So anyway…

My Worst Date Ever

10 Mar 2011 Leave a Comment

by Stephanie in This one time? At Band Camp?

I actually have a story for this one!

I can’t remember the guy’s first name. It was either John or Jay (I’ll use “John” here). I remember his last name perfectly but I won’t spill it. He had a mnemonic for it, which is why I remember it 20 years later.

I met him because he was making prank calls around PSU Altoona campus. I’m a pretty quick-witted broad and I made him laugh. Laughter led to conversation. Conversation led to nightly calls, hours long. I’m not saying there was a love connection. I’m saying that I liked talking to him and, since he was the one doing the calling, he must’ve liked it as well.

He asked me out after a couple of weeks of nightly conversations. My friends knew about this and were like, “About time.” I agreed. He didn’t ask me to meet on campus (it’s a small campus), which would have been smart. We could have done something at the student union or just gone and talked somewhere in person. He had a car (his father was, allegedly, a cardiac surgeon and therefore John had The Best of all possible things), which meant you were somewhat obliged to get the hell out of Dodge whenever you could.

One of the things he asked me when we were playing “spot my phone friend on campus” was, and I quote: “You’re not fat, are you?”

I gave my honest answer: “I’m not fat. I’m average.” At the time I was a size 14/16. Moreover, I never thought of myself as “fat” (unless someone else was calling me “fat” but that never happened outside the house, which is another story). So I honestly said what I honestly perceived.

Apparently his frat-boy-waiting-to-happen definition of “fat” was different.

He picked me up in the lobby of my dorm (I was a sophomore; he was a freshman). He literally did a double take, like something out of a Chuck Jones cartoon. The whole way to the theater, he didn’t talk. I would try to talk. He’d shut me down.

The movie was Sleeping With the Enemy, which I didn’t want to see because I hate(d) Julia Roberts. He walked up to the box office ahead of me, which I took as a good sign. There was no way the very nice, warm boy I’d been speaking to would jump in front of me to buy his ticket if we were going Dutch.

“One,” he said.

And that’s when the date shut down on my end. Not because he didn’t buy my ticket. I had my own money. In fact, one of the things I brought up on the ride was to ask if we were going to each pay for our own. I assumed we would but old-fashioned guys (which I tend to like) will often pick up the whole tab. Nope. Him jumping in front of me, which included him pushing up the door to the theater and going in ahead of me combined with the fact that Mr Talkative suddenly wasn’t… well, that was that.

So I suffered through that ridiculous movie with him sitting next to me and his jaw set. It was almost comic, had I not been pissed off about wasting my time on him.

Needless to say we drove straight back to campus. He pulled up behind my dorm and didn’t even put the car in park. One last attempt to be friendly, I said, “You don’t want to come up, do you?” I forget what his answer was verbatim. It wasn’t nasty but it wasn’t friendly either. I believe it was, “I don’t think so.”

I said, in my way, “Yeah well thanks a lot.” And slammed the car door.

He didn’t call again, which was unsurprising. I like to imagine him wistfully wondering if he gave up something wonderful by acting like a total douche (answer: yes). I saw him around a few times but I didn’t have any particular feeling about him so I never so much as said hello to him. I did point him out to some friends, who thought he was definitely cute but had an air of dickweed about him.

It wasn’t *that* bad a date but it was kind of a shock. Usually I’d win them over with conversation after meeting them. To win one over and then get rejected (based on looks — who does that? well, apparently that guy), well, that sucked. I don’t think I ever had another blind date.

I looked him up on Facebook just now and if I have the right guy, he got fat. If only he’d also gone bald…