Gay dating in the styx (part 2), or why I rarely watch American Idol

When I moved to South Jersey, I thought the dating field would improve. After all, Atlantic City is a well-known city, important enough to be included on USA Today weather maps, right?

Wrong. The scene in Atlantic City consisted of one rather creepy and deteriorating bar, so my options centered largely around the hour drive to Philadelphia. In other words, not a whole lot different than my Brazoria County/Houston situation. Which leads me to how I met Cary.

One of my frequent haunts in Philadelphia was karaoke night at the club Pure, and during one visit along with some friends from Houston, we walked in to here the most butchered version of "Memory" from "Cats" that I had ever heard. It turned out that the guy who was singing it, however, was attractive enough, and seeing as I was having a dry spell, I decided to give out my phone number -- against my friends' warnings.

Our major date consisted of me being invited to an office party of his in one of the more rural areas of South Jersey. He was a substitute teacher, so most of his colleagues were middle-aged, married women. Not exactly my usual demographic for a Saturday night, but they seemed nice enough.

There was liquor aplenty at this party, and Cary seemed to find every drop of it. Jello shots, wine, hard liquor all blended into the Long Islandest of iced teas for him. And then the karaoke machine came out.

The teachers did karaoke a bit differently, in that mostly they just sang along together to the tape rather than have one person actually sing in the microphone. After most had lost interest, Cary, somehow, managed to find a CD of disco tunes, whereupon he took to the center of the room and belted through "Native New Yorker" four or five times in a row. And if I thought the rendition of "Memory" had been bad, the drinks combined with the fact that he didn't even know this particular song made this much, much worse. To him, however, each performance was better than the last. The rest of the teachers looked on aghast, a few leaning over to me to make sure I indeed would be the one driving that night.

I managed to get him back to Atlantic City and shove him on the train to Philadelphia, whereupon, from the cryptic voice mail I got later, he seemed to have passed out and missed his bus. I later found out that he found himself a full-time boyfriend whom he eventually beat up, and he then checked himself into AA.

Now. Based on that experience, I find myself in complete agreement with Lone Star Times' David Benzion's thoughts on American Idol. While many of the horrid singers are worth a belly laugh, I can't help but think that there are some dark, dark traits that often come along with that level of delusion. Plus -- how many bare-bones, generic versions of "I Can't Help Myself" do we really need to hear?