A few weekends ago, I was invited to something called a “running dinner” for my good friend Monika’s 50th birthday. Running dinners were all the rage in the early aughts here in Europe, and Monika’s been carrying the dinner candelabra ever since. I can imagine that even when she turns 80, it’ll probably be a running dinner with all her septuagenarian and octogenarian friends motating around town in their wheelchairs and walkers.
Running dinners are a strange hybrid of the games we thought we’d relegated to our childhood and young adult years: Imagine a scavenger hunt crossbred with a group blind date and then with musical chairs spliced in. The purpose? Perhaps an attempt to recapture that “zany-spontaneity-of-our-youth-albeit-with-more-expensive-wine-and-impressing-strangers-with-our-mad-creative-grownup-gourmet-cooking-skills”?
We all had to RSVP months in advance of the actual running-dinner birthday party to allow Monika ample time to compile our individual, running-dinner dance cards. Her mission? To organize 75 party guests into traveling “running pairs” – sets of two people who don’t know each other but who will be spending most of the evening together eating and drinking at “running dinner stations” dispersed from one end of town to the other. Remember those three-legged races where you were tied – in full preteen mortification – to some other random nine-year-old at summer camp and then the two of you had to perform the miracle of instantaneous mind-meld and motor-skill coordination if you wanted to tripod-hop your way to the finish line? Yeah…
I got assigned to a dude named Juergen – a friend from another part of Monika’s life whom I had never met who lived in Berlin and would be traveling in from out of town for the occasion. I discovered just a week in advance of the party that Monika had volunteered me together with Juergen to host two other running pairs at my apartment for the starter course and aperitivos/drinks. With my microscopic European apartment and kitchen and still working on my hostess skills so that I can be reincarnated as Martha Stewart in my next lifetime, the prep required to wine and dine six people was the same as for 20. Based on a few emails and one short call ahead of the party to coordinate what we’d be doing for our course, I already had a bad feeling about Juergen – especially when he got miffy when I told him I needed him at my place two hours prior to the other guests arriving, so I wasn’t stuck doing 95 percent of the work myself.
Well, day of the party and STRIKE ONE! Juergen pulled a passive-aggressive switcheroo on me and showed up an hour late, exactly the time he had originally planned to show up. He was a man and wasn’t going to let a woman tell HIM what to do with his time!
In addition to being egregiously late, Juergen was already drunk when he arrived and was emanating some seriously horrible – and I mean ghastly – beer breath. STRIKE TWO. He did try to sound authentically abashed and admitted that he was late because he’d decided to go drinking with a friend instead of showing up on time to do his part of the work. Juergen had also totally dropped the ball on picking up a few bottles of wine, a baguette, and even the ingredients he needed to prepare his contribution to the appetizer course. STRIKE THREE. I didn’t even know this guy, and he was already trying to adjust the power balance in favor of patriarchy and treat me like his housewife – deciding to go drinking and let me – the little woman – take care of the logistics so he could just “waft” in an hour in advance.
Cruising altitude
Within TOPS a millisecond of opening the door to Juergen, my “OH HELL NO!” woman radar went off. I immediately noticed the hungry-dog-spotting-a-sausage look that men get when they meet a woman they think is attractive and with whom they moreover, through some testosterone-poisoned delusion, believe they definitely have a chance with.
As Juergen sauntered into my beautiful bachelorette apartment with a smug, shit-eating, drunk grin on his face, he had this whole “Oh yeah, I’ll be shacking here tonight” smug vibe emanating as noxiously as the beer through his pores as he attempted to act casual while surreptitiously doing some male, pre-shag check of my apartment’s “accouterment”: the contents of my kitchen (“Can she make me bacon and eggs for breakfast?”); the fluffiness of the sofa cushions in the living room (“How many pieces of furniture will we fuck on tonight?”); the bedside tables with little drawers that I’m certain he was certain were stuffed with condoms waiting for his dick.
But because I am a woman, I automatically shifted into “placate the male ego”/“just air-freshen the weird sexual stench” to avoid escalating any drama that might ruin my friend’s big 50th birthday bash. While every single fiber in my body was screaming at me to admonish this complete stranger for being late, for not having shopped at all, and for showing up drunk and then starting to hit on me in my own apartment, I instead tried to make polite small talk while he prepped his part of the appetizer course.
