All The Single Lady

While I lived in New York, I had an excellent entourage of totally fantastic gay men. One in particular, Nate, was essentially the captain of my team of guys and perpetually fabulous: he’d drag me out of bed at two-thirty in the morning on a Tuesday promising me a good time and I’d never regret a second of it as I stumbled into work the next morning covered in glitter and reeking of Moët. Nate had gone to law school, but had piddled away his student loans not on text books and tuition, but on enormous bottles of Kettle One, Reese Witherspoon DVD’s, and a truly fantastic wardrobe. He was also a great friend, and continually on the lookout for a new man for me, even though every venue we frequented featured exclusively unbelievably attractive and inordinately friendly guys who were not even minutely interested in the female sex. Ah, life can be so cruel sometimes.

One winter, Nate became obsessed with setting me up with a supposedly super amazing guy. He went on and on and on about this dude, how hot he was, how funny he was, how just plain, old nice he was. “How’d you meet him again?” I asked as we strolled through Central Park eating Pinkberry. “Oh, at Splash,” he said, sucking a kiwi off his plastic spork, not making eye contact with me. Splash, for those of you who are not In The Know, is a huge gay club where muscular men wriggle and grind atop gigantic boxes beneath colored strobe lights and a hoard of handsome guys drop it like it’s hot on the surrounding dance floor. So I was confused. “And this guy’s supposedly straight? Why did you meet him there?” I asked. “He’s the bartender! I told you that. He’s not gay.” Nate rolled his eyes as if I had just ignorantly inquired if chartreuse was the same hue as goldenrod. “He’s totally into meeting you and so your type,” Nate finished up with a wry smirk.

I was highly skeptical that any semi-straight, alleged “hunk” of a guy would willingly bartend at a gay club where intoxicated men would try to snatch and caress his various man-parts by “accident” while continually ogling him, licking their lips as if he were a glistening, roasted Road Runner, and they were a pack of malnourished Wile E. Coyotes. But all the same, I gave Nate the benefit of the doubt and agreed to meet the guy. That Thursday we went to Pop Rocks (a weekly gay gathering), then, once Nate became bored with the selection of boys, and deemed the Stoli Razz and sodas simply undrinkable, we hurried out to the sidewalk with our friend Matthew and, as per tradition, hailed a limo to go to Splash.

We walked into the club and beelined for the bar. “Sasi,” Nate said smugly, “This is Landon!” With a flourish, he displayed whom he thought should be my next beau. Now, I am a pretty predictable girl in general: I typically like tall, preppy boys with blue eyes, who are athletic and somewhat goofy (and, in the end it seems, always jerks). I wear only dresses from April until October, have a coordinating headband for each ensemble, and covet all things nautical. Anyone who knows me even slightly, knows all of these things, and also, that when it comes right down to it, I’m fairly superficial. So when the widely smiling Landon was unveiled, I accidentally squinted my eyes then erupted in a very loud, very obnoxious, very sarcastic, sitcom-esque laugh because I was sure--no, I was positively positive--that Nate had presented the punchline to a really excellent joke.

Landon was clad in something most would call a Speedo, but which was far tinier  and much more sparkly than anything Ryan Lochte would dare wriggle into. He was wearing nothing else. He was my height, which is basically midget sized if you’re a dude, which I could be OK with, but he was also twice as wide (albeit about .03% body fat) and looked like a reflection in a funhouse mirror. Most ridiculously though, he was covered, literally, from below his neck to his ankles, in thick, extremely amatuer-looking black tribal tattoos that wound around his tree trunk legs, his dark, pointy nipples, and then disappeared beneath the tiny fabric of his work “uniform.” All these aesthetics, combined with the fact that I was already skeptical of his motives for being a straight guy working at a gay club, made me turn to Nate and shout, “Are you even serious with this right now?” in an unintentional booming voice as I pointed at Landon, holding back giggles. “You have got to be joking!”

But as it turned out, Nate was not joking. Landon, of course, having heard everything I said, and seen every face of disgust and disapproval I had made, looked at Nate, hung his head like a suspended grade schooler, and went back to his post, his metallic undies sagging with sadness. I was sure I heard him stifle a sniffle. Nate glared at me as if I had just seriously suggested he join the priesthood, Matthew shook his head in dismay, and the forty of so surrounding guys who’d also heard and seen everything, looked at me totally appalled, their eyes rolling with contempt. But, honestly, what did they expect?! I certainly wasn’t trying to be the rudest girl in the world...but there I was: the rudest girl in the world. Ugh.

With a huff of embarrassed annoyance, Nate and Matthew shuttled me downstairs and out of Landon’s sight before I could even try to blather out some sort of lame apology. After getting drinks, we hustled back upstairs, me on Nate’s tail and Matthew right behind me, but when we reached the top of the stairs, Matthew had vanished. We looked all around the dance floor, thinking he had somehow snuck by us and was already getting down and dirty to Beyoncé, but when we went to go back downstairs, there he was on the stairs, furiously making out with some guy...whom he had met just then on the stairs. I literally spend countless hours frenetically foraging for a guy I even want to talk to when I go out, and Matthew somehow managed to snag a cute guy in the two seconds it takes to give someone the onceover as you traverse a carpeted landing. Then, in the subsequent fifteen seconds it took me to get Matthew’s attention to signal that we would be back up on the dance floor, Nate had disappeared himself: I found him locked in the amorous arms of some muscular man with a faux hawk. So there I was, having already alienated the one guy in the whole place who could’ve maybe shown some slight interest in me and without a single soul left to talk to. I was female, straight, single, and alone. But what else is new?

One of the Seven Wonders of New York City: Nate somehow always manages to hail a limo instead of a taxi, no matter our destination.