How to Pick Up Chicks

I don’t know where men get the idea that women want them to reek of designer fragrances. I’m very much one woman who doesn’t want them reeking of anything. I mean, if their hair smells recently shampooed, that’s nice, and if they smell faintly of soap, that’s nice too, but the only thing more obnoxious to me than a man reeks of the Paco Rabanne aftershave in which he’s slathered himself is a man who reeks of cigarettes. Robert Duvall’s character in Apocalypse Now might have liked the smell of napalm in the morning, but I hate the smell of impending emphysema any time of day or night.

I’ve been smelling lots of men since the last of my surgeries because, with Internet dating been such a disappointment (no one sends a photo of himself less than 15 years old!), I’ve seized the day and taken to going with one or another of the younger gals from the office to bars where single people meet. The Honduran surgeons (I was supposed to have the work done domestically on my salary?) exceeded my wildest expectations, and everybody seems to agree that I’m incredibly hot not just for 51, but for any age. One of the gals, Trycia, has said she won’t go trouser-chasing (the female equivalent of guys’ skirt-chasing, you see) with me anymore because I was the one getting all the attention the last two times. She was especially disgruntled last Friday night, when I took home not just one, but a pair of hunkboats in their early 30s — her age — while she wound up going home alone. When I suggested — very diplomatically, it seemed to me, at least — that she might want to visit Honduras herself some time, I could see she wanted to say something snide and hurtful about my age, but I guess she also wanted to remain employed, so she just blurted something about needing to get home to her dog, and left. Her stool remained vacant for around four milliseconds.

I don’t lie about my age, and won’t pretend that a couple of my, well, conquests haven’t been a bit discombobulated to discover that I’m actually much older than I’ve come to appear. Only last week this very attractive account executive I took home from Lucki’s went pale when I mused that I was old enough to be his mother. He was out of bed and half-dressed in less time than it had taken Trycia’s stool to be claimed. It was as though he’d discovered that I’m a guy, as, between you and me, I used to be, what seems a lifetime ago. I just laughed, secure in the knowledge that I’d find someone just as cute or cuter the next night. And I did, another duo.

I’m amazed by the number of guys who imagine some variation on “You’re really beautiful” to be an effective opening gambit. It isn’t. It’s a waste of time, or at least used to be. I would always smile and say, “Thank you,” or, “How kind of you,” which left us squarely still on Square 1. Lately, though, I’ve taken to saying, “Yes, darling, I know,” which turns out to be quite an effective separator of wheat from chaff. Should my prospective seducer smirk and say, for instance, “And modest too!” I’ll surmise he probably imagines it witty to repeat catchphrases from television sitcoms, and will find something interesting to look at over his shoulder until he reads the writing on the wall and shuffles off with his tail between his legs.

As a young man (in my earlier, pre-transition, life), I was greatly saddened to read that Sammy Davis Jr. had literally bathed in Aramis, presumably to minimise the danger of a white person accusing him of not smelling nice. How cruelly ironic that potbellied rednecks with sopping underarms should imagine themselves more naturally fragrant than someone as talented as Sam. It's always those lacking any trace of stylishness themselves who most loudly ridicule those in mullets or Crocs.