This is where me and Kyle are different. I'm terrible with women, and I could never do the whole 'friends with benefits' scenario. It made me feel terrible for just thinking about it. I bought into the whole 'your first time should be special. It should mean something.' I wasn't holding out till marriage, but I wanted my first time to be while I was in a relationship, a long meaningful one. Kyle, on the other hand, didn't share this idea with me. He wanted to live life to the max, and enjoy every last minute of it. And the fact that he could woo anyone helped him in that department. And he didn't care who knew about it.
One moment sticks out the most, and that being one o'clock in the morning, and me sitting outside of his house, smoking Camel cigarettes while he went off to the park near his house to be with one of his many women. He would come back, a big smile plastered on his face while I pulled my coat closer to me and wondered if I was going to get sick from the cold and die.
He couldn't understand why I had this mindset. Not in a bad way, mind you. He just wanted me to live life to the max and enjoy every last bit of it before I got old and all the fun got sucked out of me. He would even try to hook me up, but my overall awkwardness, anxiety, and the fact that I insulted almost everyone made me that friend that they would just talk to and hang out with. Nothing more, nothing less. Which worked for me, I was all for having more friends. When he wasn't trying to hook me up, he would tell me some of his secrets. Some of them made sense, others not so much.
"Dude, Harry Potter is great."
"Really?"
"Yeah, every time I've watched it recently, I've gotten laid."
"Really?"
"Yeah, every time I've watched it recently, I've gotten laid."
That was one of the more strange bits of advice he gave me. It's probably just me, and my outdated attempts at charm, but I stick more with paying for dinner, giving them flowers, and long walks in the moonlight hand in hand. That usual romantic crap.
Since I couldn't drive (a lack of money, and I was blind as a bat having lost my glasses for the longest time), he would always have to pick me up. Which wasn't all that bad, seeing as how instead of gas money, I just had to buy him food at the many fast food establishments we went to. And to be quite honest, I enjoyed hearing some of his stories and the random bits of information he would say. Sometimes, we would drive past someone that he had screwed around with and say "[insert name here]... Man, that was nice. Dude, I can't wait till you get some for yourself and know what I'm talkin' about."
I was always afraid of this moment though, when I eventually was in a relationship and she'd go "I want to meet your friends! From all the stories you tell, they sound funny!" Let me clarify something. My stories are not meant to be like that. I mean them to be cautionary tales of debauchery, bad choices, and the consequences of those choices. But hey. People think they're funny, so to each their own, I guess. This one girl I met, Claire, was fantastic. Funny, down to earth, and almost as equally cynical and jaded as I am. Needless to say, we hit it off pretty well. Knowing that this was going to happen, I decided that a preemptive strike was needed to avoid disaster. So one day, I called Kyle.
"Hey," he said, sounding groggy. I checked my watch to see that I had woken him up at two thirty in the afternoon.
"Hey, what're you doing tonight?" I asked.
"Uhhh.... Nothing, why?" He asked. In the background, I heard him pissing. What can I say? I know classy people.
"Do you want to go to dinner with me and Claire?" I heard the words come out of my mouth, but my brain was too busy screaming at me.
"Sure man. Where at?" I heard the toilet flush and him walk back into his room. His bed, he told me, after so many uses had a very distinctive squeak to it. Needless to say, I immediately never sat on his bed again.
After I gave him the details, I hung up the phone and called Claire. She came over, and I told her about dinner.
"That's great!" She said with a level of enthusiasm that one usually reserves for getting a new animal.
"Yeah," I replied, not sounding so sure. She picked up on my weariness.
"It'll be fine," she told me, rubbing my back. I secretly wished that I could somehow get to that level of denial. My life would be so much better.
"It'll be fine," she told me, rubbing my back. I secretly wished that I could somehow get to that level of denial. My life would be so much better.
"Yeah, well... He may or may not bring someone." I told her, rolling onto my side to look at her.
"Hey, that'd be fantastic! It'd be like a double date!" I shuddered internally at the thought and laughed with her.
