(What's a Personal Ad Tease? Click here!)
As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I had only gotten one response to my personal ad that I had placed in Westword through its new 1-900 voice mail system. The one woman who responded turned out to have a boyfriend already. I felt like the ad was a failure. I was considering running another ad, but hadn't gotten around to it.
A month after I had placed the ad, I went out to my mailbox. I had received a manila envelope from Westword. I opened it up and found four letters from women who had written in to respond to my ad. This surprised me because if anyone had read all the instructions, they would have been disuaded from sending letters to the mailboxes. But I guess Westword was allowing a grace period for people to get used to the new system and they sent me my responses, even though I didn't pay for the service.
The great thing was that, judging by the letters, they were all women who were just my type, in terms of taste in music and the arts. The bad thing was that certain events had taken place in some of their lives during the month after they wrote their letters. I contacted all four, but I only remember two of their names.
#2 was named Bezz. (#1 was Siz, whom I wrote about yesterday.) She actually had a name similar to that of my ex-girlfriend Bez. One of the things I remember most about her letter was that she had a hobby of photographing rotting fruit. I tried calling her from my house, but I kept getting the machine. One night when I was working at the Mayan theatre, I called her from the payphone in the lobby between shows. We had a really good initial conversation. She mentioned that she lived about a half-block away from the theatre. I told her I worked there and that was where I was calling from. She told me to give her a call in a couple of days and we would go find something to do.
I called her up a couple of days later, but she acted all irritated and said she was sleeping. I kept calling over the course of the next week, but I only got her answering machine. I would leave messages, but she wouldn't call back. Finally, I left a message telling her that if she wasn't interested, she could have just told me and that would have been end of it. I never tried to call her again.
Later, I figured out what had happened. She likely came over to the movie theatre the night I talked to her, saw what I looked like and didn't like what she saw. That's fine. That just meant she was superficial. But she could have just told me something when I called and woke her up that one day. If I hadn't had three other women who responded, I would have kept trying to call her until she finally admitted the truth.
#3 was named Raez. She was a single mother living on welfare. She still lived with her family. She said that the baby's father was still in her life, but she wasn't romantically involved with him anymore. She also told me that she had a tattoo on her breast.
I actually got to meet her and hung out with her a couple of times at her house. Both times, I brought fast food for us to eat. The first time I came to her house, I saw her car parked outside. It had all these stickers the back. I knew I had seen this car before around town. I didn't know it was hers. She turned out to be really cute, and reminded me a lot of Dayz.
It turned out she had once gone to the same gay bar I went to one time. She and her friends saw all these great looking guys inside and decided to go in. Her first thought was, "There's no competition here!" Then she started to figure out where she was. She leaned over to the bartender and whispered, "Excuse me, is this a gay bar?" The bartender answered yes. She and her friends quickly left.
The only bad thing about Raez was that she was always taking care of her child. On the few occasions that she could leave her child in the care of her parents, she tended to want to hang out with her friends. She told me straight up that she wasn't looking for someone to be a father to her child. She just wanted to hang out and have a good time. The real problem was that this could never be done with advance notice. It just happened to be when her parents felt like watching their grandchild for awhile.
One night, she and a couple of her friends came to visit me at the Mayan. One was a woman and the other was a man. This was the first time I had seen her in full Goth mode. She had makeup on and she was wearing a shirt cut low enough for me to see the tattoo on her breast. The man kept trying to stare me down. I wondered if this was the father, but she didn't introduce him as such. Cynz happened to be working the door that evening. She was rather shocked that this was someone I was interested in.
That would be the last time I saw her. I think it bothered me that she didn't seem to be looking for a boyfriend. And if she was, I got the idea that we would never get to spend any alone time together. I was going to have to either spend time with her child, her family or her friends in order to be near her.
And of course, I have no idea what happened to her.
#3 was a 30-year-old woman. In the letter she wrote, she gave me her work number. When I called her work place, they said she was at home and gave me her home number. I called her up. She seemed rather surprised that it took a whole month for me to call her. She was an artist who did paintings. Since she had written the letter, she had developed carpal tunnel syndrome and was going to be on disability. I actually got to meet her the same day I met Raez. We arranged to meet at Paris on the Platte, a coffee house on the outskirts of Downtown Denver.
She was tall, thin, had dark red hair and wore black leather. But she never smiled during the entire conversation. I just couldn't get her to laugh. It was really hard for me to get a read as to whether or not she actually liked me. During our conversation, I saw a woman I used to work with at Fiddler's Green Amphitheatre. I did a quick introduction. Then she asked me, "Why all the odd jobs?" I guess she didn't like the fact that I had a college degree, but was just barely scraping by.
We went outside to our cars. I stayed and waited for her to leave. She actually waved at me as she drove off. I thought that was a good sign. I continued to call her over the next couple of weeks, but couldn't get her to commit to going out again. In addition, she just had nothing nice to say. I guess she was pretty depressed about being on disability. I just stopped calling her and that was the end of that.
I don't remember too much about #4. We had a good intial conversation on the phone and had agreed to meet. However, she called me the next day to tell me that she had met someone in the last month and thought it was going somewhere. Because I was trying to get three other women on the hook, I didn't consider it that much of a loss.
Even though I struck out five times on this one ad, it still convinced me that it was the best way for me to meet women. And I continued to make use of personal ads over the course of the next ten years. I met a lot of interesting women and actually succeeded in getting a couple of actual girlfriends out of them.
As usual, those are stories for a later day and time.
No comments:
Post a Comment