I’m Afraid Of Girls Now, Especially Scarlett Johansson!

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Lately, I’ve been telling people that if I never saw another man again, it would be like I died and went to heaven. And I mean it. And no, that isn’t because I’m dreaming of a non-stop orgy. My concern right now is that I won’t be enough into sex anymore for a girl (don’t worry, girls, I can get back into it!). But there was this joke in some movie where a girl says, “What I couldn’t handle about being a lesbian is the unbearable amount of TALKING!”. I think that might have been Rose McGowan in Jawbreaker. But that’s exactly what I enjoy most—talking to girls, when I can actually get them to talk to me openly, honestly and authentically. 

No, even if it was a world of all 80 year old women, or all 12 year old girls and sex was not a part of the equation, it would still be heavenly for me to be rid of dudes and all the problems they bring, and to be in a world where I didn’t constantly have to dumb myself down to accommodate lizard-brained males. But yet, it is the ultimate male world that I am trapped in...

It seems like something more than just my legal problems. I’m not in jail right now. I pass women on the street, some of them smile, some of them speak, but yet I still feel at a distance from them. It could just be my own anxieties, but I feel like it is something more than that, as if there is some force that will not allow me to have meaningful interactions with women right now. And my fear is that “right now” will turn into “ever”. 

Not only am I a born-again virgin who hasn’t had sex in seven years(!), I haven’t even been alone with a woman in a social situation since my release from prison two years ago.  I’ve been so long exiled from the company of women that I feel awkward and uncertain, unsure of what to say or do even aside from my concerns about my criminal case and my legal status.

I need to be nursed back to a place where I am capable of feeling healthy intimacy. So much so that I had the idea of approaching the hot psychologist who ran the “sex offender therapy” center I was ordered to go to, and making her an offer. 

She had a lot of marks in the plus column: she was pretty cute, a doctor, apparently single, possibly Jewish, and kept giving me smoking hot looks, so I thought about approaching her through some back door (lol) and proposing to her that she quit that job, be my girlfriend/therapist for a year for professional purposes, and I would really tell her everything, which nobody actually does, and then we could co-author a book about it. She’d probably lose her license, but the project would be successful enough that it wouldn’t matter. But I told myself nothing like that ever works and it would just get me in more trouble. 

I’m afraid of women because I feel that women are now afraid of me. One misperceived comment or action could land me facing forever in prison given the record I now have. I was shocked, truly shocked, that neither in my five years incarcerated, nor in the two years since my release have any of the women who have been a part of my life reached out to me. It feels like their collective response to my being exiled from society was “Good riddance!”.

I want nothing more to do with men, but I’m so discouraged about the prospects of my being allowed entry into the female world that I feel like just wandering off somewhere by myself. But I’m not built for the wilderness life. I’d like to wander off to a nice house near Gig Harbor outside Seattle and just write, walk and drive country roads, and watch movies, and not see anyone except for when I go into the city every now and then. That is, if there is no girl I like who really wants to share life with me. 

I’m so alone right now, but the lesson I’ve learned in the last seven years is that I’ve always been alone. I was with a girlfriend for five years, but still I was alone because we were never really on the same page in life. I have a huge family (or had before I severed myself from them once and for all), but they never supported me the way family should if it is to justify its position as the central focal point of our society, hence the severance. 

I had lots of people I thought were my friends, but in the last decade, I’ve learned that they were not real friends. I had work colleagues that I thought I had good relationships with, but I worked with probably a thousand lawyers, and no one came to my aid when I got arrested, even just to see that I was treated fairly if not to fight for my freedom. 

But most devastatingly, not a single one of the many women I’ve had social or professional relationships with (a great many of them lawyers) raised their hand to say, “Um, I don’t think Michael would do that”, which leaves me feeling that they were afraid of me all along, and that was why my romantic endeavors never worked out. It is like the world has voted “No” on Michael David Boyd, and so I have no idea what to do. I’m trying to figure it out, but it feels hopeless and pointless. There is just one tiny point of light that I see on the distant horizon, and I’m trying my best to make my way to it. 

In my wanderings as a homeless fugitive, I checked into the Hotel Indigo in downtown San Diego. I walked into an absolutely beautiful room, so nice that I thought, “This would be a wonderful place to be with a girl”, and at the moment there is one girl that I can’t get off my mind...I looked out of the tenth-floor window at downtown San Diego and thought about what Pierce Brosnan said in The Thomas Crown Affair: “A fugitive with means, all the difference in the world.”. But my means are meager by comparison to Thomas Crown or Pierce Brosnan, within a few weeks of running out. 

