#RealDeal: The anonymous misadventures of a Hollywood hookup
<editorsnote> The following is an anonymous story from a very dear friend of mine. It's a hilariously random tale of a hook up he recently had. For reals, high-larious. Like prepare yourself. You have been warned. Jen Out. </editorsnote>
I need to see ID. If you look under 30 it’s the law. It’s also a sneaky way to get some information. A group of five young girls, all from different states, over-dressed and over-excited to be in my douche-bag bar. Easy read. Friends from an internship. Most of them are gorgeous so I’m guessing television or PR (I was right). My favorite is from Massachusetts, her name is Jackson and she’s the only one older than 21. She’s barely less pretty in her picture.
All that legal information is always good to bring up later.
Like an hour later. And an hour after that. Until the cab’s outside. “Hi Jackson,” whenever she walks by.
****
“We’re going.”
“I hope not back to Massachusetts.”
“How’d you know I… ?”
“You seem taller than your ID says you are.“
“Not yet. I have two more weeks here.”
“Well if you decide to stay you can text me your number.”
I’m usually not one to go out with someone without at least the potential for a long-term thing, but honestly she had me agape and the thought of having her attention for a night was too appealing. Still, I left it with my number and figured it was only worth it if she was interested enough to call me anyway.
Her 21-year-old friend, Rachel, (ironically from my hometown) was excited about the prospect too. She handed me the check out of Jackson’s hands and said clearly and instructionally, “Call her.”
The receipt that Jackson had already written her number on is still folded up in the key-pocket of my work jeans.
It’ll stay there.
DATE ONE: It’s trivia night at this bar?! Someone likes me. I’m about to show off. I’m sniffly and sick but nothing a little intellectual flexing can’t overcome in the eyes of college girl.
The dude next to us is from Bangaloristan and insists (physically) on me handling the American questions. Which in America is all of them. It was charming to me and annoying to her. Until he grabbed me and made me explain to the judge that despite receiving credit for Prancer, Vixen, Comit, Cupid, Donder and Blitzen, Dancer was in fact readable, and we deserved that point as well. Then we were both annoyed.
So we went to another bar.
We talked about my age. And how it was a lot more than hers. We talked about school, family and tragedy. And I kept making her laugh. Even during the tragedy part. I’m good at that.
She’s good at laughing.
The abandoned streets of Westwood are a romantic place to have a first kiss. Though they weren’t where ours was. “I don’t want to get sick,” she said.
So I said, “Give me your cheek.” Full disclosure: I may have caught her ear and a little bit of her neck as well.
“I liked that,” She said. But she looked at me for a full minute first. Her eyes are soft and hazel.
DATE TWO: We had to wait a day to see each other again. It was the second anniversary of her best friend’s death and she was able to travel by car to the memorial service. A blessing for her, being out here in LA.
We’d had to wait a little longer because it was a Friday and I work until 3 a.m. I didn’t want to pin down her whole last week so we left it open.
She showed up at my work.
That’s creepy, right? That’s why bartenders won’t tell a girl which bar they pour at, because showing up at someone’s work is creepy. Only if you can look at the person without the butterflies in your stomach doing the jitterbug, that is. And I can’t do that. Not with Jackson. I look up from my well, surprised to see her. My belly turned into an insect sock hop.
Three a.m. We’re hungry. We never got food. The taxis are driving by and despite my arms being longer than her body no one’s stopping. The frustrated girl jumps the fence of a West Hollywood apartment complex and puts her feet in the courtyard pool. I’d have been happy if this was the last hour I got to spend with a woman.
Somewhere in the conversation her freckled little mouth hiccups, “Skinny dipping is on my bucket list. I don’t think I’ll ever do it.”
I couldn’t hear the last part because my shirt was already over my head.
But I don’t think I’ll ever do it. She’s a prudy little thing. Awesome by me. One of the most attractive qualities in a woman, and as far as I’m concerned, sex, while great, is only absolutely necessary in a relationship when just being around them isn’t satisfying enough. So we had a long conversation that ended with a ‘not without towels’ rule. Skinny-dipping that is. Not sex. The only-with-towels rule applies to skinny-dipping.
Oh, also that I cannot buy towels. That’s the fine print.
Did you know 24 Hour Fitness in West Hollywood is not 24 Hours? Fuck those guys. A ton of towels and two locked doors. But across the street is a Ramada Inn. Watch this:
A tall man, MATTHEW, walks up to the front desk of a swanky West Hollywood hotel. There is a MAN sitting there.
MATTHEW
Check out’s 12 noon, right?
MAN
Yes sir.
