#64 THE ANGRY PAINTER: MY BRUSH WITH PERCEIVED SOCIAL CLASS DISTINCTION
Remember the Notebook and that line about the boy being ‘trash’?
Before I start my tale of the angry painter, let me tell you, the day after my birthday (15 June), I found that Patrick Bateman, AKA the Florida State Uni film student, about which I wrote an entire saga (starting here and here – and involves a finger in an unmentionable place) replied to a comment I made on his YouTube video from twelve years before (i.e. the time we went on a few dates and hooked up).
In the YouTube video, I said the music made me feel uneasy and what did it mean? To which he replied, twelve years too late: “It was a film school assignment. Twelve years later I don't know what it means anymore!”
He clearly doesn’t recall that we ever went on a date or that I stayed at his apartment for a long weekend or that he stayed at mine for a long weekend…but it begs the question, why is he answering YouTube comments from twelve years prior? I was the only commenter on the video and it has 45 views total – in twelve years. Random!
Also, based on a video from 2020 (I didn’t go very far down the rabbit hole – don’t worry for my sanity too much), it looks like he and his girlfriend like to camp from their hatchback Toyota Matrix and were travelling around Washington State where he’d custom built some kind of wooden contraption for the back of the car to sleep on complete with storage drawers, a built-in cooler, and a table that pulls out (pretty cool?). So, I guess he sometimes lives the tiny home kind of life (but it also looks like he has a big house in suburbia somewhere) and I forgot his voice sounded a slight bit Kermity. Looks like he’s come a long way from the ‘getting his shirts hand-tailored’ sort of thing.
Old southern money
Without going into my usual long diatribes about what the South is like (the southern United States that is) for anyone who has ever seen Gone with the Wind and The Notebook and things along those lines you can maybe tell that the South has distinct social classes (like anywhere I suppose) and if you have seen this scene from The Notebook (film version) where the mother says that Noah is ‘trash’ and cannot be suitable for the rich, class-established Allie, then you can understand the whole vibe. Please ignore the fact that both of those references do not reflect any sort of current time period, but the fact that people in the South still wear ‘rebel flag’ t-shirts and the like, it’ll demonstrate just how slow to change the South is and how many people still long fo the ‘good old days’ of the antebellum. Here’s the scene:
All you need to know for this context is that the ‘angry painter’ came from that sort of Allie-like family.
In June 2011, the painter had been living in New York, living out his painting dreams, funded by his rich family, but he’d attended my university for a spell and he was one of those people who I’d heard of through people and/or seen Facebook photos of because he was one of those people who was a friend of several friends and acquaintances. He was handsome – in the way that there are so many incredibly handsome shorter men (don’t you find?) – but shorter and more slender than the type of person I’d go for in that he was probably around my height. (Shorter and more slender because of my insecurities about being ‘bigger than most women’ and nothing to do with male height per se, although I always loved a man over 6’.)
My gay bestie Ian would say I was a ‘collector’ of people. Back then, I’d take approximately 5,489 photos on a night out and eventually have a ‘mass posting’ on Facebook of all the parties/events/whatever I attended. I was sociable, flirty, and made friends easily. Here’s a pic of my amazing gay bestie, Ian. I’ve used this photo before but I think it’s a good one. (I often took weird, sweaty photos.)
It wasn’t like now where you get the iPhone pic uploaded on the actual night out – sometimes in real time. Back then, it was an effort that involved my Sony camera and memory stick downloads – my Sony Vaio laptop even had a memory stick slot (I wasn’t fancy enough back then to own a MacBook like I do now in lovely rose gold). Plus, re photos: there was none of this lovely filtering (so these past photos are all unfiltered). I’m now a fan of the subtle edit – not where your whole face is erased but subtle so that some of my face creases don’t seem so pronounced.
Here are recent snaps of my husband Michael and my Grammy (mama’s mum) on our holiday in Madeira (last week). I’m now officially middle-aged and not mid-twenties. Sigh! I mean I prefer my late thirties, but can I have the body and the face of 20s me who I thought was just the worst!
How we met(ish)
Back all the way in 2008, the painter added me on FB. I messaged to ask how we knew each other. He said we didn’t know each other but we had mutual friends and ‘it looked like you might be an interesting person.’ Like some kind of interviewer, I asked him to ‘tell me about yourself then.’ He summed up what he was doing (MFA candidate at the time, raised in Adel, Georgia, majored in physics, enjoyed Bukowski, Greek classics, Orwell, college football, etc). College (American) football is a random interest in that mix!
