The Matchmaker

Matchmaking client, 63, NYC. 11 first dates with us, 3 second dates. Honestly my most challenging client.

He works in an Amazon stocking facility overseeing the region. Solid 401(k). 530 credit score. 6ft tall, 6’2” depending on footwear. All solid stats.

He has very specific tastes. She needs to be 18, blonde, 34C breasts. Only naturals. “no fatties” (that was his email send off 😴 Men these days lol eyes rolling emoji)

I have my team ransack our database for the perfect match. It takes weeks. Finally, I find the perfect girl. Leslie. Educated, pretty by contemporary standards. Raised Christian but religiously bi-curious. Reads Quran in her free time. Perfect.

I set up a call to get to know her. She leads with “I can deadlift 308.” Tremendous green flag. I tell her, “I’ll believe it when I see it, toots.” Leslie invites me to the gym the next morning.

I get to the gym at 8am. Equinox, Hudson Bay. Greet Leslie, who’s been there since 4am. I watch her deadlift. Pretty amazing. I collect sweat samples for the database while hugging her. She’s the perfect match. Somewhere between this realization and Leslie’s last set, I start feeling dizzy. Everything goes black. I wake up in Leslie’s car, on my way to the office. Very courteous. Tremendous green flag.

I settle into the office. Call the client to schedule a date with Leslie. Client very excited. I book them at Lee’s Thai and Seafood, 2pm the following day.

Halfway through the main course, I get a text from the client. Leslie isn’t his type whatsoever. Client very upset. Borderline hysterical. I ask where he is right now.

He says, “The restaurant.”

“In the bathroom?”

“No, at the table.”

“Is Leslie there?”

“Yes.”

“Am I on speakerphone?”

“Yeah, you are,” Leslie responds.

I hang up immediately. I glance around the office to make sure nobody heard that, reach into my drawer, and take a 2X dose of Adderall. I grab my laptop and lock myself in a bathroom stall. Set up VPN, everything’s good. I delete 27 points from Leslie’s attractiveness score and $50k from her target bachelor salary range in our database. Gotta keep the database accurate and searchable.

After dinner, the client storms into the office and starts a commotion. I hear it from the bathroom and hurry out. Sharon from Accounts Receivable sees me exit the bathroom with my laptop and pretends not to notice.

I try to calm him down, but he’s inconsolable. I tell him the company will reimburse the bill at Lee’s and that I’ve updated our database to match his preferences. Client is skeptical. “She was all cellulite saggy gross. Looked like a deflated blow-up doll except she had this sadness in her eyes. I asked for 18.” I tell the client that I understand. Not everyone is for everyone.

Client threatens to pull funding. I lean in close and whisper, “Look. I’ve got big titty 18-year-olds who would love to date a 63-year-old Amazon warehouse worker. More girls than I know what to do with. But you scratch my back, I scratch yours. Capiche?”

Client capiches.

“I want you to go to Tiffany’s. 63rd and 3rd. You’re gonna walk in and find the ginger homosexual behind the counter. Don’t talk to anybody else. You’re gonna go up to him and ask for the 63 Deluxe. Don’t explain yourself. Don’t say my name. He’ll know what it means.”

Client capiches.

Wonderful. We shake hands.

Client hightails it to Tiffany’s. Walks in, finds the gay ginger. Client looks around, shifting, and says “I want the 63 Deluxe.” The ginger smiles. “Of course, sir. One moment.” He disappears into the back.

While the ginger is gone, the client mills around the store thinking about the girls he’s about to get.

He’s picturing them—barely legal, blank-eyed with admiration, all tits and no opinions. They won’t deadlift anything. They’ll look at him like he invented money. They’ll look at him the way girls used to look at him before his hair went—before the warehouse, before the Kirk fiasco, before his first divorce, before that round of TRT that permanently shifted his hormonal baseline to estrogenic once he stopped the injections. That look. The one that says you’re a man who knows things. The one that doesn’t have a deadlift PR or a Quran opinion or a single goddamn question. Just big soft agreeable silence.

He imagines greeting them at Lee’s. The way they’ll be nervous to meet him. How they’ll be all gussied up —just for him. Going out tops, jean shorts, a little too much makeup for a Tuesday.

They’ll all be so soft and so blonde and so glad he picked them. They’ll think his job is cool. They’ll think the Adderall thing he does is cool. They’ll lie about their age and order strawberry daiquiris—not virgin—with a fake ID they’re scared to show. No saggy cellulite fat. Everything still where the good lord put it. Braces on one of them, still. She’ll cover her mouth when she laughs at his jokes. They’ll fight over who gets to sit next to him. How one of them, the blondest one, will touch his forearm and say he’s not like her Dad’s friends. One of them will spot the Labubu on his wallet and know, right away, that he gets it.

He imagines how their faces will light up when he tells the story about Kirk. How he drove a tug into a pallet of lithium-ion, and instead of hitting the pull station, he tried to move it into the ammonia line. Whole refrigeration side lets go. Now it’s a fire and an IDLH cloud, and Kirk, God love him, props the emergency exits so the smoke’ll clear. Fire jumps to the pick tower, tower comes down into the drive field, and the robots just kept running. OSHA came out and just started a new binder.

“Kirk sounds like a fucking moron,” they’ll say. He’ll shake his head. “Yeah. But he’s my friend.” They won’t understand. They’ll just know it’s serious and important. They’ll want to know everything about the region he oversees. “What’s a 401k? What’s a credit score?” He is so glad they asked. Other guys their age can’t explain this stuff to them. And deep down, the girls know it. Because they treat him like a man. He can see it in their faces. He can see them being so happy to be there. He is, at long last, going to be somebody’s favorite.

The ginger’s been gone a while now. That’s fine. Good things take time. He checks his reflection in a display case and fixes his collar for the girls.

The ginger comes back with a small blue box. Inside is a single AirPod. The client nods like he expected exactly this.

☣︎