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I have been asked by a few people to tell the story about my placing of a personal ad. So, to understand it, I have to tell two stories, and it is quite long, but since it makes me look like a complete moron, I’m sure my Exes will love it.
About two years after my divorce started, I decided that it might be a good idea for me to try and actually date someone. I was working two jobs, raising my son and writing but still thought I would have time to be nice enough to someone that they might actually go to a movie with me once in a while. Boy, I was a moron. But, I was young and stupid and full of piss and vinegar. Now, I’m all out of vinegar.
So, I placed an ad in the local “alternative” paper (which means they have a lot of personal ads and full page ads for gay phone chat lines) with the help of…ok, no one helped me. I wrote it myself and I didn’t keep a copy of it, but my friend Psycho Jen said she would have answered it if she wasn’t married, and didn’t want to have anything to do with me in a way that involved physical contact. I remember the last line was “picture not necessary, but if you send one, make sure it is by Ansel Adams.”
I thought it was funny.
So, I placed the ad and about a week or two later, I got about 10 replies in the mail. 5 were bad photocopies of a letter asking me to call and such, and I dismissed them. I mean, I have some standards, and if I am going to be desperate you should at least take the time to write a personal letter, right? I would have written an ad for each woman if *I* could have, so… Two were people who sounded like I would have nothing in common with them, two sounded nice and one was so needy that I could feel my soul being sucked into the reply as a read it. She went into all the problems she was having in her life, and how if she just had a soul mate, she could make it through the day. And that reading my ad she KNEW we would be wonderful together.
Rule #1: Anyone who claims you are a soul mate, a lover from a past life or was destined to meet you is someone you need to run very far away from. Preferably to the opposite side of a continent.
Rule #2: Anyone who says that you would be wonderful together without seeing you and only knowing 52 words about you doesn’t just have issues, they have volumes.
I put the photocopied letters in the garbage, put the three I wouldn’t answer on top of the fridge and answered the two that interested me. One I chatted with on the phone a couple of times, and she very politely begged off when she decided I was too young for her to date. The other one was nice, we went on a couple of dates, and she begged off for a third saying she had found someone. Which is a nice way of saying, “I think I would rather date someone imaginary than go out to another restaurant with you, ya long haired, liberal bastard.”
I probably wasn’t in the best of places to date someone, since I was utterly overstressed after a bad few weeks at my jobs.
I had TWO jobs at the time. By day I was the manager of a store that sold books, comics, porn and baseball cards and I worked as a part-timer at a group home (much like the one I run now) where we had 10 kids. I worked two overnight shifts (where I could sleep) and one 24-hour shift from Saturday morning to Sunday morning, alone. Now, I can’t imagine how we were expected to do that, since I would NEVER trust my staff to do such a thing.
One of the kids was a real thorn in my side, as well.
He was a morbidly obese kid, which normally isn’t that big a deal for me, but the whole thing we were to work on with the kid was to get him to control him impulses. He would spend every penny he got on junk food, snuck down and stole food to hide in his room, that sort of thing. While he was at the group home, we were able to get him to follow the rules and not do such things…except when his grandmother and aunt would come by.
They would show up, unannounced (which was a rule violation since you had to get approval for all visits from the director) with a grocery bag or two of Hostess stuff, and candy, and would give him $50. Now, his allowance at the house was $5, and he had to go through a spending plan with his case manager so that he didn’t blow it all on junk food that he would eat in the woods on the way home, but if he had $50, why would he follow that? He would just quit doing his house job, swear constantly, break rules right and left until the $50 was gone, then he would start to follow the rules again in order to get allowance again.
It didn’t help that this was a kid I simply didn’t personally like. I know that as a social work professional, I am to find something about every client that I can like, but I couldn’t. He refused to shower when he had money, would sleep in just his tiny underpants (when we required they were minimum sweatpants to sleep in) and was incredibly verbally abusive, telling staff what part of his anatomy we could suck if we asked him to put on pants, get the dirty clothes off of his floor or took the food he had stolen and hidden in his room. He was just vile, unlikable, and hard for me to work with.
So, first we had the case manager tell the Grandmother and aunt (or Auntie as he called her) that what they were doing wasn’t allowed. Then the director tried to stop them. Then the social worker met with them downtown and explained how they were undermining the kid’s recovery and if they continued, she would go to court and have their visitation rights revoked. The court told them that if they continued, they would be in contempt of court. He was barely 15 and already had diabetes from eating too much pre-processed crap; he has developing a bad heart and was getting VERY sick. It wasn’t so much that he ate in binges; it was that he would ONLY eat sugared crap or fast food. He told us he had never eaten a piece of fruit or a vegetable when he lived with his mom because he would get violent if she tried to give him a meal that wasn’t from McDonald’s or Burger King.
I, as a lowly part-timer, but the only staff there on Saturday, was told that if they showed up with anything other than their winning personalities, I was to tell them they had to leave. And if they didn’t, I had court papers to give them. And I was not to allow them in the house.
This is what we part-time staff used to call “a set-up”.
The confrontation had been shoved off onto the weekend staff and we were to enforce this stuff. And sure enough, the first weekend after they were in court telling the judge that they “just cared so much about him it would be hard to see him deprived of the one joy he has in life” but that they would follow the recommendation of the court.