He seemed interesting (read: he seemed hot) and I recall he had a FB photo that made him look like a distinguished 1920s gentleman complete with a three-piece suit and a pipe. He had dark hair, dark eyes, and a handsome face. As I said, he was much shorter and more slender than the type of man I’d usually go for (again, my insecurities).
I seemed to get amnesia and didn’t reply and then randomly A WHOLE YEAR later I said, ‘How do we know each other again? You’re pretty hot.’ This time he said maybe we had a class together and I was hot too! He said he’d been in town for Thanksgiving. I said I could spare some hours to see him. That never happened. At least, I don’t recall if it did.
We’d have conversations on and off. Same old same old story with the 400 people I seemed to manage to correspond with (read the rest of my Substack chapters for deets).
In 2011, by which point we’d been messaging on occasion over those last couple of years, he asked which website address I liked better for his art website. I said I trusted .orgs more than .nets but then he said he wasn’t a charity so wasn’t sure. I’m not sure what he chose in the end as his website seems not to be defunct.
Going for a walk
One day in 2011, I was chatting to him whilst drunk. I used to drunk message people after a night out and he asked if he could ask me a question:
That night I came by and we walked around the block and ended up sitting on your couch, did you want me to stay longer?
I said, ‘Probably.’ He said he probably didn’t want to leave but he wasn’t sure why he hurried off. I said, ‘I guess life is life. Too bad.’ He said it sounded like drunken poetry. He asked me when I was coming to NY to visit. I don’t recall him coming for a walk with me or sitting on my sofa. Maybe we made out.
In a touch of irony at one point he said I’d been putting up a lot of pics on FB (not that he’d been looking) and he was enjoying perusing them. In June 2011, he said he’d be in Georgia. I said I no longer had a car because my ex-boyfriend crashed it (story here – this was another New York guy, Dorian, my least favourite ex-boyfriend, AKA the Stella Adler Academy actor).
Visiting Georgia, meeting in person
Somehow, he came out to one part of my birthday celebration that week, which was at a downtown bar in Valdosta, Georgia. I had a house party later in the week which included ‘party punch’ which is a drink introduced to me by one of Air Traffic Controller’s epic Halloween parties (he hosted along with the Hot International Tennis Player lot). It consists of litres of cheap, plastic-bottled alcohol (rum, gin, vodka, etc) poured into a cooler of ice along with fruit juice, Sprite, and ‘sorbet’ and it becomes a lethal (yet surprisingly tasty) concoction that gets you very drunk very fast and must be drunk from a red Solo Dixie cup (ladled in of course) that everyone sees in American movies that are a real thing if you go to uni in the States. (Sometimes you even get other colours and let’s not consider the environmental impact right now.)
Instead of me being the photographer for the night, some of my friends took photos of me very obviously flirting with him. Maybe there were too many photos and in a grand photo dump, I did at some point, but I tagged him in the photos on FB and he made some kind of super upset FB status about it and untagged a bunch of photos.
Photo evidence below and some other random pics of my outfits that week. I guess that’s what my drunk flirty face looked like – and my gorgeous gay bestie Ian again. The grey outfit is in front of my grad school house and not sure what the mailbox thing is about but I had Brittany take the photo (Why? Who knows why I did anything back then).
I think he came home with me the night before that night and slept over in my bed. We didn’t have sex but he sort of spooned me in a way I distinctly recall because he decided to play touchy-feely with my lower stomach and I remember thinking my belly was lying there like a deflated, saggy bread roll, all distended to the side in a way that was I felt was unattractive – because I had this notion that I always had to fit the male gaze despite always liking and eating a lot of food.
Even when I had upper abs, I’ve always had an inch or two of fat on my lower stomach (more now, of course, being middle-aged and still loving food). Before social media, I didn’t know that was the convenient spot for the womb and lots of women have this, but I thought it was the height of embarrassment and that all other women must have rock-hard abs and totally flat stomachs (thank you media) and they wouldn’t mind someone playing touchy-feely with that area but anyone who touched me there (when I wasn’t lying flat and thus disguising this area), would be completely put off by this random touching. Incidentally, my husband Michael also loves to touch this area and I still feel like a hissing cat when it happens. He assures me he thinks it’s ‘sexy’ and I still am taken back to this feeling of being a floppy dough ball.
I said in a message that based on the photos it seemed I was a ‘crazy flirt’ and hoped I hadn’t said or done anything inappropriate. We must have also had a text convo going but I didn’t feel the need to save evidence of this very short-lived flirtation. I was the type of person who went to blackout-level drunk back then.
