A Ladies’ Man-With All The Ladies He Was Not With Tonight In Mind  

By Jason Taylor 

David McGovern always considered himself a ladies’ man, although it was not obvious from his appearance or his demeanor that he harbored such thoughts. No, Dave (his preferred nickname and not Davey as his blessed late mother used to call him, call him with a certain tone that meant he was in some kind of trouble, under some maternal menace and he would run for cover against her wrath), was not a guy who had his generation’s idols like Paul Newman or Robert Redford good looks (and now let’s say Brad Pitts for those baffled by the mention of the previous names). Rather he had the craggy good looks of a weathered Irishman (or as one gal put it after he had turned her over, had left her in the lurch for the “next best thing,” his constant search, a Rasputin look complete with that evil eye spell that had been the bad night of her existence, and not her alone) when young which played to his advantage among the gentile and non-gentile beat/ hippie young women he was attracted to from his high school roaming days on around Cambridge and environs. 

He emphatically was not, could not be attractive to the ice cold beautiful set of women that he attempted to avoid like the plague (you know the cheerleaders and social butterflies in high school and the stockbroker trophy wives later). They ignored him and laughed at him in his funny hand-me-downs in any case so as much a question of accepting social reality as anything else. His demeanor, well his demeanor, or his “hook” as he always kidded himself in private moments was to take a woman by main force-by the fact of wearing her down with his two thousand assorted facts ready for distribution at a moment’s notice and his thousand, roughly, ideas some off-point but some fascinating to intellectually-oriented women -also sent by main force. So you could see that he knew early on that he would be attracted to, attractive to certain types of women-and they to him. So for a great deal of his sweet soft soap life he had at any given time a bevy, nice word huh, of women in his orbit.                  

That bevy idea to Dave is important, will become more important because he defined himself by his “list” (what in the old days would be called the black book, the book where you had a list of names of available, available to you, and telephone numbers, so you can tell by that old-fashioned instrument it had been a while since that concept had been in its prime, of as many young women as you had come across and not crossed off). 

Some of Dave’s exploits when he was younger were the stuff of local urban folk legend among his crowd. In this day and age it might cause snickers or raised eyebrows as rather sophomoric and a sign of youthful insecurity (even though the particular “run” to be spoken of had occurred when he was in his mid-twenties). That insecurity part, upon later reflection by Dave himself in some private moments had some merit since in early high school due his poverty and self-consciousness of that hard fact, and his female classmates’ as well he did not have any girlfriend at all. It was only Harvard Square, the folk scene, the coffeehouses, the old Hayes-Bickford and what was happening there that gave him a new lease on life.

But enough of the psychological reasons for his need to take a “run” every now and again. That “run” meant that between serious women friends he would try to date, lure or whatever (and bed) as many women as he could logically handle. This was no meant trick in the days when all you had was a landline telephone and only a certain amount of time to do your hard-boiled loving. Five, well, maybe six was the highest number he could handle when Dave was in the “rut.” Here’s what a “run” might look like and remember this was not some teen frenzy but from his mid-twenties times. Needless to say it started with him going to a friend’s party (pot party if anybody is asking although the liquor flowed as well) and he ran into Josie, a delicious young woman fresh from the campus at half-revolutionary Madison at the University of Wisconsin (via Manhattan and a high ranking at Hunter College High) and so just Dave’s meat in those days when he was particularly attracted to high achiever Jewish women who had a radical past, or wished they had since that was one of his calling cards then. Dave had been a draft-resister, had served some time for his resistance so he played the “girls say ‘yes’ to boys who say ‘no’” card for all it was worth. (There is a famous, maybe infamous today, photograph from 1968 maybe you can Google it with three fetching women, three women a guy would be willing to say “no” to the draft for if you wanted to get an idea of what they looked like, sitting on a couch under a sign with just that expression written above them.) Josie went for him in a big way, and if things had been different, if he hadn’t just broken up with his first wife (a wife he had married as he was going off to jail so that she could have visitation rights and so he in a morose mood would have been married something he was hung up about since his teens-bad move, very bad reason in the end) and was in no mood for being serious just then they could have been a solo match. In fact at one point Dave seriously considered dumping the other women for Josie but he was just not smart enough to see that he could have had a much simpler life had he had the brains given to geese.                           