As if we had been married for 50 years, Juergen helped himself to my tomato sauce, garlic, and to about 20 Euros worth of my aged Parmesan cheese to prep his wunderbar baked clams for our guests. “I’ll just pinch a few things out of your pantry.” He seemed to feel right at home sitting in my kitchen, because of course he’d already decided he’d be eating breakfast there in the morning. I was automatically complicit in his plot, because I was being cordial to him.
Then all “man of the house”-like, he popped open a bottle of prosecco that I was chilling for the guests. I let it slide and thought to myself, “Maybe the only way you’re gonna survive this evening is if you drink, too.” Because I am a woman, I didn’t want to provoke some male-ego meltdown by chastising this man-child in my kitchen. Who knew what the domino effects of that might be.
“Here’s to a fabulous evening!” he gushed as he raised a glass of the prosecco I’d been “good woman” enough to stock up on for the party. I could feel his beady little Juergen eyes fixated on my breasts through the thick corrective lenses of his fussy, German-engineered, spaceframe eyeglasses that – from the looks of it – had at least a -4.25 correction for myopia. But then with huge relief, the dull glint of a gold wedding band caught my eye as we toasted, and I felt like a drowning woman finally being thrown a lifesaver ring. I had to figure out how to turn this discovery to my advantage and nip Juergen’s sexual-pest fantasies in the bud.
Family man
“So Monika didn’t really tell me much about you, Juergen? What’s your story? Family? Kids?” Alas, my relief was short lived, because apparently – also something he had conveniently failed to mention up till this point – Juergen had separated a year ago from his wife of 25 years (and three kids), and they had “mutually decided to get divorced just two weeks ago.”
The wife is actually the friend of Monika’s, and “Juergenlein” (little Juergen) was just a friend-by-proxy. The wife, in fact, was elsewhere in the city that evening as part of another running dinner pair. While Juergen said they were divorcing soon, he still had his ring on – sort of a “shooting for the best of both worlds” indication to me.
My own divorce happened two years ago after years of truculent separation, so when I shared some of my own “wisdom gained” about the topic of divorce while we were chatting before the guests arrived, Juergen started mansplaining to me that I needed to learn to make better choices in men. I’m not sure how he made that determination based on the limited information I gave him about my divorce; or how he presumed to know more about divorce than I since I had already gone through it, and he was just at the very start of his nine levels of Dante divorce hell. He could have just made the assumption because, after all, I am a woman and what could I know about how to direct my life?
I didn’t notice that Juergen had already sucked down an entire bottle of prosecco almost entirely on his own in the 30 minutes since arriving and had, in fact, popped open a new bottle. In fact, it didn’t register that he was moving from tipsy into “feisty drunk” territory.
I did catalog his really creepy, skin-crawling, lecherous remarks about my appearance placed scattershot amongst a continued long study of my boobs. So, here was this complete stranger – a friend of a friend – in my apartment, cooking with me and feeling like he could start hitting on me – because why? Because I am a woman and because, especially, I am woman unguarded or owned by another man.
Dine and dash?
I tried to shut Juergen down several times in my apartment, but feared that if I told him to leave or tried to ditch him en route to our next “running-dinner station,” he’d get really ugly whenever he finally showed up at the next location and ruin Monika’s birthday. I weighed my own integrity and safety against the greater good of the group – because I am a woman and wanted to ensure that everyone was happy and that my part of the birthday bash went off without a hitch.
After the appetizers, our guests left, and Juergen made sure to bottoms-up a full glass of expensive Primitivo I’d gotten as a gift for MY birthday and which I hadn’t set out for the guests. The German Lothario must have gone exploring in my pantry while I was busy playing hostess. Perhaps he stumbled across it while checking to see if I had Nutella for breakfast the next morning and decided it was OK for him as the man of the house to open it without asking me? Well…one for the road, Juergenlein!
