Rehosting "Hardboiled Catfish"
Groupies, Threesomes and Absurdity
originally posted Aug 5, 2018
A couple of weeks ago, I did a bit at an open mic. The next morning, I awoke to find a red dot on Facebook. A young redhead, with a profile locked down tight.
“I think you’re really sexy.”
Last year, before I swore off Tinder, I had received a nearly identical greeting from a different woman. She had wanted to “celebrate” “opening up” her “relationship” with her rising-star musician boyfriend, and wanted me to fuck her because he was far, far, ahead of her in what definitely wasn’t a competition, no sir, not at all.
One hook, link and sinker later, I’d taken her up on her offer. I had felt like shit and hated every second of it. And now here was a bright young redhead, ex nihilo, calling me sexy.
She asked how old I was.
“Old enough that I’m gonna need to see some ID if you want to keep talking like that.”
She told me that she had seen me in the bar, yesterday, and that I had made quite the impression. Adding,
“My girlfriend loves you.”
The night before, I had been yelling at the crowd to stop watching porn. The whole thing stunk to high heaven.
I tried playing ball with her, by acting a wall. She asked me where I find my inspiration, told me I was a genius. She asked me to take them, she and her girlfriend, under my wing. Teach them about art.
Sure, if you buy me coffee in a public setting where strangers will notice if I’m suddenly dragged kicking and screaming into a black truck — sure. Sure thing. Why not.
I gave them a simple writing exercise, so we’d have a starting point for their tutoring. I didn’t hear back for a while. Her “girlfriend,” to whatever degree of intimacy that was supposed to imply, did however also invite me to be her internet friend, for what I assumed was a mutual degree of social media snooping.
Both profiles were, despite our new status as the best of friends, still locked down tight. A quick investigation revealed that they were at least 6–7 years in use. Large network, larger than mine. Tight privacy settings, tighter than mine. Linked to family members. Likely on better terms than I am with mine. It all seemed too complex to justify the amount of work it would take to fake. I began coming around to thinking that they might be actual people.
Then, over the weekend, I woke up to discover a message I had slept past, at 23.47:
“Hey sexy, you up?”
I mulled the whole thing over. Thought about it long and hard. And thick. Using both hands. Had a smoke after.
It just seemed too easy.
I was curious. I mean, who the fuck does this happen to? Sure, I imagine “The Kids” are all fucking each other to death while society crumples around us because mindless hedonism is the only thing their vapid, necrophiliac raised-by-sitcoms-parents ever taught them. But no matter which angle I started from, I ended up in the same place. I couldn’t escape the mental image that they were open-minded and hypersexual, dressing up a lack of coherent identity in fashionable language designed to obfuscate through a foggy notion of sophistication, using stolen language from malevolent intellectual frauds from the 70s to cover up that the “sexual identity” they so far had in place of a soul,could most clearly be articulated as “pretty much just wanting to fuck weird in the vague hope that someone would accidentally stuff a personality in there at some point.”
It was trite. I don’t like when my life feels like a script.
The problem was that if the catfish weren’t catfish, I could read too much between the lines. I know the language of depressed art people very well. They are dependently clichéd.
Anyone who thinks of themselves as, first and foremost, “open minded,” for example, are usually so goddamn open minded they couldn’t hold a thought in their heads for more than a few seconds before it blows out into the aether. Being Open Minded™ doesnt require you to grasp the things happening in your head, which appeals to depressed art people. It’s easy on the arms.
But reading thoughts on their own is useless. Common mistake in relationships, thinking that just because you understand what your partner is thinking, that that’s enough. It never is. Understanding is easy, you can do it sitting down. To grasp something, you have to stand, sometimes even jump, to get it.
So I invited them to a party my roommates were throwing.
“Don’t you feel jealous?”
“I’d feel like a forest fire. I’d be going fucking crazy. I’d feel like there was an electric current buzzing through my skin. I’d be so goddamn present that I’d be tasting the flesh in my mouth. I’d be jealous as all fuck. I’d hate myself for feeling aroused by seeing someone else kiss my lover.”
“Isn’t that the point of the threesome in the first place? Isn’t the whole thing an exercise in playing around in the borderland of jealousy? To what other end could you possibly invite the complication of incorporating an entire new world into what is already a cataclysmic event, if not for the joy of bathing in the resulting explosive, burning chaos?”
“If I were a nineteen-year-old woman who presented myself to the world as an open-minded bisexual, coming on to a man ten years older than me, I couldn’t imagine doing so from any other motive than a taste for chaos.”
“If I were a nineteen-year-old woman, I think my entire life would be chaos. I think it would be unbearable. I think it would be boring, so god damn boring. I’d feel a storm of indignant rage and a maelstrom of sour, inexcusable betrayal every morning when I opened my eyes.”
“I’d have just recently awakened to the fact that everyone’s always trying to sell you something, and unable to supress the intrusive thought that everyone wants to buy me as well. I’d feel trapped in this metropolis, trapped in a pile of fat and flesh. I’d hate beyond hate that nothing seemed human and everything feels like plastic excuses. I’d be constantly fighting the urge to puke from the dishonesty of it all, as I tried selling myself to the lowest bidder just to fuck with the economy.”
“I wouldn’t even know where to begin to make sense of the injustice of it all, and I wouldn’t feel any reason to try. Asking that would be asking too much, and I’d resent that no one had ever asked me anything before.”
“I think I would hate my parents, but not dare to vocalise it for fear of seeming a teenage-cliché, now that I’m a real grown up big girl. I think I’d spend 5, maybe 10 years fighting that, not wanting to give in, because admitting that I hate them for failing me makes me feel small, weak –makes me feel like a child. And there is nothing I would want less than feeling like a child, since my childhood sucked fucking ass, because my parents let me do whatever the fuck I wanted. Every boundary I ever crossed I was rewarded by my cowardly parents who spent more time thinking about their yearly two week trip to Hawaii than whether I would grow up to be anything resembling a human being.”
“I think I would be desperate to find anyone who would put some goddamn limits on me so that the world wouldn’t feel like a fucking scam. I’d transgress and transgress, hoping to somehow find anything solid, because I’d already be at a point where nothing feels transgressive any more, no one ever reacts to anything I do, no one cares about me. I’d fantasize that I could probably cut someone’s head off in the street, and the only people who wouldn’t ignore me would applaud my gumption and go-getter attitude, being a Strong Independent Woman™.”
“I think I’d be desperate for someone to tell me that anything I do is wrong, so that transgressing would at least make me feel something more than the grey salty taste that’s stuck in my throat.”
“I think I’d lose faith in love, and for that loss, I would want bloody revenge.”
“And when I’d try to invite an older man to have a threesome with my girlfriend and I, I think I’d do so because the chaos of seeing my love betrayed simultaneously as I betrayed it myself, would be the exact magnitude of darkness and turmoil that I feel in my core at all times, and for just a moment — maybe just a second — I would disappear into it. The outer and the inner would be aligned. I wouldn’t feel like I was drowning, because I wouldn’t be able to tell myself from the ocean. I wouldn’t care that it meant drowning — For just that moment, I’d feel like I could breathe.”
TIL this used to actually be a perverted sex blog.