MATTHEW
Great. Can we get two more bath towels, please.
MAN
Yup.
I’d done a really good job pretending I wasn’t sick tonight. And, romantically, Westwood has nothing on trespassing in someone else’s pool. If you’ve never had a first kiss naked and in water, you should put that on your bucket list.
The pool light danced under her chin and her wet hair stuck to both our faces. With my arms gently around her she was even lighter under water.
And that’s as far as it went. All hands on deck. I may have caught her ear and neck again, but a soft turn of her knees let me know that this was as physical as we’d get on a second date.
The harsh turn of her brow told me it was because of my age.
DATE 3: She’d told me she’d be in my bar Saturday, too. So I knew she was coming, but my stomach was still dancing. Shit yo, stupid butterflies need to relax, amirite?
At two o’clock I opened my car door and she waited in my truck by herself until three for me to get out. We weren’t as hungry. And she said she’d never seen the Hollywood sign. Now there’s probably a better way to get there but she knows this town even worse than I do so I headed to Griffith Park, which is, of course, closed at ungodly hours like this. Gated, locked and all.
The second gate was, too, but we drove around both of them. And when we got to the Observatory it was 3:30 a.m. There were about four people who had apparently done the same thing we did. I get out of the car to ask them why they were there and… flash, a shooting star flames across the downtown skyline.
The Perseids.
So yeah, we did that. Walked to the back of the LA Observatory, pointed out all the places she’d been in her six weeks here and watched a shower of shooting stars until the sun came up.
And we kissed. Up to the point where she would slowly turn her shoulder away and think about our age difference.
“What do you want with someone as young as me?” She asked, “Where is this going?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But you keep showing up.”
We chased two deer.
And we kissed again.
DATE 4: I couldn’t wait. Then here’s the text I get:
We just had dinner. An awesome, fun and butterfly break-dancing dinner. In a fish house in Malibu. I called her a liar a few times. But smiled afterwards like a gentleman.
It was a work night for both of us. She seemed to care more than I did and insisted on sleeping at home. This was a theme.
DATE 5: …didn’t happen. By the time I was free, she was in bed. I must have been short because I did get this text:
It turns out that making yourself vulnerable to someone gets you invested. And being invested in something with an expiration date makes your emotions do weird things. Like get short with someone you (for whatever crazy short-lived fucking reason) really care about. Or you text revealing sweet things when you’re supposed to be sleeping just to unsuccessfully get them off of your mind.
None of that shit works, though.
It only makes you afraid to touch things. Doubting they’ll touch back. In dreams you don’t know you’re asleep, but in real life you’re haunted by your own awareness. You stare at fog and wait for it to dissipate. Like a breath-taking ghost, beautiful and unexplained, that lives inches from your cold-breath and disappears when you reach to feel it.
****
I guess date five happened the next night. I met her and her intern friends at a bar. It was their last night together.
DATE 6: I’d gotten her a book (and a towel). She’s not sentimental, she’d said, but I am. Opposites attract. I tried to keep the cover note short, but couldn’t fight my own sentimentality enough to not say how wonderfully I felt about her.
It’s her last night in town. And it’s a boxing match between living in these fleeting moments of amazing company and just putting the car in neutral and pushing it off a cliff to collect the insurance. One minute her head’s laying into my shoulder in a loud club. The next I’m getting the run-down on how single she is.
When the bar closes and she says she wants food, my suggestion of the 24-hour place by my apartment is fine by her. So we get it to go and she comes over for the first time.
Of course on the drive the boxing match is still being fought. She lured me in with a rope-a-dope. I opened myself up to the swing.
Shadows cross the stage as streetlights and fellow cars pass by. There is much unsaid.
Lauren: You’re lying.
Matthew: I’m not. I don’t lie and especially not to you.
Lauren: Yeah right.
Matthew: If I were going to lie I’d have told you I was 26 like you thought I was.
Lauren: You’re right. [beat] And if you’d have told me that I’d have slept with you by now.
Silence. The only sound the soft crackle of a heart’s edges Matthew couldn’t keep from breaking.
It was a low blow. I don’t know why it came out. We were casually flirting at the time. I can only guess that it was anger at the fate of the situation and the only person around to blame was me. It still hurts.
We ate. And we kissed some more.
I pulled her in my lap and slowly identified the specific freckles on her shoulders that I wanted in my mouth. My hands were up her thighs and I laid her on her back. Her dress was unzipped and pulled up to her chest.
I’d fantasized about getting as close to her as I could. And having her hands in my shirt and mine in her panties kept giving me pause. I stopped to study her face so I could connect every part of what was happening.
