Tales of a Baby Gay Part 1

Sensitive Content Disclaimer: This story contains references to mental health issues, as well as mature content and light cursing.

I couldn’t be sure what had caught my attention in Sonja’s online dating profile. Sonja had posted two photos instead of the recommended six, which was already suspicious. One was a blurry selfie taken at a subway station in Manhattan, Sonja’s red basketball shorts and gold cross necklace looking garish in the dim light; the other was a full-body bikini shot taken at a foreign beach, maybe Brazil or the Philippines. The bikini shot revealed a somewhat scrawny body with a C-Section scar and multiple risque tattoos including a lewd army pinup girl and the scripted word “Daddi.” Sonja’s profile revealed that her interests were reading, gaming, sweets, art, and women’s rights. Now, that was suspicious as hell. Honestly, it met all the criteria for a catfish profile. I swiped right anyway.

I checked my phone during my lunch break in Starbucks and felt my heart rate quicken when I saw that I had matched with Sonja, the Likely Catfish. I hadn’t matched with anyone in over six months, mostly because I kept deleting and then re-installing my dating apps, giving up after seeing twenty profiles in a row of girls who promised they could “outsmoke” me and were looking for someone to “match” their “energy.” Yuck. What energy? Their lame-ass, basic, matcha-drinking, gym-going, hustle-culture energy? No thanks. I was not interested in going on a drinking date with some skinny bitch who had lost money producing a short film and believed she was the only one who still listened to eighties rock bands. I had never thought of myself as a true member of Gen Z. I identified more as a middle-aged tenured professor who owned a farmhouse and dabbled in bird-watching and embroidery, though the reality was that I was a nineteen-year-old barista/college student who mostly scrolled the dark corners of Reddit in my spare time and had once gotten a UTI from using a piece of cinnamon-raisin Ezekiel bread as a pad because my credit card had maxed out and I had failed to buy sufficient sanitary products.

So when I matched with Sonja, who was thirty-three and appeared to be employed (phew!), I sent her a message immediately, inviting her to see a movie with me at the dine-in AMC theater in Staten Island. She did not live in Staten Island; in fact, she lived in the Bronx. I think I was secretly hoping to end communications with her before I ended up in a seriously dangerous situation--For example, in the basement of some unhinged couple who had recruited me to be the star of their amateur stuff film, or in an IHOP booth with some old dude with an NSFW SpongeBob t-shirt. But Sonja did respond, asking (quite reasonably) if we could compromise and meet outside, on a boardwalk with a view of Brooklyn Bridge. We agreed to meet there the following Friday, and she sent me the coordinates.

I changed my outfit several times on the morning of the date before settling on a Buffy the Vampire Slayer crop top and denim cutoff shorts with borscht-colored converse high-tops. I was of the age when I believed these things were important--What I wore on a first date, the outcome of the date, whether strangers thought my thick thighs were hot or frumpy-looking. I was convinced that I was infinitely smarter than most people, yet essentially inferior in a way that made me unable to participate in pedestrian activities like grabbing coffee with a group of friends or striking up casual conversations with my college classmates. Every month, I went to lower Manhattan to see a Botoxed psychiatrist named Dr. Love who was constantly squinting at me and sighing loudly, like I was her least favorite patient. Well, screw you too, Dr. Love. She had tried putting my on Prozac, Zoloft, and Desvenlafaxine, all of which made me sleepy but did not do anything for my undiagnosed OCD.

That Friday was beautiful in the way that spring days are when they are sandwiched between stretches of misty chill or clingy, headache-inducing heat. The sky was a bright blue, like a model globe in a middle-school science fair. Behind the bench where I was sitting, a queer couple was completing a bondage photo shoot. It was the kind of day that would be set to as soundtrack of “Don’t Stop Believing” and “Forever Young,” the kind of day that could make you convinced that you could win the lottery if you prayed hard enough to Jesus and promised to give a million of your earnings to help solve world hunger. I had brought a book with me, an Agatha Christie mystery. I pretended to read it while I waited for Sonja to arrive. She was an hour late. She explained, via the messaging feature in the app, that she had taken a detour to walk a dog so that she could spend more time with me on our date. Apparently, she was a dog-walker/home attendant/dance instructor/bartender. When she finally arrived, calling “Yo, Ava!” from a few feet away, my heart leaped. She was real. There she was, wearing a tank top and a snap-back that said “Not dressed for boys.” Her left brow was pierced. Why would someone who looked like that actually want to go on a date with me? I was born looking like a narc. A more uncool young person than me did not exist.