Then, the VERY NEXT Saturday morning, they showed up with three shopping bags. I stopped them at the door, and they showed me the bags, and there was a towel on the top of each one. I asked what they were, and they said it was “clothes and towels”. I let them know that I needed to look in them, as per the court order, and the Auntie got VERY verbally abusing, saying I didn’t have the right, and if I did look, she would call the police. I calmly explained to her that the court order said everything they were to give him had to be inspected by staff for weapons, drugs and other contraband, and she started screaming at me. At this point the kid came outside and HE got into it as well, yelling at me and threatening to beat me up (with far more colorful and sexually explicit language). I keep my calm as long as I could, but finally just told the kid to go inside in my “holy shit, Cory!! Is going to get REALLY pissed in a second” voice and he backed down. I had a reputation as a hard-assed staff that wouldn’t hesitate in doing something. I never DID anything, but my size helps with that, I guess.
The aunt and grandmother at this point are completely screaming at me, and threatening me physically as well, since the kid went into the house saying that it wasn’t over…and I turned to them, shut the door while staying on the outside and said, “I don’t want to have to remove (whatever his name was), but if you violate the court order and continue to escalate him, he’ll be in redwing so fast you won’t have time to say goodbye. And I don’t think you can squeeze boxes of Twinkies through the Plexiglas, so maybe you should go home, wait until you don’t feel the need to ruin his life and send him away to juvie prison so you can meet your own needs. And, if you aren’t gone by the time I get to the phone, I WILL call in the court order so that maybe you can ride in the same police car as him.”
They kept screaming at me as I went inside, and by the time I got into the office, they had left. I went outside and they had left the bags “hidden” in the bushes behind the house, and I quickly brought them in and locked them up. I felt horrid about the confrontation, but spend about 90 minutes with the resident in a one-to-one calming him down and getting the issue worked through.
Sadly, the staff that worked the next day didn’t do as well, it became a HUGE thing with police and everything…and the kid was removed from the house. Ad we had to put up with a LONG lecture from our boss, which I didn’t deserve as much as the staff that wasn’t able to get them off the property.
So, when I went on said dates, I was pretty much drained from the work, the divorce, being a single dad and all.
I was pretty depressed when the girl I had gone out with a couple of times said she wanted to see someone else, and was pulling into my little hole in the wall. One of the people at the full-time job asked how it was going with the personal ad and I told them about the responses, and he asked, “Did you at least call the ones you didn’t respond to and tell them you weren’t interested?”
“No,” I said, “I just didn’t want to reply.”
“You should at least tell them that you are seeing someone, or something. That way they at least know you got it and responded. It’s the polite thing to do.”
And dammit, he was right. My mom raised me to be as polite as an American can be, which I have been told repeatedly isn’t very.
So, when I was home that night, I grabbed the responses off the top of the fridge and sat down to call. I left messages with all but the last one, which I read again. I was sad, lonely, feeling as if I would never have anyone in my life, and maybe if someone was really needy, they wouldn’t leave me like my wife had done. I read the letter again and, again, felt my soul actually being sucked out by the words on the page.
So, I decided I would call.
And, as with most of my decisions to call people, I put it off for a good two weeks.
So, I am at work at the group home…most of the residents are watching TV, and all is calm. I decide to call. I have the phone number in my “list of shite I have to do” and dial it, not wanting to talk, praying to whatever god would listen that I get an answering machine…
But no, my horrid luck holds, and the phone is picked up on the third ring.
“Hello?” says the young voice on the other end of the line.
“Hello, is Mary (yeah, a fake name, it was almost 10 years ago, sue me) there?” I say, hoping she isn’t.
“No,” come the reply. Thank goodness. I relax, which is good because I was so tense that I could have been used to break folding chairs.
“Could you take a message for her?”
“Sure.”
“This is Cory, and…”
I am cut off by the person on the other end of the line, “Cory? Why are you calling my Auntie?”
Oh.
My.
God.
It’s the kid with the evil auntie and grandmother. The one who had threatened me. The one who had been in court.
Oh.
God.
How do I get out of this call?
My mind is RACING, looking for a reason that I would have called other than “Yeah, she wanted to marry me sight unseen and had no idea I am the staff she said she would run over with a car.” What can I think up? What lie can I come up with? Oh my God, I’m a smart guy, I can think of SOMETHING! I’m a writer, create an excuse! OK, none, what about old episodes of Three’s Company, there has to be some stupid story they used to trick Mr. Roper.
Nothing.
All of that went through my mead in less than a second. I could almost feel my life flash before my eyes.
Then, before I could admit the awful, horrid, painfully pathetic truth that “Yesh, I places a personal ad that would attract YOUR aunt, and now I know I will never EVER get laid again.”…
He said, “Is this about that missing library book?”
In my mind, trumpets blow, angels fly down from the heavens and I think, “Wow, I can actually breathe now.”
“Yes,” I say confidently, “yes it is. I was calling to say that we found it and I’ll be dropping it off tomorrow morning.”
“Good! How are things there?”
I chat with him as if we were old friends at this point. He tells me he is there for another day or two until there is a bed at a hospital for 90 days and then he goes to a secured residential facility until he gets his weight under control and he’s no longer having heart problems.
And I get out of it.
The very second I get off the phone; I dedicated the rest of my shift to searching every inch of that house until I found the missing library book.
And decided I would never place another personal ad as long as I live, even if it means the only hugs I get are in dreams when I am wrapped so tightly in the covers that cut off the flow of blood to my brain. Which would be better than another one of those phone calls. |
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