Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (4 page)

The third stop was probably our favorite—the Australian TV show also known as
Today,
which is broadcast on the Nine Network. Jackpot. Mike and I have always gotten along well with Australians. We're cut from very similar cloth. Mike even lived in Australia for a while and then refused to come home. He ran away to Fiji with an Aussie gal he met while he was over there. Our parents freaked out, but I knew something had to give—she was
way
out of his league. The
Today
show in Australia was right in our wheelhouse. Australians are like Americans, except
all
of them are cool, instead of just some of them. With Lauer Power and Coops, we got drunk to stand out and go against the grain, but for
Today
in Australia, we were getting blasted just to blend in. They scheduled our interview at three in the afternoon on St. Patrick's Day. Hello! We didn't even have to get up early, but we still did. Four thirty a.m. worked so well for us the first few times that we decided to stick with it. When we arrived at the studio, we were one level less than “Coops drunk,” but we had also smoked a whole bunch of grass on our walk there. We were making jokes that only the two of us found funny. Luckily, it never became an issue, because the studio only had one guy, and he wasn't even Australian! He was just a dude named Kirk.

Kirk set up everything for us to do a live feed to Australia. Then he noticed we were drunk and directed us toward the extensive liquor cabinet. We all immediately became best friends. Frank the bulldog was with us, too. He wanted a taste of the action, and Kirk didn't seem to mind at all. Frank ate a bunch of popcorn while Kirk, Mike, and I sat around the studio kitchen drinking warm bourbon and smoking grass out of various pieces of fruit from a gourmet basket sent to the studio by one of my personal favorite Australians—Kylie Minogue. She is such a babe. Oh, by the way, the fruit was dipped in truffle-salted chocolate. Talk about high class. In my life, I've never felt finer smoking grass out of a piece of fruit.

Eventually, we took the call from Cameron Williams, the host. Cam was smooth as silk. The best part about the Australian
Today
interview was that Frank was walking on and off the set periodically, sniffing things and humping the leg of the stool Mike was sitting on. No one said a single thing. Kirk didn't intervene or motion for us to get him to stop; Cam didn't even acknowledge him. It was as if two drunk guys and a troublemaking, butt-sniffing junkyard dog were par for the course in every Australian's morning.

(Mike)

Online dating is here to stay, whether we like it or not. From now on, it will be part of every young person's social and love life. Except Dave's. Or mine. To this day, neither one of us has gone on an actual date with someone we've met through online dating. Of course, that doesn't mean we don't dabble. We'd never pass up an opportunity for an awkward exchanges with so many members of the opposite sex. Take a few minutes to consider the niche markets that have developed for all the weirdoes out there. It goes to show that there really is someone for everyone. If you're hoping that mustlovevampires.com helps you find the future Mrs. You, something is probably a little off . . . but at least you know that will also be the case for whomever you get matched with, too! Have you guys seen the online dating websites out there these days?

FarmersOnly.com

For farmers,
only
.

YouMustLoveDogsDating.com

Their dogs can watch
them
hump, for a change.

Vampiresonly.com

For Goth kids who all of a sudden aren't feeling so hopeless after all.

Tinder

For sluts.

Catpeople.com

Made that one up, but I guarantee it exists in some form, though.

Dave discovered these sites last year the week after he spent the entire Thanksgiving break refurbishing this early-twentieth-century wooden trunk he found in our parents' attic. He was out in our garage for hours every day buffing this thing, sanding it, staining it, all that shit. It came out awesome. But the combination of fumes, metal particles, and dust ended up making Dave deathly ill, and he had to take a few days off work. But Dave doesn't do well when he has to sit still. So instead of recuperating, he spent over seven hours creating a fake online dating profile for me on every major, minor, bizarre, and fucked-up dating website there is. He custom-tailored each profile to be different and to fit the mold of whatever that site's fetish or theme was. He had a different, wildly authentic character, name, and set of pictures for all of them. He had a mission: he wanted to drive responses. Nobody wants to go on a date with a
fake
farmer. The only problem was that you could tell toward the end he started to get lazy. My
BlackPeopleMeet.com
profile was basically a picture of me where my skin was tinted dark and dreadlocks were Photoshopped onto my head. Also, my face wasn't even on my shoulders, it was free-floating in front of a Jamaican flag. I'm not even going to mention the name he gave me. Horrible. But guess how many hits that got before site administrators took it down? Three! They were big girls.

For at least the next three weeks, we were spending all our free time creating online dating profiles and making sure to use each other's real contact information. Dave's widow's peak and milky white skin already make him look like a vampire, so that one was pretty easy. I also signed him up for this one dating site for people who like to puke on each other. That is the one he never talks about. I secretly think he met up with someone from it and found that he liked it. Officially, though? Neither one of us had ever been on an online date. We were waiting for the right place, the right time, and still figuring out how not to be such pussies. Basically, like so many guys, we wanted it to simply fall into our laps.

When our Craigslist ad went viral, it was like God and Craig teamed up to create a custom online dating website just for us. It was free and received more attention than we ever could have wanted. The timing of it all was perfect, too. Dave and I were both single, working desk jobs in Washington, D.C., and New York, respectively, and suddenly had a fucking Rolodex of women who thought we were way cooler than we actually were. The ad first picked up steam in New York, so I did what any sensible young professional would do. I immediately left for an inordinately long vacation and headed north to Manhattan. I slept on Dave's floor for a solid month. During that month, I was bitten by every insect in the tri-state area. One night, I had to make love with my shirt
on,
because I had so many bites on my back and chest. The takeaway here is that Dave's floor was just filthy. Even after I made a fort out of bedsheets and thumbtacks, I could never hope to call it a home.

