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| It's been too long since we had one of these :( by Jerry Whorebach 05/31/2018, 6:22am PDT | ||||
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| So I'm walking home late at night. It's dark and the streets are practically deserted. Ahead of me, staggering down the sidewalk looking helpless, is a pretty girl in club clothes. I pre-emptively cross to the opposite side of the road so as to avoid any unwanted social interaction as I pass. Doesn't work! She calls across the street asking if I have a cigarette. I say "No, sorry," and keep walking without breaking stride; another minute and I'll be clear of the social danger zone. She crosses over to my side of the street and starts following me.
She yells after me, and I do the same thing I always do when a woman yells at me on the street: pretend I don't hear her and keep walking. I get a lot of practice, probably due to some combination of doing 24k of roadwork a day and looking like a guy who does 24k of roadwork a day (I've got an iliac furrow like the mariana trench). As long as I don't make eye contact, for all they know I could be deaf. There are plenty of hot deaf guys! But that's not going to work here because I already answered her cigarette question. So when she yells again I have to stop and turn around. She asks if she can walk with me, which is tough to say no to when you're both going the same direction. She's drunk, and in her words, afraid that ANYONE could take advantage of her. I try to reassure her it's a safe neighbourhood, but she's not having it. She says she started walking home without her phone and now she can't call anyone to come pick her up. I pass her my phone, she gives it back to me. She says the numbers are all in her phone and she can't remember any of them. So we start walking, and chatting. She's 22, in her third year of marketing at the university. She seems smart, correctly throwing out terms like "cognitive dissonance" (which would honestly be a stretch for me when I'm sober). We get to a well lit area with some traffic, where she stops at a 24-hour service station to buy cigarettes (no trouble remembering her ATM number). I ask if she's good from here and she grabs me by the arm, says when she wants me to go she'll let me know. At this point I just stop resisting. She's so attractive, and I'm enjoying the attention, I'll walk her home. We walk for almost two hours. As we talk, I get less and less uncomfortable. At some point she starts holding my hand. For stability, I assume, she is pretty drunk. Then she starts resting her head on my shoulder. She's tired, too. Then, with her other hand, she starts doing what I can only describe as molesting my bicep. No excuses anymore. There are two articles that make up the bread and butter of Men's Fitness Magazine: one is how to get biceps women can't resist, which is what I read it for, and the other is six ways to tell what a woman is REALLY thinking, which I also end up reading because it's right there. One of those ways is always bicep touching; this is well beyond touching, this is full on groping. We finally get to her place and I say goodnight just as she gets the key in the lock. She turns and throws her arms around me, which would be great if we were both falling down drunk and on a date, but as it stands I'm stone cold sober with a semi-conscious 22-year-old I just met. I hug her like my aunt and get out of there. So far, so good. It's on my own walk home that the gears of stupidity start turning. Loathe as I am to admit it, I am a man. Which means I'm dumb like a man, and vain like a man, and prideful like a man. All those traits that were supposed to get drowned when God flooded the Earth live on in my tiny male brain. Over the next couple days, I start wondering... what if she actually liked me? What if I wasn't just the safest-looking guy on the street at 1 AM - what if I was her soulmate? I start imagining what I'd tell that one loser guy in the Canadian Gaming Deals and Discussion forum on NeoGAF if he posted my story. I'd tell him to grow a pair and go knock on her door, and make sure to note down every humiliating detail of his rejection so we can all enjoy them. Then ten other people would tell him not to listen to me, that I delight in his misery, that I'm trying to get him hurt or trick him into hurting someone else - which I'm not going to lie to you, I have tried to do - and then the sad bastard would go back to clipping his little Gamestop coupons and whining the XXL sweatpants they sell at Walmart are too tight around his cheap ass. You don't have to tell me it was a suicide mission. I knew it was a suicide mission! I was going to be standing outside her doorway, completely exposed, like Omaha Beach. And let's skirt around the ethical line between knowing where someone lives and having the right to just show up there. Her address should've been mentally discarded as soon as I dropped her off, like the improperly retained DNA evidence they were always getting in trouble for trying to use on Law & Order. The odds were a million to one she'd ever want to see my face again. The odds! Did 33-year-old Harrison Ford let any gay robot tell him the odds when he decided to have an affair with 19-year-old Carrie Fisher? I'm not Harrison Ford, but I am 33, and as far as my male brain's concerned I am Harrison Ford. Here's where it gets good, so take your coffee cup away from your mouth so you don't bite down on it when you cringe. I knock on her door, two days after meeting her, around six thirty in the evening. It's Jekyll and Hyde. I'm still wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but she's gone from the shredded remains of jeans and what's left over after they make a regular T-shirt to the most conservative floral dress in the world. At her chest she's clutching some kind of Pikachu-themed Nintendo portable that I can't even identify because I'm a grown-ass man. She looks so young, and I feel so old. She says she doesn't remember me or anything else about that night, but I can see on her impossibly smooth face a mixture of shame and horror that says she remembers everything. This is where the little NASA commander in my brain starts slamming the abort button, but he's too late, we're past the point of no return. All I can do now is power through. I didn't nut up my nuts all the way into my throat so I could run away at the first sign of what I already knew before I came here, that this was the worst idea in the world. I re-introduce myself, I say I really enjoyed meeting her, and I ask if she'd like to come out for a walk. She's polite enough to make up an excuse why she can't. It's obviously an excuse because there's no alternative, no how about later or here's my number, just this thing she's about to go do prevents her from ever seeing me again. It's also obviously an excuse because, seriously, it looks like her face is about to explode from revulsion. I take the hint. I want to make a Breakfast Club reference to ease the tension, but I figure that was probably before her time. All I can do is rasp out "sorry to bother you," to which she chirps, "no worries," her face finally starting to relax. I book it like I've never booked it before, only once I'm out of sight collapsing into Charlie Brown after a baseball game. I walk home like that, my hands shoved so far into the pockets of my jeans I can almost fit my head in there. When I get home, I close my curtains and bawl my fuckin' eyes out. All night I'm Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant, only without the sex and drugs, just naked ripped old man crying. And that's the story of the first time a girl held my hand. |
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