The Mediocre Date, or Carson McCullers is a Little Bitch

Last night I was on a mediocre date. These things happen. It was not the first and, despite all attempts at prevention, will probably not be the last. The Mediocre Date should not be confused with its evil sister, The Awful Date. I have had a few of those as well. So have you, probably. The mediocre dates should just be able to fall away, to end when they end, to have that be that. No harm, no foul. And parts of it were great. I got to see The Hurt Locker. He paid. We had things to talk about. It just wasn't ... good. The x factor wasn't there. No one's fault. It was so harmless that I might even be willing to accept the fault, if he wanted to push it onto me the way some people do. Maybe I was not interesting enough, maybe it takes a certain kind of person to have a not-mediocre date with me. Shrug of the shoulders and move on.

However, this mediocre date was different, in that he managed to say the cruelest thing that anyone has ever said to me. He said: You know, Carson McCullers was 23 when she published The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

This is after I told him that I had just started reading the book, that I was 23 myself, and had told him that I spend most of my free time making up stories on my laptop and one day might want to see if anything could come of them.

And I knew this, of course, that this little bitch McCullers was published at 23 to great acclaim. It is on the book. I knew this and already hated her for it, the same way I hate Joyce Carol Oates because she says she edits while on brisk jogs near her home. [Although, one time, when a lot of my crazy friends were coming to me with their crazy dating issues and I was considering putting together an essay collection called Your Slightly More Stable Friend Has A Few Things to Say About Your Non-Relationship, I decided that all I wanted, more than money or success or accolades, was a jacket blurb from JCO saying, It's like He's Just Not That Into You ... but good!]

The world was smaller then, I tell myself. When Carson McCullers was writing. Doesn't it seem like that, in old movies? Or when reading old books? That the world was just so much smaller? That there were so many less people? That everyone knew everyone? New York seems like a little village, like it could fit inside Central Park. So it must have been a lot easier to get published back then, since there were - what? like, three people writing. She just had to show up at a publishing house, with that starved, haggard look on her face [you've seen the cover!], hand them her stack of a manuscript, collapse at their feet, and she was in.

This is of course not true.

This is of course me speaking from the fact that I am turning 24 in two months and haven't had my novel published, that I don't even have a novel that could even be considered for publication anywhere. I am 23 and the extent of my writing "career" has been an undergraduate prize and a story about the Grand Canyon published in my school's literary magazine where the Grand Canyon represented the protagonist because, like, you know, people have layers. Don't look for it. I'm thinking enough time has passed, that it may not even be around anymore. Unless, of course, you stop by my parent's house and find the ten copies they have; one that, against my will and better judgment, I agreed to sign. SIGN! Ugh.

And I have been trying give him the benefit of the doubt, this Mediocre Date. Maybe he was trying to say that each of us, even at 23, has the potential within us to write or paint or do something great. I do not think that this is what he meant. But I don't think he meant the opposite, either, in which his statement is followed, in my head, by: and what the fuck have you done? I think it was just a statement, something he had heard somewhere and, for whatever reason, retained. Maybe because he, himself, is 23. That he was sharing with me without motive, simply because he knew it. Our previous conversation had suggested that maybe he didn't know very many things and when the chance arose to share some piece of accurate information, by god, he was going to take it.

It was also on Friday that I read in The Daily Rumpus that Hal Ashby [Harold and Maude, Shampoo] didn't really begin directing films until he was 38. A precedent has been set for late bloomers. I have nothing to worry about. 23 is not old.

That's good and fine, but at the time, what did I do? I did not handle the situation with grace. I decided that I would not be paying for dinner, told him [an aspiring actor] "Well, Tatum O'Neill won an Academy Award when she was, like, 11" [IMDB: "10"], and decided that this Mediocre Date was so over.