I met Ricky on OKCupid, and for our first date he pulled what I considered, at the time, an extremely big-balls move.
“My friend is DJing at Webster Hall,” he said. “Come meet me there. We’ll hang out onstage.”
Okay. Sure.
I showed up and, technically, everything Ricky had promised was true. His friend was DJing at Webster Hall. We were onstage. What Ricky had neglected to mention was that his friend had an early set and it wasn’t like the thousands of people there had come specifically to see him.
But Ricky acted like his best friend was fucking Daft Punk.
This was my first exposure to one of Ricky’s defining characteristics: he was a hype man. He didn’t just get excited about things. He believed the hype. His friends were the funniest people alive. This party was going to be insane. This band was about to blow up. We should absolutely go do this thing right now.
He was six-five, with a very ordinary white-guy look, and he was fun. Really fun. He played the oboe, taught DJing and music software, and ran with a crew of people who were always getting dressed up and going somewhere or doing some ridiculous thing. His whole vibe was Burning Man meets SantaCon.
And yet, from the beginning, there was something about Ricky that repulsed me. I can’t explain it. I went home with him that first night, so clearly the repulsion had its limits. Rather than acknowledge the obvious implications of these feelings, I invented an entirely new sexual identity for myself.
“I don’t really like kissing,” I told him.
This was a lie.
“And I don’t give blowjobs.”
Also a lie. Ricky was unfazed. And somehow we started dating.
This is the confusing part, because despite being physically repelled by him, I liked being around him. I should also add that this fucking doofus was the first man I’d ever been with who could make me orgasm consistently.
I was furious about that.
My friend Graham described Ricky as having “kicked-dog energy,” which was exactly right. He was big and goofy but deeply wounded and pathologically eager to please. He could also be incredibly spontaneous. After hearing my initial description of him, someone in our friend group started calling him Fun Ricky. The name stuck. On our second date, Ricky asked, “You want to go to Guatemala?”
“When?”
“Now.”
So we bought tickets. That was Fun Ricky’s superpower. No thinking. All action. Why couldn’t we go to Guatemala tomorrow? Who said you needed a plan? We’d figure it out when we got there. And we did.
We rented the top floor of a little two-story place near the water and spent our days deciding what to do roughly five minutes before doing it. It was incredibly fun. I started to think maybe I could change Fun Ricky. I thought I could maybe mold him into the person I needed without sacrificing this chaotic, fun energy that just poured out of him.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only thing that poured out of him.
Within a few days, we met this skinny Rasta-looking dude, and Fun Ricky immediately became obsessed with making him his new best friend. By then I’d learned that Fun Ricky had never met a stranger he didn’t want to make his new best friend.
One night, while the two of them were chopping it up, I announced that I was done drinking and wanted to go home.
“Have fun,” I said.
This was a mistake. Sometime around sunrise, Fun Ricky returned absolutely annihilated. He climbed into bed stinking of booze, then began making increasingly frequent trips to the bathroom. Eventually I heard him vomiting.
From the way his retching sounds were bouncing off the porcelain, I could tell his head was more or less in the toilet. Good, I thought. That’s what toilets are for.
After twenty minutes or so, he came back to bed. He turned toward me. I reflexively rolled over so my back was to him. Fun Ricky spooned me. Then he vomited into my hair.
I was, of course, disgusted. But I was also amazed that he was still capable of producing such a prodigious volume after twenty straight minutes of puking in and around the apartment’s only toilet.
I hopped over the puddles he’d left in the bathroom and got into the shower.
When I came back into the bedroom, freshly de-vomited, Fun Ricky suddenly sat bolt upright and hurled what looked like another two pints over the foot of the bed.
“YOU CANNOT VOMIT HERE. GO TO THE BATHROOM.”
As luck would have it, in our haste to find somewhere to stay, we’d rented a two-bedroom. I moved into the second bedroom, locked the door and eventually fell asleep. When I woke up, I needed to pee, which meant venturing back into the scene of the crime.
The bathroom was a calamity. The bedroom was disgusting. But Fun Ricky wasn’t in either.I found him in the kitchen with his laptop open. Jerking off.
This remains one of the grossest things I have ever seen. This man had apparently surveyed the devastation a night of drinking with a stranger had wrought and thought: You know what would be nice right now? A little me time.
Then there was a knock at the door. It was the people staying beneath us.
“Is there some kind of leak?” they asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
I went back upstairs to investigate and inspected the still-destroyed bedroom. Whatever had come out of Ricky had seeped between the cracks in the rough-hewn plank floor and dripped into the bedroom of the people staying below us.
And that should have been the end of Fun Ricky. I gave myself a whole pep talk. Bitch, put a smile on your face. Enjoy the rest of Guatemala. Then go home and break up with this motherfucker.
So that’s what I did. Except for the breaking-up part. To his credit, Fun Ricky quit drinking immediately, which was unfortunately exactly the sort of gesture that worked on me.
He was always willing to make an effort. I would present evidence for why we shouldn’t be together and Fun Ricky would treat it like notes from a performance review.
This became especially problematic because somewhere during my time with Fun Ricky, my biological clock had started making noise. Suddenly I was looking at this man for whom I had invented an alternate persona who didn’t enjoy kissing or sucking dick and thinking:
Could I have a child with this person?
It was a bonkers idea. So, naturally, Fun Ricky was into it. I told him he didn’t make enough money. Fun Ricky, a grown-ass man well into his thirties, said he’d start a savings account.I then had a moment of clarity and tried to break up with him again.
He came back with a printed, bulleted list of items laying out why I shouldn’t. I don’t remember all the bullet points. I do remember there was more than one list, because I tried to break up with him more than once and he reused the tactic. And yet, somehow, we stayed together for almost two years.
I wish I had a profound explanation for why. I don’t.
I think I didn’t want to be alone. I thought maybe I could mold him into something. We liked the same nerdy shit. We played games. His friends were fun. He was smart. He was silly. I can’t resist silly.
And life around Fun Ricky kept moving. There was always another party, another friend, another trip, another insane idea that somehow went from “Wouldn’t it be funny if…” to something we were actually doing.
But the weird thing at the center of the relationship never went away. I didn’t want to kiss him.I had known that on the first date. It just took me almost two years to believe in myself.