She gave me a hug, which I returned in the most cringe-worthy manner possible. I felt conscious of my age, my lack of experience.

“I’m a virgin!” I blurted.

Sonja laughed, a deep chuckle. I saw a flash of sunlight glint off of her adult braces, which had hot pink rubber bands.

“That’s cool,; that’s alright.” She paused and met my eyes, a sharp gaze that bled through me like a light saber. “You are at least eighteen, right?”

“Oh, yes, yes, of course.” I pulled out my Driver’s License, like she was a bouncer at a trendy club.

She examined the license, the peered at me carefully. “Jesus, you look like you’re twelve in this photo.”

My stomach fluttering, I let out a string of word-vomit. “Yeah, I have a baby face. Like my mom. She had me when she was twenty-one. Right here in Brooklyn. I was born on my due date.”

“How responsible.” Sonja took a sip of her energy drink and wrapped her arm around my waist, leading me down the boardwalk. “So, what made you swipe right on me?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess that you seemed different than most of the other people I usually date.”

Sonja raised her un-pierced eyebrow, and I felt impossibly jittery. “Different how?”

“Like... I guess most people are kind of like cardboard cutouts of real people. It’s like there is an alternate world where people are actually real, and then there is this world, which is like a hologram. Like eggs made from powder. But the other world has that cage-free kind of shit with spinach and mushrooms added in, and pesto made from home-grown basil. And we’ve got, like... powder eggs. Do you know what I mean?” I paused for breath.

Sonja was silent for a moment, and my stomach sank. “Wow, you’re so weird!” she said. “I like you! I knew I made the right choice when I saw that you were reading a book. What book is that?”

I handed her my secondhand copy of Death in the Clouds, and she showed me the book she was reading, a YA sapphire retelling of a Brothers Grimm fairy tail. As the conversation processed, I discovered that she was into the same kind of nerd shit as me: escape rooms, vintage kids’ shows like Goosebumps, and painting terrible portraits in cheap, bold acrylics.

We made our way to a romance bookstore with books that mostly featured bodacious white women on the covers. Sonja went to the bathroom while I mindlessly browsed, my mind roiling. I picked a book at random, went up to the counter, then changed my mind and put it back on the display shelf. I couldn’t think.

After Sonja emerged from the bathroom, we exited the shop together and wandered around on the sunny side of the street.

“So, one thing I can’t deal with is being cheated on,” said Sonja. “And being lied to. I just want to tell you that upfront.”

I laughed. “How could I possibly cheat on you? This is our first date!” I was secretly hoping she would contradict me, make me feel special. She did.

“If we have a second date scheduled after today, you can’t date other people,” she said. I leaned into her shoulder. I liked a woman who could take charge. I couldn’t differentiate between hot, TV-type alpha lesbianism and fire-engine-red flags. I felt like I could say anything, do anything. Jump off a building and remain airborne.

“Has anyone ever cheated on you before?” I asked. “I can’t picture anyone cheating on you.”

“Yes, I was once dating this one girl who was Indian. Her parents were really traditional. She had a fiancé who was a doctor, but she was dating me without telling anyone about it. I told her she couldn’t have sex with him if she was dating me. But one night he kept asking her, and she finally gave in and did it. Then she felt so guilty and she told me. So I broke up with her.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That really sucks.”

It only occurred to me years later that, if anything, this girl’s fiancé was the wronged party in this scenario. Like many lesbians, I went through a long man-hating stage where I assumed that women held the moral high ground in all situations just by virtue of their historical status as the oppressed sex.

We wandered into another bookstore and talked for hours. She told me about her four kids, whom she had apparently had from four different men if I was judging by the photos she showed me. The oldest was eighteen, only one year younger than me. The youngest was five and shared Sonja’s sapphire eyes and cropped, sunlight-colored hair. She also told me in that conversation that she had always known she was a lesbian, which had me confused. But I kept my mouth shut. I did not want to seem more naive than I already did. As the day entered its lazy, pre-dusk hours, I said, “Lets have sex.” Maybe it was an attempt to salvage something that I felt was slipping through my fingers like the white beach sand in Sonja’s bikini photo.