I messaged him:
I saw your status update and I really didn't think it was a big deal. If you see my photos there are loads of photos of me with other people, too. I don't have my friends being all like "Oh my gosh are you sleeping with __?"
To be fair, I looked at the photos and I had posted pictures with at least eight other men but I stopped counting. And yes, I looked fairly flirty with them all and here’s another photo of me with two men, one (the taller one) which I did later sleep with who was my Bosnian neighbour across the street (one of the ‘International boys’) and the other who I would have happily slept with if he didn’t have a long-term committed girlfriend because he was hot and cool artist type (they’re still together and he’s a photographer and she does some kind of nature wildlife preserving and is one of those gorgeous natural blonde granola types) – and he also came from a rich southern family.
I continued:
I don't see how a few pictures make people think you partied hard for the entire trip and brushed them off. We talked for all of 10-15 minutes tops at my party and you came to my friend's party and that wasn't for all that long. Obviously, your friends take things way too seriously. I'm not even sure what to say. I think the whole thing was blown way out of proportion for sure. And I assume you've fallen out with me based on your lack of response. Terms like "distort reality" and "[His surname] gravitational pull at work again. The results can be embarassing" (which should have two "r"s) is offensive to me. I thought I was just a friendly person who happened to end up at the same bar with you. I apologize for taking up your time. No other friend has had such an adverse reaction to photo tagging before.
The spelling correction. LOLs. I was an arsehole and I was clearly very haughty and overly sensitive. I remember being out that night and one of his friends saying something disparaging about my group of friends (hence the title of the brush with perceived class difference).
He replied:
The reason for my lack of response is because I have a job. I've been extremely busy. I appreciated the initial apology, but that's obviously been retracted (if it was even sincere in the first place). I thought I explained things pretty well and the whole incident was over with in my mind. I don't put up a lot of photos. Even though that wasn't a lot for you, 17 new photos all of the sudden is way out of the ordinary for me. If they're all with you, people think something's up. Compared to my normal level of Facebook activity, it was a flood of photos out of nowhere. I didn't mean to make you feel bad, and I appreciated the fact that you wanted to tag my photos, but I had to let you know how I felt about so many being tagged.
And I guess is where the later feature of having to approve tags came in and/or not allowing things to be posted on your Timeline without approval. It was for ‘careless’ people like me! Doh!
A few would have been absolutely fine. I owed my friends an explanation because it was way out of the norm for me. It DID distort reality. I never said you did that intentionally, but it gave my friends the wrong impression. People who looked at my profile only saw me in 17 new, very flirty pictures with the same girl. Nobody I've ever met or heard of takes 15 photos in 15 minutes at a bar and posts them ALL on Facebook. I felt like it was perfectly fair to let you know how I felt about it. I wasn't trying to be rude. I think I handled things pretty gently. The reactions I got from people were embarrassing.
Oh, the drama of 17 photos!
Like I said, I appreciated the apology (that I now question) and I felt bad letting you know how it effected me.
If I’m being a total arsehole (which I am) – cough ‘affected.’
I felt bad about untagging myself. But the reality is that putting so many photos up of me without my permission and giving no thought whatsoever to how my friends (who don't know you) would react is pretty insensitive. Taking offense to my brother's harmless joke and the accurate phrase "distort reality" isn't reasonable. That kind of sensitivity stands in sharp contrast to the insensitivity I mentioned earlier. This should not have been a big deal. I'd put it behind me. I didn't think there was any sort of "falling out".
I was overly sensitive and never one to shy away from open dialogue but I really should have just not even bothered! It may also be important to note he was five years older than me and when you’re in your early 20s, five years makes a huge difference in terms of maturity and life experience (as I explained with the Hot Jewish Doctor and Captain Thor, who were also both older).
This is one of those AITA (am I the arsehole) situations. I mean how would I feel if someone tagged me in a bunch of photos? Back then, I wouldn’t have cared. But equally, I didn’t then account for people having different personalities from me.
I suppose if I’d come home for a short time and didn’t see a family member and then someone tagged me in pics where it looked like I was partying and people got all upset with me, maybe I’d be upset. And I guess I did have a similar level of perceived embarrassment with the Hot Turkish Guy – oh those dastardly southern Christian high-society judgy people! Their judgement sinks in like the tentacles of an octopus breaking open a clam.
