I Dated a Butch Lesbian so She'd Kill a Black Widow That Lived On my Trash Bin
Sometimes you gotta play the game.
Every Wednesday night, I roll my garbage and recycling bins from my garage to the sidewalk for Thursday morning trash pick-up. Bringing the garbage out goes against my religion, but I live by myself, so I don’t have a choice. My garage doesn’t have electricity because it was built before electricity was invented, and my only source of light is my phone; thanks a lot, Steve Jobs. This one particular Wednesday night, everything was fine until I reached for the lid and saw her. A monster-sized Black Widow with a red hourglass on her abdomen parachuted down from under the lid. My entire life flashed before my eyes as she dangled from the exact spot I was about to put my hand as if to say, tisk tisk… this is my home now, so be a good girl and put your trash somewhere else.
I heard her message loud and clear; this was her garbage bin for the foreseeable future. I ran upstairs as fast as I could, shrieking the entire way, worried she was chasing me while also tripling, no, quadrupling in size. I could almost feel the thundering of her eight spider legs closing in on me, bang bang bang bang. Once I got back inside, I slammed the door in what I imagined to be her face and deadbolted it shut, just in case.
I shouted out, “Alexa, how fucking long is a Black Widow’s lifespan?” She answered calmly, not understanding the urgency, “Black Widow Spiders can live between one and three years.” I either had to put a hit out on this spider or wait for time to run its course. And I’d add it in my will that if I die before her, she could keep the trash bin.
For a month, I had to sneak out in the middle of the night and stuff my garbage into my neighbors’ bins. I knew this solution wasn’t sustainable because people in LA get really weird about strangers putting garbage in their bins, even though it all ends up in the same place, the ocean. Something had to be done about this eight-legged bully, I couldn’t continue living this way. This was a job for a man. And that man was a Butch Lesbian.
I dusted off the old Hinge profile, paid the forty-dollar-a-month subscription fee, and started my search.
I was wary about returning to dating apps after what happened the last time I met someone on Hinge. My previous relationship ended a few months earlier after finding out the woman I’d been dating all year was a pathological liar, con artist, and serial catfisher. She lied about being a Physicist and Professor at MIT, and about doing her post-doctoral work at NASA’s JPL. She lied about her grandparents dying, about owning an apartment in San Francisco and growing up in Pasadena, she lied about buying a Tesla, and about paying for her sister’s college. She even lied about being allergic to nuts. The biggest lie, though, was by omission; she didn’t tell me she lived in the Midwest with her wife, who was seven months pregnant with their second child. That would’ve been great information to have before she moved in with me.
She wasted a year of my time, and time is the only thing I hate wasting more than wine, money, or a good outfit. Ashley stole a year from my life that I’ll never be able to get back. I wish there were a way to deduct a year from her life and tack it onto mine, or better yet, my dog’s. I should sue her for making me go to Bakersfield to visit her family every other weekend.
Once I learned who Ashley was, I couldn’t unsee it. I was so disgusted with her and her entire family, who covered her lies and affair. One of the last times I saw Ashley was when two LAPD officers dragged her out of my home in handcuffs and drove her off to the loony bin. I’ve never been more happy to break up with someone in my life. I shook it off and returned to my carefree, stress-free, duty-free lifestyle and soaked up all the singleness I could. That is, until trash day.
Taking the trash out is one of my least favorite chores, behind scrubbing the toilet and flossing. It kills my vibe, and honestly, it just isn’t really “me.” But as a newly single woman, I didn’t have Trashly around anymore to do the chores I didn’t want to do. So for the first time in nearly a year, I tied up the trash bag in my kitchen and confidently marched it down to my garage, all by myself. I hadn’t been in my garage for months, I don’t even park my car in there. During the Pandemic, I thought about converting it into a bar with a pool table, but the walls were too narrow for pool sticks. I even considered filling my garage with hay and buying a small horse to live inside, I was unwell. None of these ideas took off, so my garage remained where I stored my trash and recycling bins — nothing more and nothing less.
This spider, though, needed to be dealt with, so I started swiping.
