50 First Dates (a Tinder story)
Story of your life.
Ready?
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On the first date, she got me drunk. In the hopes, I think, of having me divulge my deepest desires and truths.
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Halfway through the Mets game, I couldn’t recall what I’d told her and what I’d told the one before her. Couldn’t recall what I told, what I left out. It made me realize how often I perform, even if I didn’t like to call it performance.
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How many words do I get?
And how good does it feel when they’re all on my tongue?
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Maybe she just wanted me to kiss her.
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I can predict my every reaction. Everything is predictable.
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Well? she asks, tapping her nails on the table. White tips on wood. Aged? Refurbished? I had no idea.
I’m still writing it.
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We sat in the best seats in the Manhattan Inn, a view of the whole scene, the piano bar and all the surrounding tables, and I thought of lines, or at least a title: Conversations of Other Couples (a companion piece?)
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I never like to save the first kiss for the very end. Because as soon as it happens, you’re gone. I’d rather keep kissing. I’d rather kiss again and again and again …
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I liked to watch things happen; I liked the view. I liked to peer out the window from time-to- time, and see the dark blue sky, the sun bleeding into night, the purple crescendo of waves rising and receding.
Except we are nowhere near a beach. Nowhere near any waves at all.
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I teach this class on intimacy. Intimacy, identity, the Internet.
A real tongue-twister, she says, putting her hand over her mouth like she’s about to laugh and tipping her head back. On the verge of falling over. Have you learned anything useful?
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The whole of history is laid out on a roll of film, crisscrossed and double-sided it’s so long, re-played every three days as an encore.
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What’s your favorite animal? she asks. We are even holding hands now. It’s almost time for dessert. It’s almost time for an after-dinner drink.
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Sometimes things happen and I have the feeling that they’ve already happened before.
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Turtles, I say.
Why turtles?
Because turtles are the opposite of the Internet.
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There are no fixed subjects. Only dynamic relationships.
I try to keep reminding myself. I have it written on a post-it that’s slapped on my laptop. Occasionally, we make eye contact.
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I often ask to meet in coffee shops. Cafés, hotel bars. Anywhere public enough to pass through, in transit, like anyone else. Just passing through.
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A quick shift in the hips and you are looking out through someone else’s eyes.
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Somewhere between the kale basket and the seasonal doughnuts, she answered her phone and began a seven-minute conversation about last week’s Empire.
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Bruises mark physical trauma, but they are also signs of healing.
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So you’re, like, an expert on this?
Expert? I manage to laugh. A real chuckle. I shake my head. The only thing I’ve ever been good at, I say, is asking questions.
And what are you asking yourself now?
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The only requirement is that each date will be the first date. And there will be fifty of them.
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What people really want out of public spaces is a place to be private with all their public communications. I run a hand through my hair and scratch my scalp and try my best to appear shook up. When was the last time you met anyone at a bus stop?
I don’t ever take the bus.
Well, when was the last time you were ever really alone?
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This is a safe environment. Please keep it friendly and nice.
What are you looking at? she asks, and I snap back to reality, or at least the reality of our date, us sitting almost close enough to touch at The Commodore. Dirty Dancing playing on the television in miniature. Patrick Swayze looking pretty sweaty with a smile on his face.
There’s a sign over there, I say, pointing with my index finger. Sorry, I often do that.
Do what?
Get lost. Lose myself.
I furrow my brow and look thoughtful. We’re both watching Patrick Swayze now. Pretty sweaty and pretty and sweaty.
Either, I say. Both?
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We will only have first dates. There won’t be any repeat episodes because there won’t be any option for the pilot to be picked up. And if they ask, if they ask … I’ll tell them?
I’m writing a book.
You’re always writing a book.
… … …
What’s your book about?
How people move and what moves them.
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I played along with her. It was an amusing game.
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Do you like to read? Do you prefer pictures with your words? Do you read at a post-Dan Brown level?