“Okay,” said Sonja. Easy as that. Anti-depressants had killed my sex drive, and I didn’t actually feel like having sex, but I thought that I did, which at that time felt like the same thing. We went to a nearby Wendy’s. There was a bathroom on the second floor, with a large corner stall reserved for the disabled. We took that one, and I pressed my back against the cold tile of the wall. I was keenly aware of the feel of my belly straining against the zipper of my shorts like an ill-contained loaf of baking bread in a pan. Sonja leaned in. Her breath smelled sharp, like black coffee. She slipped out of her tank top, and I saw that she was wearing no bra underneath. Her breasts were small, like the ‘before’ image of two tangerines in that old subway ad for breast augmentation. I had grapefruits, but I didn’t want to show them to Sonja. The room was quiet, save for the sound of Sonja unzipping my shorts. She slipped her hand into the waistband of my Hello Kitty underpants. She was wearing boxers under her shorts. The boxers had little pineapples on them. I felt a wave of nausea and dry-heaved into the toilet.

“You good?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, wiping spittle from my mouth.

“Are you sure you want to continue?” Sonja asked. “You look like you don’t want to do this.”

“No, I do! I do. Sorry. I don’t know why that happened to me. I just wasn’t feeling well for a second. It’s probably the soda I had earlier,” I lied.

“Okay.” Sonja grabbed my hand, guiding it towards her. I saw the C-section scar again, the one I had noticed in the online photo. Sonja’s breath was hot, and the peach fuzz on her arms stood up from the aggressive air conditioning in the room. I noticed a wad of gray toilet paper peaking out behind the toilet. The grimy floor seemed to blur and spin. I was having a psychosomatic response to the situation, something I had never experienced this acutely in the past.

“Stop, stop!” I said. “It’s too much! I can’t do this. I can’t do this, I’m sorry.”

Sonja left the stall without a word, and I heard the lock slide into place in the next stall. I slid down to the floor, my sports bra in my hand. How had things gone so far off the rails? And who would I talk to about this? Dr. Love? I snorted at the thought.

“Are you finishing yourself off in the other stall?” I called.

She didn’t respond. I felt a wetness on my cheeks as a few solitary tears cascaded down.

I left the stall and stood in front of the dirty mirror, hyperventilating. I heard a mother arguing with her child on the other side of the bathroom door. Other people’s problems seemed so unimportant compared with the enormity of my own loser-ship. Sonja exited the stall, frowning.

“You got me all worked up. You were the one who asked to come here,” she said.

“I know. I’m sorry.” I swiped at my face, smearing tears and snot.

“This isn’t what I signed up for,” said Sonja. She quickly washed her hands and then held open the door for me.

“Please just stay here with me for a second,” I said. “Please. Maybe we can start over. Maybe we can try again. This isn’t me.”

Sonja nodded at the hallway outside the door. “Let’s go.”

“Please,” I whispered. “Don’t leave me.”

“I’m not leaving you.” Sonja sighed, like I was a toddler throwing a tantrum in the supermarket because I couldn’t buy every sugary kids’ cereal at eye level with my stroller. I stood there for another beat and then followed her downstairs and out into the sun, which momentarily blinded me.

“I have to get home,” said Sonja. She walked me down the block to the closest train stop.

“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say. I felt the force of a thousand shadows scoop my belly out from the inside, the depth of my irrelevance revealed in the golden glow of the late afternoon.

“When I’m with someone, I want to feel like I’m wanted,” said Sonja.

“I did want to do this!” I insisted. But even to me, my argument sounded both weak and abrasive, like the twangy strum of a broken ukulele.

Sonja shook her head.

“Will I ever see you again?” I asked. Even at this point, I deluded myself into hoping I had not screwed it up.

“Maybe when you’re older.” Young and trusting as I was, I believed her.

“You don’t even know what you like,” continued Sonja. “Do you know if you even like women?”

“Well, I definitely don’t like men.”

“Some people don’t like anybody. Have you ever considered that?” She sounded angry, and I felt ashamed.

We had arrived inside the subway station at this point. I waved goodbye and stepped into the crowded train. When I looked back, she was already gone.

I saw her online dating profile again five years later, after having broken up with my girlfriend of six months. She had dyed her hair a sandy brown color, and this time she had uploaded the recommended six pictures, all recent, mostly selfies.

“Looking for my forever,” she had written in the bio. “Yes, I have kids.”

I had dated seven other people by this point. I was older, more knowledgeable and experienced. The kind of women who maybe would have made it past the first date with a women like Sonja. The kind of women who could spot red flags like a charging bull.

I swiped left.