There was the soft butch in Echo Park who got really into making quilts during the pandemic. She was nice and had a natural beauty to her, she could’ve been a stand-in for Alia Shawkat. But I’ve always thought quilts were boring, and she didn’t seem like the kind of person to kill a spider; more likely, she’d strap herself to my garbage bin while summoning PETA to cancel me, so our conversations fizzled out.
Then there was the Dog Trainer to the Stars. I had a good feeling about her. Her profile listed her as five foot eleven, sturdy enough to kill a spider or a full-grown man. Plus, she was from Texas, a place I wouldn’t mess with unless it was to remind everyone that Ted Cruz favorited a porn tweet on 9/11. Her photos showed her driving a boat, doing a polar plunge, and hiking to the top of Machu Picchu. Morgan had everything I was looking for; we needed to meet.
We made plans to have drinks that Sunday afternoon at the Village Idiot in West Hollywood. Morgan was already seated at the bar when I arrived. I was five minutes late, and she was already two scotch neats in, probably still recovering from the previous night or year. You can tell a lot about a person based on what they drink. Scotch Neat says, “I can skin a deer, drive a truck with a manual transmission, and I’ll help you hide the body if you kill someone.” Obviously, she would be the one digging their grave, too.
Morgan wore a dark green army jacket, and her long black hair was half pulled up in a man-bun. She stood up to hug me, and I realized she was closer to six foot one. When we sat back down, her feet didn’t dangle off the bar stool but lay flat on the floor. She was the butch lesbian I’d been searching for, and she would be the one to rescue me from my evil garbage spider.
We had a really fun afternoon of gay day drinking and planned to see each other during the week. I couldn’t just spring my spider situation on her, I had to ease into it. Our next date was to see Top Gun at the Americana. I hadn’t been to a movie theater since right before the pandemic, and of course, the last movie I saw in theaters was Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Like, I’m so gay.
The more I got to know Morgan, the more I realized we were not a good match. It was the middle of summer, and she refused to turn on her air conditioner because she wanted the cheapest utility bill possible, and she only went to the Dentist when she found a good deal on Groupon. She also walked around barefoot on the streets sometimes, which is almost worse than wearing flip-flops. I was getting turned off fast, and I had to act.
We were in my living room one night, the A/C blasting, watching the newest season of Love On the Spectrum, when I conveniently realized it was Wednesday night, Trash Day Eve. I paused the show and told her I had to bring my trash bins out to the sidewalk, but there was one small problem: a Black Widow lived underneath the brim of my trash bin, and she threatened to murder me if I touched it.
This was it. I held my breath waiting for her response.
“I’ll take it out. And I’ll kill the spider.”
Oh wow, she was my hero. She shot up from the couch and marched outside.
“Wait!” I called after her. “Aren’t you gonna need your shoes?”
“Naw, I’m good!”
And off she went.
I expected a big commotion but didn’t hear screaming, clamoring, or gunshots. I pictured her kicking in my garage door like it was an old-timey saloon, her hands at her sides hovering over the pistols in her holster, ready for a duel. But instead, she came back into my apartment forty seconds later.
“That was a big ass motherfucker!” she said.
I excitedly asked, “Is it dead? Are you sure? How sure are you?”
She said, “Oh, it’s long dead. I knocked it off the trash and then smeared it all over your garage floor. You can go check if you want to see the body.”
No, I was good. We sat back down and finished Love On the Spectrum. I didn’t want to ask how she killed the spider because I already knew the answer, she stepped on it to death with her bare feet, and now those feet were dangerously close to resting on my white sofa.
We dated for a few more weeks, but things fizzled out when I flew to the Midwest to meet my ex-Ashley’s wife, who had become one of my good friends. I took Morgan on one last dinner date, I told her I’d take her anywhere she wanted, my treat. She picked a crab boil at a strip mall on Hollywood Blvd, and we agreed to just be friends.
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The author is a lesbian comedy writer and reality TV producer. She grew up on a Gold Mine in Alaska and now lives in LA with her golden retriever Perci. Lauren is currently working on a memoir about her teen years spent as a news reporter covering the crime beat in Alaska. Her first book, And Then You Die of Dysentery; Lessons In Adulting from the Oregon Trail. Is available for purchase.
Twitter: @LaurenReeves
Instagram: @LoReeves
Omg - trashley spoilers 0.0