I met my boyfriend online. I forget what the dating site was called. It hardly matters, though. After a while, they all start to look the same. The same sort of posturing. The same lies. The same truths. I had also signed up on quite a few different dating sites. Even a few of my friends signed me up to some sites without me even knowing. You sort of forget which ones you’re using after a while. But either way, I copied and pasted my profile in as many lonely-seeking-someone corners of the internet. I figured dating was like hunting, and I always tended to hit at least something with a shotgun, even if that something wasn’t always the right thing.
That is how I met Ted. He does not like to be referred to as Teddy. Ted is fine. I won’t give his last name, though. This isn’t one of those sorts of tell-alls.
Our first date was at a run-down dive bar. The place smelled like too much cheap cleaning products, and everything from the barstools to the tables to even the glasses our drinks were served in was sticky. When we met in the bar we both pretended like it was a blind date, as if one of our friends were concerned about the both of us possibly being alone forever and realized they had mutual friends of other mutual friends that knew two lonely people (aka us) that might wanna meet and see where the sparks landed.
I will admit that I was initially attracted to Ted due to his physique. I am shallow enough to admit that. He was one of those sorts of young, just out of college, sort of guys that still felt the need to take care of his body, because the shape and tone of his abs somehow informed the rest of his personality. One might say Ted’s physical appearance was the beginning and end of his personality. Ted had very dark features, and stood with a straight, purposefully elongated posture. The hallmark tall, dark, and handsome sort of trademark that made him look like an extra on a television show about pretty people with pretty problems.
I certainly hope that Ted also found me attractive. I mean, I know that he did, since he would affirm his attraction towards me in various ways. But I don’t think I’m shallow enough to suggest that I was just as pretty as Ted was.
I also like to pretend that we didn’t fall head over heels for each other, since that would be way too cliche, and the relationship that Ted and I had was much too young to be cliche yet. Though I’m almost positive that it wasn’t, you know, ripped from some mamby-pampy rom-com silver nitrate story. It was, if I’m being honest with myself, simply brain chemistry, or psychology, or perhaps a little bit of both, or none of the above. I don’t know. I didn’t really pay attention in Psychology 101 in school, so I’m definitely not an expert as to what part of the brain controls what part of my life and all the decisions that come about it.
What I do know is that Ted and I became enamored with one another, and the relationship developed in a healthy and productive manner. We went on dates. We met each other’s respective friend groups. We slowly began to move in together, one article of clothing or toiletry at a time. First it was a change of clothes so we could easily get dressed and go to work the next day. And then we started going on trips to Ikea and Costco to shop for our shared coexistence/cohabitation. Then, before either of us realized it, we had moved into a single apartment. My apartment, specifically.
For whatever reason, Ted did not seem to want me to go over to his place all that often. Or at least whenever the question came up as to whose place we should stay at on any given weeknight, he usually suggested my place. I assumed he was being romantic by allowing me to be in a comfortable space. But I had my doubts.
Sometimes intrusive thoughts of mine would flair up. Sometimes I would think he was hiding another life from me. Anything from another girlfriend/relationship to a secret kid he had with an ex of his that he didn’t want to tell me about because on our second or third date I had discussed how I didn’t really like and/or want kids. And then sometimes those sorts of thoughts would go off the rail. Sometimes I would imagine wild scenarios of how Ted was really a mafia assassin on the run from a rival gang or police agency, and he was using me as a cover to come across as normal.
I’m not proud of where some of my intrusive paranoia took me, but I felt as if I needed to play out the worst case scenarios in my head so that when it was something else, something a lot more frivolous by comparison, then it wouldn’t freak me out whenever he finally disclosed what it was that he was hiding.
Assuming, of course, that he was hiding anything in the first place! Though I suppose love stories would not truly be love stories without a little intrigue and paranoia peppered in.
But I did discover something Ted did not want me to find out. Or maybe he did, and he was just waiting for the right moment to disclose his secret. But with those sorts of secrets that lie deep within a person’s psyche, the right time is never right, and the discovery is always a surprise for all parties mentioned.
