date, it should be in my personal dating Hall of Fame. (What a sad hall of fame that would be. Most definitely not a hall; more appropriately, the back corner of a shelf, perhaps in my fridge beside that four-year-old jar of sauerkraut.) 

 

What makes recalling Saul more challenging beyond that fact I seem to have a generally faulty memory—I’ll admit to now feeling a tad panicky—is that I never use people’s actual names when I blog. Just like with “Huey Rackman,” I don’t get ridiculous about it. These aren’t Russian spies I’m writing about. (Not knowingly, anyway.) I don’t rename George as Bubba and I don’t rechristen Al as Engelbert.[3] Usually, the name I use rhymes or begins with the same first letter but, in this case, “Paul” didn’t ring any bells either. U-Haul?! (No parent would be that cruel, even if that’s where the kid was conceived.) Running through the list of “S” list from Sacha to Sylvester got me nowhere.[4] Not Saul but…

 

Stumped.

 

I read subsequent blog posts. I needed Saul, Part 2. Saul cannot be a one-date guy.

 

But he was. 

 

He got a mention two weeks later when I wrote, “Despite a good start, I expect nothing more to come of it. The occasional message becomes more detached. I’m not as interested and, no doubt, neither is he.” These are saving face words. You can’t fire me; I quit. Sure, if you say so.

 

I don’t know if I was crestfallen then, but I am now. He wasn’t “the one that got away,” but he was certainly one that got away. Perhaps I knew it at the time. Perhaps repressed memory was my best way of coping.

 

---

[1] RIP, Mr. Trebek, in my mind, the one and only host.

[2] Blake Shelton? Seriously?! 2017 was unlucky enough to host Trump’s inauguration. “Sexy” Blake adds insult to injury. 2017 is still waiting on that retraction, People.

[3] Makes me think of all those celebrities who thought they had to change their names for a shot at becoming famous, e.g., Marilyn Monroe, née Norma Jean Mortenson; Rock Hudson, née Roy Harold Scherer, Jr.; Elmo née Red Sock. (I made up that last one just to see if anyone other than me reads footnotes.) Seriously, if Engelbert Humperdink can have a successful music career, there are no name barriers, unless your sadist parents have a certain last name and put “Adolf, Jr.” on your birth certificate.

[4] If anyone knows a decent single gay guy named Shaw, shoot me an email. I would DEFINITELY hold hands with a guy named Shaw on a first date. If he let me.