This the first of my “Warts and all” week posts, where make entertainment (hopefully) out of moments I’m not the proudest of in my life. I haven’t been everyone’s pal all the time and there have been definite times when I didn’t want to be one.
These are things that I thought about saying but, the angel of discretion won over the devil of hurt or easy humor. I have actually said some mean things, though.
When I was in my very early twenties, my friend Chris worked as a light man for a lot of local bands and met a lot of groupies that we ended up hanging out with often. They made it obvious that the only guys that they were interested were the ones who played in the myriad cover bands and occasional “national” act that played in Ocean City. It was a bit emasculating, being treated more like a girlfriend than anything else, being privy to all kinds of information that I never asked or wanted to know about.
We were watching some band play some song live when one of the groupie girls squealed, “This is my favorite song that they play!” adding slyly, “I’ll have to thank them back at the hotel.”
I almost said,”I think you might be a bit big for them.”
Thank God I didn’t,the implosion of her ego would have been so huge, nothing would have been safe.
My last year in Salisbury, I dated a woman that was the girlfriend of someone I knew that used to live in the area but moved to Baltimore a while back. He, understandably, was quite upset with me when he found out and vowed to punch me in the face next time he saw me.
A little while later we ran into each other at a party, after my unsuccessful attempts to avoid him. He was actually much cooler than he had to be and told me,”You actually did me a favor getting me out of that relationship. I ALMOST said,”That’s funny, she said the EXACT same thing.” He didn’t deserve that.
A few months after my most painful breakup ever, the girlfriend that had broken up with me called me frantically,”Are you O.K.? I had a feeling that something had happened to you.” She took these feelings very seriously, it often meant that someone she knew had died, but I was fine. I almost said,”You’re a little off, last night was the first time I made out with someone that wasn’t you.”
This actually almost happened dozens of times after my then-roommate Ed told me his three kinds of human failure. Every once and a while, a customer at the toy store would say after they did something stupid,”I’m an idiot.” I’d say,”No, you’re not stupid.”, I had to stifle the desire to add on,”Really, you’re just foolish. Your smart enough and you know better, you just did the wrong thing anyway.”
At it’s core, that’s REALLY not an insult, but I certainly smells like one.
It reminds me of something I started saying when someone would ask a potentially prickly question: “Do you want me to answer that honestly or sensitively?”
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