Big City

One of the things that I was most excited about when I decided to move to DC was that I would no longer be living in a small city (sub-100,000 people). After living in one place for nearly 30 years, you tend to run into the same people over and over. What's more, your dating circles get intertwined to the point that it's almost impossible to date someone who hasn't slept with at least one of your buddies. One night my good friend John and I were talking and found that between the two of us there were really only about four degrees of separation between us and every girl we could name in town. Further, there were about eight or nine that we had both slept with, a figure much higher than I had originally guessed.

I looked at my move as a blank canvas, a way to start fresh. At home, if a night was slow you could "go hogging" but your friends always knew you did no matter how hard you tried to conceal it. You would also inevitably run into the hog somewhere, and that's never a pleasant experience.

My mantra in DC was "7-up", I would only target girls I deemed a 7 or higher on a 1-10 scale. No more big fat goalie chicks for me, and I reasoned that this would be easy in DC simply because the pool of women was about 15 times larger.

I will admit that it only took a month for me stray from my 7-up theory, but I think I'm holding strong at 6-up, or maybe 5.5-up, depending on your scale. For someone who routinely dipped into the 2's and 3's, this is a vast improvement!

One thing I hadn't counted on is that DC is remarkably small for its size (I realize that doesn't make any fucking sense, but give me a minute). Between DC-proper, Arlington, Alexandria, Chevy Chase, and other surrounding 'burbs, there must be a few million people in DC. However, I still manage to see the same faces ona regular basis, which is a virtue of the fact that you tend to go to the same places over and over.

I will preface the coming catastrophe by saying that I spread myself pretty thin for a while. I was juggling Anne, Kate, and a girl from home for a while, and still found at least one night a week to go out with the guys in search of new talent. I tried not to lie, but I would come up with creative half-truths to go out on guy only nights, even if this meant that my buddies brought their wives' or girlfriends'.

One of my favorite nights of the month was when Mr. Green Jeans would play at The Clarendon Ballroom. This was usually a Thursday night, and always made for an uncomfortable Friday in the office. If you have not seen Mr. Green Jeans I highly recommend it. The band is fun, but the ladies are fantastic.

So one Thursday night a few guys and I went to the Ballroom. I did a little fancy footwork and managed to get a night off from Kate, and Anne had made plans to go to dinner with her girlfriends, so she was easy. We defiled ourselves as usual at the concert, and I was really hurting the next morning. Work ticked by at a glacial pace, but at 4pm I clocked out and went home to lick my wounds. I was supposed to go out with Kate and was thinking of an excuse to get out of it when I saw her number come up on my phone. I almost let it go to voicemail, but decided to answer.

Kate proceeds to tell me about her night out with her girls. They went to dinner at a new restaurant in Chinatown.

You can probably see where this is headed.

They were having drinks, enjoying themselves, and ordered a big round of appetizers to start with. The waiter brought the appetizers, but it turns out that he had swapped their food order with the group of girls sitting next to them. Both tables started eating before they realized the orders were wrong, so when they figured it out they decided to combine the two tables. As it turns out, yup, Kate had stumbled into Anne and her group of friends at dinner, they were sitting four feet from each other.

Honestly, I couldn't make this shit up, I'm just not this creative.

Now, as one big happy table they started chatting it up. At some point in the evening Anne mentioned that she lived on 16th Street, and Kate says, "Oh, where, I have a friend who lives on 16th Street?" Anne says the cross streets and Kate says what a coincidence, that's where her friend (the soon to be alone - me) lives. Anne then says the name of the building, and Kate blurts out, "Oh, do you know my friend ---?" ...

Having heard this same exact story from Anne just an hour later, I can tell you that at this point dinner became extremely uncomfortable for everyone. Neither girl actually said they were dating me, but apparently both implied it at nearly the same moment, and the tables were pushed back apart shortly thereafter. Gene, who was there that night and who gave me a third perspective on the events, said it was one of the most uncomfortable moments of her life.

Since things hadn't been going well with the aforementioned mercurial Kate, I decided to push her out of the picture and salvage what I could from my relationship with Anne. It wasn't easy, and took days of what a good friend of mine refers to as the "lie, deny, and make counter accusations" attack.