I sent this to McSweeney’s for the website last week.
Each evening I get home and log onto denver.craigslist.org. I skip over ‘CASUAL ENCOUNTERS’, and head straight to ‘MISSED CONNECTIONS’ and start looking for people who missed me.
First I search for, ‘mid-30’s’ and ‘pudgy’, though they rarely yield anything. Feeling more adventurous, I search for ‘ample’ and ‘scruffy’. Usually that also turns up nothing, so I begin clicking on random postings.
Though my name is not ‘Anthony’, I click thinking perhaps the young miss didn’t hear me say my name properly at the coffee shop I go to every morning. Turns out she actually knows ‘Anthony’, and last she heard he was working for T-Rex in Denver. But she would love to catch up, and I give it a thought before hitting ‘back’ on my web browser.
Then I search on my actual name, and find a young lady (I presume) asking, ‘Does Anybody Know Dan?’. She’s in Broomfield, a town to which I’ve never been and is looking for a Dan with whom she went to Frederick High School, where he graduated from in 1991.
It’s close enough so I send a response. ‘Hi…..you!’ I say because she didn’t post her name, ‘I’m Dan! I graduated from Sherburne-Earlville in 1993! Coffee?’ We write emails back and forth for a week or so. She was confused why I was writing her, but I stood my ground and explained that not just knowing a Dan, but BEING one gave me the right to email someone looking for a Dan. She declines my offer to attend a film at the Mayan, and a month later her post is still up.
I type ‘Kilgore’, hoping someone spied me at the bookshop I co-own, but this yields nothing, even in the M4M section where people seem to have far more MISSED CONNECTIONS than they do in W4M area.
I try multiple variations on the bookstore. ‘Kill Gore’, kilmore’, Gilmore Girls’, ‘Val Kilmer’, ‘near the cool record store’, and all the variations of ‘comics’ : ‘comix’, ‘comic book’, ‘graphic novels’, and ‘pictures with words that make me laugh or be sad, depending on who wrote/drew it’.
I try, ‘bookish’, ‘bearded’, ‘articulate’, ‘shy’, ‘funny’, ‘left-handed’, ‘pisces’, and ‘volvo’, which once netted me a, “Dark hair and goatee/beard coming out of Charleys you drive a Volvo – 42 (Denver)”. Thinking it had to be a hit (how many bearded Volvo drivers could there be in Denver?) I responded asking ‘leaving Charley who’s now?’, not realizing Charley’s was a gay bar, not ironically a few blocks from my house.
After an hour of failure searching for a connection that missed me, I get more specific.
I search for ‘vomiting on 13th’ because I did that the other morning around dawn, but no luck. I try, ‘yelling at kids on lawn’, ‘crying alone in your room’, ‘urinating on stop sign in alley’, ‘taking out the recycling’, ‘giving homeless guy money’, ‘apologizing to homeless guy for not having a cigarette’, ‘explaining to homeless guy that your cell phone battery is dead, so, no, he can’t use it’, ‘trying to get homeless guy to understand why he can’t come back to your house to use the phone’, ‘apologizing to homeless guy for not giving more money’, ‘getting slapped repeatedly by homeless guy’, ‘meekly asking homeless guy for money back’, ‘crying and red-faced, walking away from homeless guy’. Then I search all of them again with ‘homeless girl’, ‘homeless woman’, ‘homeless fellow’, and ‘homeless dude,’ but none of it brings any results.
Sometimes I think of posting an ad in MISSED CONNECTIONS just to see if anybody is looking for me looking for them:
‘I was the nerdy guy. I spilled hot coffee on you. As the ambulance left, our eyes met. Let’s get iced next time?’
‘I caught you shoplifting Anais Nin…….let’s write some letters?’
‘I was hitchhiking…..you splashed me with water…….we can tell our kids we met on Christmas….’
‘I jumped out of the way and the car struck you…..redhead with glasses……..call me?’
‘Janice? I paid you for sex on my birthday and you stole my wallet and DVD player while I was getting undressed upstairs. I felt a connection……Can I come over to watch a movie?’
Most nights I quit searching around midnight, a little depressed that nobody has missed my greatness enough to post it anonymously on a community bulletin board. I curl up with a good book since I can’t watch movies anymore, and drift off to sleep on the couch thinking tomorrow might be the day to bust out the bow tie. That would be super easy to search for, and surely someone would notice me in a bow tie.