Ted had moved in with me, and we had been living together for some four months or so. I woke up in the middle of the night after having some nebulous nightmare I could not describe for the life of me. I will say, I do find the whole business of sleeping and dreaming somewhat tiring. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I dream, and at times I get faint glimpses of memories of those dreams. But the entire picture and definition of what it was that I dreamt about on any given night escapes me. It infuriates me to no end. But I digress.
I heard a noise in the apartment. I reached over the bed to see if Ted was in his unconscious, non-coital horizontal position as I remembered him being hours prior when we both fell asleep while watching netflix. But I discovered that he was no longer in bed. My immediate thought was that he was in the bathroom. The noise I heard, the lack of my boyfriend in the bed, all of it could mean only one thing; Ted had to be in the bathroom because he drank too much pbr before bed. Ted ate bad lettuce at dinner, and now he had horrible diarrhea. Ted might have had an uncontrollable, sexual urge to autoerotic asphyxiate himself. I don’t think I was prepared to know every little kink of Ted’s, or really any person for that matter. Perhaps that’s a character flaw of mine, but I think I can manage to live with that. Or maybe Ted tripped over the cat and ran into the wall, making a solid thud as he knocked over the print of a parisian cafe hanging in the hallway. Though the more awake I became, the more I realized none of those reasons explained the sound that I heard. Especially, and most importantly, because we did not have a cat.
I sleepily made my way through our apartment, trying to rely on muscle memory as to where all our furniture and decor was located, though occasionally failing and bumping into things (too many things!) as I made my way to Ted’s office—aka the second bedroom that we just converted into an office space—in the dark.
What I discovered, I must admit, I would not have been able to guess in my wildest dreams what Ted was up to in the middle of the night while I slept.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Ted stood there motionless for a beat. A beat a little too long for comfort. The record skipped. It sounded like the silence in between strippers going on stage and the dj can’t seem to find the right track for Tammy’s act and all the men in the club think the world is coming to an end.
“It looks a lot weirder than it is,” he said.
“Yeah, I certainly hope so.”
Ted stood in front of a camera with a LED highlighting everything (and I mean everything!) he was doing. He wore one of those guy fawkes masks while wielding a machete in one hand and a stuffed animal in the other. Strewn all over the floor of the office were the fuzz, the innards?, the guts?, of an alarming amount of stuffed animals that Ted, in his guy fawkes mask, had chopped off their heads and limbs with his machete.
Part of me, I must admit, wanted to scream. A man in a guy fawkes mask brandishing a sharp blade while surrounded by decapitated, inanimate children’s stuffed toys stood before me. Logically, I knew it was Ted. I recognized his build. Plus, who else could it be? I feel like if I had discovered a complete stranger in my apartment wearing a strange, libertarian-ish history mask while carrying a weapon, then they would have chased after me.
But seeing how Ted knew that I did not like to be chased, instead Ted stood there as dumbfounded as me. Despite our different reasons for dumbfoundedness, we both drowned in a loss of words.
“I know you have some questions, but I kinda need to finish this stream.”
“Hokay….”
“But afterward, I’m all yours. I’ll answer all of your questions.”
I got the impression that Ted wanted me to close the door and forget what I saw. At least for a moment while he finished filming whatever it was that he was doing in front of who knows how many viewers. I partially complied. I did begin to close the door. But my curiosity kept hold of me and when he thought I had completely left the room and was no longer watching, I peeked through the crack of the door.
Ted took the machete and brandished it above his head menacingly. He made a show of it as he placed another unsuspecting, innocent-looking stuffed animal—this time a giraffe—on the table. He lined the blade up with the giraffe’s neck and teased the audience with the theory of chopping off the stuffed giraffe’s head. It appeared as if he had done this whole charade quite a few times. After the third or fourth time of teasing what the audience knew he was going to do, Ted, in his expressionless guy fawkes’ mask, brought down his machete with as much force as he could muster. The blade went through the stuffed giraffe’s neck with little resistance. Despite there being no blood or gore whatsoever, I felt mildly ill. A nausea built up in the pit of my stomach.
