Gay dating in the styx

Once again, I'm preparing to return to Brazoria County, this time for an extended Christmas vacation. I haven't had one of those in years! So to honor the moment, here's a recount of the worst date I've ever had, courtesy of Lake Jackson, Texas.

There being no gay hangouts in a 60-mile radius, I was always excited whenever someone local responded to my gay.com profile. Unfortunately, most of these people turned out to be married men in their 40s. So, whenever the person didn't fall into that category, I was sometimes willing to let my standards slip a little. That is, until I met Tim.

At 19, Tim admittedly was a bit young for me, but I was only 25 or so at the time, so the age difference was not that vast. There were other red flags that I ignored. He first wrote to me using his ex-boyfriend's account. He and his mother verbally sparred like Martha Plimpton and Dianne Weist in "Parenthood" while we talked on the phone. And he seemed quite proud of an eBay scam he was running.

Loneliness does funny things to one's judgment, however, so I agreed to a date. I met him near his house in Lake Jackson one Friday night after work, and he wanted to take me to a friend's party. As we walked to the front door, he handed me a small, white tablet. "This will get us rollin'," he smirked. Yup, ecstasy. I quickly pocketed the pill when his back was turned.

Once inside the friend's house, I found myself surrounded by a ring of strung-out, babbling girls, none of whom could have been older than 17. One particularly unfortunate one was nearly comatose against the wall, but the rest were too busy trying to sing along to Ruben Studdard's "Sorry 2004" to notice. The ecstasy was already starting to take its effect on Tim, and conversation with the girls was proving pointless, so I went ahead and poured myself a drink. After all, I was the only one there anywhere near a legal age.

After about an hour of this party that could have been a perfect PSA for the council on drug prevention, someone began pounding at the door. It was the party-thrower's father. The girls and Tim seemed calm, but I began to panic. Regardless of my sexuality, having a dad catch me, a 20-something, with a glass of wine in my hand while sitting around his polluted teenage daughter and her friends didn't seem like it would have a favorable outcome. Dad, however, was as polluted as his daughter, fresh from the Mosquito Fest (yes, the city of Clute, Texas has a celebration around the mosquito). Dad was so jovial, in fact, that he offered me a sip of the Snuffy Smith moonshine he was drinking out of a metal flask. I politely refused.

The party started breaking up at this point, and for some reason, Tim and I got stuck with the task of taking the comatose girl home. She managed to mumble out the directions to the trashiest trailer park I never knew existed in Clute, and after dropping her off, Tim suggested we visit another of his friends. This one happened to live in the same apartment complex that my sister did when I was a kid, and at least having her own apartment should indicate that she was above high school age, I thought.

She was. A typical Brazoria County blonde, she greeted me cheerfully enough but mostly ignored me after my arrival. I chatted with -- it was either her boyfriend or her roommate's boyfriend, but whoever it was, he was the most sane person I saw all night. The girl did take enough notice of me to ask why I was wearing men's shoes. After all, I was gay, right? Small town ignorance is so charming.

Later on, the ditz decided she was getting a bit of an earache, so as a cure, she thought it would be best to stick a cone of newspaper in her ear and light it on fire. Unfortunately, the newspaper kept burning, even on the grass after she tossed it over the balcony when she was finished.

After an interminable amount of time, and amazingly enough during which the apartment complex did not burn to the ground, it was time to go. Tim decided IHOP would be best. It was 2 a.m. or so, and that's about the only place open in Brazoria County at that time anyway.

Lo and behold, we met some more of Tim's friends upon arrival. I saw some people I knew, too: a few policemen from the Lake Jackson Police Department who I knew because of my job as a reporter at the local paper. They gave me a wave as I walked to the table with our new companions.

As it turned out, Tim had called these people beforehand, because they were his pot suppliers, there to give him weed in exchange for his ecstasy. In horror, I watched the clumsiest exchange of pills and grass beneath a syrup-stained IHOP table with two policemen only a few tables away. I pictured my arrest written up in the newspaper in a few days. When a reporter gets arrested, you see, it gets written up no matter what, as a point of fairness. We're treated no differently than elected officials. One of my fellow reporters even saw herself in the paper after a minor fender bender.

By some miracle, the police didn't notice, and I managed to quickly get my goodbyes. It was nearly 3 a.m. I had been out from more than six hours and barely even talked to the guy with whom I was on the date. He was supposed to have gone with me to a Gloria Estefan concert a few days later -- we had set it up before the first date -- but thankfully, my mother stepped in as a replacement at the last minute. I never saw Tim again, and the last I heard, the original boyfriend -- the one whose account he had used to contact me initially -- had moved in with him at his mother's house in Lake Jackson. I'm sure the three of them are a regular Norman Rockwell postcard every night.

When I go solo to my friend's New Year's Eve party in Houston in a few weeks, I'll keep this story in mind to cheer myself up. When there's nothing but cold rice left on the buffet, sometimes it's better to go hungry.