Joe Vampire

POST 28



The Set Up



As you’ve read in previous posts, up until recently I’ve been what I’d call a serial monogamist – if two relationships over the course of fifteen years can be considered serial. It’s more than one, so I’m going with it. Even more recently, I’ve been a total non-ogamist. I might even take the wordplay far enough to say I’ve been something of a self-ogamist, but I don’t want to put any more nasty pictures in your head than are absolutely necessary. Whatever kind of ogamy I’ve been practicing, it hasn’t been with anyone else for a very long time. So I’m rusty. Plus, being a vampire has kinked my already-wavering self-confidence. I can only presume my skills wouldn’t pay the bills. My game is not the same. And my ocean has lost the lion’s share of its motion, regardless of the size of my boat. Which is basically a tug these days.

Cheap joke.

Flirting with Chloe wasn’t enough to sharpen my pencil for a real date. If she and I had picked up steam, I still would’ve been rehearsing smooth lines and throwing practice smiles so I could figure out how to not look nervous or pained. A lot of prep work goes into having a natural, spontaneous night out with someone. When it’s with someone you know, at least you have the safety net of common subjects to chat about in the event that you blow through all your smooth in the first ten minutes. But when it’s someone you’re hoping to impress, or someone you’ve only communicated with through three text messages, say, you probably want to have some sort of plan in place so you can keep things rolling. And if you’re a vampire, you need to toss in all the razzle-dazzle you can to stave off any uncomfortable silences.

I could be wrong, but I would imagine silences tend to invite scrutiny of your night-dweller appearance.

It might seem self-evident, but there is a delicate arrangement to the order of conversation in these situations. Start with the wrong topic, and you have nowhere to go but… nowhere. Start right, though, and you have a steady flow of date talk that moves from one subject to another with ease, and in a way that eliminates the awkwardness variable.

It’s best expressed in the form of a simple yet effective word cloud:

COMPLIMENTS

WORK/CAREER/JOB

HOBBIES/INTERESTS

FRIENDS/FAMILY/PETS

POP CULTURE

CURRENT EVENTS

CLIMATE CHANGE

There are no time limits on any of the levels, though it’s best to move on from compliments after a reasonable duration. You don’t want to come across as a kiss-ass right away. But there’s no reason you can’t linger on WORK/CAREER/JOB if there’s a lot to say before you move on to FRIENDS/FAMILY/PETS. It’s also no crime to skip down a level if you hit a dry spot at any of the in-between levels. And unless you want to look like you have no idea how to handle yourself on a date, it’s best to not move back up the beanstalk, so to speak. Return to a topic that, in all likelihood, has already been adequately covered, and you risk appearing desperate and underprepared. A move like that could end a date before the breadsticks even make it to the table.

You can tell I’ve thought about it a little.

But I’ve never had a chance to put the Cloud into action.

Not being known for my relationship prowess, I wanted to have all my soldiers lined up for Chloe. So I spent a fair chunk of time on working this fool-proof plan for once we were on a deeper level. Reading it back, it looks a little overly thought out.

If you feel the need to create a formula for “spontaneous flow”, you probably don’t have a proper grasp of the concept.

A lot of rambling about dating here, I know. Maybe you can see where all of this is leading.

I took Louise up on her offer to introduce me to Megan.

I thought it was time to dip a toe in the social waters again while I had the whole assimilation thing going for me. Not ready to swim, per se, but a little wading shouldn’t have been beyond my capacity. And if she already Knew, then it would be one less thing to have to make excuses for. Plus: it would be a chance to take the Cloud for a test drive, since I wouldn’t be using it with Chloe as originally intended.

Maintaining comfortable conversational transitions turned out to be the least of my concerns, by a long – and I do mean loooooong – shot.

But it didn’t start out as bad as all that.

We found a restaurant halfway between her place and mine, non-Italian, since she and I both know the unappetizing aroma that garlic has for me. A first date has enough pressures without having to cope with the lingering smell of boiled crotch while you eat. We went with something more surf and turf instead – heavy on the turf, light on the surf. It was a happy compromise.

That’s really all I’m looking for anymore.

Rather than fumbling our way toward each other, we agreed to meet there instead. I somehow reached the place first, thankful that the GPS on my phone got me there with only three wrong turns in total. To keep things interesting, we chose not to send each other photos of ourselves, but instead thought we’d describe in words how we felt we appeared to the outside world, and let each one figure out who the other was once we were there. My description of me was:

Slightly tall, somewhat nice-looking, average build, average hair, average taste in clothes. And fangs.

Very honest; no exaggerated bullshit adjectives to disappoint her when reality showed me not to be as real-world studly as the text might have implied. And I knew hers was similar, and that the visual next to the words could very easily go either way. She described herself as:

Semi-petite, dishwater hair, conservative dresser, eyes the color of sea foam. And the lips of a professional whistler.

At least she had the vampire aspects of me to fall back on, even if they were wanly hidden by my date wear. I, on the other hand, had so few puzzle pieces to work with that I honestly had no idea what to look for other than some dirty-blonde chick with big lips and green eyes. To make things safe, I pictured a younger version of Louise, but without all the wool. If I were wrong, so much the better; if I were right, no high hopes to be shot down in flames by the truth.

I reiterate: I’m all about the middle ground these days.

As intently as I scrutinized every woman walking through the door, they all must have thought I was stalking them, or waiting to serve them a court summons. I’m surprised the hostess didn’t kick me out. Nobody seemed to fit the profile… not even the tall, slender, lovely sort-of catalog model-looking young lady who figured me out for who I was before I had a chance to do the same.

She was no Louise.

She was also not semi-petite; she was willowy and statuesque. She wasn’t dishwater blonde; she was sort of radiant. The whistling lips, though? Those were right on the money. But that was a very good thing. “Joe?” My mouth went all dry as I stood and shook her hand. “I could tell by the Ray Bans. I’m Megan.” She sort of looked me up and down, and the smell of her skin made me too fuzzy-headed to be self-conscious. “I almost didn’t spot you from your description… there’s really nothing average about you.” She smiled when she said it, which I took to mean she scaled me on the above average side rather than the below.

That brought the rest of the self-consciousness through all at once.

I wanted to answer with some flattery of my own, but my language skills had switched off altogether. I sort of squeaked from the back of my throat, something like, “Me, too.” It made no sense, which was fine, I think, since it also came out sounding more like I had choked on my gum.

“Are you okay? You seem sort of… uncomfortable.”

My reply was so very unrelated to her question. “Weird about the polar bears losing their home to global warming, huh?” Shit! I had skipped over all the other topics and started at the bottom. That totally crapped up my word cloud. There was no way to go back and start over.

“So tragic, I don’t know how we’ve let this happen to our planet, but I’m sure it won’t end well if we don’t do something about it soon.”

Whoa. Good save.

It looked like someone had been working on a word cloud of her own.