The Friend Request
Near Detroit Days 1, 2, 3, and 4
The train from Toronto the U.S. border passes Lake Ontario. From your window, you can frequently see the lip of the shore, curving around the variegated blue water in an endless smile. Sometimes it’s empty, sometimes it’s speckled with people bathing, fishing, looking out towards the horizon. A lake that is so big you can’t see the opposite shore is almost more frightening than the ocean. We have some idea of the ocean’s size—too giant to conceive—but for a lake to be so large, yet small enough to fit into the landscape…it makes the world feel incomprehensibly enormous.
There is a cheap bus that will take you the last leg from Canada to the states. You must get off at the edge of the tunnel to present your passport, then re-board. Everyone on it but me was going to see some sort of sports event in Detroit. I waited, last in line with my bags, as the border agent asked two men ahead of me in their fan jerseys who their favorite super hero was. They both said Spider-Man. When it was my turn, the agent was not in the least interested in who my favorite super hero was, just how much money I was carrying and whether or not I had any secret fruit.
My dad picked me up on a street corner, where I huddled in the small shadow of a lamp pole. As we drove further and further outside the city environs, I wondered how exactly I would go on a date while staying at my father’s house. Both my parents have pretty tolerant views of whatever nonsense I get up to. Though they’ve been divorced for a long time and probably haven’t spoken in years, my mom and my dad have an attitude of “well, we’ve all lived” that’s so similar, it’s like they came up with it together. Co-parenting through generational attitude.
Still: my father and his wife live in a small and quiet town. Every house is filled with married couples, retirees, grandchildren. I wondered if I should try to arrange a night in the city. My dad offered to drive me back and forth to a date, but that sounded so awkward. Like, what if I wanted to get laid?
Not sure how to proceed, I fell easily into the uneventful rhythms of life in the suburbs. They’d bought their house two or three years ago from a Scottish woman in her nineties, who had lived there for six decades. She left behind much of the furnishings, glassware, and bric-a-brac of her era, making parts of it feel suspended in time. The basement has a finished bar, the tiled floor is inlaid with a shuffleboard set. The facade is red brick, with white tin awnings that make the house resemble a cawing parrot. My dad and his wife collect clown art, and other strange objects that strike a delicate balance between kitsch and terror. My first night sleeping on the downstairs futon I considered leaving the light on, thinking about the collection of mismatched dolls on a nearby shelf. Eventually sanity and half a Xanax won, and I conked out.
When I left the city, it was with a horror of stasis. All I wanted was to move, move, move, but sitting in my dad’s yard on a bright Michigan morning, the urge to settle down somewhere was strong. The backyards there connect to grassy alleyways, encouraging a proliferation of wildlife. Cardinals hop in the branches, butterflies float from flower to flower—there was a hawk that would occasionally shoot past the sun room, chasing prey. Even their perpetually ill-tempered little dog would relax in the yard, content to snap at flies and bake in the sun like a furry ham.
Meanwhile, I swiped on Tinder, trying to find someone I could lure out for a drink within biking distance.
“You’re just going to end up with some downriver Trump supporter,” groaned my dad, so I widened my search parameters. Maybe they’d come to me.
One of the biggest instigators of arguments between my parents that I remembered from childhood was the cleanliness of the house. My mom hated to clean, my dad loved it, or at least had a compulsion to do it at all times. There is something about other people starting to do chores that will still set my teeth on edge. The sound of a vacuum cleaner is a precursor to an argument, the suggestion of doing laundry is an existential crisis. But in his newish home, my dad’s cleaning habits had turned him into a perfect house husband, grooming, polishing, straightening, cooking, building a cozy nest for his wife to come home to after a long day at her important job. I worked from the living room as he fluttered around me, murmuring to the dog.
When I’d finally finish for the day, we’d go on bike rides across the train tracks, down to the town’s riverbank park together. Main street was blocked off for an upcoming festival that they kept reassuring me was “very New York.” I suspect my dad has a reputation for comparing things to New York amongst his neighbors, after one of them teased him gently for showing off his “New York bike lock.” This is something I do, too, and yes, I’m embarrassed by myself.
Finally, a match came through. A tall, lanky man in thick-rimmed glasses, who ended up working for the same company as my dad’s wife. She didn’t recognize him, but they both became surprisingly invested in my outing. She offered to ask around about him, which I refused. My dad suggested a nearby pub, called Brooklyn Bar (of course) and my date agreed to meet me there the next day after work. That afternoon, he messaged to say he was caught in traffic, so I kept working on my computer.
“Okayyyy, you’re going to be late! Let’s go!” my dad yelled from the living room, trying to rush me out.
Inside the bar, my date and I were the only people under 50 and regarded with some suspicion. It was exactly the kind of bar a dad would recommend, but the beer was very cheap. My date was much more attractive in person than he was in photos, with broad shoulders and thick curly hair. That happens sometimes and it’s always nice. He lived in a neighborhood in Detroit that had fit in my Tinder settings, about a 20 minute or so drive away. We talked about all the boring stuff, jobs, origin, blah blah, until finally I asked him what dating in Detroit was like. His face got serious.
