I’m sure that some people are still getting value out of Feeld, but just prior to the New York Times’ article that blew it up in March of 2019, it was fucking incredible. A big part of what made it great was that most people had no idea it existed.
Formerly “3nder” until forced to undergo a rebrand by the Match Group, which owned Tinder, Feeld was a place where I met dozens of gorgeous women bent on working their kinks out with a willing stranger. Where else could I have met someone like Taylor?
Taylor was 24, a light-skinned black chick, with long curly hair, big green eyes, and a dancer’s body. Just otherworldly beautiful. But the thing I hadn’t expected from her pictures was that she was also a huge nerd. I remember her profile saying something like, “If you don’t want to go down on me and then buy me comic books, move along.”
This was catnip for me. The first time we hung out, she was very explicit that nothing was going to happen. That this was just a vibe check. She came over, we smoked a joint, ordered food, laughed a lot, and then she went home.
The next day she texted me asking what I was doing.
She came back over, and we had insane, dirty, athletic sex.
It was on this occasion that Taylor told me she danced at a strip club in Brooklyn. She kept encouraging me to come see her at work the next week, which I never did. I didn’t want to cross the John line. I didn’t want her to associate me with work – only with having a good time on her terms.
She’d send me pictures from backstage preceded by a “Here’s what I’m wearing tonight,” text. One night she sent me a picture of herself in this very Fifth Element, Leeloo Dallas kind of outfit. She was proving to exist in the precise sweet spot between hot stripper and nerd that drives me crazy.
After we’d hung out at my place maybe one more time, though, she told me she didn’t want to just be some girl who came over to my apartment to hit my bong and fuck.
That weekend, my friend Grant was having his 40th birthday party at the Slipper Room, a burlesque club on the Lower East Side, so I invited Taylor. This would have been November 2016. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to take whatever we were doing out into the world and set her mind at ease.
Now, I should mention that at this point I had a well-earned reputation among my friends for bringing girls I was very casually seeing to group hangs. After a while, it became super divisive. Most of the WhatsApp group would vehemently veto the idea if I bothered to ask for permission to bring an unknown element into the mix, but my friend Brian – a chaos agent who often hosted game and movie nights at his place and therefore has the ultimate say – would often encourage it.
“Absolutely. Bring her. Let’s see what you’ve got,” he’d respond.
Taylor and I arrived at Grant’s party and went to the bar. When we’d previously hung out, she told me she didn’t drink, so I was surprised when she asked for a glass of wine upon arrival at the event. I ordered myself an Old Fashioned to sip – I’m not a big drinker either.
The bartender handed me the wine first. I passed it to Taylor, turned back to wait for my cocktail. By the time it arrived, Taylor was waggling an empty glass in my face.
“Could I get another one?”
The bartender shot me a look that seemed to say, “You bought the ticket, take the ride.”
He handed me another glass. This time I turned around in time to see Taylor consume it. She seemed to unhinge her jaw before rotating her wrist to drop six full fluid ounces of Malbec into her gullet.
“Can we go somewhere else?” she said a beat later, a grimace still on her face. “The drinks here aren’t very strong.”
“You’re drinking wine,” I said, half grinning, unsure if she was doing a bit.
“I know,” she said with a glare.
We had been at the party for approximately five minutes – a party full of my friends that we were attending to ostensibly demonstrate that Taylor was more than some sequestered fuck-puppet.
To that end, I tried to introduce her to three female friends of mine, friends who had been repeatedly unimpressed by randos I’d brought to get togethers in the past.
“Taylor, these are my friends – ”
She suddenly held up her phone. The screen was black.
“Oh, excuse me. I have to take this,” she said. “It’s the coast.”
She walked away and engaged in a clearly make-believe phone call.
My friends looked at me. Even by my standards, this was new ground. I looked at them apologetically and smiled. There wasn’t really anything more to say. They dispersed.
I shook it off and sidled up to another cluster of friends. Her imaginary, transcontinental business concluded, Taylor stood about six or eight feet away from us, just staring at me. I kept turning and motioning for her to come over. She wouldn’t move. Things got awkward when my friend gamely waved at her and got a scowl in return.
By now it was clear that the two glasses of wine – weak though they may have been – had done their job.
This was going nowhere good. I decided the evening was over.
I told Taylor I was going to put her in a cab and send her home. She insisted she needed to come back to my place because she’d left something there the last time we’d hung out. I don’t remember what it was – if it was anything at all – but apparently she had to have it. Right. Fucking. Now.
I told her we’d go to my apartment, get this thing, then go home.
About thirty seconds into the Uber ride, I noticed her big eyes rolling around. I asked her how she was feeling.
She wrested back control of those emerald eyes and trained them on me.
“Matt-thew.”
I waited.
“Matt-thew.”
“Yeah?”
“Matt-thew.”
“Taylor?”
“Matt-thew.”
She wasn’t saying it playfully. She wasn’t smiling. She was looking directly into my eyes, completely deadpan, slowly repeating my name.
“Matt-thew.”
I looked toward the front of the cab.
The driver looked at me in the rearview mirror.
“Matt-thew.”
Now the driver was giving me that very specific New York cab-driver look that says: “Do I need to get involved in whatever the fuck is happening back there?”
I gave him the equally specific look that says: I got this.
“Matt-thew.”
But I was becoming less convinced.
After an eight-minute ride that felt like an hour, we got back to my apartment, and Taylor asked if she could use the bathroom.
She was in there for a long time. Longer than you’d ever really want someone you barely know to be alone in the bathroom of your one-bedroom apartment.
Eventually I walked over and gently knocked.
“Um, Taylor? You okay?”
Nothing.
I waited.
Still nothing.
A couple of minutes later, just as I was about to knock again, the door opened.
Taylor brushed past me, completely composed and surprisingly fresh-looking, and sat down on my couch.
Then she said, almost as an afterthought:
“Sink’s clogged.”
I took note of her use of passive voice.
She was positioning it as though, during the time she’d been in there, a contemporaneous plumbing emergency had occurred which, as my guest, she felt duty-bound to bring to my attention.
I went into the bathroom.
The moment I switched on the light, I was punched in the face by the hot, acrid smell of vomited red wine.
I had one of those little pedestal sinks, and Taylor had somehow managed to fill the entire basin with puke. I mean, to the fucking brim.
I’ll give her her due: she was neat. There was no puke on the floor. None on the sides of the sink. But because the drain was indeed clogged, it was just sitting there – a steaming basin of lumpy purple-red slurry. I stood over it trying to process what I was looking at.
If I had to guess what she’d eaten for dinner, I’d say two heads of red cabbage.
“Matt-thew,” came Taylor’s voice from the living room.
It barely registered. I was too busy thinking about how I was going to remediate the situation. How the fuck do you remove a sinkful of piping hot vomitus from a pedestal sink without simply introducing it into another part of your home?
I removed myself from the fetid atmosphere of the bathroom to clear my head. Taylor was demurely sitting on my couch, slowly shedding clothing, apparently ready for the date to continue.
And all I could think was: Yeah. I don’t think we’re going to be doing that.
Now, I’m not going to lie, I did see Taylor on and off for years after that. But from that night on, at least as far as I was concerned, she was absolutely just some girl who came over to my apartment.
