oh for pete’s sake
Greetings gentle readers!
I’ve been promising another glimpse into the mayor archives, so I’m finally getting some time to dig back into the morass that is my brain and spew an anecdote or two.
Digging deep for this one…all the way back to high school, which, let’s face it, is nothing if not fodder for blogs in later years.
You know the person who is forever outside, looking in? The one who’s destined to observe from the sidelines…the female equivalent, say, of the male ‘wingman’, who is along for the ride while all her friends ‘hook up’ with all the folks who have more than half a brain, or at least enough popularity to preclude the need for one?
That’s me. I’m the one slightly apart from wherever the real ‘action’ is….sporting a rictus of a smile, pretending it’s my life’s dearest wish to be listening to the drinking stories of a person called “the Rickster.”
You’ve seen him around. He cackles, he doesn’t laugh. He winks in a way that resembles more of a tic than an endearment. He seems to have eight hands and they are all dangling far too close to your person at all times. His breath reeks of whatever beverage he has had 3 too many of, which naturally means you’ve resorted to mouth-breathing since he is, of course, far too close for comfort. Or hygiene. Or anything at all.
The Rickster is the one who will force you to view another trip to the restroom (that frankly isn’t very well-ventilated) as the lesser of two evils. You may even choose to hide out in there until someone sort of falls into the door on the other side, muttering something about ‘bogarting the bathroom’ and ‘needing to hurl’.
But I digress. (Believe me, I could go on and on in this vein until I ran out of bandwidth. Suffice it to say I wasn’t one of the popular crowd. I was the backup singer no one knows the name of. The straight man in the comedy duo. The assistant to the mascot. The hand inside the Muppet) See? Could go on forever.
My best friend, of course, was gorgeous, in a non-debatable, exotic, all-men-lose-their-minds sort of way. She orchestrated our entire friendship, also….I would have considered her way out of my league. It took me awhile to figure out that I was a perfectly non-threatening best friend to have…..quirky, dorky, not attractive enough to be considered any form of ‘competition’, and just happy to be included. (wow, did that sound bitchy?) I suppose the fact that she later slept with my first real boyfriend, just because she could, *may* have later colored my judgement, but I digress!
Ahem. So this one time we were out, and as usual she was hooking up with some guy that was frankly not my type but I’d be lying if I said wasn’t eye candy. You know the drill.
And where was I? Oh, off in the corner, pinned to the wall by an unasked-for interlude with said guy’s wingman, Pete. This brings up an interesting side note: the popular folks always seem to assume that their less-popular friends will automatically be compatible with their ‘social equals’, as it were.
“Hey, your best friend sucks? Mine too! I’m not attracted to you at all but let’s bond in our shared misery!”
Nice theory, but not even close. I actually wondered once how convincingly I could pass out. Only the thought that someone might summon an actual ambulance prevented me from attempting it.
Ah, youth. Ain’t it grand?
So there I was. In the corner. With Pete. Now I gotta be honest, as far as the also-ran friends go, Pete wasn’t *that* bad. He wasn’t a perv, or a lech, or a hard-core boozer. He was just…….quiet. And a bit shy. And flushed bright red whenever I felt sorry enough for our plight to try to force conversation. My attempts at humor fell…..is there something more flat than flat? I was dying. I pulled out every weapon in my arsenal and came up with nothing. Nada.
So imagine my complete horror when at the end of the night I hear from Pete, “So do you think maybe I could call you sometime?”
Um. All I could picture was myself listening to the faint hum of static on the phone, punctuated by his undoubted breathing-into-the-mouthpiece thing (call it a hunch). I tried to do the right thing, gentle readers, and tell him thanks but no thanks, or give him the wrong number, but his little red face was so optimistic that I just couldn’t. So I gave him my real number.
Did I mention the person Pete most reminded me of is the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz? I’m not even making this up. He looked almost identical, down to that hopeful expression. I just couldn’t say no to the Scarecrow.
So naturally a few painful phone interludes followed, and he wasn’t to be dissuaded. It seems Pete was convinced it was the circumstances of our meeting that were awkward, and not the actual pairing of the two of us, say, sharing space. Nothing I could say would change his mind. Fine.
