#21 THAT TIME I DATED (AND GHOSTED) MY FIREFIGHTER NEIGHBOUR
After DJ and the married professor, the fourth person I slept with was my neighbour; never have sex with your neighbours!
By the Fall of 2009, I’d slept with HSS who was on and off, but at this point off; the guy who wrote a poem about how our sex meant nothing after pursuing me for weeks; the married professor where karma bit me in the ankle (coming later); and then I’d met my neighbour.
I hadn’t been able to afford to go to England that summer as I had the year prior when I met the boy with the green jumper (sweater), so I was in my uni town, passing the time with the lovely people left that summer. I’d passed the GRE (which is the Graduate Record Examination that you have to take as a basic requirement to get into grad school – like the SAT but for grad school – which very oddly I did better on the maths section maybe thanks to my amazing high school maths teacher where I got as high as trigonometry) and I was ready to start graduate school in the fall semester.
One night, I attended a party at the International Boys’ House. Earlier the previous day, I’d played tennis with two of them (not the one I slept with). I didn’t (and still don’t) know how to play tennis (as much as I wish I had known how to play as tennis players look like they’re having an elegant-yet-aggressive dance on the court). Tennis is up there with people who ride horses. It’s often for those who grow up in privilege.
When playing, I went for a shot, stepping my ankle awkwardly to the side, to make contact with the tennis ball to fling it over the net onto the other side and heard a pop. In my ankle.
People with the NHS in England can never quite understand how if you have some medical problem that is outside the realms of what the “free health clinic” on campus (joke’s on me – I paid for these services in my tuition and fees) deals with, you just do not go to the doctor under any circumstance especially when you’re a broke AF only newly-graduated with a bachelor’s degree person, and working at a call centre for only slightly above minimum wage that confusingly sells cookies and also car repair warranties.
So, my super sweet, caring Turkmen neighbour, AJ (not be confused with the housemate who hated me) – he had a real Turkmen name but he found it easier to abbreviate his name’s initials for us Americans – came to wrap my ankle with bandages and leaves/plants of some kind because my ankle was full on swollen. His mother was a doctor and now he is also a doctor – like, a medical one not a PhD one – congrats, sweet friend! (This also wasn’t the one I slept with later FYI.) I remember shivering through the night and feeling the throbbing in my ankle but I think it did help.
The next day, the boys invited me to their party across the street so I shoved my normal foot and my super fat foot into some pointed-toe stilettos (my signature shoe which is also still my signature shoe or would be if I didn’t work from home and go mostly barefoot). My foot looked like a marshmallow, squashed and spilling outside my shoe. And as I described these parties in my post on ATC, I thought vodka and Monster would help me forget.
I say karma got me because the tennis day was the day I accidentally rang married professor’s daughter because I’d accidentally switched the last digit of the phone number as I’d shattered my flip-phone phone screen somehow and this was in the days when families all had practically the same phone number with the last digit all one digit different – and professor had been none too pleased at me.
But he’d moved away to his new professor job across the country by then…so we were no longer inflagranti.
I decided to spend the night pretending I was a flamingo and only putting weight on my good foot between dancing (for whatever reason that night as I really cannot dance). Years later, when dancing with my husband on my thirtieth birthday, my older sister drunkenly (and kindly) said, “I have no idea how Michael isn’t embarrassed to be seen with you as he’s so good and you dance like an old man dad dancing.” Pah! It’s very true.
I met this tall, dark, tanned, handsome stranger, but he actually knew who I was because we had mutual friends in my high school twin besties, Sarah and Anna, but I didn’t know that. And I found out he was my next-door neighbour and he was studying to become a firefighter.
On a side note, I may have met neighbour on the flamingo leg night or that time the hot Italian tennis player (one of the Gorgeous Tennis Player set) told me on Facebook that he picked me up and made out with me one night but I was a blackout-drunk kinda gal so either the Italian made out with my doppelganger on campus or I didn’t remember. His name isn’t on my kiss list so that’s a bit worrying if it really was me! My doppelganger apparently looked just like me. She also met lots of people who came up to me claiming they’d met me. Either I had amnesia or I really had a secret twin. But she clearly had more fun than me because the places they’d say I met them were places I’d never been. It’s a shame I never met her. If anyone from those early oughties Valdosta times knows anyone who was my doppelganger back then, hit me up! No joke – this happened to me all the time.
Firefighter neighbour seemed like a simple man, sweet, not too bright but that didn’t matter at the time. I was more into looks over like-mindedness.
I made sure we both got tested at the STD clinic before I’d have unprotected sex with him and I remember going with my friend (frenemy?) Heather (a la the Heathers) where when I asked for an AIDS test the old guy said to me, “Why do you want this test? AIDS is only for homosexuals and junkies.” I was too stunned to speak. I should have said, “Well, I’ve been fucking a lot of homosexual junkies lately so I wanted to check.” WTF? Or, like, “your beliefs are unequivocally biased and not true and you cannot think like that.” He made sure to stab through my veins so I came out with junkie bruises to feed the narrative, though, so I had blood leaks in the crook of both elbows. I have notoriously difficult veins to find, so it wouldn’t be the last time my arms lost the battle in a blood draw!
