Tell You What: Red velvet and old fringe

Tinder love at the Cellar Dweller

“I was on Tinder because of Cookie,” Christie tells me, referring to the nickname of a chubby, tow-headed friend of her family. 

In a back booth of Cellar Dweller, downtown’s resident storm shelter/speakeasy/dungeon/dive, Christie sips a sparkling wineglass of Sofia Champagne and St. Germain. She wears a low-cut white sweater, big jewelry, long hair and six-inch heels.

Cellar Dweller is hung with red velvet and old fringe; the walls are painted-red brick. Above an ornate fireplace hangs an oil painting of a bare-breasted babe wearing a ‘60s beehive and nothing else. This is the place you take people you want to seduce. As such, bartender Western Doughty says the bar has become “Tinder date central” in recent years. Christie says she’s been bringing prospective boyfriends to this bar for more than five years now. 

“Cookie was on Tinder to meet bitches and he said he kept getting these bots,” she says. “He said, ‘I can’t see what other dudes say in their profiles.’” So Christie downloaded the app, put Cookie on speaker phone, and scrolled through Tinder profiles, reading them aloud to Cookie so he could get a sense of how other men present themselves. 

Messages from interested men began streaming into her Tinder inbox. Two matches struck her fancy.

“Only to them, I said, ‘I don’t do this and I’m deleting this app in a hot 30 minutes, here’s my number, don’t be a creep, I will block you so fast, the ball’s in your court, text me,’” she says in expressive, rapid-fire conversation.

Both of the men she messaged started texting her. One started slow, texting her a cute pair of emoji once a week: the finger pointing to an explosion. They met in person six months later. 

The other man pursued her aggressively, and the relationship was called off early on. 

As for Cookie, he met someone too. 

“Last year, he starts telling me about this girl,” Christie says. “He really became invested. When they broke up, I felt super bad. He was very upset, very depressed. He didn’t really know why. He just said she told him she needed some time. She told him, ‘Let’s take a hot minute, a breather and see where we’re going in life.’

“And that’s ok if you’re being genuine,” Christie says. “But a lot of the time, that’s a cop-out. If you really like someone, you don’t break up with them. So he was upset. And I said, I’ll come over, make dinner and you can keep all the leftovers. He’s a young dude and he does well not to burn his house down.”

A month or so later, Christie’s dad called her early on a Saturday morning. “Are you sitting down?” he asked. He told her Cookie was arrested the night before and charged with attempted murder.

“Stop, this is hilarious,” she told her dad. “It’s too early for this, what’s going on?” Her dad explained that Cookie was accused of cutting all four brake lines on his ex-girlfriend’s car.

The woman had broken up with Cookie because she was seeing a new guy. The case is ongoing.

“She added the ‘In a Relationship’ to her Facebook and she had set the date the relationship started as before the day that they broke up. So he was destroyed by that.”

Meanwhile, Christie was still charmed by emoji. Finger guns, explosions. They met last July for boat races at Grand Lake. 

“I wasn’t sure I liked him but I knew he was super polite and had a very gentle way about him that was immediately relaxing. That endeared him to me,” she says. Eight months in, they’re still dating. 

At a nearby table, a bottle blond in workday-white cardigan swirls top-shelf vodka in a glass pearled with sweat. She taps the rim with fingernails, square with careful black polish. She’s the kind of girl who does everything right, but tonight she slurs her words. 

She tells her date, “I just wanna… live my life. I don’t want to live in this little…you know, snow globe.”

She constructs a sloppy steeple with her drunkgirl fingers, a prayer. Her date says, “We’re in the snow globe,” chuckling.

“Tell You What,” is a new column in which Jennie Lloyd asks people at restaurants and bars to tell her a good story. No last names are used. For the first installment, click here.