So I turn on the tv in my room and scroll through the channels, and hey look, there’s Beetlejuice, a great movie starring one of my favorite Jewish MAT Girls, Winona Ryder, who, though you might not have guessed it watching Beetlejuice, grew up to be smoking hot. I remember watching S1mone the first time and saying, “Wait a minute, when did Winona Ryder get hot like that?!?”.   Shortly thereafter, I saw her in an episode of Saturday Night Live where she was in a bikini in a hottub and...Jesus Fucking Christ. Maybe I just don’t really find girls hot until they are about thirty...

Watching Winona in S1mone again about a year and a half ago was actually the inception point for this whole MAT Girl thing, and the night when I started the two books that I’ve almost finished if I can get my computer back from my parole officer.

Anyway, Beetlejuice also stars my former boss Alec Baldwin (sort of, read on) and alleged genius Geena Davis. I don’t know if Geena’s Jewish or not, but she’s really good at her job anyway.  What an awesome movie. 

So as Beetlejuice is wrapping up, they put a pop-up on screen, “Next: Captain America: Winter Soldier”.  I’m annoyed but of course, I can’t not watch it and look for...oh hey look, there’s Scarlett!  In the very first scene. She looks so hot in that black Corvette. 

I can’t get away from Scarlett Johansson. I turn on the tv, there’s Scarlett. I go to the mall, I pass a comic book store and there is a lifesize cardboard Scarlett looking at me from the window. I’m walking around downtown San Diego and there are Avengers Comic-con banners of Scarlett looking down at me from the streetlights. I open the newspaper, there are articles about Scarlett. I can’t even get away from her in jail—They played Lucy, Ghost In The Shell and about half a dozen Avengers movies on TV.  It’s like I’m living in Scarlett Johansson’s universe. 

And here I find myself in this beautiful hotel room that I walked into and thought, “It would be nice to be in a place like this with Scarlett Johansson”, and here she is on TV. It’s not supernatural. Scarlett is on tv more than Leave It To Beaver reruns.  Scarlett is probably not old enough or enough of a sports fan to know why that’s funny. If you see Jay Mohr, ask him to explain it to you. 

I’m irritated that I’m moderately entertained by this Captain America movie. I want to hate all comic book movies on principle and I’ve been really annoyed by the bits and pieces of Avengers movies I’ve watched. But this one is not as frantic as the others I’ve seen. It has none of the unbearable scenes of six or seven great actors sitting together trading one line at a time as if people ever talk like that. At least the X-Men writers know how to write a realistic group conversation. 

But this one has a properly limited selection of the universe’s characters, and I’m not watching the clock but it seems shorter and more to the point than the others. But what a waste of talent. Robert Redford, Sam Jackson...Scarlett Johansson. I like Chris Evans too. The cinematographer of this movie is not bad.  I imagine its the same one as the other Avengers movies but this is better work. The other ones are visually cluttered...like a comic book. 

The costume department on all these movies does a really good job. I don’t mean the superhero costumes. I don’t care about those. When the characters are wearing regular clothes, they look really good. Especially Scarlett Johansson.  The costume departments on a lot of her other movies (and whoever dresses her for red carpet events) have not seemed to know how to handle her, which made me buy more into the idea that she was of a dramatically different size and shape than other actresses. If I had talked to her when I saw her, I’d have probably said “I thought you’d be bigger” like everybody kept telling Patrick Swayze in Road House. 

I keep wanting to turn this movie off as an act of superhero movie protest, but I can’t because a) its actually not bad, and b) Scarlett looks so cute in it...even more than usual, I mean. But I’m so annoyed by action movie star Scarlett Johansson. Why does Scarlett hate drama?  I know, she was just in Marriage Story. I wanted to go watch that, and ten years ago, I’d have been trying to score tickets to the premiere. But knowing how good Scarlett is, I decided it would be too sad for me to handle at the moment. 

Scarlett could at least do more comedy. She’s funny. The bar scene in The Island is still hilarious to me. “Straight up?” And the expression she makes when they take her liquor. LOL. I liked Rough Night. I’ve got a comedy. I need Scarlett, Natalie Portman, Amanda Seyfried and Jesse Eisenberg. The girls would all be playing satirical versions of themselves based on what I think they are like without having met them, and Jesse Eisenberg would be playing me. Any of the other MAT Girls who wanna be in it are welcome...unless Scarlett, Natalie and Amanda hate you. It’s like This Is The End meets Being John Malkovich. I think it would make money. 

