Bump in the Night

A lot of weird, life changing stuff has occurred since my last blog. I am not very good about regularly writing. I have to be in the mood, and sometimes, I’m just not in it. The mood, that is.

So! Let me work from a few weeks ago up to the present.

I think that during my last blog, I was still dating my pseudo-boyfriend, but that went up in flames, which was a good thing. I don’t even know what happened. That’s the thing about L.A. You think that you might be dating someone, and maybe you are, and maybe you aren’t. You go to parties with them and they don’t introduce you as their S.O. (Significant Other, if you will), but you still hang out several times per week, and you aren’t dating anyone else. Then, once you attempt to have a DTR (Define The Relationship) talk about whether you ARE together or you AREN’T together, just to gain some clarity, your pseudo partner says,

“I just can’t handle this! You are too outgoing! I hate that you are friends with my friends! I hate that you meet people on airplanes and then you invite them to your parties! I feel like I have to always fight for your attention!!! I JUST CAN’T HANDLE THIS!”

And you wonder what the F they are even talking about, because you’re not sure what they mean by not being able to handle “this.” What the crap does “this” even mean? I was just trying to find out if I could date other people or not. Sheesh. Anyway, you wind up never talking to them again until they really miss you, then they call you up and tell you that they miss you and it’s just KILLING them not being able to talk to you or take you to parties and not introduce you as their S.O. anymore, and you’re thinking that the freedom from all of this dysfunction has been complete bliss, so when they give you some lame plea about getting back together, you just say, “Thank you,” and hang up the phone.

And that’s how it is when you date in L.A.

So, with this being said, the pseudo boyfriend is no longer in existence. Good.

Since we’re on the word pseudo, I have a pseudo-celebrity ex boyfriend/neighbor that I have stopped talking to who invited me to a party in Hollywood about three weeks ago. It was some big shin-dig that was kicking off a new Xbox 360 video game.

So, he picks me up and we go to Le Deux, which is all decked out like “Clue” has come to real life, with burgundy fabrics covering the ceiling and candelabras everywhere. We get there, and my neighbor, who thinks he is extremely famous (bless his heart), has to make his appearance on the red carpet and essentially leaves me abandoned by the bar. I begin drinking beverages out of bottles just to prove a point. In the South, women are never to drink adult beverages out of bottles. Adult beverages are to be poured into a cup and sipped ever so politely. I made it a point to be a little bit white-trashy on purpose, just to make him look bad. And I did it with pride.

There was some sort of iPhone game going on where we were given clues and we had to go from room to room in Le Deux and find certain “characters” to retrieve the next clue. For instance, the instructions might be, “Go to the back bar and face the door. Find the girl in the black dress with the red gloves to get your next clue.” So we’d find some girl and hope desperately that she was part of this game and not some stranger that we are accosting, and she’d pull off her glove and have a word written on her hand like “September,” and we’d have to type that in to get the next clue. Man, it was fun. At the end of the night, if you’re the first person to get all the clues, you win a free Xbox 360.

We didn’t win.

It didn’t matter.

Somewhere in the process of all of this, I meet some porn star named Taylor with long blonde extensions and boobs bigger than L.A. and lips full of collagen. She was wearing some sort of one-piece outfit cut into booty shorts and a plunging neckline, and of course, acrylic, 6-inch heels. Where I’m from, you just don’t dress like that. Even if you’re a hooker. Even if you’re a porn star. But you can do that here.

We got to chatting and she told me that she always wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. Man. What a career shift. She was actually pretty nice. I felt sort of bad for her. I can’t imagine lacking such career longevity. She was sort of a butter face. She was only a butter face because she looked really effin old. She had this old lady face with the texture of a baseball glove that had so much work done that it sort of looked like a construction site, and this dynamite body- and she had this vacant look in her eyes. And I kept wondering when ole Taylor the Porn Star’s career would wear out. You can only do that kind of work for so long. Tragic.

At some point, Taylor asked me if I wanted to “bump.”

I didn’t know what the crap bumping meant, but coming from a porn star, I was a little bit nervous about it, and politely declined. She said it was an iPhone application for exchanging contact info. No matter what it meant, I was pretty sure that “bumping” with a porn star would make me wind up with Chlamydia, so I nicely said no thanks. She also said something about cocaine, but it was loud and I couldn’t really hear her, so I split. I got scared. Only in L.A. are porn stars freely walking around and telling you they always wanted to teach kindergarten one second and the next second asking you if you want to bump with them and mentioning cocaine. This place wears me out.

I started walking around as my neighbor kissed everyone’s ass, because that’s what you do when you’re in the “industry” out here, and I bumped into Joel McHale from “Talk Soup.” He was a cool cat. He was a lot taller than I thought he’d be. He looks like a wee man on TV.

I saw a bunch of D list “celebrities” that I’d seen at the Oscar party I worked at, and I thanked God that I wasn’t involved in this industry. It’s funny how glamorous it seems when you watch movies and see people on Leno and Letterman, and then you see them around L.A. with cocktails in their hands, talking to all of their fellow empty suit friends about NOTHING. They talk about NOTHING. They just talk about what they’d think you’d want to hear if you could overhear them, but the music is so loud that you just see their mouths moving, and then you appreciate the fact that you aren’t in that inner circle of depressing empty suits.

So that was my Le Deux, D-list celebrity experience.

The next day, I went out on the worst day of my life with a guy who looked like he was in his 30’s but would never tell me how old he was, so when he left the table to use the restroom, I grabbed his wallet and checked his ID. I was on a date with a 40 YEAR OLD MAN.

I sort of wanted to run away, but I decided that as long as I kept everything platonic, I could bail out at the end and just never talk to him again. Which is what I did.

I often think that I have Tourette’s. I don’t know what happens, but I blurt out whatever is on my mind without really thinking it through before saying it. So. I asked the 40 year old if he had fake teeth.

They looked really fake.

They sort of looked like they were made out of a bunch of Scrabble pieces that were spray painted white and all glued together in a big U shape. Of course, this was the worst thing I could ever ask, and he said, “No!” all huffy and what not. I don’t really blame him. I wouldn’t like it if I had a whole set of Mr. Ed teeth and someone asked me if they were fake.

During the course of the evening, though, he told me he had a tumor in his mouth when he was little and almost died. And I knew those teeth were fake as Hollywood.

I always ask men about their family of origin during a first date. I want to know where they came from and what they are all about. Bad question for this 40 year old joker. His dad was murdered on Halloween.

Way to go, Rachel. You’re really doing well on this one.

During the course of the night, I find out that not only is he 40 years old, but he is also divorced. Not to say I wouldn’t date someone if they were divorced, because that isn’t a big deal to me, but it IS a big deal that he’s 40 and divorced and has fake teeth and his dad got murdered.

I ruined the night for good when he took me to a movie. Guys, never take a girl to a movie for a first date. That is the worst idea ever. EVER.

So, we go to the movies, and guess what I do. I pass out. I seriously fall asleep so hard that I’m having dreams and I’m lying there like a starfish corpse.

After the movie, I wake up and JUMP because I didn’t know that I’d fallen asleep, and I look at the guy and say,

“Whoa. Did I just fall asleep?”

And he says, real miffed, “Yeah, you slept through like THE WHOLE THING.”

So, that’s the story of a terrible date, and it was terrible because I ruined it. Poor guy. He actually texted me last week and asked if I wanted to go out again. Some people like abuse, I guess. Needless to say (so why say it?), I politely declined, just as I politely declined “bumping.”