But no, I didn’t stop there and just leave it. Again, like when the Doctor ended things with me and I came back with a rebuttal (here) – what was I thinking? People weren’t suddenly going to find me endearing when I kept digging the hole. I don’t know why I kept doing the worst kind of PR damage control for myself. Someone should have fired me!
I kept going (sigh):
I'm not retracting my apology. Your further explanation makes sense. I just take a lot of photos and the people I hang out with often are used to untagging the photos they don't like. I'm sorry I posted most of the photos – surprisingly, I didn't post them all even if it looks that way.
He said:
It's fine. As far as I'm concerned, it's over with. I feel bad that it was any issue at all. It's not as big a deal to me as it all seems; it was just something I had to address.
We had one more small message exchange in October of that year where I asked how he was and did he get into some art gallery show he wanted. He said he was well. I replied about teaching and he didn’t reply again, which was just as well. Whatever flirtation we’d had that had started in 2008 had long fizzled out with the FB photo drama.
He was a talented painter, by the way, and I think he had some level of success getting pieces featured in galleries in New York. It was the kind of art that seemed sometimes a little Hockney-esque and sometimes featured bleak landscapes and geometric objects instead. Very ‘modern’ and the kind you look at and frown at in very white, empty galleries filled with people who ‘get it’ in a way I never have.
What happened to the ‘angry painter’
The painter, who I suppose is now happy and not annoyed by some random semi-stranger (me), seems to have gotten married (to a beautiful woman he met in 2012), had two small daughters since (his wife, not him personally, obviously), and gotten a second Master’s degree (in ancient and modern Greek gleaned from stalking the comments where he had to live for two months in Greece) from Ralston College, which is a private liberal arts university in Savannah, Georgia. If his not-often-updated FB can be trusted, he lives in Savannah, Georgia now (which is a lovely place) and teaches art at a private Christian school (the whole situation makes a lot more sense given that context and maybe reminded me a little of the whole Dr Scandi Lit Prof saga). His wedding photos look very glam and I hope he’s happy and still painting from time to time.
Plus, he told me once he met Tom Wolfe on the streets of NY (they have a photo together that was a profile pic).
Coming up next, that time I briefly went on a couple of dates with the Chinese American Doctor and why I messed this whole thing up.
Don’t forget to check out the other sixty-three posts I’ve written, including the one on why I’m writing this newsletter/blog in the first place – and the odd “present day snippet” of what I’m up to lately.
So really, AITA? Let me know in the comments. Also, the stomach thing. Does that bother you, too? Just me?
Things I’ve read recently that resonated with me:
- gave some fashion advice re shoes about how Tevas and dresses are cool and I bought a pair and wore them on my Madeira holiday! Plus, she recently wrote this piece on a city to visit in France that’s a sort of best-kept secret: The French town that’s better than Paris.
- talked about how we preface comments to check our privilege with an interesting take on what that means for freedom of speech: The privilege caveat.
- talked about ‘what on earth is going on with my youngest?’ And I’m not a mother but my niece has been struggling with the death of my Father and it reminded me of that and it’s just so sad. I do think it’s brilliant though that parents are now more aware of their children’s emotions. I just shut down as a teen and wrote things in journals. I never told my parents (or anyone really) how I felt about things and didn’t learn to make sense of all my emotions and/or underlying motivations until later.
- again wrote a beautiful piece about fatherhood and all the men who influenced his life.
- ’s husband Eric Hedin wrote a tear-jerker of a piece about how he was still a father after losing the light that was their daughter. It’s so sad as she sounded like such a beautiful human.
All these posts around Father’s Day made me cry and smile thinking of my own father.
P.S. Here’s a pic of me in the Tevas. I mean I can’t account for my whole fashion(less) vibe otherwise but I have some stylish sandals!
P.P.S. My husband and I have been together just shy of eight years and every year we do an annual summer solstice walk (which apparently was the 20th instead of the 21st) so these pics are from yesterday evening. We are lucky to live in a beautiful part of West Yorkshire where we have countryside views from all of our windows (and this walk is just down the road). More pics on my Instagram. And I’m so lucky and thankful that I’m with a gem of a human who makes me laugh instead of question life. It’s not lost on me that I’m fortunate to have found a life partner who gives me peace. Also, strawberry moon tonight!
The drama of those night-out albums was truly something else! I think I was somehow involved in that too... I have vague memories of be being flirty drunk with some guy at uni while almost breaking up with my ex, and messaging a complete stranger because they tagged me in photos. Man, that was risky business back then! I can sort-of understand your guy there, especially if he was at a different place in life, work, social media usage.