In a way Josie just whetted Dave’s appetite for she was not only a radical gal she was also very inventive in bed as a number of women were in those days after “the pill” and some discreet reading of the Kama Sutra had freed things up for a whole younger generation of women who were ready to break out of their mothers traps. A few weeks after meeting Josie Dave though he met an art student from the Museum School at an opening of an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. He had decided to go see some of the Impressionists that he was (and is) crazy about when he saw this young woman with sketch book in hand drawing free-hand (and very well) a painting by Monet (one of those rural France scenes all misty and pointy). He stepped up to her and gave her, gave Robin, some of his two thousand facts about Monet (the stuff that even artists don’t know or give a damn about) and that was enough to whet her appetite although she was not as impressed with his left-wing credentials as Josie since she was one of the most apolitical people he had ever met, totally into her art to the avoidance of all else (she would tell him later that she had seen her brother go “wrong” with radical politics, having had been around the Weather Underground when that organization meant something for the political action of the time and cause all kinds of problems in her family’s household so she very consciously avoided the subject).       

Of course with two women being dated at the same the question, a question that would grow exponentially with the addition of more women, there were times when one wanted to see him or he to see her and so the juggling started (and the notorious “no show” without calling to cancel the date and just leaving Josie or Robin hanging, and the bullshit reason for not doing so. The “no show” business drove the very reliable Robin crazy when he decided that he needed to check out what the sexual inventive Josie was thinking up.) That question, no, that problem, hit home when Robin brought him to her apartment across the Fenway from school to meet her roommate, Rachel, after Robin had told her so much about Dave and after a few visits began to “see” Rachel. Rachel who was a student at Boston University and had come there from upstate New York near Saratoga Springs was very political, and very much a good spirit unlike Robin who would get moody was thus number three. (Much later, after the “run” had run its course and he was alone again Dave had a private laugh about some advice the old time blues singer, Sippy Wallace, a singer that Bonnie Raitt had help “discover” as the blues revival hit high gear told her female listeners to follow-“don’t advertise your man.”)                    

Naturally that idea of dating roommates was not without problems as far as keeping it from Robin. Rachel said she didn’t give a damn who he was “seeing,” nice clean way to put it right, as long as he was available to her and didn’t tell Robin about them because she was a both a good roommate and finding another place before the school was out would have been hard. Needless to say Rachel and Dave met at his place or at hers when Robin was away although one Sunday night they had almost played it too close as Robin came in the door from a family visit and Dave had to go out the fire escape that came with apartment building sin the Fenway, praise be. The next conquest meeting Dave would gather in was a friend of Robin’s from school, Catherine, whose father had been a “lifer” military officer and since she was estranged from that man she was impressed, very impressed by Dave’s anti-war credentials. Fortunately she lived in Cambridge and so there was no problem seeing her (except she balked at first when he told her that he was “seeing” Rachel as well as Robin but his old trick of the frontal attack, of “shaming” her into being too bourgeois about the whole thing and that they should live in the world of ideas, and of art got him through the door). Dave had been in error about this “run” consisting of six young women since that would have actually been an earlier “run” (and reflects the vagaries of age on the memory). So Martha, was number five and the end, a woman he had met at a political event and had surprised him with her knowledge of politics and ideas and who knew the classics in German as well. She had stayed with him every step of the way when he started his two thousand facts and myriad of ideas. It was a serious question of who seduced who on that one.              

All of this womanizing had to come to an end sometime and you would be surprised that the big reason that the whole house of cards fell apart was that Dave developed a little “habit,” a little “date” with cousin cocaine, with the snowman. In the end he would get clean but along the way he did some awful things to those women from conning them for money for coke to the infamous no shows which got more frequent as he got into his “head” (and had to spend so much time hustling to get his dope). Martha left him early since she was involved with an organization who wanted her to go to Germany. Catherine found some other guy once it was clear Dave was not going to take her seriously (and she was having second-thoughts about cheating on her friend Robin). Rachel went crazy when Dave tried to get her to do a little coke to get them in the mood and threw him out of the apartment one cold night). Josie he kind of let go when he realized that she was worth having as a solo relationship but he was in no shape to work on that (to his everlasting sorrow). Robin, poor crazy artist Robin was the only one who was willing to stand by him, even after he lied about where the money she lend” went before it became too obvious that he was a cokehead. But by then the “run” had run its course and he left town to head out west without saying good-bye (to make a coke deal connection and “get well”).         

