"I Am Famous For It Now"
by Marie Solis
One afternoon in August, I was sitting at the long table along the perimeter of the New York Observer’s newsroom, where all of the interns lived. Returning from lunch, my editor placed a flyer in front of me. “I want you to call this guy,” she said. The piece of eight-by-eleven computer paper read, “I’m really looking for a girlfriend. This is not a joke. Just tired of the singles scene and hoping to meet the right person. I am a professional and a creative person. You know who you are. To me each and every person is beautiful. Open to the possibility of the relationship morphing into something more profound.” Hovering above this declaration were the words “Looking for a girlfriend,” and a headshot.
The headshot belonged to Dan Perino, a middle-aged man living in the East Village. I interviewed him twice that day — the second time after 6 p.m., so I had missed my usual train home. There I was, the last intern at the long table, listening to Perino tell me — three days away from turning twenty-one — that he, fifty-one years old, was looking for a woman in her twenties or thirties; he wanted to start a family. He told me that he was putting up fifteen hundred flyers a day, in nine-hour shifts, and that he had gone on thirty-nine dates in sixteen days. The endeavor was to be a month-long experiment, during which he would abstain from sex and focus on finding lasting romance.
While we spoke, I stared at the flyer, which I had affixed to the wall in front of my work station. Perino looked pretty average: He was balding with a five o-clock shadow, his expression giving away only the faintest hint of a smile. His eyes were a little unnerving — there was something piercing and demanding about them, but also something that seemed to be missing.
“I don’t want to get stuck on the internet looking for a girlfriend,” he said. “This is new. No one’s ever done it before.” He was pleased with himself — and maybe even more pleased that I was giving him additional press coverage; he said his phone was ringing off the hook with calls from reporters. After our conversation, I left the office and took a later train home, imagining his gaze penetrating the emptiness of the newsroom.
As I dozed off during my morning commute the next day, I was awakened by two texts from Perino. He wanted to know when the story would be in print. After another hour, I arrived at the office, and wrote the piece; I was happy with the finished product. When my internship ended two days later, I forgot about Perino.
But he hadn’t given up on his mission. Since the Observer published my piece, Perino has hung fifty thousand flyers (printed at a shop in the West Village for a reduced price of ten cents each); has answered nine thousand phone calls; been on hundreds of first dates; hooked up with a hundred and twenty-five women (now a hundred and thirty-seven); and has been featured in publications around the world.
On November 9th, months after we had last spoken, Perino texted me: “I am looking to do a reality tv show,” he wrote. “I am famous for it now Google my name Perino perino. Or maybe you can lead me in the right direction? Thank you. Perino.” On November 17th came another message. Perino, apparently, had found some success. “They are doing a documentary on me. And they also want me to do a pilot for a reality show. Vice.com gave me a lot of publicity. From Dan perino looking for a girlfriend flyer.”
I ignored these until one day I was reminded of Jeff Ragsdale, commonly known as “Jeff, One Lonely Guy.” In 2011, Ragsdale hung posters around New York City, offering his phone number to the masses if “anyone wanted[ed] to talk about anything.” Every day, Ragsdale received hundreds of calls and texts from people around the world and later compiled these into an eponymous book. You could say that Perino is his pupil: Both lonely, but in different ways. I suddenly wondered what Perino was up to — if he was still answering phone calls, still hanging flyers, still going on dead-end first dates.
I excavated the transcriptions of my interviews with Perino and took to the web. In recent months, Perino had begun to embrace the digital age; I browsed his Twitter, Instagram, personal website and Indiegogo webpage. Perino had abandoned his pursuit of love for a pursuit of fame.
A photo posted by Dan Perino (@lookingforagirlfriendguy) on Apr 5, 2015 at 8:34am PDT
“You’re from the camera crew? Okay,” I heard Perino say to someone in the background when I called him one afternoon in February. “Things are starting to happen now. Usually I get three calls a day from reporters,” he said. Most of it is overseas. I did something for Australia yesterday. I did something for Africa.”
He continued, “I did another interview for a tabloid in England. I did a couple of dating tips for someone out west. I did a couple of dating shows. I did one in Alaska. It goes on and on. It’s never really the same story. Things change by the day or by the week for me. I’m probably going to change this flyer and now do a world-wide search.”
Perino’s documentary had finished filming and was now on the editors’ desk, he reported, but he still desperately wanted to shoot a reality show. However, his Indiegogo campaign hadn’t attracted any sponsors. Perino seemed to be taking advantage of social media and even dating apps, the very technologies he reviled in our summer interviews, but some of that mistrust still stuck.
“I’ve tried Tinder, it’s fake,” he bemoaned over the phone. “Tinder comes and says you have to pay twenty-five dollars to pay for the really hot girls and then in the middle of texting they’ll say you’ve reached your coin limit. I got my money back from both that and OkCupid. It’s fake.” He then recounted all of the “fake” women he has met on these deceiving apps: women who wanted a plane ticket to see him, a woman who wanted gas money to travel from California, a woman who wanted his opinion on the lingerie she had just bought but then never responded. And a transgender woman who “tricked” him was the fakest of them all, according to Perino. “The flyer is not fake,” he countered. “I’m truly looking for a girlfriend.”
One morning, a few days after this conversation, I rolled over in bed, feeling blindly for my phone amid the sheets. With eyes barely opened, I checked my Twitter to see that New York magazine had written a story on Perino. I gave it a read and then browsed Perino’s latest tweets: He said he was slated to speak to twenty reporters that week. Great, I thought. My phone interview wasn’t going to cut it. I texted Perino and he said that we could meet up — in fact, I could accompany him on his daily flyer route, which is no longer just a mission: Perino gets paid to hang other people’s flyers, which he often does so while hanging his own. “I’m an expert flyer-hanger,” he boasted.
Perino suggested that we first sit down at SideWalk Café in the East Village, one of his favorite haunts. When I entered, I recognized it from the photo accompanying his Vice interview. (In it, he recounted his “weirdest date ever,” when a woman invited him to her hotel room and passed out from drinking too much. He then helped her to bed, “felt her up a little bit” and then left.) I said “hello” to the waitress, feeling bad for a moment that I was only there to conduct business, not to order anything. The only other two people there seemed to be doing the same, with one woman talking on a headset and another typing on a laptop. Perino was already there, looking just like his photo and sipping a cup of coffee. Beside him sat a stack of flyers with heart clipart. “I think they’re more romantic,” he had told me earlier on the phone. They no longer include Perino’s phone number. I shook his hand and sat down. “Look at my hands,” he said, holding them up. “They’re all cut-up from hanging flyers.” He had been posting them all winter. With the wind and cold, paper cuts abounded. As I pressed record on my phone, he requested, “Don’t give me a bad article.”
Forgetting that the last time we had spoken was just two weeks ago, Perino rehashed much of what he said before. He told me again about the documentary, the fake dating apps, the fake women, all in his low, even voice that was now familiar to me. I asked him only a few questions, which he more or less answered before going off on various tangents. I inquired about a girl he had mentioned a few days before our sitdown. In a text, he had written, “I have to ask this girl I met if she wants to talk. She may be the end of my search.”
Perino was fidgety, but unblinking, speaking as though he were reading from a script. “I was thinking I might actually turn her into my girlfriend,” he said. “She sent me pictures and said she had three months until she became a doctor. I forget where she lived…Minnesota maybe? So we’re talking, talking, talking through text, Facebook text — Facebook messaging. Then she hits me with this six-hundred-dollar chemistry book she needs.” That was the end of their interactions.
Other women, Perino said, had asked him to wire them money, pay for their cell phone bills, even purchase them a three-thousand-dollar bicycle. They wanted a sugar daddy it seemed, but — in case for a moment I had forgotten — Perino wanted a girlfriend. No matter what I asked him — is shooting a reality show your end goal? Is shooting a commercial for a dating app your end goal? — he was unflagging in his response: “No, I’m looking for a girlfriend.”
