“This Is Not The Bachelor. And I Don’t Have To Kiss Your Ass For A Rose”
– Phaedra Parks –
First dates are always financially tricky. When that tall, suave dude in his fancy tuxedo saunters over with that ominous black leather billfold, everyone at the table goes into panic mode. It’s an opportunity for a power play that gets your brain into overdrive. Is this dinner worth the investment? Will grabbing the bill imply I think they’re broke? Are they just here for the free meal?
Like I said, this shit is complicated.
Call me old-fashioned, but I HATE splitting the bill on the first date. I believe the person who initiates the first date should offer to pay for, at the very least, the first date. Fuck the traditional gender norm; if a woman wants to take a man on a date and offers to pay for his drinks, that’s hot. Because personally, there is nothing less sexy than arriving home to a Venmo request.
My brief stint with the Baldy (our story’s main antagonist) happened when I was “buddying it up” with the Harley-Davidson guy and another character whose story I will share in an upcoming chapter. I wasn’t intentionally trying to be a whore someone who was afraid of commitments. But at that time, I just moved to a new city. I was young, relatively desirable, and scared to choose because a better option might appear at my front door. Besides, my Harley-Davidson guy was emotionally unavailable and only physically available when his boyfriend was not around. And I didn’t want to settle for less— I knew I deserved more.
I just wasn’t planning to interpret the “more” part quantitatively.
Baldy resided in Berkeley, a mere 30-minute drive away (make that 45 minutes in rush hour traffic, because, well, Bay Area). There are three reasons why a gay man lives in Berkeley: academia, weed, or the sheer convenience of being a stone’s throw from Steamworks (more on that gem in a future chapter). He claimed a managerial role for a company in the city, which, to a certain extent, informed me about his financial status. In turn, I spilled about my gig scraping by as a fresh grad (more on why this matters later, promise).
The situation-ship had a reasonably standard beginning. We chatted on Grindr, discussing our life aspirations and exchanging nude pics. Baldy managed to say all the right things, from offering his service as my personal city tour guide and showering me with affirmations. Now, I’m usually not the kind of person who would be willing to travel over an hour for a dick, especially when I have more accessible options who live nearby. On top of that, he isn’t someone whom I would physically consider a lovely gentleman. His height? Average. His facial features? Also average. His body hair? Above average.
But his dick? Ginormous. And the next thing I knew, I was in my car on my way to Berkeley.
Let me clarify some things before y’all come for me for being a size queen. First of all, I’m an equal-opportunity rider. I believe that what matters is not the size of the wave but the motion of the ocean. Second of all, huge dicks are overrated. The prostate isn’t located too far away from the butthole; you don’t need the whole nine inches to enjoy the stimulation.
After meticulously checking the allowed parking hours, I parked my car on the street to avoid getting a ticket (a huge problem when driving your car in the city). I walked a couple feet past houses with outdated exterior designs and dim street lights to find my Baldy sitting on the front porch waiting for me. With his dark blue Berkeley hoodie, black gym shorts, and white sneakers, he could easily pass as a graduate student from the university nearby. And I thought to myself, “Well… I suppose I can work with this”.
I mean… what were my other options? Running back to my car as fast as humanly possible and ghosting him?! My mama raised me better than that!
Around fifty-five minutes after that fulfilling encounter, I left his house with my digestive tract barely intact. And although I was physically fulfilled, I wasn’t emotionally satisfied. Honestly, I was not feeling the sparks— the butterflies in my stomach went completely extinct. And it wasn’t because of the lack of hair on his head. It certainly wasn’t because he was rambling about his midlife crisis and repeatedly pointing out that he made six figures. But something was just missing. Meeting someone you want to spend two hours in bed with is supposed to be all about joy and fun, and this Baldy was none of that. Talking to him felt like a chore and certainly didn’t spark any joy within me.