The time came, and me and Claire got into her car to drive to the restaurant where we were eating. It was a cheap, reliable Mexican place that I went to so often that the waiters and waitress already knew what I wanted to get to eat. They liked me, mainly because I didn't try to speak in broken Spanish from high school, and I tipped pretty well. We waited, and Kyle and some girl walked in. My heart sank down in my chest. I knew this girl. This girl and I had a fling that went nowhere two summers ago. And she and Kyle and tried the whole 'relationship thing before'. It didn't end well. They sat down at the table with us and everyone got introduced to each other. We all ordered, and started to make small talk. It was tame, but that was because of the text message conversation I had with Kyle (something that would later be called the ten commandments of double dating with me):
1. Do NOT ask about our sex life.
2. Do NOT talk about your sex life.
3. Do NOT talk about how great you are.
4. Do NOT try to make subtle hints about how much you like my date.
5. Do NOT try to hook up with my date.
6. Do NOT make me pay for you and your date.
7. Do NOT talk about the one time that you had to carry me to your car because I couldn't walk.
8. DO show basic table manners.
9. Do NOT mess with my OCD.
10. DO respect my date.
We talked about music, movies, I talked about books and art. Kyle talked about his interests, Clarie talked about hers (which was revealing, I never knew that she wanted to be an artist...), and Mandy (Kyle's date) talked about her experiences in high school. It was going too well, I should've known that something was going to come up and ruin it. It went like this:
"So, what're you going to do in college?" Mandy asked me.
"Well, I want a major in psychology, and a minor in art history," I told her.
"Oh, what do you want to do with those?" Kyle asked. He enjoyed busting my balls about how 'useless' these degrees were.
"Well, a psychiatrist is what I would love to do. And I would love to teach art history in a high school." I said, sounding more smug then I wanted to.
"Why do you want to be a shrink?" Kyle asked, putting his hand on Mandy's lap. I didn't notice this until too late, and the conversation went on.
"Well, I've always been good at helping people," I responded, still not paying attention to where his hand was.
"Oh, like that one girl in school!" He exclaimed.
I earned a reputation in high school as being the person that most people came to with their problems, my most famous success story being a girl that was going to kill herself when she didn't make the cheer squad. Not only did I convince her that life would go on, I introduced her to someone, and asked her what she really wanted to do, which was paint. Last time I talked with her, she's been dating the guy I introduced her to for three years, and she's in college with an art scholarship.
"Yeah, like her," I said, with an air of smugness that I figured I deserved. It was then I noticed the face that Mandy was making. I knocked my napkin off the table and went down to get it. That's when I saw it. I was going to say something, but Claire noticed it, probably because Mandy was trying to control herself, so she was tweaking out with her legs, and kicked Claire. The check came thirty seconds after that. We paid and left. Claire dropped me off without saying a word, and three days later we broke up. She wouldn't tell me why, but I knew why.
I was furious for a few days, at Claire, at Kyle, at Mandy, and at myself for not picking up on what Kyle was doing. I stopped being mad at myself (after a week of playing the Pink Floyd song Wish You Were Here while I cried in a bathtub for a week), and eventually forgave Mandy. I eventually learned that before getting picked up by Kyle, she had polished off a handle of imported liquor she stole from her dad, so I forgave her a couple of weeks later. Kyle's apology was a carton of cigarettes (despite me quitting when I met Claire), thirty bucks, and a note with the words 'sorry broski' scribbled on a casino napkin. Then, three weeks after that, I had another apology from him. He said I'd know in due time, so I didn't let it bother me. 'In due time' was three days after the second apology, when I saw a picture of him and Claire cuddling together in some cabin in Tahoe. Another week in the bathtub, but with a different song (I chose the song Leave by The Swell Season this time, as I thought it better conveyed my emotions).
Kyle and I are still friends despite this, which from what I hear is the talk of a small group of our friends who are amazed at my ability 'forgive and forget', while another group says that I'm a 'master of repression'. I try not to think about it, but hey. I was still a virgin, the only one in my group of friends, and at age eighteen, I was the pariah of the group. It's still too strong of a word, but at the time, it described how I felt. And this was only the start of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment