#006 - The Deepest Conversation With the Worst Person I Ever Had
It was at a funeral.
I didn’t know the deceased well, but I understood enough to know she was a terrific person who was already on her way out when I met her. It’s been seven years since her death and people still talk about her regularly. She was the kind of sweet, gentle soul who carved a place for you by her side even if you didn’t deserve it. In fact, she probably went to greater lengths for you if you were an asshole. Not because she was a born victim. Because she figured that you might become better if you had a place to call home.
Back then, I had known that guy for almost a decade. He’d been dating Josie’s sister for a mere three weeks less than I had been dating Josie myself. They already had two kids together. We’d been coexisting peacefully in family gatherings and occasional double dates for nine years and counting. He and I were basically two sides of the same coins to my in-laws and everyone else in the family. We were their daughters’ happily ever after. Who we were and what we wanted were beside the point. We had already won.
We weren’t close, but we weren’t hostile either. He was witty and pleasant, but I had no idea what to make of him. Being the earnest and enthusiastic simpleton that I am, we were at the point in our relationship where I could’ve called him a friend. I never felt closer to him than on that night.
"I like your woman. I truly do," he said, willingly choosing to sit by my side for the first time in our relationship. "But I could never be with her"
"How so? You don’t like your relationships bullshit free?" I said.
He scoffed and took a sip of coffee from a styrofoam cup. "We get along. We truly do, but we’d get in each other’s face for anything and nothing. It wouldn’t last long."
"For all it’s worth, I get along with your woman. At least, I think. But I would never ever date her either."
Half of his coffee sip came through his nostrils. He didn’t expect my answer.
"Why the hell not. She’d the simplest, most easygoing woman I’ve ever been with," he said.
"She might be. But she only expresses emotion through microexpressions. I can’t fucking deal with this. I need to be screamed at and shaken out of my boots. I can’t live with someone shrugging and tilting her head each time she means anything."
He laughed and that was it. I didn’t say the conversation was deep, I said it was the deepest one I ever had with such a terrible person. One year later, he left my sister-in-law only to crawl back to her one week later. Three weeks after that, I was mysteriously roofied while attending his NHL fantasy league draft. You’ve read that right. At first, I thought that mixing Nyquil from the previous night and alcohol transformed me into a zombie in front of him and his friends. But it was more complicated than this.
Eighteen months later around the dinner table, he drunkenly admitted that he and his close friend (who was stilling beside me that day) roofied people they knew for shits and giggles. They never left them in harm’s way or anything, but they used it as a way to assert dominance over their peers. If they lived through one of the most embarrassing moments of your life by your side, they could make you feel like the people who have their shit more together than you in any social situation even if they aren’t.
It’s some nasty, next level manipulation shit.
This man hasn’t really been in my life for close to a year, but I’ve been thinking of the conversation (and the roofies incident) since. To everyone else, we were basically the same person then. We served the same function in the social circles we frequented together: boyfriends and purveyors of happiness and stability outside immediate family. We both had a similar upbringing with well-meaning, overbearing parents who instilled unwavering discipline in all the wrong places in us.
But he and I were never alike. Fucking Christ, if that conversation wasn’t any indication, I don’t know what possibly could’ve been. If it veered anywhere deep, it was to my initiative. He was basically trying to call me pussy whipped and I didn’t let him. This conversation is the greatest example of how any moment in your life has the meaning you give it. I wanted that guy to be good. I wanted him to be my friend. Someone I rely on. So, I didn’t see him for who he truly was: a condescending dipshit.
Sometimes who you truly are comes back to haunt you years down the line. But I like that haunting. It’s better that you realize late that you’re a decent guy and that you opened the door for somebody else to be decent at a very important moment than never to realize it at all. There’s also a responsibility in this realization. In the way you interpret the world around you. You can let anyone else dictate how you feel about other people. I liked this guy because the family liked him. Because I thought he was like me.
They say not to feel sorry about letting a sociopath hide in plain sight. That it’s what they do. But it’s what they do because you let them do it. Because you choose not to see them for who they are. I carved a place for this asshole by my side and he didn’t want it.
