A few years ago, Google Guy messaged me on Grindr.
His name is pretty self-explanatory: He worked at Google. I worked at a restaurant just two blocks from their headquarters on 8th Avenue, so the Grindr odds were in our favor.
After his clothed torso sent me a face pic, I agreed to meet him for a drink at Merchants—which, currently, is a demolished pile of bricks. (It’s a sad thing to walk by every morning on my way to work.)
Google Guy was handsome and charming, a double-threat. He talked about his job, essentially managing people—to be honest, it sounded absolutely boring, but he seemed to like it. I told him about the restaurant, and how my real calling is writing. (I’m not sure I mentioned the column—he seemed pretty private about his life. It’s one thing for your Grindr photo to be a torso, but a clothed torso?
After a few too many drinks, he asked if I wanted to come back to his place for another—to which I happily agreed. He made me a Cosmo while I went to the bathroom, making sure everything was in check. When I emerged from the bathroom he had our drinks ready, and I was just in my tiny cotton underwear.
“Oh,” he smiled. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
We sat down next to each other on his couch—well, I was practically sitting on his lap—and we talked more. I tried not to ogle his apartment, on 19th and 9th, which was honestly mesmerizing.
Three bedrooms (a bedroom, an office and a guest bedroom), high ceilings, and the most beautiful kitchen I’ve ever seen. “Your kitchen is to die for,” I couldn’t help gush.
“Oh, yeah—I had the whole thing remodeled.”
Handsome, charming, stable—triple threat.
I’m not sure when the night went wrong. Everything seemed so perfect: We were drinking, I was in my tiniest underwear, we were getting along great. Then, somehow, we were talking about exes.
“I had an ex that killed someone,” he told me. “He showed up to my place after; it was pretty surreal.”
“What?”
“Yeah. He went home with the guy, and he had this crazy plan to rob him, but I guess it went awry, and he bashed his head in.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, insane, right?” He continued to describe the murder in gory detail—which I’ll spare you.
Thirty minutes later, with his ex in jail and me flaccid as fuck, he finished his drink. “Anyway.”
“Anyway.” I set down my Cosmo, half empty (definitely not half full), and retrieved my clothes from the floor. “It’s getting late. I should get home.”
He texted me a month after, wondering why we never got together again or had sex. I told him he had a boy in his lap, begging to have sex, and he told him a bedtime story about a graphic murder.
…Eh, I’d probably give him the second chance the penal system never gave his ex.
