Almost Interesting (24 page)

But my point was, I didn’t get tangled up in MySpace for that reason, but when Facebook popped up I thought, Oh fuck, this isn’t going away. Now there’s another version of this dumbness. So I waited a year hoping this small fire would burn itself out but
nooooooooo,
it got bigger! So I finally joined. I gave in. So after getting caught flirting by not realizing how it works I pared down the people I follow. I can’t believe a guy invented this because it’s such a great tool for women to bust guys cheating! Girls know every nuance of how Facebook works, that’s what I have learned. It’s a never-ending bust. I don’t even know half the time why I’m getting caught because girls will never explain how they figure it out. And by the way, these are just girls I’m casually dating. God forbid I was married or had a live-in girlfriend. I don’t know how my friends do it.

I finally jumped in with Twitter about a year after it started, and I got on Instagram even faster because I realize the fans get mad if you don’t engage a bit. Plus, I ended up liking engaging with my fans. The movie and television studios now actually look at how many followers you have to help decide if they want you for a part (true story). They want actors to use their “socials” to help them get the word out for free on their projects. All of this is actually a great deal for the money people. You blast out shit to two million people and it’s like a little commercial on a low-rated show. But it’s still a lot of reach. Twitter started out big, but Instagram passed it fast—at least with my friends. I think Twitter is now mostly writing jokes or saying clever things about your life and some people just have trouble with that. And I get it because doing that is fucking hard. Unless you’re writing, “I had Funyuns today,” then it’s tough going. I try to be clever and within 140 characters it’s hard to do and I’m supposed to be good at this. I know some ladies who get a brain cramp because they all aren’t Jerry Seinfelds and don’t have a keen eye for observational comedy, which plays so well on Twitter.

Instagram, on the other hand, is perfect for the gals. When the chicks of the world heard there was a new invention where all you do is take pictures of yourself, your food, and your dog, fist bumps all around. Holy shit this is too good to be true! A lot of them left Twitter in the dust and focused solely on the business of Instagram. (Snapchat is even easier! Instead of a picture of your cat, it’s a twenty-second video of it!) This is all causing problems for me. Instagram gets me
really
nailed. My problem is that it’s so easy to track your whereabouts with all of this shit. It’s like LoJack (old reference). YOU CAN’T LIE ANYMORE, FOLKS!! DO YOU GET IT?! THIS IS A PROBLEM! Honestly (hee-hee), lying is a thing of the past. If I tell someone I’m busy for a night and can’t hang out, they can just type my name into Twitter and suddenly it’s forty Spade sightings all over the place. You can literally track a person’s night like connect the dots. “@DavidSpade is on my flight to Arizona!” (Photo of back of my head.) Then “just got a pic with Joe Dirt @DavidSpade at Hertz counter in Scottsdale.” Then “@DavidSpade is next to me on freeway with some chick. I think he went to school here #ASU.” So you can see how this is a problem. The girl I blew off will call me and say, “How was your night?” and I’ll be like, “Oh, pretty chill, just laid low.” “Really? Laid low in fucking Arizona? My friend saw you there with some brunette!” (By the way, it took me four years to realize that her “friend” was the Twitter time line.) “You’re an asshole!”

Instagram is the same shit.

G
IRL
: Who’s this chick Stacey?

M
E
: Stacey who?

G
IRL
: Some whore. You liked her picture on Instagram. Are you fucking her?

M
E
: What? No. I don’t even know her.

G
IRL
: So you stalk some girl and like her pictures but don’t know her? What a creep.

M
E
: No. I mean I kind of know her, but how did you even know?

G
IRL
: My friend told me! (Also known as staying in for six hours scanning Instagram like Tom Cruise in
Minority Report
. Charts and graphs all over.)

M
E
: (Bummed-out expression on face.)

Once, an ex met me in Newport for a night. I told her no pictures, no posting, no bullshit. (That should be a sign in every establishment, replacing “No shirt, No shoes, No Service.”) I didn’t want to get caught by the chick I was currently dating. (Great guy.) Then I saw that she posted a pic of herself lying out by the pool. The shot was a close-up, so you couldn’t tell where she was. Well, that was enough to set off the bloodhounds. My new girl followed the ex, or at least ghosted her (hip social media lingo). So if I was at a place that has sun, and the ex was also there, that was all the new girl needed. She went into
Murder, She Wrote
detective mode and got her answers.

