The 6

A short story about dating in the age of Twitter

Tonight on Billionaire Bios, we take a look at the story of Fred Morrison, the twenty-six year-old accountant turned entrepreneur venture-capitalist. After graduating with honors from Columbia University, he worked as a number-crunching desk monkey for four years, before quitting spectacularly (rumours had it that he entered the office that day with two female strippers). He then paved his way into venture capitalism with a small bank loan and several sound investments. He is now worth 15 billion U.S. dollars, and is known to live a lavish lifestyle filled with supermodels, drugs and expensive cars. In this half-hour documentary, we’ll…

“Morrison!”

Feelings of drowsiness instantly disappear and are replaced with a rush of adrenaline and a cold shiver down my spine as I try to figure out where I am, what I was doing, and why the documentary about how outrageously rich and famous I became has ended.

“For goodness sake, get some coffee. Wake the fuck up, Morrison.”

I had fallen asleep at my desk and my boss was shouting at me. Par for the course on a Friday afternoon. I grab my mug, shuffle away towards the kitchen and stop by the bathroom to rinse my face, which is refreshing, but further reinforces the fact that I’m not the subject of a documentary about my opulent lifestyle. Nope, I’m Fred Morrison, the twenty-six year-old accountant. The slightly chubby, old-fashioned, socially awkward, timid yet self-righteous twenty-six year-old accountant. Although day-dreaming (and sometimes night-dreaming) about success is a regular occurrence for me, I never did go out and try to make a name for myself. My dad says I’m just too timid and need to assert myself more. That’s probably why I’ve never had a girlfriend before.

Earlier in the week things had gotten to a boiling point. My flatmate Dave had convinced me that I desperately needed a girlfriend. He realized this when I told him how many girls I’d slept with in my life.

He had made me an ‘action plan’. Even with his limited grammatical skills he still managed a few bullet points:

1. Find attractive girl
2. Ask on date
3. Sex
4. Repeat step 3

So far I’d achieved steps one and two, with Dave’s help. I’d asked a pretty girl named Jenna from the office on a date for tonight. Dave had picked the girl from my company directory, looked her up on Facebook, and compiled a list of her hobbies and interests. He also gave me a script of how to ask her on a date.

“This is a bit much, isn’t it?” I remember saying to him.

“Fred, my friend, you need all the help you can get.”

I have to give it to him—he really is quite good at getting the girls. Getting girls, drinking and smoking marijuana pretty much encapsulate his life skills. He’s pretty useless at most other things—cleaning, cooking, working, reading, remembering things—he even has a hard time grasping the concept of gravity. In my eyes, he’s a textbook 21st century generation-Y hedonist, relying on his parents’ hard-earned wealth for sustenance.

I look up at the clock. Just three hours to go until the most exciting and most terrifying experience of my life—a date with an attractive girl.

As soon as the clock hits 5, I’m out the door of my office and heading uptown for my date at some swanky restaurant that Dave had picked out for me. I hope it isn’t too pricey. It probably will be.

I squeeze myself onto the train and feel the doors close behind me too close for comfort.

This is a Pelham Bay Park-bound 6 local train. The next stop is Astor Place.

Rush hour on the subway. This is why I wish I had the courage to ride a bicycle through rush hour traffic, enduring blaring horns while weaving perilously between large moving objects. But then I’d be sweaty for my date with Jenna. No, I belong here, crammed into a train carriage with my fellow sardines.

As usual I’m sandwiched between a man’s massive backpack and another with the most frightful body odor imaginable. And I’ve forgotten my Kindle today. Not that trying to read Solzhenitsyn two inches away from my face was going to be enjoyable anyway. Oh well. Only seven more stops to 51st street. Time for some good-old people watching.

Let’s see: Killer body odor man. Mid-forties. Grizzly beard. Beards and smelly people seem to go hand in hand. At least he looks like he has a reason to be smelly—the tape measure on the belt, multi-purpose knife in his back pocket. The tools of a working man. The tools of a real man. Tools that make my so-called ‘tools’ of keyboard and mouse look like a Little Tikes car next to a combine harvester. Brilliant; killer body odor man has inadvertently convinced me that I’m not a proper man.

This is a Pelham Bay Park-bound 6 local train. The next stop is 14th Street- Union Square.

This calls for a bit of downward social comparison. The guy sitting in the seat next to the door looks like a good one—ill fitting suit, dark bags under his eyes, early 20’s, reading some sort of comic book. Sad really how some grown men can amuse themselves with comics. Although that’s not a type of comic I’m familiar with. If I can peek over body odor man—yes, upon further inspection it seems to be in some Asian language. The Japanese are really into cartoons, maybe it’s that. No way to tell really, it’s all Greek to me. This magazine has got me really intrigued though, I have to get closer to take a look. I have to see what drives a grown man to read cartoons.

This is a Pelham Bay Park-bound 6 local train. The next stop is 23rd Street.

I nudge past massive backpack man as if I’m preparing to alight the train at the next stop. He turns around to check if his massive backpack is being burgled, unintentionally knocking several passengers about his radius out of balance. Pretending to be oblivious to the disruptive chain reaction I just caused, I make my way toward the doors. Now I’m at an angle where I can see the content of his magazine and… oh my. What the hell is that? It looks like—no, it can’t be—he’s reading cartoon pornography… in public?

I stumble backwards as I realize what I just made my way across a train carriage to observe and step on the toe of a very stern-looking lady.

“Hey!” she says, tall and intimidating with her female business suit and perfectly polished black shoes—now with the faint imprint of my dirty sole on the toe.

“Sorry, I’m very sorry,” I murmur pathetically, keeping my head down as I shuffle away from the formidable businesswoman. I feel her scowl without even looking at her.

This is a Pelham Bay Park-bound 6 local train. The next stop is 28th Street.

I somehow end up in front of comic man again. He looks up at me as if I’d done something wrong. Me? Try you, you pervert! I look straight into his eyes, then down at his magazine of cartoon filth, then back up to his eyes before he even has time to look away. Ha! Now he knows that I know. Take that you dirty minded bag of filth—put the fantasy magazine away in shame and return to your life of solitude and misery.

But what’s this? He doesn’t even flinch—he’s straight back to his magazine! He’s completely unashamed. He continues to read it with the pride and smugness with which I would read Solzhenitsyn.

I stand holding on to an overhead bar as I try as hard as I can to distract myself from the myriad of judgmental thoughts I could have about cartoon man.

This is a Pelham Bay Park-bound 6 local train. The next stop is 33rd Street.

I notice a woman to my right. Young, blonde, attractive and intelligent looking. The type of girl I can only dream about dating. She’s reading a Kindle, but hers is a newer model than mine. Is it strange to talk to women on the subway? I suppose an alpha male like Dave could pull it off but I’m just a bottom feeder. I’m pretty sure the last girl I slept with did it out of pity. That’s just the guy I am. Or am I? I certainly wouldn’t go as low as reading adult comics on the train. That’s really low. I’m better than that. He’s the bottom feeder. That makes me the alpha male.

I figure I have nothing to lose, since I already have a date tonight. Maybe Dave’s courting lessons are finally paying off. “Is that the new Kindle?” I find myself asking this attractive woman whom I would normally never approach.

“Yeah! I just got it last week, it’s so great,” She responds with unexpected enthusiasm; enthusiasm which us bottom feeders are not used to.

“It does look fantastic. Just my luck—I bought the old model a month ago and it’s already outdated.” I’m making conversation with a woman I just met on the train! It’s undeniably geeky, but it’s conversation. We discuss the Kindle and I stutter because I’m not used to talking about this type of thing with women. It’s unnerving. She’s an attractive geek! Surely this is a rare opportunity I must take advantage of.

“What are you reading?” I ask, to keep the conversation going.

“A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,” she states with a hint of smugness.

“Of course, yes, Solzhenitsyn! I’m reading him too—Cancer Ward.” This is too good to be true. This is the girl of my dreams—screw you Jenna, I’ve moved on!

“You’re kidding! Hey, you should think about joining my book group—we read a lot of war history and we’re huge fans of Solzhenitsyn.”

“I—I’d love to!” Is this really happening? Is this how easy it is to meet women? All this time I’d spent in fear of rejection, needing a script from Dave just to be able to approach a girl, and look—I’m being invited to a book group—a book group probably full of other young, attractive women! All along I thought I was a bottom feeder, without ever realizing I was an alpha male in hiding until just this moment.

This is a Pelham Bay Park-bound 6 local train. The next stop is Grand Central- 42nd Street.

“Hey, this is my stop—let me get your number so I can let you know about the book group.” She’s asking me for my number? This is too easy; years of enjoyable companionship and gratifying sex await me!

“It’s 805…” Just as I’m about to give her the next seven digits, I see a man approaching me in the corner of my eye. I turn my head and realize it’s the comic man.

“I saw you eyeing this,” and he leaned closer and said shiftily, “It’s a good one, this.” He thrusts the raunchy rag into my prehensile hands before I can react and slips out the doors into Brook Avenue Station.

I look at her in terror. She’s staring at the dirty publication in my hands.

“Oh my god. I just saw this guy reading this thing so I gave him this look and…”

“I better get going,” she says quietly. She’s walking away.

“No! He’s the freak! I’m not actually into this stuff!” I shout down the carriage to her. I realize my mistake as everyone in the carriage slowly turns to look at me, the shouting man on the train waving a comic porno around.

“It’s not mine!” I exclaim, and drop it to the ground in disgust. As if my luck couldn’t get any worse, it falls open to a full page spread of a depiction of a sexual act that would have been illegal if it weren’t a cartoon.

I hear a scream from an old woman as a mother shields her son’s eyes with her hands. This is the most utterly humiliating moment of my life, bar none. I try to walk away but the shocked faces surrounding me form an inescapable barrier.

This is a Pelham Bay Park-bound 6 local train. The next stop is 51st Street.

I will never forget my Kindle again. Just twenty seconds of extreme humiliation left until I alight at 59th street. I try to keep my head down and my eyes closed but I know that just beyond my eyelids there is a crowd of people backing away from an obscene illustration in the middle of the carriage as if it were a ticking bomb.

Thank goodness this is my stop. Before the doors are even fully open, I squeeze through sideways like a letter into a mailbox. What a ride—I meet an attractive girl on the way to a date with an attractive girl, only to by foiled by my own inquisitiveness. I’ll have had more interactions with girls today than I had in my entire college career.

I find the restaurant on 58th Street—Mia Donna. Damn, this looks really expensive. Oh well, I guess it’s worth it if it gets me to Step Three. The waiter shows me to a cosy table in the corner (did Dave pick this as well?) and I take my seat and wait for the lovely Jenna to arrive.

She arrives wearing a tight black dress, a pair of delicate red dangle earrings that brush against her perfect jawbone, and hair beautifully groomed into what one might call a sculpture on her head. I stand up and kiss her on the cheek as Dave told me to.

“Nice to see you, Fred!”

“You too! You look great, by the way.” She smiles but doesn’t return the compliment—do I look like shit? In the excitement of the night I hadn’t even checked my hair.

I tell the waiter we’ll both have waters and that we need a moment to look at the drinks menu. Jenna spends a few minutes perusing the wine menu, while I secretly hope she doesn’t choose anything frightfully expensive. She does.

“Could we have a bottle of the 2008 Ferrari Carano Cabernet?”

