Top Five Asinine-Behavior-By-A-Guy Moments

I have lots of really awesome and cool men in my life.  I also have known a lot of total losers.  This post is about the latter.  And please – PLEASE – share yours with me in the comments.  I got a girl out there who needs to hear that she ain’t alone, and that crappy behavior (male and otherwise) is a universal problem we all share.

5. I had had a lingering crush on low boil for J. for years.  He was athletic, but sensitive – a wrestler who wrote poetry.  It was a college thing, rekindled when we bumped into each other a year or two after graduation.  We were thrown together time and again, and finally one evening we shared a lingering, chatty, eye-gazing-across-the-table glass of wine (for me) and beer (for him) at a bar, the last two left of a big group outing.  We went on a number of dates – mostly group dates, but always sitting together, always talking only to one another.  I was pretty brave in those days, and I asked him out on a formal, just us date.  He agreed, and then later blew me off with some lame excuse.  The next weekend, giving him the benefit of the doubt, I called him once, and left a message.  I called him again a couple of days later, and got the voicemail again.  No dice, and in fact I didn’t hear from him for six weeks.  So, at the end of this six weeks, I ran into him at a party.  He looked startled to see me, and left almost immediately, without saying anything.  He called later that night, saying that seeing me made him know in his heart that he wanted to get together again.  He talked about his parents’ divorce (when he was aged THREE) and how it had wrecked his view on relationships, and about how he was sorry, but we’d just had such a connection, and it scared him to feel that way again, after a recent breakup, but now he thought he’d worked through those feelings, and could we please just go get a drink or something so we could talk?  This was, of course, on my voice mail, because when I saw it was him I certainly didn’t pick up.  Snort.  I was already with M.  Moved on.  All set with that business.  I’m sure he had a legitimate mental hangup or whatever – fine.  You be all hung up and stuff.  You figure it out on your own time, dear.  I won’t be waiting.  As one of my closest friends used to say – he missed his window.

4. I ran with a group of about 5 or 6 kids in middle school.  There was one guy in our group – a pretty insecure dude, because he had not hit his growth spurt yet and was about four feet tall – at least a foot shorter than all of us girls.  Anyway, despite his insecurities, his immaturities, and the fact that he was neither remotely interesting nor very good-looking, we all hung on him all the time.  Inter-gender relations were still pretty new and exciting in those days, and we didn’t have the discretion to be discerning about our crushes.  Anyway, once he passed around this note at the lunch table.  It went to everyone at the table except me – the girls would read it, look really uncomfortable, fold it and pass it on, and then very pointedly not look at me anymore.  The last girl threw it away.  I fetched it out of the trash, against their weak protests, and read the note.  It said “that mustache girl is one ugly b****.  I can’t believe we’re friends with her!  She makes me wanna throw up!!”  So, as an adult now, I think back on this and wonder – WHY?  Was this really necessary?  In any case, as a kid, I practically swallowed my tongue to keep from crying.  I tried my best to coolly fold it up and throw it away.  Then I turned to a friend, and asked (in a voice that was much higher pitched than my normal voice) “That was about me?”  She said nothing, and so I repeated, a statement this time.  “That was about me.”  And folks, I’m here to tell you, you’ll never believe how deeply I allowed that dumb short kid’s note to affect my self esteem, or how long it took me to get over this incident.  Let’s just say it was way too long.  Like, COLLEGE too long.

3. I had this friend in high school.  He seemed like a nice, respectful guy.  He was the year ahead of me, but I went to his graduation – I mean, not for him specifically, I just had some friends who were seniors and so I went to graduation for the class of ’95.  And I ran into this guy.  Eric was his name, I remember he was going straight into the army.  Something had clearly ticked him off, pushed him over the edge, and he was in a weird mood.  As my group of friends and I walked towards him and a group of HIS friends, I waved and chirped Hello!  Congratulations, Eric!  You must be so relieved to be done!  And he turned to his friends and said – check this out, ya’ll.  And he grabbed the back of my shirt and pulled it taut against me, so that my body was pretty exposed, and then “honked” each one of my boobs, right there in front of everyone.  Then he slapped me on the ass and shoved me out of the way, and he and all his cackling male idiot friends kept on walking.  It was really strange, and really humiliating, and I didn’t understand why he was behaving in this boorish way.  I felt very violated.  We’d been pretty good friends for a while.  That was the last time I ever saw this kid, and that’s how I’ll always remember him.  As a jerk, who did a jerky thing in front of his jerky friends in order to get some sort of accolades.  Instead of the pretty nice guy who was gentle and kind to me, back when I was a shy, nervous kid.

2. This story isn’t mine to tell.  You’ll have to ask my sister to tell it, in the comments.  Re: J. and the sudden end of a half-decade long relationship, followed by an instant new out-of-the-blue wife, followed-closely-by-triplets.  There are multiple stories in this one arc.  But I’ll leave them to her.

1. OK, so I’m working as a waitress at a swanky place in a tiny midwestern town.  This place is the only remotely nice restaurant in the area, and it’s run by a former actor who had gone to New York, failed at acting, and returned to marry a rich older woman and then use her money to open this Italian place.  One night, he invites all of us to his place for drinks after work (“all of us” being his own slightly uptight older sister waitress, the pregnant 21 year old chain smoking Long Island Iced Tea drinking townie waitress, the 40 year old chain smoking Long Island Iced Tea drinking non-pregnant kind of awesome raw voiced hardened by life townie sous chef, the chain-smoking in the kitchen with ash dripping into the FOOD thirty year old male chef, and twenty one year old me).  I do not realize that this invitation is a scam, a deal he’s worked out with everyone else, that when there’s a pretty young waitress (they were always pretty and young, so I was later told), and his wife was out of town, he would invite everyone over and then everyone would say yes and then no one else would come, so he could end up alone with the pretty young waitress and no wife to spoil things.  By the time I figured it out, I had had several glasses of red wine, and I’d also HELD HIS ONE YEAR OLD BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER IN MY ARMS.  The skeeze.  (Him, of course, not the baby.)  He offered to give me a little foot massage, and invited me up to the master bedroom in order to enjoy said foot massage in comfort and quiet, away from the baby’s room.  I got in my car and drove home drunk – the only time I’ve ever done it, I’ll have you know.  You’d better believe I went to work the next day.  At least he had the good manners to look ashamed.