G
IRL
: So how is golf in Newport with your buddies?

M
E
: (Getting nervous because this is a weird question.) Um, good.

G
IRL
: So you’re having a good time, just you and your guy friends?

M
E
: (More nervous, WTF is going on?) Ummm yeah, yeah, all good in the hood.

G
IRL
: So it’s just you and no chicks. Just guys weekend, like you said right? And don’t lie. I’m giving you a chance not to lie.

This is the worst thing chicks do. I never know if I should bite on this hook because I have to quickly guess the odds of how much the chick already knows. I rarely come clean in this situation, mostly because I’d always rather put off a fight than have it right then.

M
E
: Umm . . . sticking to my story, babe. Just dudes, yawn . . . actually pretty boring.

G
IRL
: You’re such a fucking liar. (Hangs up.)

I was confused. I started accusing my friends of ratting me out because this girl always texted them just to say “hi” and she’d use her evil genius to trick them into giving up vital and bustable info.

Example: G
IRL
: Hey Steve, I know David still hangs out with that girl Amy. It’s cool, we talked about it. I just want to know is she nice or a bitch?

S
TEVE
: Um, she’s pretty cool I guess.

G
IRL
: Oh that’s good. (She never knew I was still talking to Amy, but now she does!)

It’s a chick trick (more on those later) and she loved to start this kind of civil war. And my buddies are so fucking stupid they fall for it every time. I’m always overly concerned with how I’m found out. The chick would always tell me it didn’t matter how she knew, but that I needed to address the charge levied against me. I would plead that if the accusation was based on emails obtained from my laptop, that was inadmissible evidence. Girls don’t play by the same rules as the court system. Unfortch.

Anyway, this brings me to the only Twitter story worth a shit that I can share. Through the magic of the social media, I got to meet one of the most beautiful girls in the world. Here’s what happened. One day I was walking around in Beverly Hills with my crooked stupid trucker hat on trying to look cool as per usual, and I stumbled upon a Victoria’s Secret store. In the window was a huge photo of Candice Swanepoel, a sickeningly hot import from South Africa who puts 99 percent of girls to shame. In the photo she was modeling the latest underpants or whatever, and I thought, Ooh-la-la, let’s take a picture of this to share with all my horny guy followers. Great idea right, but what’s the joke? I couldn’t just post a pic for guys to beat off to, and at least half of my followers are female, so if I make it sort of clever at least they’ll laugh (maybe).

So I held up a penny in front of Candice’s poster and took a picture of it. My brilliant caption was “Oh look at this sexy, hot penny.” The penny was tiny in the foreground and then behind was this whole picture of her. Now it looked kind of amusing, but it wasn’t some home run of a joke. But that was fine. It was a broken-bat single. They can’t all be gems. I figured it was funny enough to throw out there to the Twitter gods. I fed them one more day, my work as a comic today was done. Well, luckily this one happened to get a lot of play. I got some favorites and a lot of retweets. (So gross that I noticed.) Now, when this happens there’s a chance you’ll get burned by some Twitter rats. Twitter rats are the losers who rat you out to other people when you do jokes about them. Like they’ll say, “Hey @KimKardashian did you hear what @DavidSpade said about you?” They want to get you going in a Twitter war, which I would rather avoid. (Isn’t it sad that we live in a country where Kylie Jenner can’t drink or vote but she can be in a Twitter war?) I never put the “@” with the celeb name when I do one of those kinds of jokes, because I just want to get a burn in and be on my merry way. Plus, the Twitter rats will likely take care of it for me.

Well, Candice found out. Now, in all fairness I’ve laid down some harsh jokes on Twitter, but calling a girl beautiful isn’t the worst one. And Candice wrote on her Twitter that she thought the joke was funny. Well la de frickin’ da! This babe knows I’m on the planet! This was great news! I was shocked by this. I didn’t plan to do anything about it. But my idiot friend said, “Dude. Send her a DM. Just say hello.” I thought this was a bit nuts. I mean, first I needed to make sure that the page was actually legit. It panned out so I decided to embarrass myself and send a direct tweet. For those of you who don’t know what that is (my grandparents), it’s like an email. If you both follow each other then the lines are open once a direct tweet happens, and you can send messages no one else can see. So I rolled the dice. I said something like, “Hey glad you were cool with that joke. Keep up the good work,” or something similarly weak and gameless. I left it at that and went about my day. Well lo and behold the next day there was a notification that I had a direct message from her. My friend was shitting. I played it cool and waited about eight seconds before I clicked on it. She wrote, “Hey there. I laughed. It was funny.” And in my head I’m like,
Boiiiing oooinnng ooinggg
(that’s a boner noise) and in my pants I was like
Boiiiing oooinnng ooinggg
and then, like a dumb fuck, I wrote back. Immediately. I didn’t wait a day like you’re supposed to, I didn’t even wait ten minutes, and I immediately started pecking away. Again, gameless. To make matters worse, I said something like, “That’s great maybe I’ll run into you someday.” So lame, especially when you consider that her message really didn’t require an answer at all. It was a statement, not a question. But that didn’t stop me. No sirree.