I looked her in the eye when I slid her underwear down her legs. Her hands went to my belt, then my fly and opened up my pants. I pulled them down and kissed her hard. I flashed to us in the pool remembering clearly how I’d felt her skin against all of me for a split second in the water. It was like being 15 and learning for the first time the powerful feeling of another’s physical touch. It’s sublime in the truest sense of the word. And here we were, me between her legs and everything touching. My shirt came off. My fingers were in her fingers, in her hair and in her body. I slid my hand to her ass and my hips pressed her thighs further apart. I moved my hips lower and pushed myself…
“No!”
She jumped. Shocked. And Lauren sat up as angry as I’d seen her. “What are you doing?!”
“Nothing now.” I said. “I was going to have sex with you, but…“
“This is why I stopped myself from coming here. You wanted to trick me into sex.”
“I wasn’t trying to trick you. I thought that’s what was happening. I took your underwear off. You undid my pants. We were on top of each other…”
She said, “This is not what 21 year olds do!”
And despite the fact that I was once 21, for an entire year of my life, I didn’t argue her point. “I just thought it was understood that that’s what was happening. You said stop. I did. That’s the line. Found it. I promise I won’t cross it and never meant to.”
“You didn’t even ask!”
She’s right. I didn’t. And when I was 21 I probably would have. Now I’m not. I’ve been softened by years of sex that didn’t lead anywhere. I felt awful. I feel awful.
Her shoes were on and purse over her shoulder before I could take my head out of hands. I was sad. This was one of the most amazingly, childishly, fun weeks of my life and I’d hurt the person who brought it to me. And right or wrong, she was hurt in a way that seemed traumatic.
I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I hadn’t done everything right. I just wanted her to sit down, calmly and remember that she liked me. That I wasn’t trying to take advantage of her. She said a lot of things. “I was ok having sex but you tried to do it so sneaky and gross.” “I told you about my experience in the past and you still tried to take advantage of me.” “This is why I can’t be around a 31 year old. You expect things out of me.”
It was at that point that I fought back a little. I don’t expect anything out of anyone. I genuinely thought that it was understood and we were both anticipating it. My time and money with her was because I whole-heartedly liked her and didn’t need anything more than her spending her time with me for the same reason. Despite her efforts to not talk about it (because as she said, she bottles “this stuff” up and it comes out years later) a lot came out on the ride home. That she was embarrassed to be out with her friends and have a 31 year old there.
“What are you doing with me… if I’m such an embarrassment to you, why are you here?” I said
She didn’t like it turned back on her. After all, I was the one who hadn’t lied about my age.
It was a truly horrible experience. I haven’t felt that shitty about anything I’ve done in a long time. And I don’t know if I should or not.
I dropped her off. And despite her yelling, I walked her to the door. I’m sure I was crying when she hugged me, but I couldn’t hug back.
When the door closed I went back to my car and thought about any thing I could do or say to make the last time I saw her not be this. So I walked back to the door, knocked on it, and her roommate, Rachel, from my hometown, answered.
“Matthew! Can you take me to the airport?! Right now?!”
That’s literally how it happened. And I did.
The drive down from 4:30 a.m. to five was me relaying the story Rachel hadn’t had the time to hear the other side of yet. She listened and told me I’d done nothing wrong. That issues and past experiences prevent us all from normal behavior at times and that sex was one of those things for Lauren.
I think we were caught in the fog. That we were both the ghost you reach to touch. And a little shocked that when we pushed our bodies forward there was the genuine feel of another body pushing back. I reacted by melting. She by freezing. Opposites attract.
And I know that starting a fight with someone is easier than saying goodbye.
Because, God knows, the word good-bye feels like your voice box slitting your throat from the inside. The words don’t reach your mouth; they drip out your neck.
THE DAY AFTER DATE 6:
When I get sad I want to go home.
I’m glad Rachel made her flight. She’d had an emergency and needed to book the flight on a moment’s notice. I imagined curling in her carry-on and surprising my parents at the airport. Getting a hug from my mom and looking around at the quiet Midwestern city that, despite being tattoo-ed across my body, was no longer mine.
Do you believe that things happen for a reason?
Maybe this whole week happened so I could get Rachel home. And without that dramatic evening I’d have never knocked on her door at 4:30 a.m., sending her back to the town that built me.
Maybe the world doesn’t revolve around me.
But from the top of LA, watching stars burn to reach you, falling with a girl you were born to catch… it sure feels like it does.
THAT NIGHT: It was a Friday so I walked back behind the bar. That’s where I spend my weekends.
I didn’t ask anyone for ID.