But in my fear of girls, I’m scared of Scarlett Johansson most of all. Well, I’m not scared of Scarlett Johansson—she seems really nice. In fact, when I saw her in Vegas, I think part of what struck me most about her is that even though she was walking through there like the queen of the world, I could tell she was really nice, and maybe that’s why she looked at me because she knew she was busted. Not for being Scarlett Johansson, but for just being an ordinary cute nice girl looking all important. 

No, what I’m really afraid of is SCARLETT JOHANSSON, not the person, but the global brand worth billions to corporations who probably has a personal payroll of dozens if not hundreds: accountants, lawyers, stylists, publicists, agent, manager, personal assistants, skin care expert (movie sets are too expensive to wait for Scarlett’s pimples to go away), driver, housekeeping staff...there are so many people who depend on SCARLETT JOHANSSON for their livelihood, they are going to do their very best to make sure nothing happens to Scarlett Johansson. So my on-paper history rightly should concern Scarlett’s “team” on the surface. But I’m one of those people who also wants to make sure Scarlett Johansson is alright. 

If I saw Scarlett Johansson’s phone number on the internet, what would I do?  The last thing I would do is call it. What I would do is carefully write down the web address, find out who Scarlett’s talent agents are, and call them and let them know.  If I walked in some place and Scarlett was there, my immediate instinct would be to turn around and walk out so nobody thought I came there looking for her, unless she said, “Hey! Come here!”. 

But I do want to make something clear. I play the “I’m nobody” card as a reflection of how I’ve been treated in the last seven years, and how I feel right now. But Scarlett Johansson and I are a part of the same social orbit. Obviously, we’re on opposite ends of the spectrum within that orbit in terms of fame, success, wealth and such, but we’re a part of the same community. How?

Back in the mid 90s, when Scarlett was...about twelve and I don’t think a millionaire yet, I was working for the tax lawyers for Alec Baldwin, Dolph Lundgren and many other entertainers. My job was not important. I was a mail room boy, fill-in secretary, archiver of irrelevant old files. Probably the most important thing about my job was that I knew how to use Windows 95 and nobody else did. 

I never met any of the famous clients. Only spoke to a couple of them on the phone. I wasn’t there to try to see famous people. I was busy WORKING. But for all I know, that same tax lawyer is Scarlett Johansson’s tax lawyer.  I don’t know how well Scarlett Johansson and Dolph Lundren know each other, but I’m guessing they are acquainted because they’ve been in at least one movie together and they are both Swedish, and there are even less Swedes than Jews, I think. So Scarlett is double-rare, and most girls in Sweden were smoking hot and most Jewish girls are smoking hot, so we all should have seen Scarlett coming.

So might Scarlett Johansson have asked a smart fellow countryman in her industry for a tax lawyer recommendation when she started making money? Very possible. And Dolph Lundren is smart—he has a master’s degree in chemical engineering and wears nice suits.  Someone that the tax lawyers there might have told that they had a Stanford physics student working in their office...

So who knows, Scarlett Johansson might have walked behind my desk when I wasn’t paying attention way back then.  But since then, I’ve had social and professional connections with a literal shit-ton of the people in her industry. My niece went from kindergarten through high school at the place where most LA film industry heavies send their kids. My sister worked at Fox for a decade and my other sister worked at Summit Entertainment. They were not on the production side, but they were not janitors either. 

And oh yes, I did write a little movie and start a little production company. We’re not talking Dreamworks here. The movie didn’t get made and the production company has been defunct for over a decade (you could argue in retrospect that it was defunct at its inception). But actors who have SAG cards and that maybe Scarlett knows wanted to be in it, and an agent that I’m sure Scarlett knows liked it and wanted to meet me to talk about it. And this is all aside from the fact that I was at one time good friends with an actor in the Avengers universe.  And I was flipping through a recent People Magazine in jail last month only to see an article about a girl I know in Hollywood...

In fact, there are those who might say that I am of a definitively higher social class than Scarlett Johansson. I don’t know because I don’t know very much about her family background. Of course, her current position of success has put her in the highest social circle in the world, but I’m talking before she got famous. My father was a nationally-known evangelist, both my mom and dad are from socially prominent Black families in Houston and Denver, respectively, and I went to Stanford with Chelsea Clinton, the Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Joseph Kennedy III, Tiger Woods, and Scarlett’s professional colleague and one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, Sterling K. Brown. Our provost was Condoleezza Rice. The argument that I am a Black blue blood is not hard to make.  

So after all that, I think I’ve earned the right to tell Scarlett Johansson she’s cute, and write a little blog about her and the other awesome Jewish MAT Girls without anybody freaking out about it. It’s my party and I can daydream about marrying Scarlett Johansson if I want to!

