My Unfailing Ability To Attract Undesirables

Let's hope the person serving as the inspiration for this story never reads this. I disavow any and all responsibility for her actions if she happens to see it.

So I went to a party on Friday night. It was my friend Steve's birthday party. His birthday had actually been Tuesday of that week. Anyway, it was a fairly typical college house party. Keg in the basement, beer-pong, people trying to 'hook-up', and I actually saw some people playing Jenga. I attended the party with Matt and Thom.

At a previous party attended by some of the same people, a girl had spent quite a bit of time talking to me, seemingly whether I liked it or not. She seems like a nice enough person, but she is loud, obnoxious, and has been pretty wasted every time I've seen her, with only one exception. I have absolutely zero attraction to this girl. If I had to compare her to an actress, I would say Cameron Diaz comes the closest. Same body type and roughly the same facial structure. Unfortunately for the girl, I loathe Cameron Diaz and have an extremely difficult time watching any movie in which she appears.

Perhaps due to the amount of alcohol this girl had consumed, she found herself utterly unable to correctly grasp the proper pronunciation of my name; she stumbled through variations of Wylet, Wiley, et cetera. This was cause for great amusement among the people who knew both of us. Some reports from the previous party had attributed the girl's crying at the end of the night to her inability to obtain my phone number. Luckily, she was able to gain consolation by sleeping with someone else.

At this party, I thought things would be different, since I had done my best to convey my lack of feelings for her. Again, alcohol seemed to play a role in making sure things would go very similarly to the way they went before. By the midpoint of the party, she had unilaterally decided to write down our names as a team for beer-pong. Since she had forced me into playing the same game against her at the last party, I had an idea of her skill-level, which is to say that I knew she sucked. In the game we played against each other, she failed to make one cup. When our turn came to play this time, she was nowhere to be found. Thom filled in for her and I made my first two shots. Fortune was not on my side for long, however, as she stumbled down the basement steps to join the game just as Thom was about to take a turn. Somewhat predictably, she failed to make a single shot, and I made only one more. Apparently, the fact that she wasn't going to make any shots dawned on her and she dragged Thom back in to the game. Despite a valiant effort from Thom to tie the game, we lost in overtime.

Sensing the situation and wanting to help me out, Matt and Thom had engaged the girl in conversation earlier. She failed to remember Matt even though she had spent about 90 minutes playing cards with him at the previous party at the same house. Thom let her know that his name was "Tobey - like Tobey Maguire. In fact, you should just call me Spider-Man." Well, Matt and Spidey's first tactic was to tell her that I was gay. When this 'revelation' failed to make an impact, they changed strategy and used a new favorite: they told her that I abused women with whom I had relationships. When I was informed of these efforts, I tried to act the part around her for the rest of the night. However, it was somewhat difficult to act both effeminate and threatening simultaneously, and I feared the ruse was not being accepted.

A side note here...while Matt and Thom were trying to save me from Cameron Diaz, I was becoming involved in a conversation near the keg. A guy had seen me approach and said, "Medieval History?" I replied in the affirmative and we bantered back and forth with anecdotes about the class and the professor. I, of course, held the advantage because I had held a certain story in reserve. When I told him about the woman I knew in the class, he exclaimed,
"the ADULT LEARNER?!"
I nodded.
He said, "I fuckin' HATE her! She laughs at all of his stupid jokes, and she's always raising her hand and asking stupid questions."
I replied that I felt sure the entire class would eventually feel the same way. Just give it time.

As the night wore on, it became more and more obvious that my supposed homosexuality and tendencies toward domestic abuse were not enough to dissuade the girl from throwing herself at me. Of course, I was not the only target of the night. Matt and Thom later informed me that she had been seen making out with another random guy on the couch while I was downstairs. When she saw them, she looked mortified, caught 'red-handed' as the cliche goes.

And yet, even this was not enough.

Matt and 'Tobey' left to go to Sunny's and I stayed at the party, which was in retrospect a bad idea. Soon I was led by the hand into the now-vacated basement (the keg had been "kicked" about twenty minutes before and revelers now had to rely on the "Jungle Juice" concoction being served out of a large Rubbermaid storage container. I opted for some beer that had been hidden in the back of the refrigerator). 'Cameron' - as I shall now refer to the girl - was taking our solitude as an opportunity to express that she was "interested." I did my best to stifle my surprise. She then told me that she was going to give me her number. Suddenly, I remembered that I had to go upstairs. Right then. Somehow Cameron saw through her drunken haze and must have realized that I was trying to escape. As I was plotting my exit while in the bathroom, Cameron had been climbing the two flights of stairs to position herself directly in front of me so that she could thrust a quarter-sheet of notebook paper into my hand with a giggle. As I descended the stairs to open the front door and imbibe the cold night air, I looked down at the paper. It was covered on both sides with two variations of email addresses (Hotmail and her Fredonia account), two AOL Instant Messenger screen names, her phone number (once on each side), and her name.

Two days later, I heard that she had woken up in a car parked in a 24-hour lot with no memory of how she got there. This turned out to be an unfounded rumor. Sadly, it seemed eminently plausible when I heard it. The truth of the matter turned out to be that she had gone home with the guy with whom she had been making out earlier in the night.

This is merely one incident in a fairly well-established pattern in my life - my ability to consistently attract only women to whom I am not attracted. On rare occasions, this pattern has been broken. Most notably, this occurred when Destini approached me for the first time, in the cafeteria at JCC, where I had been sitting with Abe. Her mysterious comment to me and her rapid exit from the building led me to follow her out the door and two days later we were a couple. However, that kind of incident has unquestionably been the ultra-rare exception and not the rule.

I hope you enjoyed this story. If you haven't noticed, this blog has many functions, but a primary service it provides is the opportunity for my friends to take pleasure in the various misadventures to which I am subjected throughout my life.