Originally posted: November 20, 2001

Good evening everyone, and welcome to another edition of “Dates From Hell!” I’m Keith, always your host, and while this Date From Hell doesn’t end when I dropped her off at the end of the night, our panel of judges has allowed us to call this a “Date From Hell.” Let’s jump right in to the tale, shall we?

I’ve said somewhere along the way that I do have a membership to JDate, which is an online dating service for Jewish singles. I figured that since my friends weren’t doing such a stellar job setting me up, I might as well let an impartial computer do some work as well. So one night, I got an e-mail from one of the female members who sounded fairly interesting in her essays, we corresponded back and forth for a week or so before we finally agreed it might be a decent idea to see what we’re both like in person.

It was a cold night in January when this Date From Hell took place. We met at a restaurant centrally located to both our residences, though I didn’t learn until we met up that night that she didn’t have a car and conned a friend of hers into driving her over to the restaurant—by saying how hard it was to find a ride and that she should’ve arranged a lift beforehand, oopsies! As if the fact that she hadn’t thought to arrange transport and ended up inconveniencing someone at the last minute rather than take a cab wasn’t bad enough, things started off on a decidedly low point when she asked me right off the bat if my parents were divorced because she was also looking to set up her mother, and wouldn’t it be fun for us to go out on a double-date: me and my dad with her and her mom. (My parents just celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary this past August. They are still very much in love with each other.)

Oh, but that’s just the beginning! Things went downhill from there as, over dinner, she began to tell me about her prior boyfriends, most of whom had been abusive in various ways. Might I remind you that this was a first date and that people don’t usually talk about abuse on the first date? I also heard of her parents’ messy divorce, her father’s alcoholism, her repressed memories that are starting to surface (some of which involved more abuse) and about a thousand other details about her life—mostly because I couldn’t get in a word edgewise, so I just kind of sat there, eating and soaking in all this lunacy and thinking Chuck Woolery was hiding somewhere in the building watching me on closed-circuit TV.

Chuck didn’t show himself, so when dinner was mercifully over, no limo was waiting to take her home and she hadn’t arranged a ride—oopsies! I can’t even remember how, but she somehow conned me into a ride home because it was cold outside, but the ride was worse than dinner. During the 15 minute ride back to her place, she debated out loud about whether or not to tell me her secret, then decided to tell me. She had been raped a few years ago by a family friend, so now she carries “defense” with her at all times. “Defense” turned out to be the hunting knife with the five-inch-long blade that she pulled out of her purse to show me. It’s a testament to my nerves that I didn’t drive off the side of the road when she unsheathed that big mammajamma.

We made it back to her apartment building in one piece. Thank God. Except she didn’t get the hint when I unlocked the doors to the car that it was her time to get out and go back to her apartment. She stayed in the car for another 20 minutes, yammering on and on and on… I tried just about every trick I had in the book—yawning, surreptitiously adjusting the heat down so it would get cold in the car, playing with the radio, but none of it worked. I finally had to flat out say something along the lines of “Well, I’ve got work in the morning, I should be getting home.” When she heard this, she started pouting and invited me up to her apartment—she’d “keep me awake.” I wanted none of her sleep remedies, so I stood firm and said I should probably get home.

Somewhere along the way, I had managed to say something about the fact that I didn’t kiss on the first date (not true, though I used the excuse because I didn’t want to kiss her) so before leaving, she said, “I know you don’t kiss on the first date, but I do and I think you’re looking just so kissable.” She aimed right at my lips, I was quickly able to turn my head in time and she nailed me on the cheek with a rather sloppy smooch. The air reeked with her disappointment as I said, “Well, thanks… good night.” She finally got out of the car, and I took off like a bat out of Hell.

Ah, dear readers, it doesn’t end there! The next day, I got an e-mail from her saying that she had a very nice time and she really liked me, but she was very put out by the fact that I didn’t take her up on her invitation to come upstairs. Would I like to come over tonight? I politely wrote back (after a few hours’ delay to give me some breathing room) that I had plans to go to dinner and then shoot some pool with a friend, we hadn’t seen each other in a while and I’d had these plans for a while (which was the truth). She wrote back much later that night another disappointment-laced e-mail which I received in the morning, containing another invitation to her place for the following night. Sorry, I wrote back, that was Friday night and I had plans to go out into the city with friends (not entirely true, the plans were tentative but there were definitely options for me rather than sitting at home writing her e-mails saying I wasn’t coming over). She wasn’t getting the hint though—she wrote another e-mail telling me that I was offending her Southern hospitality (she grew up in Florida) and that she’d be very upset if I didn’t come over to her place sometime over the weekend.

At this point, I’d had enough. I’d told one or two of my friends about this girl and forwarded them the e-mails I’d received, they were laughing so hard at my continued misfortune in the dating world that they suggested I let them respond to this final missive from her. After all that, I probably should’ve, but I didn’t. I wrote back a final note, saying that it was very nice to have met her, but I just didn’t think things would work out between us. I wished her luck in her quest for her Man (she had made references to her quest several times during the course of our dinner, and I swore I could hear the “m” in “man” capitalized when she said it) but said that I didn’t think I was the one for her.

You’d think that would be the end of it, wouldn’t you? You’d think that in a sane universe, that would’ve been all. But, of course, this isn’t a sane universe and she was decidedly insane. It was rather late in the evening one night during the following week when I was bored and logged onto JDate. They have a chat room, so I figured I’d pop in and check to see if there was anyone interesting talking online. Guess who was there? Guess who, as soon as she saw that I had logged into the chat room, began telling everyone what a bastard I was because I had “stood her up” and then began publicly bashing me? Yes, it was Knife Girl! At this point, there was nothing else I could do but ignore her.

She finally went away. But months later, I was reading the Improper Bostonian, a bi-weekly magazine that comes out for hip Bostonites, and got to their section in the back where people can place anonymous messages—most of which consist of “after a year, I’m still in love with you” or “you fucking bastard, I can’t believe I slept with you” or “I saw you on the T, you were wearing this and I caught your eye and wished I’d gotten your number.” One of the messages caught my eye. It was pretty vehement, talking to a girl and saying how psycho she was, how she could go live with her single freakish Mom down South, how she needed serious therapy to get over her abuse issues and how this guy wished she’d just get out of his life already. To this day, I’m thoroughly convinced that he had also met my Date From Hell.