And I did afterall run into her in a place I’ve been going before her, unless Scarlett was strolling the Strip in Vegas when she was eight. And I doubt Scarlett got her room on Priceline, so that probably means she loves The Aria just like I do. I never went looking for Scarlett Johansson. She’s just a girl I happened to run into at a place I go all the time...

But I am still scared of Scarlett in a way. All my adult life, perhaps my biggest fantasy daydream was that the girl I loved at the moment would show up unannounced at my door with a suitcase. It would be terrifying if I opened my door and saw Scarlett Johansson. That would mean it was probably the Apocalypse, and if Scarlett had made it all the way down her list of resources to me, that would mean things had gotten really bad, like when Amber Heard comes knocking on Jesse Eisenberg’s door in Zombieland (that movie and Cafe Society are the reasons why I want him to play me because his characters in those movies so much reflect my emotional experiences with girls). 

So I’m kind of scared of randomly running into Scarlett again. I’m scared that I’m wrong about everything I think about her. That I wouldn’t like her and she wouldn’t like me. I’m scared that maybe she does know who I am, and maybe she does want to meet me, but that she would be disappointed. 

If I did meet Scarlett Johansson again for the first time, you know where I’d like to meet her? Well, first of all, Scarlett is smarter than me, so I’d be just like the arranged-marriage queen in Coming To America: “Whatever place you want to meet.” But if Scarlett wanted me to pick, you know where I pick to meet her? In an OFFICE. 

Why? Because the most interesting thing to me about Scarlett Johansson is not that she’s cute...even though she’s sooooo cute!  It’s not that when I saw her in Vegas she looked supernaturally beautiful. It’s not that she’s rich and famous. It’s that she is a girl who started working at fourteen and at thirty-five is one of the most successful people EVER in her profession. That is so hot. 

I don’t know if I could be of any use to Scarlett in her personal life. But I know I can write movies. So I’d like to meet Scarlett Johansson in her office and we can talk about the female future of the film industry and the world. And perhaps, if I’m the luckiest guy ever, and God really likes my work, at some point she might let me buy her an ice cream or cook her a kosher dinner or marry her. 

Here’s the reason I know that I really like Scarlett Johansson. Hot girls are not a new phenomenon for me, nor are highly successful careerwomen. I know lots of girls that have been paid money to have their picture taken. I’ve been around actresses and models and such more than I care to admit, and probably more than I realize, because I talk to hot girls just like they are regular girls...because they are.

I’ve spent time in places where celebrity girls hang out and some of you know you looked. Hell, probably a few of the hot girls I’ve chatted with at some of the ritzy places that I go were unbeknownst to me celebrities, because I really don’t follow pop culture like that to know who everybody is. 

I’ve worked with powerful female executives, some of whom were really cute too, and through it all, I was too cool for school...too cool for my own good.

I’ve walked past tens of thousands of “10”s and none of them stopped my clock the way Scarlett Johansson in Vegas did.  But when I saw Scarlett Johansson, I did not know that she was Scarlett Johansson. I thought, “That girl must run some company, or if not, she’s gonna be running it soon”. The instant I laid eyes on her, I thought, “Now there’s somebody I would like”. But I had no idea at that moment she was the ridiculously famous actress of whom I’d been a silly fanboy because of her acting talent since I saw her in her very first movie so many years ago. 

And that’s the comic irony of the whole thing that I’ll never get over. I don’t care about Scarlett’s fame or money, except that it reflects the fact that she’s really good at her job, which I care about a lot. I don’t care that she’s cute...ok, I care a little bit that she’s cute. But what it really is, is that I think she might be THAT girl I’ve been walking around the planet this whole time looking for...THAT one!  Who is THAT? “Scarlett Johansson? No fucking way!”

When I think about Scarlett Johansson, it throws me back into my elementary school days when I was shy and nervous around girls, and couldn’t summon the courage to tell a girl to her face that I liked her. Before I saw Scarlett, I hadn’t seen a girl who made me feel that way in a long time. 

I don’t know, I think we’ve made love too serious, like a business transaction instead of something fun.  I’m interested in the movie business, quite obviously, and I really really want to do a ton of work with Scarlett Johansson, but I also think I’d really enjoy spending time with her. When you meet someone you like, it should be like being a kid again. It’s Valentine’s Day coming up and I would give Scarlett one of those chalky little pink candy hearts that says “I Choose U” on it. And then on the playground at recess, I would tell her she’s cute, and then run away.  But I’ll be peeking around the corner to see if she’s still looking for me...

Hey Scarlett, you’re really cute! *runs*

Follow me on Instagram: @michaeldavidmodern