But later that night, there it was: another message from Candy. “Hey are you going to go to the Victoria’s Secret party in L.A. next week? If so, come say hello.” And I go, trying to be cool, “Oh, I might swing by.” Meanwhile it’s another round of
booooiiiinggggg
.

I told (bragged to) my friends, who were all stoked and wanted to tag along. Luckily, my buddy Cade works with Victoria’s Secret and had sent me an invite so I had a legit reason to go. The day of the event, she messaged me again. “So, are you definitely coming tonight?” And I was like, “RELAX babe, don’t be so thirsty. Fucking Needy Gonzalez. Take it easy. I might pop in.” I didn’t really write that, but we were all laughing at how redick we were all being about this party. My buddies and I cruised in, got a juicy booth, some booze. I see Candy Cane. Now I was nervous. “There she is,” my idiot friend said. “Are you going to go talk to her? You going to talk about Twitter?” And I go, “No, that’s stupid, dude. We’ll talk about other stuff.” So I slugged down a few shots of Belvedere and primped my fluffy feathered nineties hair and sauntered over. I was getting closer and she was getting prettier. Cade made the introductions. “Candice, this is David Spade.” I say, “Hey, how are you doing?” You know, I was playing it all cool. “Hi” she said. And that was it. “Hey,” I said. And then silence. Again. “Having fun at the party?” “Yeah.” Finally I couldn’t take it. “Hey, on Twitter, thanks for liking that joke about you. I know it’s stupid but that was nice, you were a good sport.” And then, as if in slow motion, she looked at me funny and said, “Oh no, I’m not on Twitter.”

Wuhhhhhhhhhhh????

I looked at her like a dog watching a magic trick. It wasn’t quite sinking in. I couldn’t hear anything. I stood there like an idiot just staring in disbelief. Finally she jumped in with “Oh, was there like some fake account that says it’s me or something?” I was dying of embarrassment. I didn’t see this coming at all. To add insult to injury, she said, “Oh, what was the joke? I’m sure it was funny.” It was like when a bomb goes off in the movies and there is that high-pitched noise over total silence. I grabbed my ears and staggered away in slow motion.

I walked back over to my buddies, who were all desperate to hear what happened. I couldn’t even talk. And then Miranda Kerr, another lovely, sweet Victoria’s Secret model, came over to ask how I’m doing. I managed to mumble something like “Uh, ah . . .” and she asked why I was crying. (Kidding.) So, I just told Miranda the whole story. She couldn’t have been nicer about it. She even felt bad for me. And while I was coming out of this Candice jet wash I slowly realized that the other hottest woman on the planet was actually supercool and supersweet and was A REAL PERSON, not a fake Twitter account. Eventually, we all had a laugh at what a fucking dipshit I am.

I still can’t believe I got catfished, though. It can happen to anyone, guys. I was so fucking stoked to meet Candice and she had no idea who I was. She probably thought she was meeting a contest winner or something. Serves me right for trying to beat the internet.

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHICK TRICKS

T
his chapter is a lot shorter than you might be expecting, mostly because I’m not married and my love life is sort of a disaster, so any relationship advice I give should really go in one ear and out the other. I have a reputation for dating tons of girls. This probably started back in the
Just Shoot Me!
days. Finch, my character, was hitting on models in every scene. Most of my rep comes from the characters I play on television and movies, and generally my characters chase young women. I’m not even sure I can play anything else, to be honest. I’ve never been asked. Now Spade the real guy isn’t exactly Finch or Higgins or any other number of skirt chasers I’ve played. Obviously these characters are exaggerations—I try not to be so desperate and obvious when talking to girls in real life like, but that doesn’t mean I am good at it. And even though I’m not good at it, that doesn’t mean I don’t try.