“I have something to tell you that I usually admit before I meet people, but I know you’re only here for a short time,” he began, and I wondered if I was about to find out he likes choking or is a convicted sexual offender. It turned out he was just in an open relationship. Phew! Honestly, I would ordinarily be pissed if someone sprung that on me, but the circumstances did make it palatable. I asked why he didn’t have that in his profile.
“I wasn’t getting any matches!” he said, but then admitted a lot of people unmatch after he tells them anyway. What a wonderful way to waste everyone’s time.
“Well, it’s true that there are almost a comically large number of people in open relationships on Tinder,” I said. “To the point where it seems like there are actually no truly single people left.”
“Really?!” he asked in disbelief.
“Yes. The ‘ethically non-monogamous.’ I like to say that I’m an evil slut. But that just excites them.”
He seemed astounded by this intel, so I asked how he and his girlfriend had opened their relationship. What was the process. He said they’d read a book, Opening Up by Tristan Taormino. This book is famous, but reading a book doesn’t exactly plug you into the polyamory scene. And my date and his GF weren’t necessarily into polyamory—they had a lot of rules.
At first, he said they’d agreed to never go out with someone more than three times, but had quickly thrown that out the window. It’s too hard to find people with whom you share a mutual attraction. Chemistry is sadly much rarer than hotness. If you do find a person, throwing them away after three dates is ludicrous. A lot of people opening up their relationships probably imagine that sex is raining down on everyone else and they just have to set down their umbrellas, but it’s not like that at all. Now they’re more flexible about the duration of outside arrangements.
We finished our second beer and he suggested we find another bar. In the parking lot he threw out some suggestions about where we could go.
“What if we buy beers and then drink them in the car and make out?” I suggested.
“Music to my ears,” he said. He then asked me if I had any rules.
“About sex?”
He nodded. I told him I don’t really have rules, and he said his girlfriend and he do—you can’t take your underwear off on the first date. I doubted it would come up, because I definitely wasn’t bringing him home.
We each bought a can of beer around the corner from Brooklyn Bar and then I very bravely/stupidly got into the car of a practical stranger. This is probably necessary and normal for a lot of daters out there, but it’s not something I often have the opportunity to do in the city. We take trains or taxis or Lyfts, we don’t get into our date’s vehicles before we know their last names. But he seemed like a non-murderer.
He drove us back down to the park where I’d been the day before with my dad and we drank and talked and kissed. Finally we got out of the car, and went to sit on a bench looking out over the river. It was windy, but warm, and he held me with the intimate ease of someone who has been in a comfortable relationship for a long time. They know how to hug.
Tipsy and turned on, I imagined for a second that I was sitting with my actual partner, watching the light fading into early evening over the rushing water. I wasn’t picturing him or anyone in particular; I was picturing love and shared history. The simple pleasures of connection and company on a beautiful day. Eventually, we had to pee. After using the park facilities, he drove me back towards my bike, though we kept pulling over to make out on quiet, mostly empty streets.
I asked if there was anything in the rules about when I could take my underwear off and we drove around the block one more time.
When I got home, I drunkenly ate pasta in the yard and gave my dad and his wife an edited run down of my date. We talked about open relationships and how they worked. They both seemed fascinated, but said it was something they could never do. My dad was also shocked I’d gotten into the car.
“You rolled the dice and won,” he said.
A day later, I was throwing my things together to move on in the morning. My dad had been steadily drinking since it was five o’clock somewhere, and his wife had already gone to bed. I came across my recorder, packed in an ambitious moment of thinking it was finally time to start that dang podcast! But I’d been too busy traveling, working, dating, and also a little too shy to ask anyone to speak with me on the record. Most of what people share evaporates when the night is through.
I asked my dad if he’d let me interview him in case I ever do painfully birth my own show. He agreed, and I turned it on. At first we talked about love, about the ways he wasn’t ready to love when he knew my mom. I asked how it was different from his wife, and if he knew she was the one right away.
“No, actually,” he said. “We’d been dating for a little while, and I remember, one night she came into the bar with some friends and it was kind of busy, so I was working. I looked up, and she turned and looked at me. And it was like, ‘Whoa.’ I asked her later, and she remembered it, too.”
Love at many sights.
My dad is a prolific storyteller, and he often tells the same stories, but is generally good about remembering whom he has told them to. He started relating one I’d never heard, but could tell was an old chestnut. The story was about meeting a man at the doctor’s office in the waiting room who had tattoos of a woman’s name on each hand. The man actually liked people to ask about his tattoos, because he wanted to explain what they meant.
Here, my dad’s tale-telling voice began to break. He started to cry.
“I don’t know why I’m crying, I never have before about this story. Probably because I’m drunk,” he sobbed.
The man told him that the names were of his two daughters, who had died together in a car crash. He’d gotten the tattoos to remind himself of them, to remember to live life fully, and that loving someone is always the beginning of letting them go. My dad then felt a profound connection to this man and asked him if he could friend him on Facebook, but after misspelling the guy’s name several times, offered his own and went in to his appointment.
“I kept waiting and waiting for the friend request,” he told me. “But it never came. It was like he just disappeared, he just came into my life and disappeared.”
By then, I was crying too, having been drinking chardonnay on the patio swing since before the sun went down as well. We cried in the pool of light from a ninety-year-old woman’s lamp, each thinking about the things we’d shared, things we couldn’t share, and the things we might not get to share before it all disappears.