The firefighter neighbour had a big cock which he couldn’t seem to operate and made a show of buying magnum condoms as if it was a status symbol. I remember we had uncoordinated bad shower sex. I enjoyed spending the days I wasn’t at work reading in his hammock in his odd room maybe to get away from the housemate who hated me – everything was dark wood panelling with dark wood furniture – which was sort of like a big reception room in which he kept a hammock, random stuff, and a dresser, a closet, a bathroom, and a little bedroom (in which was just a mattress on the floor and no bed frame – thankfully with sheets and pillows and everything) on one side of his house, which was connected to a large living room, and his hot housemate’s room on the other side of the lounge.
Even though Heather (of one of the Heathers who went to the STD clinic with me) was sleeping with the hot, intelligent, dashing housemate who was a little Hugh Grant-y, I spent time wishing I was also sleeping with the housemate instead. But alas! I met him after I’d met firefighter neighbour via firefighter neighbour. We later had a text flirtation but never actually hooked up because he was a good friend (unlike that time I was a bad friend and hooked up with my gorgeous housemate Margaret’s handsome ex-boyfriend). Also, it’s probably a miracle I’ve A) never had an STD or B) never been pregnant.
During that late summer, the firefighter neighbour came with me to parties at my friends’ houses, to pool parties, to the bars, to trivia night, and to various events with me like an uninteresting accessory. He came running when I texted him to rescue me from a roach in the dining room. I could never stand to kill the giant disgusting creatures myself as I sort of felt sorry for them. He was also inept at killing bugs so that was a bust. He was, however, sweet and affectionate.
There was nothing inherently wrong with the firefighter neighbour but at first he’d seemed sexy and I was into it but then the sex was lacklustre and he lived in a semi-hippy state where he barely ever had food in and was constantly broke and any time we went out to eat it was my treat. And I was also a broke student between degrees. The lack of much positive besides the fact I found his hammock peaceful and he was pleasant meant that I just wanted to run away.
I found out later that he told his hot housemate that I had a big vagina (actually vulva) – not the tightness part, but the outside of it – I’d never once been paranoid about the look of my vagina until then. It reminded me of the time I was sixteen and my first short-lived high school boyfriend (aka First Kiss) asked me on MSN chat if I shaved down there and I never knew you had to shave down there (I was often very naive and under-informed).
By the time I had sex for the first time with HSS in college, I used to shave my “undercarriage” and some of the sides but not the front bit. The front bit came down like Jaffar’s beard in Aladdin at a curly point (yikes). I shaved that front bit off for the first time I slept with DJ and more permanently when I realised narcoleptic alcoholic Stella Adler Actor Dorian, preferred porn to me – I thought that would help – it didn't.
This was about the time Brittany moved in right before graduate school. One day, I just decided to remove all my stuff from neighbour’s house and just escape next door. I didn’t explain. I just fled.
I was at work sometime later and I got a call from my Russian housemate that the neighbour had come over insisting he return some things to me in person and he was standing in my room, waiting. He said something like, “Guess where I am?” And when he said, “in your room” I thought it was a joke.
I came home and Brittany and the Russian roommate were understandably creeped out. I arranged to meet him in my room the next day and he gave me some brooch and a ribbon as gifts that matched a polka-dotted navy skirt I wore sometimes, which I guess showed attention to detail and was kinda sweet but I was over it. I think he also used to steal my underwear from the dryer in the shack outside my house, which was creepy but I had a lot of it (so I could avoid doing laundry for a really long time – and then I’d move to bathing suit bottoms as in the ATC story).
We didn’t have our laundry room in our house because we also shared the laundry shack with the lovely couple on the end. Our single-family dwelling house, as I’ve mentioned before, was divided into the “girls” house on one side which was the main house and then a sort of “apartment” on one end that was an entirely self-sufficient studio – probably built from the old master bedroom. Half of the couple, Stephanie, was in our grad programme and one of the seven also chosen for a funded Master’s degree in English/Literature.
So our laundry room was a shack/shed attached to the couple’s back door and we (the girls’ house inhabitants) had to walk around the house or go through one of our housemate’s back doors to access it. A little while later when our tiny Greek landlady, Ms Georgiou, built a screened-in porch on the back of the house between our parts of the house, the washer-dryer was then held there, which was much nicer than the spider-infested shack-shed situation, which mostly stored random discarded junk, leftover shelving units from the Greek restaurant our landlady owned, and our bikes. I had a vintage-looking Schwinn Cruiser bike with backpedal brakes and zero gears which even though Georgia was flat was a pain in the arse to ride. Brittany, sensibly, had a proper bike with gears that was for the function and not the looks.
I’m sure the whole thing was done and dusted within a few weeks, if that. He was hot-ish but I didn’t feel the connection and I should have been brave enough to let him down kindly because when I’d walk to class in the months and weeks later he’d look longingly at me as he sat on his front porch – that I had to walk by every time I went to campus. Sarah and Anna would report things he’d say and how he’d ask after me. But by then he probably got a show of the string of other people I pursued. Poor guy! I hope he found the right connection eventually.
He was a FB ghost even back then so I have no clue what he’s doing. I’d see him around town back then from time to time but I’d only make pleasant small talk.
Next up, my hands-down best date ever with the CFO.
Don’t forget to check out the other twenty posts I’ve written, including the one on why I’m writing this newsletter in the first place.
Did you ever date someone you wanted to escape from or did you ever ghost anyone?
