During my exchange in Portugal, I kept a daily journal filled with the things I did that day, from what happened at school to the travel stories I accumulated. Reading back on that journal, there are some standout days that I’m glad to have records of.
Some of my favourite entries are those entailing my dating life. The romantic, the weird, the downright confusing. A collection of the interesting characters I met. One of them in particular was a standout, and a story that seems to come up time and time again…a girl who I learned self-identified as “Hitler’s #1 supporter in the modern era”.
Below is my recollection of that odd day.
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The day I went on a Tinder date with a Nazi
February 25, 2016
I woke up today feeling even worse than I have the past few days. Something I ate most definitely gave me food poisoning, and it’s been wreaking havoc on my stomach.
Mornings have been especially bad, waking up feeling like my insides would rather be outside. While food hasn’t been going down easily, I know that I need to eat for some energy.
A couple of eggs on toast, a handful of extra strength ibuprofen, and a cold shower. All the things I need to get me from feeling like I want to die into the happy petunia I’m striving to be.
Just what the doctor ordered.
After laboriously finishing up my morning routine, I had a look at my Tinder messages. I’ve been having a back and forth with this American girl named Nicole.
Nicole’s from Massachusetts, and she’s fun to chat with. She’s been in Portugal for around a month, but is heading back home in two days. She’s holed up in an Airbnb a short walk away, and we make plans to meet up at one of my favourite coffee shops, Casa Independente.
After another handful of extra strength meds, I head over to meet her.
Casa Independete is a bit hidden, so I’m not surprised when she texts me 15 minutes late saying that she’s lost. I head outside to meet her and find her chatting with an old man guy on a bench.
Apparently he was a cashier at one of the Indian restaurants she frequented. Ok cool, she likes Indian food. I like spicy food. Into it.
She’s cute. Her eyes are the largest, bluest pair of lookers I’ve ever seen. Red hair, a big personality, this girl is small, but spunky. Even her body language has a ton of character.
Heading into the coffee shop, the next few hours contained the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had on a first date. Actually, I don’t know if you can really call it a conversation. More like being talked at.
I learned a lot about Nicole very quickly.
It started off pleasant enough. Telling me that she’s been in Lisbon for 2 months because she got tired of working as a maid, and annoyed at her boss for telling her what to do. Normal enough. You deserve that vacation, Nicole.
“Yeah my boss was such an asshole. And all my clients hate the Mexican cleaners because they’re lazy and steal everything. They want a white person which is why they all liked me so much”
Ah, so I guess that’s where were taking this conversation.
It’s amazing how quickly your entire perspective of a person changes once you realize they’re a complete bigot. And I was only brushing the surface of how ridiculous this girl was.
The following is a catalog of merely some of the things she brought up, that I learned about her, or that I noticed during our date, which ended up lasting from 3 in the afternoon until 1am:
- Excessively used the ‘C’ word
- Has a tattoo of a backwards B on the inside of her lip
- She goes by B because it’s the first letter of her middle name
- Says the ‘N’ word without any remorse. Or, as it turns out, is just a total racist. See next point
- Doesn’t think the Nazis did anything wrong. Her words. Apparently she’s their biggest supporter in 2016
- Tried telling me I’m not fully Jewish, because ‘we had to fuck up somewhere down the line’
- Was planning on voting for Trump, because she’ll get some extra money from a lawsuit she won a while back (???) and agrees with most of his policies. However, she shares the same horoscope with Bernie, so how could she not vote for him
- A year or so ago, she quit her job and spent 3 months taking care of her best friend who was in the hospital. Apparently the doctors couldn’t figure it out, and they thought he had a form of contagious AIDS, and expected her to get sick as well
- At least she cares about her friends?
