BUMBLE STUMBLE
by Mark Blickley
Last week, after more than seventeen months on the dating app, BUMBLE, I achieved a first. A woman, a very, very hot woman finally responded to my profile pic and contacted me for a potential date. I was so excited and a bit flustered about how to properly respond, so I drove over to my grandfather’s apartment and showed my grandpa the exotic looking woman named Anca who contacted me. Gramps was famous in his day as a successful womanizer, so I needed to get his advice on how to proceed with this beauty. When Grandpa saw Anca’s profile photo he said, “Good Lord, she’s built like a brick shithouse!” I thought his response disgusting and insensitive and it got me really upset, until Gramps explained that in his day, that’s what they used to call really sexy women loaded with wonderful curves. Go figure.
I’ve rarely been successful with women due to my intense shyness and a proclivity towards body rashes, the cause of which my dermatologist still claims is a mystery. I’ve been on many dating sites, but each time I’ve contacted a woman for a potential meetup, I was either ignored or turned down. Each rejection stoked my insecurity and I eventually stopped sending out requests to avoid being crushed. But BUMBLE is a different kind of dating app. Only women can make the first move, not men, so I was able to eliminate the humiliation of constantly being turned down. But the seventeen-month silence most certainly did not engorge my ego.
My friends insisted I needed a great opening line to break my shyness during my first face to face with the lovely Anca. They threw out many lines and I mulled a few over as possibilities. I was sitting at a Starbuck’s table for more than an hour before our initial meeting time, running lines in my head, drinking cup after cup of decaffeinated, herbal tea to help soothe my nerves.
I saw Anca the moment she pushed open the café’s door. She was even more attractive than her BUMBLE profile photo. I waved to get her attention. As she approached my table I stood up, extended my hand, and we introduced ourselves. My hand was clammy and I feared my handshake a bit too unmanly.
‘Oh my God! You look so hot you could be arrested for global warming,’ I blurted out.
She eyed me up and down and then sat down in the chair opposite me. I was fumbling for another line when she said, ‘Arnoldo, have you ever been arrested?’
Trying to appear witty I responded with, ‘No, not yet. Have you?’
‘Just once in this country,’ said Anca.
Her response was a surprise. ‘Why were you arrested?’
‘I was arrested for peeing on my ex-lover’s grave at Green-Wood Cemetery.’ ‘Wow, you must’ve been really angry at him, Anca.’
‘Absolutely not! I adored the man.’
‘So why did you pee on his grave?’
Anca drew a short breath, the pain evident on her face. ‘I was just crying from the place I miss him most.’
Image by Mark Blickley