A forty-five dollar bottle of wine. I don’t know anything about wine, but I know that it’s overpriced. Just because it’s got Ferrari in the name doesn’t mean it’s worth forty-five dollars.

Her phone makes a sound and she fishes it out of her purse, laughs and begins to type a message. It seems as if technology has shortened our ability to focus on the task at hand to that of a goldfish with attention deficit disorder.

After a while she looks up. “Sorry,” she says, “My friend just tweeted the most ridiculous thing, and it reminded me of the time we…

I guess Twitter is acceptable at the dinner table now. I begin to wonder where technology is taking the world—in a few years, will people be playing Angry Birds at weddings and video-conferencing while they shit?

…I mean,” she concludes, “isn’t that just so messed up?”

Realizing I hadn’t heard a word she said, I do my fake chuckle, which unfortunately sounds very much like a fake chuckle. She looks slightly disheartened at my disinterest—uh oh—she’s catching on to my complete disregard for social media. I’m making it too obvious.

“The Ferrari Carano Cabernet 2008,” says Phillip as he pours a little into her glass. She likes it. Of course she does; it’s forty-five dollars.

I attempt to appear more socially-networked. “That reminds me of something. You’ll never guess what I saw on Facebook the other day,” but it comes out all wrong. I said ‘Facebook’ the way my 70-year-old grandmother would say it—as if it had landed in her backyard from outer space and started shitting on her daises, while everyone around her treated it like the new family pet.

She seems not to notice my hiccup. She asks me what it was that I saw—this actually interests her! But I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Think, Fred, think!

“My uncle updated his status to ‘Drinking a frosty beer and watching the sun go down on me’, except he spelled it S-O-N instead of S-U-N!”

Unfortunately the punch line was delivered just as she was taking a rather large sip of wine. She almost sprayed me with wine (heaven forbid—that would have been two dollars’ worth right there) as she burst out with laughter. I laugh along with her, but realize I’m laughing at the fact that she finds such a crude joke so funny; this is my type of girl! With the adrenaline of this new experience pumping through my veins I do something very bold.

“I’ve gotta say, I love your earrings—but I think blue would suit you better than red.”

This was one of Dave’s favorite tactics—the backhanded compliment. He claimed it worked every time, that it was the pick-up artist’s secret weapon. The split second it takes her to react to it feels like eternity.

“Really!” She says with surprise. “You think so?” The eagerness in her tone of voice tells me I nailed it. I’m suave. I’m James Bond. I’m as cool as the underside of a pillow doused in liquid nitrogen and garnished with sliced cucumber. I’m the man I never thought I could be!

“Oh, yes, of course, blue would go much better with your eyes and hair. Red matches your skin tone but not your eyes.” Where am I pulling this from? Perhaps that episode of America’s Next Top Model that I accidentally Tivo’d and watched out of boredom? Never mind that, the look she was giving me was genuinely lustful. It was a look I had never witnessed before in real life, having only seen it before in adult movies—shameful, bottom-feeder stuff. Stuff that I’d never need to go back to again.

“I guess you’re right! Thanks for the tip, Fred,” she says with a smile.

She looks really lovely, sitting here in her tight black dress, grinning from ear to ear and looking straight into my eyes. I suddenly get the feeling that this is going really well, that I might have sex for the third time in my life tonight, and that I might love this girl. She has lovely shoulder-length brown hair, striking blue eyes, and just enough makeup to accentuate her beauty but not so much as to be construed as hiding ugliness.

“The beef carpaccio.”

“Yep, that’s me,” she responds, without diverting her gaze from me. The waiter slides the plate in front of her and she keeps her eyes locked on mine. Wow, that’s incredibly hot. I’ve never experienced this before.

“And the cured salmon flatbread”

Years of carefully honed etiquette try to pull my eyes away from hers and onto poor Phillip, who must feel as if he had walked into some sort of adult staring competition. But my eyes don’t budge.

“Yes,” I say, and in the corner of my eyes see him slip a large white plate in front of me.

