Thursday, December 8, 2011

Americano

I once dated a guy who had an intense passion for Europeanism. My guess is that since he was born in a small town in Southwest Louisiana and raised on a farm in Wyoming, he’d seen parallel levels of American hell and dreamed of something more.

So he pranced around Lafayette wearing man capris and pronouncing fleur-de-lis with a strong “s” sound at the end. In fact, any word that appeared to have a French origin was delivered with the diction and inflexions of a Parisian waiter (which isn’t unusual for the area, but jarring when it comes out of a nineteen-year-old queen behind authentic D&G shades).

I admired how he could be moved and marveled by a culture whose refinement didn’t closely resemble his own — with all of its monster truck rallies and black rodeos — but his whole shtick made me want to grab him by the collar and tell him that if America is good enough for Sofia Vergara, then it’s good enough for him.

The whole thing got weirder when he started wearing neon-colored jockstraps from the very European and very homosexual Topman.com — claiming that he needed them because they “helped him avoid panty lines.” In my confusion and frustration, I would counter with statements like, “Your entire ass is now fully exposed to you jeans. I hope you wiped yourself, you whore” or “Panty lines? You’re nearly 200 pounds and carrying a dick between your legs. Stop giving me the willies, Tranny Oakley.”

We broke up shortly before he boarded a plane for his summer abroad, and soon after, I began dating someone else. When word got back to the states that he’d become the American slampiece for half of Barcelona’s gay scene, I didn’t even flinch. Prospects of expatriatism could give him a raging hard-on, so I could imagine how some muscle top named Salvatore could reduce him to leg-humping.

In the mean time, I was sleeping with a hick from West Texas who couldn’t identify Heidi Klum in a crowd of black men, let alone describe wine pairings or the difference between Louis Vuitton and Louboutin.

Instead of forcing me to miss sophisticated companionship, my new boyfriend only helped me to become more disillusioned. I went from being with someone who never fully embraced his nationalism to someone who would take a bullet for (and a dick from) Trace Adkins.

After him, I dated one guy after another until I was faced with something that I would consider a departure.

In Chuck Palaniuk’s Invisible Monsters, the narrators commands us to “find what [we’re] afraid of most and go live there.” So I did. I met a British guy named Sam. And after deciding that my exboyfriend’s affection for his type was something that I abhorred, I asked him if he wanted to date me exclusively.

Three months of concentrated fieldwork and this is what I learned about having a European boyfriend: he will refuse to surrender his man purse in public (even if you beg), the rumors about his irregular bathing are not only true, but horrifying, and most importantly — he can’t drink the things that you can. So challenge him. And beat him. And rub it in his face.

Because European guys are overrated. And American gays who are obsessed with them are in for a rude awakening when they find themselves tied to a sex swing on the 4th floor of some Italian bathhouse while twelve Silvio Berlusconi lookalikes wait their turn.

Consider this my love letter to America. La dolce vita.