We traveled to our next running dinner station, which was the main course with two other pairs. I was relieved to see Monika when we got there. But en route on the underground, Juergen – now tanked with a lethal mix of beer, prosecco, white wine, red wine, and even a little vermouth sloshing around in his gut and veins – actually fell over twice onto other passengers when the train braked for stops. That was when it finally dawned on me how trashed he actually was at 7 p.m. on a Saturday night. It was embarrassing to see a 50-something, (still)-married father of three as drunk as a teenage girl on her first-ever, vodka-and-Red-Bull bender. People assumed he was my partner because we were together, and I got some nasty looks. I actually had to scold him to hang onto the railing. Because I am a woman, I was taking care of him, allowing him to simultaneously assign me “ersatz mommy mode” while leering at me like the woman he would use that evening to try and make his soon-to-be-ex-wife (and mother of his kids) jealous of his mad rebound skills.
On the underground ride – six agonizing stops – Juergen also kept insisting loudly that I switch seats to sit next to him (We both had aisle seats.), and I said, no, I didn’t want to. He lurched to sit next to me when a seat opened up, and that’s when he took his second drunk fall – onto the fragile, osteoporosis thighbones of an old lady. He kept trying to touch me and put his hands on me and honestly, I should’ve punched him or just gotten up quickly, hopped off the train, and disappeared. But because I am a woman, I just kept thinking, don’t wreck Monika’s birthday, and I would wriggle away from his mooching paws.
For the dinner and then dessert stations, I made sure to sit as far away from Juergen’s groping hands and increasingly poisonous alcohol breath as possible. He kept sucking down enormous quantities of alcohol, and at the last station (dessert at a third apartment) before all of us convened at the bar with the whole group to countdown to midnight and toast Monika’s 50th, Juergenlein chain-drank three huge vodka martinis. Half of one was enough to knock me out, and it was my last drink of the evening before I switched to water. At one point – I think it was Martini No. 3 – the fool actually dribbled martini out of his mouth onto his blue, button-down shirt while getting aggressive about something political with the rest of the guests. Everyone was embarrassed. Horrified, even. But no one moved to mitigate or remove him, because he is a man – and no one felt comfortable enough to reduce, chastise, or rein him in.
By the time we got to the bar where everyone was gathered, Juergen was grabbing me and getting his face too close to mine. At one point, he tried to kiss me, and it was absolutely mortifying. His wife was there, but they didn’t sit together. His antics were on display for this whole circle of friends to see, and STILL I didn’t want to make a scene at Monika’s special birthday event.
Exit, stage left
Just after the midnight toast to Monika and 75 tipsy or outright drunk-albeit-happy Germans struggling to sing the “TH” sound in “Happy Birthday,” I felt the dog’s foul, hot breath and sweaty paws on me again. “Let me know when you’re leaving, so I can come with you,” Juergen insisted. And at that point I said, “No. You will not be leaving with me. Enough is enough now. Genug ist genug.” Another female guest noticed what was happening and asked me what was going on. I told her. I didn’t even have to explain to her – or any other woman I’ve related this story to since that night – why I had opted to sacrifice my own enjoyment of the evening to avoid creating a bad scene that might mar everyone’s memory of the party. I didn’t have to explain my reasoning to her or to any other woman, because we are women, and we’ve all had to make this kind of sacrifice many times before in our lives.
She was a big girl, so she stood up and said, “I’ll block him, and you go. Don’t say goodbye, just go.” Which I did. I left the bar. I didn’t want to leave the party that early, but I also didn’t want to deal with any further sexual assault by Juergen that evening. We had made it to Monika’s toast. And because the event was technically over, and no one would be insulted or suspicious or left wondering or think me, as a woman, impolite – because after all, I did stay till the end – I felt I had adequate cover at that point to care for myself.
I left the bar and actually ran down a slippery cobblestone street through a heavy summer rainstorm in a flimsy pair of gold strappy sandals, which got devoured by this last stretch of action that evening. I kept looking behind me the whole time to make sure Juergen wasn’t drunkenly lurching after me. I feared for my safety, because I am a woman.
I haven’t talked to Monika – yet – about the events that unfolded over the course of the evening with Juergen, but I may do so. Because I am a woman, this conversation is not inevitable. My relating this whole horrible experience to her may still have the power to wreck her 50th birthday, albeit retroactively. Because Monika and I are women, if we talk about what happened, we’ll each blame our respective female selves for a man’s egregious behavior. We’ll blame ourselves for not having done something differently or earlier. Juergen has my cell phone, my email, and knows where I live. I had insomnia most of that night because I was worried he would show up at my apartment to make good on his presumed claim on me, made evident the moment he stepped into my home.