- She routinely gives away or throws away her entire wardrobe because she gets bored of wearing the same clothes
- Mentioned that she’d done every drug (especially the hard stuff). When I asked her about what some of them were like, her answers didn’t make much sense. For instance, she mentioned snorting heroin and feeling weird for an hour then wanting to clean. Not that I’ve ever seen a heroin den, but I don’t think of them as particularly tidy environments
- She speaks fluent Spanish and Portuguese but doesn’t try speaking them here because she gets too shy. Maybe she’s unsure what fluent means
- She’s renting out 3 apartments at the moment. Not apartments that she or her family owns. Paying rent for 3 apartments. She’d left the other two because the landlord was creeping her out, but still paying rent for some reason
- Casually mentioned a few times that she was on the cover of some magazine. When I asked about it, she wouldn’t show me or go into details
- Throughout the date she got maybe 150 messages. No idea who they were from but they kept popping up. She kept checking her phone. Because she’s the worst. And, you know, a Nazi
- She mentioned that she enjoys sleeping with Asian women, and having them pose in her handmade thongs (she makes a lot of things). I asked her if she was bisexual. She spat the word back at me, saying absolutely not. Obviously, I’m unclear on what bisexuality is. We didn’t get a lot further on the subject
- Calls herself the Priestess of Darkness every once in a while (I nicknamed her the Maid of Darkness after that)
- Turns out that she came to Lisbon to visit schools, with the plan to walk into a school and apply. Was disheartened when a German guy told her that wasn’t a great idea, and instead she decided to do nothing for the past 2 months. Yup, makes sense
- Doesn’t have a good relationship with her brother or mother. What a surprise!
I don’t think I’ve ever gone through so many emotions during a first impression. From horrified, to containing my laughter, to thinking “did you really just say that?”, I was amused and bewildered at how this human being could exist.
Throughout the evening, I continued to tell her that she couldn’t say these things; that not only were they bigoted but it was a hateful way to go about living life. I don’t think I got very far.
While normally on a date just one of these comments would have me leaving, I knew the absurdity of the conversations we were having would make for a ridiculous story, so I continued to soldier on.
As the moon started to rise in the sky, we decided to walk over to a grocery store to grab a bottle of wine. Browsing the shelves, she got much too excited about the cheapness of wine for someone who’s been in the country for 2 months.
I was having a tough time keeping track of what was a lie, what was real, and who I even was at this point. If you hang out with a Nazi, are you an asshole by affiliation? What if it’s for a good story? I need answers!
With our bottle of vino, we ended up in the park. Drinking and walking around, I continued not being able to get much of a word in and listening to the onslaught of random bigotry. Eventually, we happened upon a trivia game at a nearby bar and decided to pop in.
Unsurprisingly, we did very poorly at Portuguese trivia night. “What was Hitler’s dog’s name?” was unfortunately not one of the questions.
Still, it ended up being a lot of fun.
When trivia wound down, we ended up in this little garden on a bench. Quick to sit down directly across from us was a ragged looking woman, fumbling with her pockets.
As the woman sat down, Nicole and I watched her hand shake as she pulled out a dirty pipe, and smoked something that I can only assume was crack. In the middle of a park. With tons of people around.
Noticing that Nicole and I were there, the woman started to apologize profusely In Portuguese, to which we said no worries, we didn’t see anything. We hung around briefly to get this woman to stop looking at us in terror, and eventually decided to move on.
As it was getting late, I’d decided that it was time for me to go. With a simple goodnight, my evening with the Maid of Darkness had ended, never to see each other again.
I wake up after a long sleep in, feeling pretty groggy. Grab some water, a bite to eat, and check my phone, still thinking about the ridiculous human being I met last night.
I see a notification from Nicole. No words. Just a link to an article on a tool sharing depo in Toronto.
Huh?
We hadn’t talked about anything relevant to the article. Like, not at all. This girl lives in a completely different world.
I send her a message saying ‘what’s this about?’ but, no surprise, don’t hear anything back.
I’m not sure whatever happened to her. Maybe she’s off leading white supremacist rallies. Thinking about a swastika face tattoo she’s been wanting forever. A girl can dream, right?
Nicole, if you ever read this article, I’d be curious to find out how you ended up.
Hopefully you stopped using the ‘N’ word so often. And hopefully a tinder date with a Jew helped to change your mind a bit on that whole Nazism thing.