These are deal-breakers, I say. These answers are critical.
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Always being myself and my salve, which is life. I’m not lonely, if that’s what it seems like. Always writing things down.
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You really like to look around, don’t you?
Yeah, I say. I say, Yeah, I guess I do. I’ve got an obsession with interiors.
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The video shows a brunette in white blouse and blue jeans massaging a head of lettuce (boston bibb?) as water from an unseen faucet descends onto her from above, soaking everything, except for her smile. Still intact after the great deluge.
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These are two types of people, I volunteer. Ones who float down the river, and ones who are the river.
Only two? she asks. I nod.
What about all the people who can’t swim?
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Among the amenities is a fully immersive horizontal shower designed to “wash away stress.”
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Let’s stay in touch, okay?
Sure, I nod, not certain if I’m already breaking the rules by agreeing. You can reach me on my cell.
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Can I tell you a joke? she asked, just as we were being seated.
A sure sign of a bad joke, or at least a bad comedian, is asking permission to tell one. But I didn’t tell her that. I didn’t tell her anything.
Why didn’t the melons get married?
She wasn’t really asking anyway.
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We go to museums. We go to bowling alleys. We go to Turkish bathhouses. Really. We go to overpriced cocktail lounges and faux speakeasies, kind you need to call up in advance and enter through a phone booth. We go to trendy cafés and old-school diners. We go to Mets games and movies. So at least there’s that.
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Cantaloupe, right?
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Intimacy, identity, Internet. It’s got a nice ring to it right? And if I came out to a song—I mean, if I had my own entrance music—it’d be “Take On Me” by A-Ha. Can you hear that playing right now? Or at least five minutes ago, when we’d walked in and sat down and the server poured us our water, but before we’d ordered a drink.
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Oddly enough I felt a little stir of desire, a thing that had never happened when she was actually present.
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The whole world is a vast film set in which the props are continually shifting, four extras reprising the roles of twenty-four characters and people you’ve never seen before playing your most beloved ones.
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I had to be alone to feel that kind of want. Alone, unwatched and watching the images go by
… one by one, or all at once.
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Why’d you pick “Take On Me”?
I’m open-minded. I’m very—what’s the word?—I ask, pausing, pretending to think. User- friendly.
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A handsome man and his fiancée are shown lounging poolside sporting sunglasses and an umbrella for the shade. The man scrolls elegantly on his sleek laptop while his attractive companion holds her cell phone to her ear, engaged in lively banter with her niece of nine years. The audience understands almost immediately: he is important and he is working; the woman beside him is undisturbed and entertained.
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You drop a word like “perspicacious”
In a conversation just to see
Who’s listening
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Time stretched like a rubber band, it stopped, it started, it lengthened each time a voice track clicked on (“Still? Sparkling?”). Hours passed, a minute or two went by, unless I’d been sitting there, surrounded and alone, making time stop myself, making it assume an untangled ribbon of hair and glancing at my phone, too, wondering if anyone had messaged me, at some point, somewhere else, wondering when the moment would arrive. Some big bang.
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“The new disembodiment does not ask you to deny your body its pleasures but to love your body … put it somewhere beautiful, warm, and exotic while it works.”
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And if you had to appear to the sound of some other song?
“Now That I’m Real (How Does It Feel?)”
Naturally.
Naturally.
I nod and she nods and for a few spare seconds or maybe a full minute, we are silent.
Story of your life?
Mine and yours, and everyone else’s.
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We’d only conversed in emojis for two weeks, each of us (I’d thought) trying to preserve the mystery a little longer until we’d finally meet in person; that aura of anonymity that makes first dates thrilling and at the same time perilous.
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Don’t be sad we can’t actually be together, I say, practicing, again. In front of the mirror. Typing and re-typing.
Be happy you can still think about it.
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The play would begin any minute. I was only confused as to whether I was attending the performance, or a part of it.
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Her English was not the best.