In my restless state, my mind fixated on Bram Stoker’s Dracula in which vampire etiquette, law, and lore dictate that if you invite a vampire into your home once, if you allow them to cross the threshold into your home with full permission even one time, then they have irrevocable permission forever onwards to revisit whenever they want. In the grisly, blue-black depths of that night, I went over and over what I should have done and said; what could still happen; and how I will respond. If X happens I’ll call Monika, I practiced. If Y happens I’m calling Klaus, or some other male friend or neighbor to provide some masculine intervention. If Z happens I’m not even waiting, I’m calling the police. I had my defensive moves all mapped out.
Rules of the game
I’m pretty sure Juergen will be contacting me again. He either won’t remember the harm he caused me due to the fact that he was drunk enough to be clinically dead – or he will have some recollection or at least an emotional memory of how he hurt me, but will conveniently brush it off as “harmless flirting” that, since I wasn’t adamantly and verbally opposing, must have meant I “wanted it,” right?
My first impulse when he contacts me will be to write or call him back and scold him for his behavior. But because I am a woman, I will think even if I scold him for what he did, he’s not going to have any regrets, and he’ll probably try to turn the conversation around to say that I was this desperate single woman hitting on a married man. Or he’ll say something along the lines of if I didn’t like the attention, why didn’t I tell him to stop? He’ll place the blame on me. Because I am a woman, I won’t be able to explain my reasoning in a way that will make any sense to him as a man: “I didn’t want to ruin the party!” “I was afraid of you!” Because I am a woman, I will refrain from talking further to him about his behavior, because I won’t want to invoke more anger or yet another anger state. I can’t forget that this man has my cell phone, my email, and knows where I live.
I regret that I’m not the badass Xena: Warrior Princess/Jackie Brown/Brienne of Tarth/Uma Thurman’s “Bride” in Kill Bill that I would like to be in these situations. My feminazi self mostly keeps her cedar shoe-trees in her jackboots. In real life, there’s rarely the cool and satisfying justice of a “break the hand of the sexual assaulter when he grabs your ass” scene like in these shows, that’s then followed by the badass woman sovereignly returning to sip her martini to the cheers of all the onlookers while the sexual pest crawls away.
I’m almost 6-feet tall and built like a field hockey player. I was pretty sure I could beat Juergen’s ass to a pulp if I wanted to. So why didn’t I? I didn’t want to make waves. I didn’t want to bum people out. I didn’t want to make a scene. Because I am a woman.
Unlike vampires, human etiquette, law, and lore are built upon the foundation of the social contract. Citizens give up freedoms in return for what their government and leaders can provide, usually in the form of security. Men agree to a stenosis of their full humanity, so they can focus on the rewards of riches, status, and power. Women agree to sublimate to the wishes of boys and men for their own physical safety and for the riches, status, and power that men and boys can bestow upon them. Men are conditioned to dominate; women are conditioned to behave.
I didn’t agree to this social contract. Men didn’t agree to this social contract. We were minors when the terms were dictated to us. It’s an illegal indenture, and we should all be let out. But I’m a good citizen. And men are good citizens. And we’re all doing exactly what society has trained us to do: to be men terrified of their fragility and emotions; to be women terrified by our strength and self-confidence.
I’ll tell you one thing I won’t be doing again is another running dinner, because I literally had to run for my life after this one. Monika and her good-time buddies1 can celebrate their 70th and 80th in their Hoveround® scooters without me. I’ll toast her with a flute of prosecco at midnight from the sanctity of my home, which hopefully in 30 years will be liberated from the funk of Juergenlein. I’ll be burning a lot of sage and palo santo in the intervening decades.
Notes & Images
1 – Lieutenant Bookman, Seinfeld, “The Library,” written by Larry Charles, October 16, 1991.
¤ “Drinking Man, SF Obscura” – Photo by Jeremyriad, FlickrCC https://tinyurl.com/ycndwrdj
¤ “Drinking Man (sketch)” – Photo by Zijia, FlickrCC https://tinyurl.com/yc2yau4g