You Can't Catch Crazy!

June 11, 2011

But it may be hereditary. 

So if you thought the last Adventure in Online Dating was complicated, you ain’t seen nothing yet.  You see, this one was the primary reason I needed to create a timeline.  She and I were off and on, friends and strangers, more times than you can shake a stick at.  And believe me, I’m really good at shaking my stick.  Let me just forewarn you that it could indeed get very complicated towards the end as more people become involved in how it all went down.  Some of the names have been changed at their request.  Oh yes, this may involve people you already know, are familiar with and most definitely, there are some mutual friends that the 3rd parties have in common.  I told you it was going to get messy.  Please keep your hands and arm inside the vehicle at all time,

I met T…  Sometime in September, 2008.  We initially met on a dating website, go figure.  And while I was still living in Riverside at the time, she lived in Long Beach.  Casually meeting for drinks after work wasn’t going to be easy.  So we spent a few weeks talking, texting, emailing, getting to know one another.  Same old story.  And sure enough, I find out in no time that she’s a big fan of Disneyland.  Maybe we could meet there sometime?  Sure enough, with my 9/80 schedule at work, I happened to have a Friday off and she was going to have lunch with her sister at Club 33.  I know, I know.  Her old boss was a member and he took his employees there for a work-related thank you.  Anyway, I tried to finagle my way into being her plus one but her twin sister, who was also a Disney fan, took precedence.  Besides, how awkward would that be for a first meeting/date.  With your co-workers at a luncheon.  Anyway, I met her and her sister at the park and her sister quickly excused herself to join her husband and kids who were somewhere wandering around waiting to join her.  Leaving T. and I at Disneyland by our lonesome. 

All in all, it was actually a pretty good first date.  We didn’t want to kill each other and snuggled up for the fireworks.  She later told me she wished I had made a move there while watching the show.  I didn’t.  I waited until I walked her to her car at the end of the night.  We got to talking a lot more after that day and despite the distance, we got to see one another more than a few times.  Her twin lived in Lake Elsinore and she would make the drive out often to spend time with them so planning stuff wasn’t so hard.  We went to a couple of pre-season hockey games, once we were right across from Angels Stadium while the Halos were in the playoffs.  She was a Red Sox fan though…  I should have known back then. 

Anyway, things weren’t really progressing much, I’d say.  Yes, we had things in common but the spark was never really there.  And come November, I knew it wasn’t ever really going to go anywhere.  I’d already started talking to A. and D. at the time so it was time to let one of them off the line.  And that happened to be T.  Of course, she had already invited me to Vegas to go see Jeff Dunham perform at Caesar’s Palace.  Turns out, the real Caesar didn’t really live there. 

You could argue that I was being selfish for going on that trip knowing nothing was going to come of it…  and you’d probably be right.  But I really did plan on letting her down easy before the weekend was out.  A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum.  Well, ok, it happened WHILE we were at the Forum.  We ran into her ex-husband and his date while waiting in line for the show.  Odd, she was really pre-occupied with him and his date.  Trying to flag him down, doing what she could to get his attention while he pretended not to see.  Whatever, I wasn’t really hurt since I knew where I stood on my end with her anyway.  Besides, if I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t be worried about my ex in Vegas with another guy if I had brought a date with me too.  Right? 

It was after the show in the cab on the way back to our shitty little room at the Plaza Hotel.  Oh yeah, did I mention she picked the worst possible hotel for us to stay at?  Anyway, it was in the cab that I had to tell her that while I really enjoyed her company the past few months, I just wasn’t feeling any sort of…  well…  anything to really want to date her.  She seemed to take it fairly well but needless to say, she wasn’t as friendly as she had been up until that time.  Understandable.  I wasn’t offended by that.  After we got back to Cali, she kind of disappeared for a couple of months.  I didn’t have a problem with that since most of my time was then dedicated to A. and D.  I saw her one other time at the Shore shortly after that and she was already working on getting pretty hammered by the time I got there.  No big deal, I was with friends anyway so when she told me she was leaving before the band even got on stage, I didn’t think anything of it.  Oddly enough, she ended up scolding me the next morning via text for “letting her” walk out of a bar drunk.  Who knows what might have happened to her.  Um…  Sorry, what?  It wasn’t until about February that I heard back from her again. 

