A few months after moving back to Los Angeles County after living in San Diego for 2 years (which seemed like an eternity but now, after all this time away, seems like such an unfortunately short time to live somewhere, especially when that somewhere is Sunny San Diego) I sat around moping for several months over the harshness of the latest failed relationship in what was to become a string of gigantic failures.

Eventually I ended up on OKCupid and met a couple people this way. I was 19 at the time. I met up with some 16 year old girl who introduced me to Sins O’ The Flesh, the Santa Monica Rocky Horror shadow cast. (She and I never had any sort of romantic relationship, being that she was 16.) I went every weekend for maybe a month straight.

I found this hot chick on OKCupid, with the back half of her head shaved and a fandom of John Waters and A Clockwork Orange. I figured she was ridiculously out of my league, but with a little prompting from my Rocky Horror friend, I invited her to see Rocky Horror with me. When you message a chick on the internet and say, “Hi, I’m a complete stranger, would you like me to pick you up at 10 p.m. and drive you into Santa Monica with me?” and they say “Yes” immediately, without questioning you, and aren’t even keen on a phone call in advance, you should be wary.

We ‘dated’ for two weeks without having sex and I started to get annoyed. At about the same time, one of the female security guards who flirted with me occasionally at Rocky Horror “randomly” found me on OKCupid and sent me a message. I picked her up for a pseudo-date in which I drove my 16 year old girl friend around Encino while hunting down these two homeless guys she knew as friends. They were living in an alley behind a couple of buildings. One of the guys talked about how he was saving money to buy Nine Inch Nails tickets, and I couldn’t help but think: Shouldn’t you be focused on moving out of your alley box?

Our second date went a lot better (or actually worse, considering we slept together and started to tell each other we loved each other because the sex was so awesome and we were young and stupid, ’cause I’m so old and wise now, you know) and in the mean time I was totally ignoring the other chick, who although was ridiculously hot, wouldn’t sleep with me and kept going on about how she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to love me or hate me.

After a week or two of this, 16 year old girl was talking about how she wanted to fuck the hot chick I was dating before the security guard (you love the lack of names, you love it) and started to get all cocky about it, as if she could get laid with her before I could. I was annoyed. I played it cool, saying yeah yeah whatever go for it, and then she said, “You know what, dude, you could have fucked her. All she does is go on about how upset she is that you dumped her,” and an idea hatched in my 19 year old brain.

I went over to hot chick’s house randomly with a burst of confidence and testosterone, and I said, “You know I’m with the security guard, but maybe you could be my, uh, mistress?” She sat and she thought about it for a while, and then said, “I don’t know why, but I kind of like the idea.”

She didn’t. I took her to Rocky Horror with me and a group of friends and while she watched me play boyfriend with the security guard she leaned against a wall looking miserable and, I think, crying a little bit. It was incredibly awkward, because I think I told my friends what was going on, so they kept looking at her, then looking at me, then looking at her, and I felt kind of bad, but not bad enough.

Once I slept with her (and this is when I learned that making certain chicks feel like shit makes them open their legs, which is a sad fact and you should avoid women susceptible to this as when you make them feel like shit they may open their legs for other people, which I learned later on with this same girl) I called up the 16 year old girl and I was like, “Yeah blah blah I got laid with the girl before you even had a chance,” and she hung up on me. She called me back apologizing for hanging up on me, then never spoke to me again.

Around this same time I discovered Nickel Creek’s “Why Should The Fire Die?” Hot girl and I listened to it on a drive down Beach Blvd one day where we ate at an IHOP and the song Helena caught my ear and didn’t let go. I started listening to it all the time, never really paying attention to the content of the song, just that I love the ‘rave up’ that happens in the last couple seconds of the song.

After a week the security guard flipped out on me one night after she ignored me the entire time we were at Rocky Horror. I wanted to hang out with her afterward but she just vanished, with some dude, in some random car, and then wouldn’t answer my calls for a couple hours that I stressed endlessly for. This was before I learned to be aloof and not give a shit, so we got into an argument, fucked later on, and then I decided that I wasn’t happy. I stopped talking to her. I didn’t dump her or break up with her, I just stopped contacting her and answering her calls.

