I met Gershom on eHarmony

This is the first pages to a chapter of my memoirs I am working on. My memoir's angle goes something like this, (Caspar, I'm quoting you):

I am a tall beautiful blond California chick, with a sunny temperament, a ready wit and a love of sex. So why is it that I have, on the latest count, two dozen failed relationships with some of the most pointless men in the world...



This chapter relates my last and most fatal "pointless man" relationship.


I met Gershom on eHarmony. Red warning lights already are flashing, no? In the box, “Describe one thing about yourself that only your best friends know,” he said “I am the catch of the century.” His profile’s photo was far from appealing: bottle-bottom thick glasses; spandex bike shorts; buckteeth and receding hairline. What did I see? He looked clean. He looked like he might have a sense of humor -the saving grace of many an unattractive man. He looked safe. Hard to remember now. . . really quite challenging to remember what exactly drew me to him…. perhaps I saw a damaged person I thought I could help heal? A person locked away in a cage of their own construction, and, liking a challenge, I wanted to release him? A nerd who would pose no dangerous threat to my daughter or me? (Nerds were inherently good, right?) Did I want to be the savior of this geek? Or did I want a savior…someone to look after me, to protect me and save me from myself ?

Standing there in the parking lot next to his white mini-van, clutching the three dozen long-stems he had bought for our first date, he looked fat and scared. He looked terrified of my headlights as I guided my car in next to his, already I was too much for him…too bright, literally too bright. He took me to the most expensive restaurant in my little town, wanting to hammer home one of his main attractions…he had bucks. During dinner, he stared at my hands so intently; I was unnerved, kept getting the serial killer vibe. Did he want to chop them off and eat them with lima beans? Of course not, he was a vegetarian. And yet I ignored my creep alert siren. I’ve had some luck that I never actually encountered a serial killer because I would have obviously ignored all the warning signs and ended up gracing his refrigerator with my presence. I am the girl in the slasher movie that blithely goes down into the basement when all the lights in the house have gone off mysteriously and you, the audience know, that this is the last place anyone should be going.

Our first face-to-face conversation featured first-date-hot-topics such as what restaurants he had most enjoyed in the last few months, what particular food items he had enjoyed at those restaurants, and dropping as many names (of authors, potential big-wig-friends, musicians) as he could cram into three courses and dessert. He was cultured, could talk the talk about literature and films, a far cry from the unwashed hippies I had been dating in Sebastopol, but there was this surface quality to all of it. He knew the right things and the right people to talk about because one must. Some people go through their lives pantomiming what they think living is supposed to be about, but not actually living it or being it. Gershom was a shadow puppet of a “New York intellectual turned yogi” and his accent was an approximation of that -not quite New York, more Nasal-Gay-Snob than anything. In fact, during our first few conversations on the phone, I found his gay-infused vocabulary and intonations somehow comforting, reaching into my heart-of-a-former-fag-hag. I could banter with him about the nothing that composed our conversations and know how to do it, know how to banter in that catty-tear-that-bitch-apart way. It is fun with a truly witty and dirty-mouthed queen, but was never that fun with Gershom…he didn’t have enough heart to make it real and all that was there was the stylized packaging of a witty conversation.

Gershom suffered from a type of eye disability that rendered him nearly blind, and so had zero night vision, which accounted for him stumbling and almost falling over the parking barrier outside the restaurant. You can’t laugh when it’s pathetic and when the perpetrator is taking himself too seriously to guffaw at a mistake. I actually felt bad for him, as one would. I mean he obviously suffered a great deal due to his disability, and it is hard to see any human being suffering, no matter how creepy they are. Though he was loaded and seemed to take quite good care of himself physically, (yoga daily, organic food, weekly massages, etc), his glasses looked to be at least twenty years old. The frames were too small for his face and the lenses were yellowed with age, amplifying their thickness. A source of continual martydom from which to draw, his vision problems paid high dividends in the pity party that was Gershom’s “in” into society and with sucker-for-a-broken-man women like me.

Mom was babysitting that night and when we got back to my place, (I know, how did I ever think of going beyond dinner with this boring weirdo?), she was in my bedroom with the door closed watching a movie. I invited the dork in and we sat on my orange velvet couch and kissed. He quickly moved from kissing me to begging to have just a taste…which I allowed him to do. I am seriously nauseous writing this down. I should have sought professional help right then and there. Yes, I was a lonely single mom, yes, it was nice to be touched after so long of being alone, but this was beyond desperation. This was sick. Maybe it was a huge blessing in disguise that the guy turned out to be completely frigid and hung-up in bed…not hung…hung-up.

A week or so after our first date, he came and picked me up, greeting me with a gift basket he had assembled at L’Occitaine ($150), and took me to an upscale bed and breakfast resort on the Russian River ($350 a night), were we had a four course dinner with a nice bottle of pinot ($250), and side-by-side massages ($200) by masseuses that heard about how he had Rolfing done once a week and did yoga for two hours a day. We had sex for the first time that weekend and I remember very vividly thinking during the act, “So this is what stockbroker sex is like.” Meat and potatoes with no seasoning. Very June and Ward Cleaver. And yet I persisted and continued to see him. I could probably teach him to be a bit more free and fun in bed, right? Obviously, I had gotten over my initial revulsion to the guy and was now working on selling myself to him. For the price of a weekend getaway and a hidden prize behind curtain number three, I was willing to ignore my gut instinct to get away from this guy and instead applied myself to marketing to him what a great catch he had found in me. I can hear what you are thinking, “What a terribly low-self-esteem she must have had to believe she had to sell-herself to someone she is repulsed by!” I can see that now myself. But at the time, what was I thinking? I was thinking meal-ticket. I was thinking stability. I was thinking happy home. My desire for those things was so strong that it picket-fence-white-washed over the reality of the situation. From a more negative viewpoint you could see me as base, as a hooker in disguise. Perhaps all the years of living as a single-mom on Welfare and hand-to-mouth even when I worked full-time and beyond, always being afraid that I would not have enough money to buy dinner or pay the rent, the countless times at the grocery store I had to count out the pennies at the bottom of my purse to make it, had all this hardship lent me a crack-whore mentality? Buy me some groceries for my baby and I’ll give you a blow-job. Again, it’s a question of self-esteem. I was the catch of the century, but I never believed it.