I swiped right on Patrick, but exactly why I met up with him so soon after he shot me a message is hard to remember.
His profile photos were all of him doing outdoorsy shit like kite surfing. I could tell he had a good body, but I couldn’t really see his face. This was in 2015 or so, just before dating apps insisted on a clear picture of your face. Or at least a face. It was a simpler time.
I think his profile mentioned that he was half Asian, which I liked, but his answers to the canned profile prompts weren’t funny or charming. I think I was just in an online-dating groove where the bar was basically: You seem fine. Let’s do it.
I guess another part of it was that Patrick was very ready to meet. An eagerness to meet sooner rather than later can be exciting when you’re having a great hair day, not on your period, and don’t already have plans. Maybe he just caught me at the right time – or just dangling the right carrot.
He told me that he lived two blocks from a super viral ramen spot, which at the time usually had a two-hour wait. He suggested that he put our names down, then hang out at his apartment until our table was ready.
A combo of all these things was probably why I agreed to show up at the apartment of a stranger I couldn’t have picked out of a lineup just hours after we matched.
When I pushed open the door he’d left ajar, Patrick was in his living room, watching some terrible, dude-centric reality show. Volume up. Shirt off.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey,” he said. He barely looked in my direction. He just invited me to sit on his lap and watch it with him until it was over, which for some reason, I did. My friends tease me about being super agreeable, suggestible, and I have to admit, this is a pretty good example of that.
But I do remember thinking: What are we doing?
After a few minutes, the terrible show finished. Patrick turned his attention to me. All of it. Everything.
Now that he was facing me, I saw that he was very good-looking. Half Japanese, half Brazilian, and in great shape. He worked in finance, and his apartment was beautiful and seemed brand new. He was also sexually assertive and goal-oriented in a way that I didn’t necessarily like.
I mean, the first time I hook up with someone, I’m not thinking, You need to give me the greatest sexual experience of my life. I’m thinking, We don’t know each other. Let’s see how this goes.
But a lot of guys are like, “I’m going to make you come!” “I’m going to make you squirt!”
And I’m always thinking, “Okay, dude. But you don’t have to.” Far more often than not, they fall far short of their promises.
So when Patrick told me he was going to make me come. I basically told him he wasn’t and that he was off the hook. He told me to relax and carried me over to the bed.
And then he delivered. In fact, he overdelivered.
As I lay panting in a puddle of my own making, I remember thinking: Oh. Okay. My mind was scrambled. He told me his name was Patrick Bateman.
I didn’t immediately get it. I was stuck on the fact that Bateman didn’t sound particularly Japanese or Brazilian. Before I could regain the ability to form sentences and ask some questions, his phone chimed. Our table was ready.
I wobbled to the bathroom to freshen up, which required walking through his enormous walk-in closet. It was full of suits. In the dark, they all looked like the exact same suit, over and over again. The shelves in his stylish bathroom were full of expensive toiletries, and I remember thinking that he was like the main character in American Psycho.
Finance guy. Incredible body. Fancy apartment. Closet full of identical suits.
What was his name?
We got ramen, came back, had more great sex, and eventually fell asleep. Then, around four in the morning, people began spilling out of the bars and woke us up by hollering on the street.
Patrick got out of bed, opened the window, and just started throwing stuff at them.
Ice cubes from his freezer, then a pint of water from his nightstand.
“What the fuck?” came yells from below.
Patrick beamed a huge smile. He thought this was extremely funny. I guess I sort of did too, except I’d lived in New York long enough to know you don’t throw things at every drunk person who wakes you up at four in the morning. Not only would you eventually end up with your windows smashed, but you’d never have time for anything else.
He railed me the morning and sent me home in an Uber. It was only then that I remembered that Patrick Bateman was the name of the main guy in American Psycho. Was the guy I was just fucking assuming the name of a fictional serial killer? Could it be a bizarre coincidence?
For the next week, his attempts to pick up where we left off were relentless. He kept texting me things like, “What are you wearing?” and “Come over right now.”
“I’m at work.” I’d say.
“Come over,” he’d reply.
“No. I’m at work,” I’d insist.
Eventually he got wounded about it. He called me, almost in tears.
“Y’know, typically, when someone can’t hang out,” he breathlessly explained, “they usually suggest another time.”
I was being scolded for not properly rescheduling the booty calls I didn’t want. Despite his hotness, flashy apartment, and proximity to great ramen. I was happy to let this fizzle out and look into less unsettling options.
Then, maybe a year later, I saw Patrick’s profile on another dating app. Same blunt answers, same enigmatic pictures.
For some reason, I felt compelled to reach out.
“Hey, saw you on Hinge. Get it! Hope you’re doing well.”
“That’s not me,” he responded.
What?
Patrick – if that was even his real name – told me he had “loaned” his dating profile to a friend.
I read that message several times.
Loaned it? Like a Netflix password?
He explained that his profile had already proved successful, so why should his friend go through all the trouble of building one from scratch?
“But those are pictures of you.”
“Are they?” he asked. “You can’t really see my face.”
This blew my mind.
I went back and looked at the profile again. Annoyingly, he was right. The pictures that had seemed mysterious and sexy when I first encountered them now looked almost deliberately incognito. There was a man in them, certainly. A body. A silhouette. A suggestion of Patrick. But there wasn’t actually much evidence that the person you were arranging to meet was the person in the photographs.
I started trying to work out the logistics. Was his friend also using Patrick’s answers? Patrick’s age? His job? His sexual preferences? At what point during a date did the substitute disclose that the man you’d been messaging was essentially a franchise?
More importantly: had Patrick invented this system, or was this something men were actually doing?
Was this catfishing? Not exactly. He hadn’t invented an imaginary person so much as invented transferable date bait. I couldn’t decide whether this was ingenious, sociopathic, or simply the most male solution to online dating I had ever encountered.
Was there just one friend using it? Had there been others? How many women had gone out expecting Patrick and been presented with whoever happened to have custody of the profile that week?
And then, inevitably, another thought occurred to me:
Had I actually gone out with Patrick?
Six months after that, I went to Miami to party with some gay friends of mine.
We were out clubbing when this extremely hot guy started following me around. Not following in a sinister way, exactly. He was dancing with us and flirting with me specifically. I called him by the wrong name on purpose. He didn’t care. We’d leave one place, and he’d come with us. We’d get in a car, he’d get in too.
I knew he was following me. I knew he was very persistent. I also knew he was hot. So I was like: Fine.
Eventually we ended up at one of those very Miami hotels with little bungalows clustered around the pool. There was cocaine. There was an older gay man whose role in the evening I no longer remember. A few of us migrated into a room where my friend David cuddled in bed with another guy and watched the hot follower guy fuck me face-down, ass-up, on the sofa.
Miami.
The next morning I got a text. It was from Patrick Bateman.
“So I hear you’re in Miami.”
I froze. I stared at my phone.
Patrick and I had no friends in common. We weren’t connected on social media. We weren’t talking. I was relieved that we had nothing to do with one another. There was absolutely no reason I could think of that he should know where I was.
“How the fuck do you know I’m in Miami?”
He got cute.
“I have my ways.”
“No, seriously. How do you know?”
He left me on read and, to this day, I have no idea how he knew where I was and what – or possibly who – I was doing.
Maybe Patrick happened to be in Miami and saw me at a club.
Maybe he somehow knew the guy who’d followed me around all night.
Or maybe – and this possibility only occurred to me much later – I’d just had sex with a guy in this weird dating profile borrowing ring.
I’ll guess I’ll never know. Which, when it comes to a finance guy calling himself Patrick Bateman, is probably the best outcome I could hope for.
