The Boyfriend Auditions Part II: The Shyest Man in All the World

First let me preface this sordid tale of romantic misadventure by stating that although I always had a soft spot for boys since my hormones began messing with my head at around age four, I wasn’t adept at discerning when one was interested in me until waaay later. Puberty kicked things up a notch, yet still I puzzled over why truckers honked at me as I went about my business. Perhaps I was walking on the wrong side of the road, I mused.

In those days, that business included acts of petty shoplifting and mishandling the seduction of the neighbor boy for practice, by displaying my newly budded breasts in a maroon bodysuit tight as clingfilm. One day the neighbourhood cross-dresser stole that bodysuit off our clothesline and I never saw it again. I’m not kidding you, he used to steal my mom’s friend’s underwear and she never reported him because the Irish cops might have spread it around that she wore scanty panties of the variety cross-dressers took a shine to.

Anyway, in general I tended to take a shine to the closeted gay one, or the one who had a girlfriend he hadn’t mentioned, while some socially backward young chap burned for my bright white flesh from afar. With hindsight, such short-sightedness probably saved me a lot of wear and tear over the years.

It’s not your humongous nose, I swear…”

One such romantically challenged Cyrano was José, a serious, reserved physiotherapist from Galicia in Spain. We met at a house party at the dive where I lived on my year working abroad. It was the scummiest scumhole you’ve ever seen. The communal living area was down a few steps into a sunlight-free basement and it had an ancient old green sofa that looked like it was growing into the floor. In the kitchen area was a hideous old Belfast sink of the type lepers convene around to wash their carbuncles in.

So us residents threw a giant party because the place was already fucked and you could have propped up dead bodies in there and it would have have blended right in to the décor.

José was a serious, reserved type of guy who knew all the Celtic regions in the world, and what their coats of arms looked like. He told me while looking deeply into my eyes, that one day he intended to get married to a pure Celtic girl and make pure Celtic babies. Now back in the day, Celts were known artists, drunken pugilists, slayers of boar and storytellers, which is why the organised Roman forces totally whipped them and I’m not sure anyone should be worried that we will make any kind of Master Race some day. Without any inkling as to why a young man might say such a thing, I proudly declared myself to be a hundred percent pure Celt, apart from a little squirt of rapey Frenchman from around the time of the Norman invasions in Ireland, about a thousand years ago.

José approved of this ethnic intermingling and duly spent the night staring intently at me and shadowing my every move, all but checking my teeth and phoning his mother to announce: «Yes, I have found her. Call off the search, get the pigs ready for slaughter, she will be my Celtic bride ». Again, I had no clue he liked me at all. I, you see, liked the look of his friend Fred, a handsome homosexual.

Fred was one of the two buddies José brought with him – the other an extremely tall Asian guy with oddly upper-class sounding English. Fred rescuscitated José’s conversational flat-lining by complimenting my pants. I took this to mean he’d like to see what’s underneath them.

I had instantly written José off as a romantic interest: he had no banter. He told me he massaged people for a living, and I asked him did he give happy endings and he didn’t get it at all. I shook my head in wonderment. It’s okay if a guy is kind of innocent or whatever, but a girl who breezily says a dirty thing like that to a stranger will never be a match for a deadly serious quiet guy whose deadpan reactions are not hiding any spark of humor. Even if I have no intention of practicing breeding with such a person, what kind of monotone babies might his frogspawn and my eggs make? Turgid, responsible children of the stamp-collecting variety, that would grow into boring adults. Diligent voters. Scrupulous recycling-sorters. Genetic disappointments.

José seemed worried. The Asian guy was their driver and he wanted to leave since he couldn’t drink his way into enjoying our stale, gross party. A disgusting French pig of a guy, Loic, strummed a guitar in the corner and three skinny girls sat at his feet combatively vying for his attention, thrusting their sparrow-like chests out and flipping their hair. Other people were unconscious drunk, messily Frenching in a way that gave you the impression they were one tongue thrust away from vomiting in another human’s mouth. These days you can get the big bucks recording that shit and putting it on porn hub or one of those other execrable drainers of young men’s highly motile tadpoles.

Fred decided before they left that they would call me and we would all go out together some time. Female hindbrain says: “Hot diggity, he wants me!” No, Cakes, no….

Next weekend, the three guys picked me up and we started off in a bar next to a strip club, drinking cheap watery beers and chatting about nothing. José ran out of things to say after “how are you”. Meanwhile Fred and I chatted up a storm, but I sensed nothing beyond conversation would take place. We ended up in a club. At around 2AM, amidst bad techno music and choking dancefloor smoke, Fred and Asian guy melted away together (perhaps to the same dirty toilet cubicle?), ‘subtly’ leaving José and I dancing together. It was unbearably awkward, and he was hardly able to make eye contact with me never mind leading me to a dark corner and talking me into things I might later regret. Which is what one always hopes will happen.

After, they all dropped me home, and José finally made his big move – he turned to me in the backseat of the car and asked “So, do you have a boyfriend?” while Fred and that other guy awkwardly pretended not to be there. Writing the whole undertaking off at this stage, I responded glibly with a “Yeah, too many of them. Ha ha.” and sauntered off into the night without a backward glance.

I did not comprehend that it was José and not Fred who wanted to throw me the sausage. In fact, that’s not what he wanted to do. What I believe he wanted to do was fall in love with me. Take it slow. Invite me to the park and walk around holding my hand even though that’s an uncomfortable way to get around. Tell me private things about himself. Patiently teach me to speak his language and introduce me to his mother who would embrace me against her giant old lady uniboob.

Maybe after about three months he would feel it was appropriate to go beyond kissing and hand holding and I would see his naked wiry body, stark white like a sunbleached femur, for the first time in the blinding winter daylight in a freezing room with horrible curtains. He would be scrupulous about contraception but talk in detail about the children we would one day have. Yawn-o-rama.

It was only years later, sat in my office one day, he popped into my head while reminiscing and I suddenly thought – Oh! HE fancied me. Hm. I could be living in the Spanish sunshine eating figs I pick off a tree in our garden, running around after ten little sun-browned Celtic babies, dragging my prolapsed womb after me on a little sled, while my husband’s mother plans our takeover of the whole world.

If you’re interested, here’s Instalment 1 of my ‘men friends that never made the cut’ chronicles – they’re in no particular order.