It was kind of random, what happened in February.  Details of exactly how or why we got to talking again, I genuinely don’t remember but she seemed friendly to me and I was ready to celebrate my new job offer.  Literally, I had just gotten the job with the PCTA and was heading to the Shore to celebrate, although my celebration party wasn’t going to be until March.  This was just a quick trip out and I had brought D. along with me.  Having broken up with A., I was feeling a little bad about what happened with D. and her seeing me with someone else on my birthday.  Yes, an argument could be made that she had disappeared, hadn’t gotten back to me and I even told her so much.  But I guess in the back of my mind I was thinking, things could heat up like they had back in December.  I never said I was a saint.

Needless to say, I’m no Alex P. Keaton by taking two dates to the club on the same night.  On second thought, that didn’t work out for him either.  The girls ended up chatting more with each other than with me and by the end of the night at Roscoe’s, they were like bosom buddies.  Without resorting to dressing in drag.  That, truly was the last time I saw D., once she got in her car and left my place.  We wrote a few times after that but there was a touch of bitterness in her messages.  But what I did find very odd a few days later was in one of the pictures of T. and D. that I had taken that night.  T. had posted it on her MySpace page (Yes, we were all still using that social network at the time) and one of the first comments on the picture was from T.'s ex-husband.  His exact words were, “Is she the one you were telling me about?”  I didn’t think much of the comment at the time but hindsight is always 20/20 and looking back at it now, it made much more sense as to what was going on. 

T. and I were strictly just friends for the next few months.  We didn’t see a lot of one another but she loved to text message.  BOY, did She LOVE to text message.  Literally, there were times I would get a series of texts in a row, moments apart from each other.  My favorite was a time she sent me 3 in less than a minute.  They consisted of:

“Hey, can I ask you something?”

“Hold on”

“Oh, wait, nevermind.  Thanks.” 

Seriously?  I mean, SERIOUSLY?  If you had taken a minute to think that through BEFORE sending me the first text, you wouldn’t have had to send me 3 in a row to essentially say NOTHING. 

Right around this time she was having all sorts of dealings with her daughter.  Now, I don’t want to get into too much detail about it because of there being a mental health issue involved but I can’t gloss over it since it does play a part in our story.  Just to give you some kind of background, her oldest daughter wasn’t living with her at the time I met T.  She was staying at a facility in Utah and would remain there until she was 18, at which point they could no longer keep her there.  So, right around this time is when her daughter was going to be moving back to California to stay with her.  T. was so happy to have her home and would go on and on about how much she missed her and so on.  That’s all well and good but she has to remember to stay on her meds.  Her daughter, not T.  Although… 

Anyway.  After a couple weeks of having her daughter home with her, it became too much for T. to deal with anymore.  She called me at one point in tears because her daughter had run away from home, again.  Not to sound callous but, 18 is too old to be “running away.”  I didn’t tell her that, just thinking in the back of my head.  She went on to say while she had reported it to the authorities; they quickly found some video footage of her daughter that had been captured at a gas station less than a mile from her place.  Her daughter was dancing in the gas station parking lot at 3 a.m. by herself.  All I could do was listen to her sob her story to me.  I have no words of advice or wisdom I can share with her and I wasn’t sure anything I could say would have helped but she thanked me for letting her get some of it off her chest.  So I left it at that and she eventually hung up the phone.  I really did feel badly for her having to go through this.  What I wasn’t expecting though was the nasty-gram I got from her the next morning. 

Via text, of course, she sent me a few messages telling me how horrible of a friend I was for not checking up on her last night.  She ended up in so much stress that she checked herself into a hospital for nerves.  Odd that I was a good friend for letting her talk last night but somehow, I was a horrible friend because I didn’t rush to be right by her side and look after her.  We wouldn’t speak again for almost a year.

We ran into each other again at the Shore and I have to say, she was looking pretty good.  She had just gotten her long-awaited tummy tuck done.  She got the lap band done before I ever met her and managed to lose somewhere around the neighborhood of over 200 lbs. which is why she always tried to order off the kids menu whenever we were out.  I knew this early on.  Anyway, she was dying to get her tummy tuck and when I ran into her again in Summer of ’10, she was looking pretty good.  We didn’t really get to talking or hanging out much though.  She was gone almost as soon as we had seen one another.  I remember she was so excited to invite me over to her birthday party in August or September and I agreed, sure.  About a week later, she’s “in a relationship” and I’m suddenly un-friended on Facebook.  Wow, thank you very much for that.  I wouldn’t be making it to her b-day party. 

