I Won't Date Boys Who Don't Know Who the Lizard King Is

I never went out with a guy who didn't know who the Lizard King was. Until recently. He knew Slim Shady and P. Diddy. Not my peeps.

He was 21. A guy who never heard of "Rockaway Beach" or "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker." Those are things I could sort of deal with, but it was him not knowing who the Lizard King was that made me feel especially like I was cradle-robbing.

At 30, I must be going through some kind of early midlife crisis. My boyfriends in the past have been my age or older. Once I hit 27, the ages of my significant others have dropped...and continue to. Jed was a Tae Kwon Do instructor I met when I was doing a photo shoot for this fetishy karate-girl website. He was instructing a class in the studio across the hall from where we were doing the shoot. I was getting paid $500 to wear an evening gown and 6-inch stilettos and do high roundhouse kicks to this guy's head. I wore a blonde wig so that people would not recognize me as the trashy low-rent Bond girl that I was. It was the guy's website. Myron, the guy whose head I was kicking in. Not only would he attain pictures of me inflicting pain on some guy, he would get double the pleasure by being that guy.

Jed saw me waiting outside the studio for Myron to come back with more camera equipment. Myron was a slight guy in his late 30s with wild wiry hair and pockmarked skin. He was quite the contrast from Jed.

Jed was small but muscular, with guido black hair and green eyes. He looked adorable in his little gi. And so macho with his black belt tied neatly into a knot around his waist. He was this cute little Italian ninja boy. Yum. In my jeans and a t-shirt that said "Women's Arm Wrestling Federation," I smiled sweetly. Jed walked over in that bow-legged athletic-guy way and asked what I was doing. I fudged the story a bit. I don't normally like telling people what I do for money when there's a sexual slant to it.

Especially cute little ninja boys. Even though I would be fully dressed for the pictures and wouldn't be doing anything I felt compromised by, the guy to whom I was to do it would be enjoying it much more than I would like. This is not something most people understand or pardon.

I told Jed I was doing pictures for a martial arts website. My truth. He told me he won a silver medal in the Junior Olympics for Tae Kwon Do. I was hooked. I love men who fight. Only a green belt in Tae Kwon Do, I unreasonably look up to, admire and easily get crushes on black belts. Myron came back and territorially ushered me into the studio. Jed looked at me strangely. I whispered, "He's the photographer." Jed nodded and made small "o" with his mouth.

A half-hour later we took a break and so did Jed's class. I thought he might find it a bit odd that I was dressed in a gold halter evening gown, silver stilettos and a blonde bob wig, drinking from the water fountain, but he just told me I looked hot. That made me like him more. Behind the closed door of the studio, as I was waiting for Myron to set the timer on his camera and mark the spots on his body for me to kick, I wondered how old Jed was. I have to remind myself to do that these days, as I forget my own chronological age much of the time. It's easy to when you're a person who does things like modeling for a fetish karate-girl website. You're not on the same timer as everyone else.

I figured he was probably 26, which wasn't too bad, and proceeded to give Myron a hard kick to the stomach. He grimaced and told me not to kick so hard. What a pussy, I thought. I figured Jed could take a kick like that and not whine like stupid Myron.

At the end of the shoot I changed and saw Jed waiting outside. Myron was still packing camera equipment and holding his stomach because he is a pussy. I slipped out the door and Jed asked if there was a way he could contact me. I gave him my number. He asked if Myron was bothering me. I smiled and said, "You think I can't take him?" He winked, put my number in his pocket and left.

He called me that night. I asked him how old he was. He said, "Guess." Hopefully, I said, "28." He said, "No. Younger than that." I said, "Okay, 26." He said, "Um, no." I said, "25." He said, "Stop right there!" I laughed and said, "You're 25? Geez." He said, "You'll still go out with me, right?" I thought about it for less than a second.

Why not? I had nothing else going on. Besides, the last two guys I dated who were around my age disappeared from my radar screen without any closure. I later heard that one of them took up with a young model chick who had a pierced tongue. She might have been 19 years old, if that. So the men my age are dating younger, why the hell can't I?

Jed took me to a cute little Mexican place in the Village for our first date. He wore a sleeveless summer sweater so I could see the dragon tattoo on his well-defined shoulder. I loved how shamelessly guido he was, wearing a thick gold chain around his neck and slicking his hair back with product. Not at all like the artsy-fartsy guys I mess around with. He was the real deal. We ordered margaritas and the waiter carded us. I was incredibly charmed. Even though he asked for Jed's ID first, I was still flattered. "Just had a birthday, huh?" the waiter remarked to Jed. "Uh, yeah," he replied sheepishly. "Well, happy birthday, bro. I'll send a round on the house. That's a big one," said the waiter. When the waiter looked at my ID, he looked up at me with a raised eyebrow, grinned lasciviously and went off to get our free drinks.

"Wow," I said, "I didn't realize 25 was such a big deal."

"Jill, I gotta tell you something." Jed took a deep breath and cast his eyes downward. "I'm really 21," he admitted while licking the salt off one of the first legal drinks in his life.

"You are so joking," I said.

"No. Look, I'm sorry. I just didn't think you'd go out with me if you knew my real age," he said sweetly. "Please don't judge me because of my age. Judge me if I don't treat you right or you think I'm an asshole, but give me a chance."

He looked into my eyes with his big green adorable peepers. Jed didn't really lie when I asked him his age on the phone, he just avoided it. Something I do all the time. And I guess his dark Italian good looks made him look more mature. If he was a Swede, I probably would have thrown him back into the urban ocean.

I decided to just go with it. We wound up having a lot of fun together. We discovered the joys of naked sparring, he showed me how to do PlayStation and I showed him...other things. For the most part, at least on the surface, it was a good match.

The relationship started to show strain when we attempted to have conversations. Besides his being young, I believe he suffers from attention deficit disorder and has difficulty talking about things other than himself. The real difficulty began when music would come on that he or I didn't know. If I didn't know it, I felt like a fogy. If he didn't know it and it was a song that had resonance in my life, he became alien to me. He had no reference to my adolescent life and he was barely out of his.

Whenever this happened it was like a boulder toppling down and shattering our little pink fake relationship bubble. One day he was singing, "Come on Baby, Light My Fire" to me. Kiddingly, I said, "Who do you think you are, Jed, the Lizard King?"

"Who the fuck is that?" he asked.

We broke up that day. There's nothing like music to bring the truth to the surface.

I can't say I regret the relationship. He was a good guy, great in bed, an acclaimed fighter and a sweet person. Without him, I would never have learned how to play Tomb Raider.

But there's something wrong with the man in my life not knowing who the Lizard King is. There just is.