I Love the Eighties
It started when I signed up for a free dating website. A few weeks later, one of the girls whose profile I had seen, but not messaged, sent me a message. I checked her out again and she looked alright and had a list of various interests (the usual including movies, gym, dancing and 80s music. I tend to have a guilty pleasure for the 80s too. We were also both 21 and students in the city who lived near our respective campuses, so it was a pretty “local” match. We messaged back and forth and agreed to spend the following Saturday having lunch then a few drinks in the early evening.
Nothing of note happened over lunch. It was pleasant and although conversation and the food was nice, I wasn’t feeling a connection and was beginning to think of whether to order a pizza or Chinese when I got home. To be courteous, I agreed to take her to DC’s for a drink. It’s usually a popular bar during the weekends with students but with us arriving about six, the place was not at full capacity and we managed to get a table. It was here that things started to go downhill. In the time it took me to drink one pint, she was on her third double Malibu and coke. Not long later the alcohol had begun to take its toll on her as she started coming onto me and rubbing my knee, etc. I was smiling nicely and trying to think of how to leave, but also get her home to make sure her night didn’t descend into a black-out night of drama where she would do something she might regret. It was here that she started a frankly bizarre conversation:
“Do you know who Baltimora is?”
“Uhm, yeah, the guy who did ‘Tarzan Boy.’”
Yes, my 80s knowledge really is that bad. Anyway, this led her into a big spiel about how under-rated this guy was and how people “obviously” hated him because he was gay (which didn’t stop her from ranting about how he would still be alive “if he kept the stick out his pooper”). By this time she was speaking louder and beginning to draw nearby people’s attention. I was mortified. She ranted at me when I countered her accusation of me hating bands because they were in the past by saying I liked, for instance, the Beatles, and she responded by saying, in a loud voice of course, “BALTIMORA IS BIGGER THAN THE BEATLES!”
Can the night get any worse? Yes! She got up, stumbled over to the jukebox and stuck on the only two Baltimora songs it had. She then started dancing (badly as you would expect from a drunk) and telling people to join in. By this time I was so humiliated that I considered just leaving her to it. But somehow my better judgement prevailed and I got up, took her by the arm (“MY SONGS AREN’T FINISHED YET!”) and took her out the bar all the way to her flat five minutes away. She was mumbling about how nobody likes her and that with me as her “rock” she will achieve great things. I left her in her flat with a jug of water in the kitchen for the morning after. This is why I will never try online dating again or listen to “Tarzan Boy” without a sense of shame.