I focused my energies on the hot chick, and quickly became unhappy again after about a week or two. I don’t know what it was. (Maybe the fact that although she was ridiculously hot, she was a bit of a dead fish in the sack and wouldn’t blow me, had stanky breath constantly, was kind of stanky all over [including where stankiness can be at its worst], and spent most of her time scowling at me.) One night I called the security guard chick back up and said that I made a mistake.

She tore into me like I’d never been torn into by a woman before or since. I groveled and begged for forgiveness, I practically cried that I had made a mistake and chose the wrong woman, I needed a second chance, and after about an hour of ridiculous conversation on my phone outside my friend Mike’s house, I ended up driving to her place.

She hadn’t cleaned herself up at all for my arrival and look at me with teary eyes. She told me that while I was gone she had my abortion because her birth control ‘malfunctioned’. She then proceeded to tear into everything she knew about me. She insulted me and screamed at me. She made me feel the lowest low anyone had ever made me feel. She emasculated me completely, it was quite wild, and I don’t even remember exactly what she said. She told me that we couldn’t have sex, even if I wanted to be with her now, for at least a week or two because of the abortion.

Then she fucked me anyway.

Half way through fucking her, while I was staring down at what I hadn’t yet noticed was a lazy eye that she only seemed to develop while getting fucked, I realized that I didn’t like this girl at all. I didn’t love her in the least. Actually, I kind of hated her. When we were finished she wanted to cuddle up and go to sleep together, but I made some excuse, told her I loved her, and then headed out the door.

On the way home, Helena came on my iPod and I finally listened to the lyrics. While the story is not the same (Boy dates girl, boy cheats with other girl, boy falls in love with other girl, boy can’t dump girl #1 because he feels bad, which causes the other girl to become jealous, and he loses both girls, ending with the statement “guys like me don’t sleep alone at night” and closing with a rebellious and raucous “I’ll be fine”) it dawned on me finally, that night, at 4 am, driving down the 101, that I was incredibly awesome.

I was 19. This was the first time I’d actually juggled women, and though I wasn’t doing it very successfully and it was actually kind of emotionally trying because I wasn’t doing any of it on purpose, I realized that I’d finally achieved a level of manly assholeness that I always thought was unattainable. I was a player. I was playing women. I thought this was awesome at the time.

It wasn’t until about a year later, when I caught hot girl getting fingered in her bed by some dude who I knew from a video game forum who works at Pandemic Studios (his name is Drew Marlowe and if you find him talking to your girlfriend on the internet you can be reasonably sure he’s just trying to fuck her behind your back and I wish people would get fired for the horrible things they do outside of work because Drew Marlowe is a cocksucker, yes I am talking about Drew Marlowe who works at Pandemic Studios), that I realized that I wasn’t awesome at all and that I should have just dumped both women, stopped going to Rocky Horror and hanging out with underage kids, and focused instead of bettering myself. Oh well.

I kept sleeping with the security guard off and on after the failure of the relationship with hot girl (because what else are you going to do?), and eventually she told me that she lied to me about having my abortion just to make me feel bad.

If you’re a young male reading this, I hope you’ve learned these things from my story:

1.) When a woman tells you she had your abortion and she’s talking about it like she’s angry, ask for proof. In my experience, abortions make women sad, not angry.

2.) If you’re trying to be a player and juggle multiple women, you should never let them know about each other. You should probably date women who live at least 50 miles away from each other. Or, you know, you could just find one really good woman and be faithful to her and pour all your effort into her if she’s not a gigantic bitch. (This has been working for me lately.)

3.) Just because the woman is hot doesn’t mean you’ll be satisfied by her sexually. Women can be unattractive naked, even if their bodies are bangin’ hot, especially if they’re stinky because don’t shower every day.

4.) Saying I love you right after the first time you fuck is a bad idea and sets an unhealthy and unrealistic precedent for the rest of the relationship.

5.) If you girlfriend still trolls dating websites while you’re with her and strikes up conversations with dudes, chances are they’re unethical fuckheads (like yourself) who will try to screw your lady. (It doesn’t help matters any when your girlfriend tells the guys she’s talking to on the internet that she dumped her boyfriend and he’s just a crazy stalker now.)

6.) Healthy relationships are the best relationships.