“One date” I said. “We can go on one date.”
We went out to dinner and to a movie. It was the longest evening of my life. It was almost physically painful trying to draw him into conversation. The evening was basically an ongoing monologue from me and one-word responses from him. It was like dating paint that is slowly drying. And trust me when I say those fumes were killin me.
We pulled up to my house and I almost cheered that this was nearly over. Until the Scarecrow puts his hand on mine and looks soulfully into my eyes and tells me what a great time he had, and how he felt so COMFORTABLE with me, and when could he see me again?
Funny you should ask, I thought. Funny.
Don’t worry, gentle readers….the one who can’t give out a fake number to the Scarecrow (or anyone, as it turns out, dammit) was surely going to let him down easy. So I did. I really really did. I think I made my point clear. I was gentle yet forceful.
So naturally I said he could call me again. He understood I wasn’t interested in dating. Fine, fine. So he called. And he called. And he called. Our ‘conversations,’ such as they were, had but one theme. I imagine it was sort of like watching cartoons argue.
“I don’t like you like that”
“Yes, you do”
“I don’t”
“Yes, you do”
“I don’t”
“You don’t”
“I do!”
And he wore me down and got me to the point where I was second-guessing myself so thoroughly I was half convinced he was my soulmate.
I was wrong. The second date was more exquisitely painful than the first….so much so that even Pete seemed to accept that there was nothing more to be done. Pete moved on and so did I. (and not a moment too soon, in my opinion)
Fast forward a few years later and prom time rolls around. Guess, oh guess who didn’t have a date? Senior prom. No date. Big surprise. I kept saying I didn’t want to go, and my mother kept telling me I would ‘always regret not going’. If only I knew how polar opposite that would end up.
I ended up asking my friend’s younger brother (who was a year younger than me, which frankly is embarrassing enough, but also shorter than me, which means I had to wear flats in my fancy schmancy dress or risk a Kidman/Cruise vibe in the ol’ prom photos) I was sure this meant that at the very least I wouldn’t have to worry about getting hit on and pawed all over all evening. Again, I was wrong. I silently fumed in a ‘wait-til-I-tell-your-sister-what-you’ve-done’ sort of way.
I should add that I’m reasonably certain said photos have all been destroyed, so don’t even ask. No. Do not.
None of these things held a candle to what I will officially call the Crowning Jewel on the Tiara That Was My Life. I and several of my friends decided to share a limo to said social disaster. Three couples were piled in and we went to pick up the fourth. I was so stoked for my girlfriend….she finally had her first boyfriend and was positively bursting with pride to be attending her first formal.
The limo pulls up. My friend enters, glowing in lavender. She was just beaming. I beamed back and shared her moment……until her date climbed in after her. Can you smell where this is going?
Her first boyfriend….the love of her life, who was now facing me in the limo, being introduced……was Pete. *My* Pete. The Scarecrow. Two years and a lifetime later. My friend always called him ‘Peter’ and I just never even in a million years would have thought it could be him. Who would??? The odds are just ridiculous. I should play the lottery sometimes.
I really, truly wish there were photos of our faces in that moment. I morphed from shock to horror to surprise to a decision in about 4 seconds flat.
“Nice to meet, you, Peter,” I said as I gave him my best play-along-with-me-here-please-note-what-I-am-doing-with-my-eyebrows look. “I’ve heard so many good things about you!”
He took my cue and smiled in a relieved way and broke into his trademark Scarecrow grin and all was well. Well, for them, anyway. I had to keep employing my elbows to keep my friend’s brother from getting grabby.
Epilogue: (and again, I am not making this up)…5 years later, I ran into the same girlfriend at a bar after we’d finished college. She’d been with ‘Peter’ all that time, and said they had only recently broken up. When I said that was a shame and asked why, she said something along the lines of how he ‘wasn’t very motivated’ and, ‘if she was honest about it, kinda boring.’
Wonder where Pete is now. I sincerely hope he’s happily married with several children. Who wouldn’t want to hear stories from the Scarecrow?
As always, thanks for reading, gentle readers. And by all means, I’d love to hear any and all dating horror stories you’d care to share about the Scarecrows in your life