I saw her again at the Shore a few months later.  It was a little awkward sure, but before the night was over, we were on speaking terms again…  and maybe there was a little more…  But if you thought it was bad getting this far, just wait until you see how much worse it gets.

She and I were speaking although we were both pretty much consigned to trying to keep an arm’s length from one another.  Try to keep it civil, although I also made no attempt to conceal what my…  how can I put this?  What my goal was.  I never said I was a saint. 

She knew and she still played along and we were pretty close to being where we were before.  She even starts confiding in me about her daughter, now pregnant, and how excited she is to be a grandmother soon.  Of course, there are the holiday dinners, Thanksgiving coming up and how the rest of the family wasn’t sure about allowing her daughter to be over there.  She was upset, of course, that the family would try to distance themselves from her daughter, practically screaming at them the phrase, “You can’t catch crazy!”  I could only think, “No, but it may be hereditary.” 

Then the Meetup event happened.  Get your scorecards out; this is where it gets messy.  I will change the name of the person involved because she is a friend.  But she is definitely involved. 

Towards the end of November, there was a Meetup event that I was hosting and I get to the venue and was told by the restaurant hostess that a couple of members of my party were already there.  I went to the bar area and started to chat with them.  She was a member of the group and here she was sitting next to her +1.  While we’re chatting amongst the three of us, I keep looking at him and think he looks really familiar but I wasn’t quite sure.  Then it hits me, I think this is T.'s ex-husband!  I don’t say anything to him but subtly text message her.  Since I was the event host, it was reasonable to assume that I would be calling and texting people making sure everyone’s on their way.  So, I quickly tap out the message, “I think your ex is here on a date.”  She quickly replies back to me, “I don’t know what he’s doing tonight.”  And that was the last I’d hear from her about it.  Fair enough, he’s an ex, not necessarily someone you’d be checking up on anyway.  Oh, but literally a second after I got that message, he gets a text on his phone.  And it starts blowing up all night long.  DINGDINGDING!!!  We have a winnah!  I felt a little bad about it but also wondering, why is she so concerned about what he’s doing or who he’s out with.  And at one point during the evening, we were watching the show and his date, the member of our meetup group, is standing in front of us, he’s in the middle and I’m in back and he turns his head to partially face me and in a loud whisper asks me, “Did she send you to spy on me?”  I had no idea he was even coming and wasn’t even sure it was him when I sent her the first text.  Yet, somehow, I was spying on him for her?  Paranoia strikes deep. 

I let it blow off in my own mind since I barely knew the guy and all of it was just from what T. had told me about it.  But the next time I spoke with my meetup friend, she told me that she had finally had enough and broken up with him.  This was more or less mid-December when she broke up with him and I suppose she told him not to contact her any more.  Apparently, they had been dating for several months and there was already tension in their own relationship when this connection between his dating life and T.'s finally came too close for comfort, he started on some bizarre smear campaign about my “intentions” with my meetup friend.  I just wish she could feel comfortable telling her side of the story since it seems so incomplete from just my end. 

Anyway, failing to convince my meetup friend I was a lout, he went and must have said something pretty disparaging about me to T. because at the end of December, my meetup friend posted on her Facebook something about “so what part of this is not clear of do not text,call, email and/or the use smoke signals to contact me...”  Meanwhile just a few minutes later, I get this little gem:

December 27, 2010

T.

Hi Louie -
I don't think we should be friends from this point forward. I was given some information that is NOT pleasing to hear and I feel that I can't trust you with any information at all. I feel completely back stabbed and I'm hurt beyond words right now.

I wish you luck in life - please do not contact me any further.
~T.

All that was left to say was, Wow…  I mean, really?  Wow…  Not that I really cared by this point other than to tell her to please keep her drama between herself and her ex-husband from now on.  Quit dragging other people into your little games. 

I’ve since heard from my meetup friend that T. told her ex all sorts of things about me and our “friendship” including some different variations on the truth.  Like how I was always the instigator and “trying” to get with her but she wasn’t interested.  Funny I remember being the one to tell her I didn’t want to date her a couple years ago.  I can only imagine what other things she said about me and what we did, or didn’t do, according to her.  I’m sure she’s probably played the part of wingman for him in the past, finding girls for him to date and whatnot.  Looking back at that comment he had made about D. makes me pretty certain that’s exactly what she was trying to do, hook them up. 

Did I let this one go too long?  Of course.  Should I have let her back in my life after the first, second, or even third parting of ways?  Of course not.  But then again, I wasn’t exactly thinking with my logical head.  I never said I was a saint.