I met Jessica in the winter of 2017. We connected on Feeld, the dating app where people are encouraged and expected to be incredibly specific about the sort of sexual experience they’d like to have. Profiles on Feeld tended to be short on the poster’s penchant for tacos, love of travel, and avoidance of drama, and long on how they imagined actualizing their deep-seated desires.
Jessica was Vietnamese, gorgeous with a great ass and a tiny waist. And – bonus – she lived just a block or two away. Unusually for Feeld, her profile wasn’t very specific about what she was looking for. But then, when you look like Jessica, you really don’t need an angle.
The first day we planned to meet up, she ghosted me. The second, she canceled as I was walking over. Her texted excuse? “I hurt my nose.”
I didn’t ask too many questions because she suggested we meet just a few days later and made a note to get the nose story then. For that third attempt just a day later, we’d arranged to go out for drinks but, seeing as we were neighbors, she suggested I pick her up at home and check out her place before heading out.
I texted her that I was on my way over.
“Great. I’ll preheat the oven,” was her reply.
She’d said the same thing just before she’d cancelled the day before. Was she alluding to cooking me Hansel and Gretel style? Or did I somehow divulge that I was half Jewish and thought getting things rolling with a cheeky holocaust reference would be cute? I made a second note to get to the bottom of that one too.
Her apartment was in one of those courtyard buildings you find in Manhattan’s East Village. Her place, she said, was in the back. I saw there were two apartments at the back of the courtyard. One had normal lights. The other? A spinning disco ball. You can probably guess which one was hers.
She met me at the door and invited me in. I was struck that the place was all white. Plush white rug, white furniture. White everything. Then I noticed that under her kitchen counter, where you’d expect to find a dishwasher, was a large Plexiglas tank with a biohazard symbol on it. I was going to lead with a question about her injured nose or her allusion to roasting me, but this was far more intriguing.
“Oh, don’t mind that,” she said as she saw me looking at it. “I’m a colon hydrotherapist. I work out of here.”
I’m really not a germaphobe, but in that moment, I thought: This whole place must be soaked in ass juice.
She asked if I wanted to go out or stay for a drink. The revelation that she spent her days sluicing out feces in a 400-square-foot apartment made it an easy decision.
“Okay,” she said. “Oh, there’s this bar we should go to. I have a gift certificate so it’s on me.”
“Like, drink tickets?” I asked, having never heard of a grungy East Village bar issuing gift certificates.
“No,” she said flatly.
We walked to the bar, which was about five blocks away, stepping over piles of dirty snow from a blizzard the night before. It was February. It was freezing.
We sat down, and she began getting to know me in her own special way.
“Do you like ice skating?”
“Um…sure. I’m not great at it,” I answered, thinking that she was thinking about a future date.
“Do you like mac and cheese?”
“I mean, sometimes – ”
Skating, followed by a low-effort, high-carb meal? Was that what she was getting at?
“Do you like horses?”
“What are you…..is this from a book?” I asked.
“No, I’m just trying to get to know you.”
“Well, then let’s have a conversation,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me something about yourself?”
She explained she’d been an executive assistant to a rich CEO. Sometimes she traveled with him. His wife didn’t like that. Then, out of nowhere, they fired her – but gave her $200,000 and a Range Rover.
It was like hearing a moron tell a story where they’re implicating themselves in the truth, but they don’t realize that you can see right through it.
“So you slept with your boss and got a severance package?” I asked. “You signed an NDA? Should you be telling me this?”
“No, they just gave me those things,” seemingly annoyed that I’d probed.
“Okay. So where do you park the Range Rover?” I asked with a knowing smile, hoping that the charade would break down and she could just be normal for a goddamn minute.
“ON AVENUE B!” she screamed at a volume that alarmed me, the handful of other diners, and the server who was about to take our order but turned on his heel at her outburst.
I didn’t push it. When a girl was this gorgeous, I tended to spool off a lot of slack when the finer details weren’t adding up.
Under my seat was a hissing, old-school New York City steam radiator, burning hot to fend off the wintry blasts when the door occasionally burst open. I was being roasted alive.
“Can we move?” I said, feeling the sweat begin to bead on my brow. “This seat is cooking me.”
“No.” She refused. “I like this table.”
Eventually, after a few more minutes, I said I couldn’t take it and threatened to leave.
“Fine,” she huffed. “If you’re going to be such a baby, we can switch.”
Now she was sitting atop the radiator, seemingly unbothered by the heat.
“Happy now?” she said with a snarl.
Was she being obstinate and mean in a playful way? Was this impromptu role-play? I had no way of knowing. Girls who looked like Jessica could get away with doing and saying practically anything. She’d been conditioned, I told myself. It’s not her fault.
