My Date with the Glade Plug-In Killer

I love that manic, nervous, feral feeling you get when you’re on your way to hook up with a stranger from the internet in the middle of the night. This time, I was 25 and it was like 11:47pm on a Tuesday and I’d been lying in bed when this guy from Grindr sent me literally one blurry picture of himself, a gym locker room selfie wearing grey sweatpants, flexing his abs with no T-shirt on and this blank, soul-less look behind his eyes — the kind of guy I just knew slept on a mattress on the floor with Looney Tunes sheets and would absolutely destroy me.

“Hot. Can you host?” I’d typed back right away.

We might have exchanged two more messages before I was buckled into my car, speeding through the night listening to Ke$ha or Mariah Carey or something like that. When I pulled up to his apartment complex seventeen minutes later, it was after midnight. Dark out, especially in the Southern California desert valley where I was living. After sunset the town went pitch black, and all you could hear were the coyotes howling in the mountains around you.

I drove into the complex slowly, turning down Mariah, and messaged the guy, “I’m here.”

Moments later a dark shadowy figure stepped out from a first-floor apartment and started walking towards the car. For some reason he had a baseball cap and sunglasses on. He pointed to a corner of the parking lot, then took out his phone and typed something out.

“The guest space,” he messaged me on Grindr.

It was a little far from his apartment, in an area of the lot where there weren’t any other cars, just a couple of sad desert bushes and crushed beer cans. For a moment I wondered if he was trying to take me to the “guest space” to kill me, but something told me that if he was going to do that, he’d do it in private, which was enough for me to shrug the thought off and follow his instructions.

The man met me at the trunk of my car and we headed over to his place side by side. Even then, I could tell something was off. He walked really fast, and with his hat and sunglasses, he reminded me of a celebrity hiding from paparazzi. I could barely get a good look at him.

The inside of his apartment was somehow darker than it was outside. It was hard to see where I was going as I stepped through the front door. I was bummed, because one of my favorite things about hookups is getting to look inside people’s houses, imagine what it’d be like to be them, cook in their kitchens, use their shampoo. He guided me over to his lumpy leather couch. When I took a seat, moldy air released from the cushion, joining a fake lavender-ish smell that perfumed the air. It was then that I realized the only light in the room was coming from one of those Glade Plug-In scent diffusers plugged into an outlet in the kitchen. Creepy shadows stretched out along the walls toward us. It was like I was in a very pleasant-smelling haunted house.

As my eyes adjusted to the dark, the man’s features gradually became more clear. His saggy pale skin and greying hair. Long sideburns like from the 80s. He removed his sunglasses and watched me with bulging eyes, resting one hand on the inside of his thigh. He wasn’t ugly. I liked grey hair and older dudes are usually so much better at sex and have nice poppers and soft sheets. But he definitely wasn’t the little muscle jock from the photos he’d sent. This man had to be at almost three times his age, which I wouldn’t even have been mad at if he wasn’t wasting my time, actively playing games with me trying to hide his face with a damn GLADE PLUG IN.

“So, how are you?” he asked, seated next to me and placing his other hand on my knee. His voice sounded surprisingly relaxed, as if nothing strange was going on, which annoyed me.

“I’m… okay,” I said politely.

“Cool,” he smiled, his long white teeth glowing in the dark like the Cheshire Cat’s.

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or run. YOOO, I remember thinking, this man is really catfishing you right now. Wow. How BOLD! Does he think you can’t tell he’s not that guy from the picture? Does he think you just won’t say anything? That you’re just going to sit here and play along?

But I did not, in fact, say anything. I was so confused by his confidence, his casualness, the Glade Plug in of it all, that my body stayed frozen in shock. Plus I’m a double Pisces and try to see the best in people, so I kind of just sat there and went with it, I guess because I didn’t want to make him feel bad by calling him out. I’d catfished guys before, albeit when I was a teenager and only ever on the internet. Somewhere deep down I understood that nobody’s first choice is to lie.

There was also a part of me that didn’t want to risk him getting angry. He was a stranger, I hadn’t told anyone where I was. And you hear all these stories about gay people being lured by serial killers pretending to be hookups… I knew I had to let this man down gently.

I asked him a bunch of questions to buy myself time to figure out what to do, stuff like, “Where are you from?” And “Is that… lavender I smell?”

The man told his name was Ron, that he was from Arizona and worked at a warehouse somewhere nearby, something to do with agriculture or the citrus industry, which was honestly kind of interesting for a few minutes before my patience began to run thin and I realized that I did not give a fuck about this man’s story, which could have been another lie anyway. I had gotten out of my warm bed in the middle of the night to get there. I had been fasting all day leading up to this. Bitch, I douched. And now this man was looking me in the face talking about his supposed job saving oranges from extinction. Girl…

After twenty minutes, my survival instincts finally kicked in and I decided I needed to make a move, so I crossed my legs, and with as much flirtatiousness as I could muster, I asked, “Can I use your bathroom?” in a way that implied I just needed to freshen up a little, get ready for him.

I got up, and once I was halfway to the room he directed me to, I said, “Actually, I’m going to leave,” and sped walked to the front door. “Have a good night!” I called back over my shoulder.

“Why are you going?” he asked from his place on the couch.

By then, my hand was already on the doorknob. I was safe. Nothing bad could happen. The man hadn’t even gotten up. He just sat there, staring up at me, like he was exhausted.

“Because you lied to me,” I turned around and told him.

He blinked. “What do you mean?”

“I meannn,” I stretched the word out for emphasis, “that you are not the person in the photo you sent.”

“Yes I am,” he said.

It was wild, his audacity. He didn’t hesitate, but he didn’t raise his voice either, as if it didn’t make a difference whether I believed him.

“Both you and I know that you’re not,” I said. For some stupid reason, it was important to me that I let him know he hadn’t fooled me, that he should think twice before pulling this shit on someone else, yet as soon as the words left my mouth, I felt like a jerk. None of the guys I’d catfished as a teenager had ever figured out who I was. If they’d known I was just some lonely closeted kid in Florida and had thrown that fact in my face, it would have crushed me.

The man stared into my eyes for what felt like forever.

But I’d been a teenager. This was a grown man.

“That is me,” he said, so earnest it hurt.

I don’t know. Maybe another night I would have cussed him out, but this one, all I wanted to do was go home and fall asleep hugging my pillow. Suddenly I was exhausted too.

“Okay.” I sighed. “That’s you.”

I walked to my car with my keys clenched between my fists, just in case. Outside in the dark parking lot again, I could hear coyotes howling in the mountains nearby. When a bunch of them get together, they almost sound like a big group of kids laughing. When I first moved to town, that sound scared me. Not knowing what was out there. On the drive home, I drowned them out listening to Mariah.