“Enjoy,” he says sheepishly, and shuffles off. That’s right garçon, shuffle away—I’m the one getting frisky tonight.

“Delicious,” she tells me, “I love the taste of raw beef.” The way she says it makes my heart skip a beat. I feel a stirring in my pants. Was that… oh my… it’s a foot… caressing my… doesn’t this only happen in movies? I try to turn the shocked expression on my face into one of pleasure but I imagine it looks more like I’m choking.

“I don’t know how I could become a vegetarian… I don’t know how I’d deal with the intense cravings I have for meat.”

I must look absolutely dumbfounded because she laughs and withdraws her foot. “Eat up,” she says, “We’ll get back to that later.”

Years of social awkwardness vanish—something about this girl makes me feel so at ease that our conversation breezes along. Despite our different stances on social media, our other interests seem to align perfectly. We discuss the detriment of commercial fishing as she eats her main course of sustainably-caught mackerel over crushed new potatoes and a rosemary and lemon aioli. She’s even interested in geography—a passion of mine—and we take turns naming all the countries in the European Union.

After dinner, we take a taxi back to my apartment. I hope she won’t be turned off by Dave—he’s a big slob—but most girls find that endearing for some odd reason. I should really have my own flat. More the better to impress girls with.

We get back to find Dave sitting on the sofa.

“Oh, hi Fred! And who’s this?”

He knows exactly who she is because I’ve been fretting and asking for advice about this date for days, but I appreciate his effort in trying to make it seem like he hadn’t planned every single detail of the date we’d just been on.

“Jenna, this is Dave. Dave, Jenna”

“Lovely to meet you, Jenna. Take a seat.” She does.

“Would you like some wine?” I ask, “I could crack open a bottle?”

She nods and says yes so I make my way to the kitchen and open the cupboard where the wine is kept. Hm… $10, $15, or $20? No need to go for the $20 to impress her—I’m pretty sure I have her in the bag. Can’t go for the $10 one though, she’ll think I’m cheap. I wonder if she noticed that I ordered the cheapest appetizer and main course at the restaurant? Best go with the $15 one.

The night goes satisfyingly well, with Dave helping the conversation along whenever my awkwardness rears its ugly head—and Jenna and I end up drunk and giddy in my bedroom. We sit down on the side of my bed, and I move my head closer to hers. I can smell the wine on her breath, and she probably smells it on mine too. Her lips touch mine and we kiss for a few minutes. Dave had given me kissing tips, but I’m pretty sure I’m still doing terribly, but it doesn’t matter because we’re both quite drunk.

She stops kissing me and smiles. “I’m going to go freshen up,” she says, which Dave had told me is some sort of women’s code for “I’m going to get ready to have sex with you now.”

I lie back on my bed basking in the success of my date. I’m going to get to step three! I try to mentally prepare myself. Must make it seem as if I’ve had sex more than twice.

Her phone, which is sitting on my nightstand, vibrates. I can see that the screen has turned on by the way it illuminates my dimly (Dave would say romantically) lit room, so I take a peek at it. It’s her Twitter feed. Someone had tweeted:

I feel sorry for women because they don’t get to pee in urinals.

Precisely the reason I don’t use Twitter. But I can’t help but notice a tweet from someone named Stacey directly below that one.

Ended up sharing a moment with two creeps exchanging cartoon porn magazines on the subway today #FML

No. It can’t be. Surely that isn’t the tweet she was talking about at the restaurant? Shit! There’s a response from Jenna below!

@staceylacey Typical. What is it with these pervs? Hopefully my date tonight doesn’t turn out to be one #WishMeLuck

“I noticed your book collection,” she says as she walks back into my room wearing nothing but her underwear, “You read a lot of Solzenitzyn… you should definitely join my book group.”

I feel the arousal that had been building up inside me abruptly converting itself into absolute terror. She must never know.