After a few more of those soulless, butt-endangering encounters, I somehow agreed to meet him again. One weekend, the Baldy promised to show me some of his favorite places in the city, as I am a relatively new Bay Area transplant. While I did appreciate the nice gesture, I was skeptical. Would I survive being trapped for more than an hour in the same room as him? What if we needed more topics to discuss when we were inevitably stuck in traffic for hours? Worst of all, what if he insisted I reveal more about myself? Wouldn’t that be treacherous?! I decided to go despite all my skepticism because I thought, “Hey, at least I’ll get to enjoy the city and a nice dinner paid for by a financially stable, more mature man, right?”
I was hugely mistaken.
The first stop to our doomed romantic date was a Puerto Rican restaurant in Mill Valley. Although it irked me that he didn’t offer to pay for my meal, I let it slide (casting directors need to put me in a movie as a nonchalant, unbothered girls ASAP). Sure, the lunch was lovely, and the restaurant ended up being one of my favorite places to go to, but the initial lack of chemistry didn’t evolve into something more substantial. It felt like I knew more about him while he barely knew anything about me. And it didn’t seem like he cared to learn more? I was so much more than just a pretty face and a tight butthole!
And just when I thought things could not get worse, they did. We made our way to our second stop, the Muir Woods. I initially thought it would have been a long romantic walk with the giant redwoods becoming witnesses to the beginning of our fairytale romance. It could have been the turning point of our tumultuous love story; imagine two strangers who met online realizing they have so much more in common than just their penis curvature preferences after learning more about, ironically, giant trunks. But bitch, it didn’t happen. The Baldy didn’t even try to find a parking space after passing through a massive crowd of Chinese tourists, and he made the executive decision for us to just simply leave.
My cute ass didn’t even get a chance to step into the park. I was livid.
He then asked if I wanted to get dinner and took me to a slightly fancy ramen place, and my dumb ass thought this was him trying to make up for the disastrous date so far. The ramen did soothe my raging anger, but then, the waiter came to deliver the bill. To my surprise, the Baldy asked the waiter:
“Can you split the bill?”
Oh. My. Fucking. God. Are you joking? My mind went blank. I was left speechless.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Unfortunately, we can’t split the bill; our system won’t allow us to do that,” replied the waiter.
“That’s OK, I’ll just use my card,” said the Baldy as he went to grab his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans.
He’s a gentleman, after all? $15 means little for him anyway.
After he handed his credit card to the waiter, he turned back towards me and said:
“I’ll just send you a Venmo request tonight. Can I get your username?”
We drove back towards his house in Berkeley, hugged each other goodbye, and I immediately made my way to my car because I couldn’t handle this shit any longer. Exactly five minutes after my one-hour drive back to my house, my phone lit up, and I saw the Venmo notification from Baldy requesting the exact half of our total bill from the ramen dinner. Not a single penny more, definitely not a single penny less. While I do understand how modern society today champions the concept of splitting bills and feminism (and bottom-ism to a certain extent), it baffled me how this man, who was making a six-figure salary and rented a quaint house in the decent part of Berkeley, didn’t even consider paying this fresh-grad twink for a fucking bowl of ramen. And if we really want to talk about equality, I paid MORE on gas for the roundtrip drive to and from Berkeley. I spent more time getting this butthole squeaky clean in case his gigantic penis wanted to travel to my cave of wonder. And the Baldy even split the bill on the gyoza appetizer HE ordered?! That was the last straw for me, and to this day, I have never seen him again. BOY, BYE.
Oh, and you thought that’s the end of the story? There’s more.
A few months after that ramen shitshow, he messaged me asking how I’d been and why I’d never looked for him again. I was going to write a ten-page essay on how he’s a frugal top who had no regard for my physical and emotional well-being, but I decided to be the bigger person and trash my Word document. Instead, I told him I was seeing someone else at that moment (this was the honest truth) and trying to focus all my energy on my new beau (this was impartially true). And the Baldy didn’t seem to take this news well— instead of wishing me all the best in life and being happy for my happiness, he said, “I wasn’t gonna meet you anyway because you’re not that cute, but I decided to meet you because you seem nice.”
I opened his Facebook profile and unfriended him immediately.
Men really do need to go to therapy.
SquirtTale 