about two years ago now, in the midst of a swathe of anticlimactic non-romantic encounters (ordeals?), i went on a couple of dates with this one guy. the first did not warrant the second; the little that i did contribute to the conversation went fairly unheeded, and i have a strong suspicion that his narcisisstic soliloquoy would have played out the same with or without my input.
however; it was at a point where i was hungry enough for dick that i agreed to a second date - ‘come over and we’ll watch a movie.’ i guess i had overestimated my capacity to put up with bullshit for the promise of sex; whatever movie would be fine, we wouldn’t be watching it for long, right? this turned out to be an incorrect assumption. he turns up on my doorstep with a copy of the spongebob squarepants movie.
i’m not a fan of spongebob squarepants. the little i had seen of it i had summarily dismissed, unimpressed with its own precocious obsession with its own wackiness. it was television for people that pose with smiles with teeth apart. message t-shirts and metal lunchboxes and IQ’s under 80. it sits as the centrepoint of foghorn tv, didyageddit? geddit? geddit? blasting and boring and boiling blood.
but i’m not so pompous and opinionated (or maybe just above hypocrisy) that i didn’t shut up because i might get laid. ‘great’, i’m sure i managed to smile (close-toothed), ‘haven’t really seen it.’
he didn’t stop at putting the dvd on, however; no, better. he proceeded to narrate the movie for me. to avert the, i’m sure considerable, danger that i might not follow the plot and the jokes and miss out on the champagne comedy therein (and i regret not being able to have that chance), he was kind enough to explain everything that was happening in the film - moments before it happened. every insipid sight gag. every blindingly obvious plot point. in some cases entire verbatim lines of dialogue. everything in a movie that i was not enjoying, twice.
whether it was the force of my hatred bursting out all sissy spacek, or just a brutally overworked dvd player, the disc started to skip. fantastic. heavensent. an excuse to stop. how about we just watch one episode of the season 1 or 2 discs that he’d also brought? (seriously. seriously.) i proposed what could be a twenty minute purgatorial shortcut out of this bonerkiller. no. he was resolute. i HAD to watch this movie. and besides, he reasoned - it didn’t matter too much if the dvd skipped and stalled a bit - he was here to explain everything to me.
eventually the movie skipped to a halt and i shot out of that room as quickly as i could, leading him upstairs to where my housemates had gathered with a kubrickian elevator’s worth of red wine. away from that dark tv room, i would attempt to lose him in the tiny crowd and haze of cigarette smoke on our balcony. good plan, right? at least surrounding him with my friends meant that he wasn’t fully focussed on me. and who knew, maybe drinking a bit might help us get along.
his focus did come off me, but it went pretty completely on to emptying his glass, and within an hour or so he was beyond drunk, taking what had begun as a harmless if dead-ended courtship into near farce. the night ended with me dragging him in from where he had run into the cool autumn night air to vomit in our garden in his underpants.
we did not have sex, or come anywhere near it. the next morning, he would not leave until i invented a family breakfast - to which he insisted on driving me, leaving me walking around the cbd at ten am, three hours early and a twenty minute bus-ride from where i had arranged to meet my father. weeks and weeks of ignored phone calls followed, and the text messages, to which i also made no reply, betrayed that he had no conception of why i wouldn’t want a rematch.
hungry as i was, spongebob squarepants will forever be my ravaged tara.