The icing on the Craigslist cake was that we were a package deal. That meant every date was a double date. It was like
Double Dare
with Marc Summers, except boobs poured over our heads instead of green slime. Before that, neither one of us had been big daters. These dates, though, they were an experience. For very silly reasons, women were knocking down our door to meet us. What an opportunity. We went on twenty different double dates in the span of twenty-one days. And since I was on a “work hiatus,” Dave was forced to pick up the entire tab. The dates were crazy. We didn't quite do our due diligence, but we did use Facebook. It was integral in our formula to select a date for that night:

1. Add the gals as friends.

2. Click on their profile, then on “Photos.”

3. Browse through albums and look for key phrases such as “Spring Break,” “Summer Lovin',” “Summer Dayz,” “Summer 2011,” “Summer 2012,” “Summer 2013,” or “Me and my bitches.”

4. Look at every bikini picture available. Pass harsh judgment. Find the hard bodies.

Unsurprisingly, this incredibly shallow vetting process did not result in normal dates. We picked a
lot
of psychos. Most of them were legitimately “run for the fucking hills” types, and we translated that into “drink your way through it, then run for the bedroom.” But they were
all
babes. We weren't going on these dates to find love. We wanted to get weird and maybe have a couple of 'gasms along the way. It was mostly about entertainment and pushing it as far as we could every night. Dave began telling the girls about our childhood and how we grew up, except he was completely deadpan explaining that we were interracial adopted brothers who were also cops with a penchant for robbing New York City subway cars. He was essentially reciting the plot of the movie
Money Train,
without anyone catching on. When we would get
really
messed up, one of us would find it hilarious to call dibs on one gal while her friend was within earshot. That move never worked out for anyone, but it did make us laugh.

We went to the same exact bar on every single date: Whiskey Town. It was close to Dave's apartment, we knew the fellas in charge, and there was a back door that was perfect for Irish exits. More often than not, there was a Beautiful Girl and her Okay Friend. I think Okay was out there looking for Mr. Right and having no luck, so Okay's mom emailed her our ad after watching the
Today
show. Okay took it as a sign and put together a creative response, then convinced her hottest friend to let her slap some Facebook photos in the response. And it worked, too. Dave loved calling dibs on the hot one. My response to this cheap shot usually depended on my level of intoxication. If I was in decent shape, I'd act offended in front of the gals, appalled at Dave's dick move. If I was drunk enough to be jealous, I'd spend the rest of the night trying to sabotage him until the girls were disgusted enough to leave.

We had only one date that went so terribly that we had to bail midway. We just couldn't handle it. The Okay gal was absolutely nuts, and her hot friend wasn't far behind. Okay gal actually started
eating
the flowers I brought her (flowers are my calling card—Dave's is keeping his socks on during sex). We snuck out when they went to the bathroom to freshen up. When we got a few blocks away, we stopped under some scaffolding to discuss just how crazy Okay gal was. Suddenly, she came sprinting out of
nowhere
and grabbed Dave like a spider monkey! I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Next thing I know, Dave is screaming, “Get it off me, get it off me!” and the girl is wrapped around him with her head
up and inside of his shirt
. He finally pushes her down his legs and off his body, but she is really holding on. Without warning, she sprints off into the night screaming
“I need to see you die!”
For a while, Dave and I just stared at each other. Dave lifted up his shirt to check out the damage to his chest. She had bitten him right between the nipples. I didn't know there was enough skin there to bite on to, but she'd done it. I could see her incisor imprints. We called it a night.

We were starting to notice some issues with our version of “online dating.” These girls weren't looking for love or companionship; they were looking for publicity, sex, free drinks, and a story to tell their girlfriends at their next bottomless mimosa brunch. After the chest-biter, we started to prep a little more.

We would hit Whiskey Town early, much earlier than we told the gals to meet us there, because we had learned to get a little destroyed predate. One night, I swear the girls were juniors in college (but read at a senior level). We decided not to ID them—we're not cops, okay? They had gained entry into the bar, and that was good enough by us. They were
college hot
. They were the type of girls who would not have given us the time of day back in school. They were even too hot for us with the older-guy card in play. We did have something, though, and they were here for a reason: we had quickly fading Internet popularity and the good sense to exploit it.

Love was in the air at Whiskey Town that night. The simple and ever-reliable formula of bourbon, slim-fit shirts, and smooth talk was all it took. Even my excessive armpit sweat didn't deter them. The four of us were crushing drinks, snapping selfies, shooting suggestive glances. Our sobriety wasn't helped by the arrival of our friend Anthony, who had a house account for shots. Soon Dave started in on a shtick that became way too familiar in the coming weeks. He drunkenly explained that we needed to go to our place to let his adorable bulldog out to poop. Hook, line, and sinker—Frank, you old son of a bitch! I realized this wasn't Dave's first rodeo using Frank as his wingman-in-waiting.

We all agreed to finish our drinks and head toward Dave's apartment.
Cheers! To Frank!
Exactly ten seconds later, a few bouncers came over and caught us singing “Closing Time” into the security walkie-talkie we had stolen earlier. Apparently they had been scouring the bar trying to figure out which dickheads had taken it. We weren't even really hiding it, hadn't moved from our booth the whole night, and we have very conspicuous singing voices, so the joke was really on them.