The server had worked up the nerve to approach us a second time. She took the gift certificate out of her bag.
“On me,” she mouthed.
I told her that I didn’t really drink. With a look, she let me know this was incorrect, and I ordered a beer.
I could tell by her furrowed brow that she was looking at the menu, then the certificate, and working through a math problem.
The server let us know that they hadn’t gotten a delivery because of the blizzard and were out of most of the food items on the already limited menu. Jessica looked crestfallen.
“We do have the hummus plate,” offered the server.
She looked at the certificate, looked at the waiter, and said, “I’ll have three hummus plates and a bottle of merlot.”
He told her one hummus plate was enough for two people.
“Three, please,” she said, satisfied that the gift certificate had been fully used.
While we waited for an inordinate amount of hummus to arrive, a tall Black trans woman in a red coat, red sequined sweater, and matching beret walked through the door, followed by an icy rush of winter wind. My date got unbelievably excited. Like, a little-girl-at-the-fair, excited.
“Oooh! She’s a palm reader. I want my palm read!” she said. “Can I? Oh please can I?”
“I mean, if you like,” I said. “She’s just going to cold-read you.”
“Yay!” she said, rapidly clapping her hands.
I reluctantly summoned the grifter over.
“You’ve had a lot of stress at work,” she began.
“No, I work from home. No stress.”
“Oh,” said the palmist, unused to such a dead end from an opening gambit.
“You’re attracted to someone,” said the struggling palmist, sort of gesturing at me – a seemingly safe bet given the set up.
“Not him!” said Jessica gesturing at me. “This is nothing. This is a first date.”
After two more disastrous probes – in which my self-esteem sustained further collateral damage – the palm reader gave up. She looked at me apologetically, shrugged, and opened her enormous mitt. I handed her twenty bucks.
Jessica dutifully dug her way out from under that mountain of hummus while draining her bottle of wine. Her mouth full, I was compelled to carry the conversation as best I could.
Now she was beginning to sweat from the heat coming off the radiator. It was at that point that a chunk of the bridge of her nose opened like the top hatch of a submarine before falling onto the table.
“Damn it,” she said.
In the chunk of nose’s place was a raw, weeping, dime-sized divot.
“So…this has to be connected to you hurting your nose the other day, right?” I asked.
She told me that she’d gotten stoned and fallen asleep with a Bioré strip on for two days. When she ripped it off, a sizable piece of skin came off with it. She’d canceled that second date because of her nose, and rather than wait until she’d healed, she decided to create a makeshift piece of nose with composite and makeup.
I told her it was fine. We were done here anyway, and I was just ready to leave. Luckily, the gift certificate meant that there was no check to wait for. Even before we met up, I’d given myself an out. I’d told her that I was meeting some friends from out of town who happened to be in improv and comedy – which was all true. I told her that I had to go.
“Great, I’ll come too.”
“Oh no, I’m catching up with them. I haven’t seen them in a while.”
“No, this is great. I love comedy.”
“I’m not inviting you,” I said, amazed that she wasn’t picking up on my haste to disappear from her life as suddenly as I’d entered it.
She harrumphed. Then loudly insisted I walk her home. I told her that I thought she could manage the five, well-peopled blocks alone, but she wasn’t having it.
“Fuck it, fine, I’ll walk you home,” I said, eventually.
As soon as we left the bar, she began haranguing me about taking her to meet my friends, suggesting that she might just invite me back to her home/place of work afterward. But I was resolute.
That ended the night, and it should have been the last time I laid eyes on her. But a few months later, Jessica texted me some nearly nude pictures, followed by a photo of an enormous amount of weed she needed help smoking, and invited me over.
By this point I had seen her colon hydrotherapy rig, heard her insist with a straight face that the CEO she’d traveled with had fired her for no particular reason and then, also for no particular reason, given her $200,000 and a Range Rover, watched her verbally waterboard a palm reader, witnessed a piece of her nose fall off her face, and spent five blocks trying to convince her that she could not come and meet my friends.
But did I mention that she was really, really hot?
We got stoned on her fire escape; she talked maniacally into my ear for about two hours, each of her utterances more bizarre than the last, nothing remotely sexual happened, and eventually, I went home.
There’s obviously a gray area between kooky and “maybe this person should be professionally evaluated,” and I’m still not qualified to say precisely where that line is. What I can say is that if you’ve spent an entire date wondering whether you’ve crossed it, going back for a second opinion because she sent you a picture of her tits and a giant bag of weed probably is going to leave you with more questions than answers.