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Everyone I meet on first dates seems to already know everything about me. I blame the Internet for that.
I blame the Internet for everything.
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The slow humming of the sky as the day unfolds. Have you ever heard that sound before?
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My first questions usually involve music. And if they like Taylor Swift, I just bury my head in the menu. And if they call Taylor Swift “T Swift,” I go to the bathroom and never come back.
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I stopped what I was doing as if frozen; it was as though the projector had jammed and left me fixed in that single frame, motionless and paralyzed.
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Have you ever seen that film? What’s it called—the one with Adam Sandler? Where he finds true love, except Drew Barrymore—I mean the lady she plays—she can’t remember ever meeting him? Date after date?
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From my wide reading on the subject, I recognized the sensation, even though I had never experienced it before.
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All of these dates feel very clinical, and I don’t know if it’s my fault or the system’s. The system of seeing and swiping, seeing and swiping. And then sitting across from one another in real life, with a drink in one hand and silence in the other. Speaking without saying anything really.
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It just goes on and on like that. Until the final turn. Classic Hollywood ending, right?
I remember that movie, she says, nodding, smiling. Her eyes are half-shut and sad. What makes you think of it now?
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Everything in the world begins on the mouth. One syllable in almost every language. Yes. Some sort of affirmation. Voilà. Like magic. Begin.
And begin again.
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I had fallen in love.
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We tried thirty-six questions over hookah. Have you ever tried the thirty-six questions? This turns a casual first date into an all-night affair. By the time I knew it, it was quarter to three and I’d be teaching in five hours.
What are you teaching them about tomorrow? she asked, as we were ambling toward the subway. She held my arm with both hands, careful not to step in the sludge. I was still coughing.
The thirty-six answers, I said.
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It just goes on and on.
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The fact that I’m thinking about turning all of this into something else appalls me. What I do appalls me. How I am. Only ever halfway here. And I wonder if in trying to find intimacy in this absent culture; in trying to find if intimacy is still possible, I’ve only found I’m the real ghost.
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I think a lot about the Internet. The Internet thinks a lot about me too.
What are you talking about?
When’s the last time you checked your Spam folder?
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Whenever I want to remember an experience, I make a square with my thumbs and index fingers, bring it up to my brow, and say Bang.
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I never expected you to be this way, she said. From your pictures.
What should the pictures say?
It’s not like they actually say stuff, you know? I mean—
Not as advertised?
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Acedia, recession … everything is fading out.
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For starters, shared self-reflection depends on having an emotion and sharing it with another person, maybe even struggling with the experience or how to communicate it.
Are you asking me to go home with you?
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The way the snow sticks to my black pea coat. So that it looks like another coat. A game of chess. Anything can be anything else. It’s that real. It’s that simple.
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Do you usually check your phone that often?
… … …
I’m asking for a friend.
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The courage to do what is necessary. Listen to the same song on repeat for forty-seven minutes as I try to finish this. Capture a particular mood. But that’s not right. I don’t want to hold anything. More like expose. Hold it up for what it is or isn’t. Make believe that none of it can be attributed to another person. Make believe that all of it can.
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Send a Message or
Keep Playing
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I’d rather save the first kiss for the very beginning.
That way I can hold on to it for longer. That way I can hold on to it.
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Halfway to fifty, I give up. I didn’t make it very far, I think. I didn’t make much of anything.
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But I already told you, didn’t I? I am asking for a friend.
Chris Campanioni is a first-generation Cuban-and Polish-American. He has worked as a journalist, model, and actor, and he teaches literature and creative writing at Baruch College and new form journalism at John Jay. He was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2013 for his collection, In Conversation, and his novel, Going Down, was selected as Best First Book for the 2014 International Latino Book Awards. He is also the author of Once in a Lifetime, a book of poems from Berkeley Press. Find him in space at www.chriscampanioni.com or in person, somewhere between Brooklyn Bridge Park and Barclays Center.