All of this youthful prelude mentioned here to observe that sometimes you cannot teach an old dog new tricks, or some guys never change may be a better way to put the matter. Dave, after “getting clean” would subsequently have three unsuccessful marriages and a few scattered affairs (some while married, some not). But mostly he stayed with one woman at a time, no more than two. After his third divorce a few years ago he had decided that he would no longer deal with having a relationship with a female, the work was too hard, he was getting too old for all of this. That resolve lasted a couple of years then one night he told his old drinking companion, Jack Collins, at Jimmy’s Grille that he needed to “break out,” needed the company of a woman again. The problem was that he was out of practice, and moreover as the mostly older male crowd that frequented Jimmy’s demonstrated where would a guy meet mature women these days. Bars were out, the museums were passe and the old time trick of haunting the bookstores was out since they were mostly out of brick and mortar in the age of Amazon. Jack then suggested to him an on-line dating service, Seniors Please, which he had tried and had gotten some dates from although he admitted that it had been a lot more work than he would have expected. That work including having to wade through the endless photos of older women holding their grandchildren, their pets or posing with their adult children. Jack told Dave from that look on his face that he was probably in need of that service despite the problems.         

Dave balked at first, balked in front of Jack that drinking night but about a week later he took the plunge. The whole idea of these on-line dating sites from the site’s prospective is to sell memberships and other come-ons to “fast-track” your chances of actually getting a date (and who knows what else). Merely signing up gets you nothing but a good laugh since you can’t respond or get a response without ponying up some credit-carded membership fee. So Dave went through his paces, paid his dough, answered a bunch of supposedly relevant questions to see who you would match up with and, most importantly, put up a few paragraph profile about what he was looking for, and who should answer his plea. Of course this part to Dave with his now two thousand plus facts and few thousand ideas was like manna from heaven. He immediately got plenty of ‘messages” from women who appreciated his sincere profile (he would find out later that the guys on the site ranged for the most part from Neanderthals to con artists looking to prey on women for dough and so his very reasonable and well-written words impressed a lot of women-the bar apparently among the senior set with their collective histories of failure very low).         

That flurry of messages from local women got him thinking about how he really was a ladies’ man, got him thinking back to the days when he went through women like water (by the way he totally discounted as bizarre messages of women from Texas or Wisconsin since why would he travel half way around the world for what was really a blind date and why would they expect anything from their long range messages). One woman clued him in to what was really going on since there were more men, already outlined above, on the site than women so they gravitated toward the sane, the rational and those whose photograph(s) showed some promise. There was no kidding about this as guys would put photographs of them in the bathroom and other strange places, would come on strong with the sex bit for no particular reason and would liberally strew their incomplete sentences with obscenities. Jesus, Jack had been right this whole thing was a lot more work than one would have though from a generation who had been through the mill already. Had all, including Dave, carried enough baggage with them to fill the belly of your average commercial jet airplane.  

Undaunted though Dave was amazed at how many women on the basis of one or two short messages were eager, more than eager in some cases, to meet for coffee or some such proposition. That ease was his downfall and that is what sent him back to his old ways. What one woman called the “harem” effect since while there were more men than women on the site there were only a finite number that seemingly had not been junkies, jailbirds or juke artists a guy like him, in person unseen, presented a target for all the disappointed lonely-hearted women (and he admitted, not untruthfully that he too was lonely). The woman, Betsy, who told him about the harem effect was actually his first date on the site and here is how it played out. After a couple of short messages she asked him if he would like to meet her the next day at the Museum of Fine Arts. Since he was still crazy about art and the location of the meet-up was a neutral place he accepted for the next afternoon around one. All that morning he wondered what she would be like in person, somebody with three heads, a mass murderer, who knows what else. As it turned out she was just a more mature version of the kind of free-spirited women he was attracted to in his youth. So he decided to play out his hand with her for a while.              

In the meantime he was getting flurries of messages from other women (some of them unsolicited, others which he initiated on the basis of their profiles). Enough to get “hungry” for his old ways despite that successful Betsy meeting. One day, one Sunday he had in succession, a date for brunch with Debbie, a late lunch with Chrissie, and a medium late supper with Alison. All without his now usual afternoon nap. Add in one more with Ellen a week later and at one point his was dating five women. Here’s the problem though our ladies’ man Dave had lost a step or five and despite the beauties of modern technology and his still intact ability to throw facts into the wind at random he grew tired, very tired of trying to make arrangements to meet this latest bevy. Moreover his interest level had diminished with age. What he really wanted was to see what there was to see about Betsy and so he gradually left the others behind (older women seem to be better natured about a guy not returning calls or taking no calls as a signal that he was no longer interested than in the old days. But you know when they put up the score in such matters Dave McGovern will be thought of as an old dog. Will always have been thought of as a ladies’ man right to the end.