I went into the living room to wait for Ted to finish whatever it was that he needed to finish up before he could explain to me what it was that I had just witnessed.
“Sorry about that,” he said as he walked in sans guy fawkes mask. “I hope I didn’t freak you out too much.”
“I mean, it was pretty disconcerting. What the hell did I just witness in there?”
“The short answer; it’s what I do for a job. It’s like a social media thing. I make videos cutting up stuffed animals with my machete while wearing a random mask that people message me asking me to wear each week.”
“And what, they just pay you money to do that?”
“Well, yeah, that’s how social media works nowadays. It doesn’t really matter what you do, just so long as you can garner as much attention as possible, and then you can monetize the content.”
“I still don’t think I understand.”
“What’s there to understand? I film myself cutting up stuffed animals, and then the internet pays me.”
“I suppose I’m more or less confused as to why you would do it in the first place.”
“Other than the money?”
“I wouldn’t think that you were getting paid to do whatever it was that you were doing at the beginning.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. I wasn’t. It took a while to get my channel monetized. Years, in fact. But I suppose I started doing it because I thought it was kinda fun, you know. I thought it was a funny idea and wondered if other people would think it was a funny idea, and they did. So, yeah, I guess it just sort of grew from there.”
“What’s the meaning behind it all?”
“Oh, well, I never really thought too hard about that. I suppose it has something to do with capitalism. That seems all the rage nowadays. Just do some random shit, say you are doing it because of capitalism, and then you’re good to go—or at least it makes it seem a lot more meaningful than it really is. But at the end of the day, who cares, really? People keep tuning in and doom scrolling down through all my videos for mindless entertainment. The platform stays happy when the viewers are happy, so I stay happy. Win-win-win-I-guess.”
“I feel like you should have disclosed this when we moved in together.”
“Why? It’s not like it defines who I am.”
“Yeah, but still…Couples tell each other what they do for a living.”
“Sure, and I mean, I would have, you know, eventually told you.”
“When? Is your job a need-to-know sort of thing?”
“No, but…”
“Cause I had to find out, well, I found out how I found out, and lemme tell you, it was not a pleasant experience to wake up in the middle of the night to the sight of your significant other chopping up stuffed animals with a machete while wearing some weird pervert mask.”
“First off, it’s a guy fawkes’ mask—”
“I hardly think that matters.”
“Second, I don’t know why I didn’t bring it up before. I guess I was trying to avoid this. I thought you might judge me and it would pick a fight, and I’ve always kinda been really bad with avoiding confrontation or uncomfortable feelings, so yeah, I suppose I just kept it a secret. And no, I don’t really know when I would have told you about my weird social media job had you not found out tonight.”
“Can I at least ask you what your social media handle is?”
“Why? Are you going to follow me?”
“Maybe. If anything, watching you do whatever it was that you did has me curious.”
“Alright, well, my handle is @stuffslaher64.”
I pulled up my boyfriend’s social media page on my phone. We started watching his videos together. After watching a couple, I began to get it, or at least I pretended to understand the meaning of what Ted was doing. I won’t lie to you and say that I completely agree with whatever sort of statement Ted is trying to make, if in fact he is even making a statement. Though I suppose one could argue that the lack of any sort of statement is in itself a statement, of sorts.
But Ted and I do share a similar disposition when it comes to not liking or wanting to engage with confrontation. Getting on with getting along, or however it goes. I figured it wasn’t really worth fighting over his social media vocation. I figured, what harm could he be doing with whatever the hell it is that he’s doing?
I suppose I didn’t necessarily have to start participating in his video process. I never got in front of the camera. No, even with a mask I would be way too camera shy to step in front of a camera to perform for whatever audience lay waiting in the tall sawgrass of the ether’s swamp fields. But I guess, if a gun was put to my head and I needed to explain myself or else my brain would paint the wall of my living room, then I’d have to say the reason I started helping Ted with his social media stuff was because it felt like we were spending quality time together. Fighting capitalism, or what have you.
How Ted ended up dead at the end of making a video one night, well, for that side B of the story, I’m going to need to consult with a lawyer first.
Fred Aiken Writing 