The way to a woman’s heart, he maintained, was not through material things. “Men shouldn’t buy women gifts until they know them for quite a while. But I do bring a red rose on every date, every single one. Which has been a lot of red roses.” He paused for a moment. “Two bucks each.” I didn’t get a rose, because I had asked for an interview, not a date, though Perino insisted there wasn’t much difference between the two. “Men do all the talking; women do all the listening, like you’re doing now. Let’s say, I was talking to you on a date and you had your red rose…” He took another long pause. “Women interview men all the time to see if they’re smart enough, strong enough, cool enough, fun enough, to go to the next level. It’s nature.”
Men want alot out of life fishing, getting laid, a nice car and a family. Girls only want fashion and a guy hung like a 9in coke can. ME
— daniel perino (@danperinonyc) April 9, 2015
Perino constantly speaks in these kinds of aphorisms, which I recognized from his Twitter feed. “New York is a dating town, not a boyfriend-girlfriend town,” he told me, echoing his March 7th tweet. “My range is twenty-five to thirty-seven, so I’ve pissed off all of the thirty-eight-year-olds in New York City.” He had previously said this in a March 12th tweet.
Admittedly, I find some humor in his tweets. “Woman wants is a handy man, good sex, fashion, a great place to eat, coffee, red wine, more sex, affection a real man not from Jersey,” he wrote the other week. It’s hard to argue with that. “No wonder why a woman is pissed she works seven days per week for half the pay a man works five days per week.” But Perino never cracked a smile or broke eye contact once during our interview. The only thing he seemed to find amusing was his imitators. “There’s copycatters. I saw a lot of funny ones. I see them when I’m putting up my flyers. One guy’s says, ‘I’m looking for a girlfriend, too!’” he recalled. Perino said he doesn’t take down their posters; he’s sympathetic to their plight.
Men fight with fists. Woman fight with words an will destroy you forever.
— daniel perino (@danperinonyc) March 28, 2015
Perino met his ex-wife the old-fashioned way: in a bar. He said he gave her a ride on his Honda 750 motorcycle. She moved in the next day and never moved out, until they split two years later. Together, they had a daughter who is now eighteen. Neither approves of his current strategies for finding a new partner. He paused for about five seconds, looking at me blankly. “Anything else?”
With posters in the crook of his arm and painters’ tape in hand, Perino took to the streets. As we walked, he broke down the exact science behind how he puts up so many flyers so quickly. With his one long thumbnail, he breaks off the tape, leaving the end up so he doesn’t have to waste time searching for the end of the roll. He keeps track of the crosswalks ahead to make sure he never has to stop moving. We looped around Avenue A and he kept an eye on the other side of the street to make sure no one was undoing his hard work. As he finished the tutorial, I noticed there was a streak of blood on one of the posters. He’d cut himself again. Walking along Avenue A, I asked, “Do you like getting recognized?” Over the summer, he reported getting stopped up to twenty times a day. “Yes. It’s the feeling of being loved,” he said. He didn’t get stopped once on our walk.
I must be the most photographed man in nyc I can no longer walk down the street without having a fan taking a picture of me. Every where.
— daniel perino (@danperinonyc) April 7, 2015
We encountered some other interesting posters, articles begging to be written. “There’s a story,” Perino said, pointing one out to me. I pocketed the tear slip. “But don’t forget about me.” He pointed out two more posters to me, acting for a moment as an editor.
As he reached the end of his fifty-flyer stack he admitted, “I’m tired of putting up the flyers. I’m going to get out of the flyers real soon. If I could get a whole bunch of girls and just pick one…but all of those dating apps are a hundred percent fake. I’m going to try other avenues and would advise that to other men,” he said.
I asked to take a picture of him and he obliged. “Should I put up the peace sign?” he asked. I told him I would take one with the peace sign and a few others without. It felt like one big dad joke. I also recognized something in him I see in my own father: exhaustion. “The flyering was fun but I’m too tired to continue,” Perino said.
After parting ways, it occurred to me that ours was probably one of his most lasting relationships: We had stayed in touch for seven months. And if interviews were indeed like dates, I had been on more with Perino than anyone else in the last year. Love is a zero-sum game.