Maybe The Sixth Chapter, Or Dating Successes And Failures From The Past, The Perils Of Online Dating And The Story Of How I Met My Daughter's Dad, In A Bar

by Rajkhet Dirzhud-Rashid

As another January approaches, with me living in Washington state (a place I’ve come to think of as ‘the dating desert’, especially for larger bodied, older black women), I’m finding myself waxing nostalgic, for the ‘good old days’. Days when I lived in either Chicago, (where I met and married my second ex-husband), or Houston, where I met and married my first ex-husband. I didn’t think I’d ever need to advertise online to find a date, or heck, just to hook up a roll in the sheets. Ah, but I’m not twenty, nor am I in either of those places anymore. Honestly, the men in this state, particularly in Seattle, seem to be from another planet, if not another species. So, I’ve done about five Craigslist ads now. The most recent one, as did a couple of others, got ‘flagged and removed’ by some anonymous bozo. I suppose he or she took offense with something intangible in my simple ‘I want a lover, and here are my standards’, ad. What, a woman can’t be honest in her advertising anymore?

Apparently not when one is questioning the availability of ‘real men’, in Washington state (which let’s face it, is a problem if you don’t look like Carmen Miranda – like any of these guys could handle someone like that anyway) and being picky in her choices. Hey, I have standards. True, in the past several years, I’ve dated a drunk French-Canadian who lived in his van (and probably still does) never bathed and looked old enough to be my father, a Korean, who was drunk most of the time we spent together and believed having anal sex was a worthwhile Christmas present for me. Then there were the series of real winners, including a guy who tried to rape me in my own apartment, because I had (he said) ‘turned him on so much’ (maybe this is why I still don’t date Middle Eastern guys) and the one who not only stole a favorite sweater, but my keys, my ID and left me at a club in Ballard, while he went home and enjoyed staying at my little boarding house room. My fellow boarders were none too thrilled with this little ‘fling’, and one of them gave me a heartfelt and serious talking to about my dating choices, because the locks had to be changed after we finally got rid of the guy (who I never heard from again). Oh, but my pièce de résistance dating nightmare was the guy who answered an ad from a local paper and half-way into the date, before accompanying me to the play we were going to, decided ‘I wasn’t hot enough’, or some such BS, and abandoned me far from our destination, making me walk back to the bus and go home. It was too late to go to the play, so I missed both a pleasant date and a play I wanted to see. Really nice.

Still, every time it gets near my birthday in January, I remember perhaps the best ‘date experience’ I’ve ever had. That was the night I sat at the counter, waiting for my chili-cheeseburger in this kicker bar in Texas (kickers are/were a mix between hippies and cowboys) that I’d done poetry in and drank in for a couple of years. A guy who looked (to me) like a young George Harrison turned to me and said: ‘you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, what’s your name?’ I giggled, looked around, then realized he meant me, looked into these water blue eyes and gave him my name. We went back to my kitchenette apartment, did some horizontal tango, fell asleep happy as two well fed ticks and moved into his place the next day. He even threw out his vast collection of Hustler mags because a particularly graphic anti-smoking ad flipped out my pre-anti-depressant taking mind. We fought, made up, and lived together before driving across the country in an old beater Chevy in 1978 to Illinois and marrying two years later. I’ll always remember that March day, because the minister was so shocked to be marrying a long-haired hippie white guy to a voluptuous Black woman. He married us in his snow boots. We were also the talk of the hospital my daughter was born in. The nurses called us ‘the most romantic couple they’d ever seen’. Really. And after much bitterness and angst during a horrid divorce, and my move from Chicago to Washington, he’s still my best ‘date story’. This, I shamelessly tell you.