Understand, I have a Rule.
It’s a good idea, of course, to test those Rules once in a while, just to make certain they’re really well advised and applicable. Not #3 (“Make sure the body doesn’t wash up on shore”) perhaps, or #7 (“Never crimp the cap with your teeth”), as they represent the extrema with obvious and highly detrimental consequences, but some of the lesser constraints should be validated from time to time. So, like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape (“That’s Captain Hilts…oh, you’ll still be here when I get out, right?”) trying to jump his Norton across the wire into Switzerland, I just can’t help but buck the establishment once in a while.
But I should start in the beginning, and for this particular tale it begins with the obstreperous endeavor that is work. Electing to suffer no longer at such a pointless task as my current work, I knock off and head home. On route a famishment of immeasurable proportions strikes me (or perhaps it is just a desire for company), and I recall the bareness of my larder, so I head to my favorite watering hole in Old Town for my monthly burger and Guinness. Replete with my repast and glowing slightly from a rather fairish conversation with one of the barlasses regarding her favored pet, I proceed to the grocery to provision the aforementioned vacuous pantry. Hence begins the trouble.
It’s not that the store was poorly stocked; indeed, it calls upon all the restraint I can muster to prevent myself from purchasing more sustenance than I can consume before putrescence sets in. Nor was their difficulty with parking, or lines, or any of the normal complaints one generally has about engaging in the process of mercantile transaction. No, friends and neighbors, or digitally remote approximations thereof, the problem is my inability to discern between the appropriate and the unwanted when it comes to the act of social exchange.
There is, in the produce section, a young lady stocking the apples. This particular bit of biological complexity in the female form, of whose name I am as ignorant as I am of the lyrics of La Boheme, is not uncomely, and moreover appears inclined to acknowledge my existence. Feeling fine and full and particularly rebounded from the agony that is my occupational distress (no doubt having something to do with the brace of Guinness I’d consumed over dinner), I circle about for a recce, all passive sensors on high gain. Sure enough, I again obtain awareness from the subject; not merely a passing glance, but a languishing contemplation that the less cultured among us might reference as “fuck-me eyes”. My stock reaction, of course, is to duck and cover, bank hard, prepare the cloak of invisibility, release chaff, dive for the deck, afterburners on full, run for cover, launch countermeasures, hard about, shields up, cast a spell of invulnerability, helm’s alee.
Foolishly, however, like a prairie dog in the sights of a .22-250 Winchester Mod. 70, I stand my ground and return my best approximation of the look, along with my trademark lopsided grin. Surely, I think to myself, this is a Sign, a Portent from Fate that beyond this infantile inability to congress with attractive members of the fairer sex. While I’ve no faith in overarching Gods, demanding Deities, or the wisdom of inflammable shrubberies, some immortal, or at least influential intelligence has looked over my shoulder and influenced the flow of space and time to proffer this opportunity.
So I browse for a bit, as if I’m just shopping for a bit of nutrition to sustain my graceless vessel, and then edge my way over to the apples, looking for some opening. Ah, I spy, there are no Braeburn apples in evidence! Why, this is like child’s play! A kitten could scarcely have an easier time chasing a ping-pong ball. What, indeed, was all the bother I’ve had with this before? And so I sally forth with my prepared question; “Excuse me, but do you have any Braeburns? I don’t see any out here, and…”
And with all pleasantness and charm, she looks at me, a slight but discernible positive manner of countenance, and responds, “Actually, I have some in here,” indicating a crate on her cart. “Some of them were bad, but I think there are some good ones still left.” So we root through the box, looking for a couple of satisfactory specimens. This is just going smashingly, I think to myself. And to think, but all of this time I’m so worried about being a pest, and specifically Rule #14. A few comments are traded–”Here’s a good one,” “Lots of them in here, aren’t there?” “Have you tried the Jonagolds?”–and the exchange is rapidly coming to a point of disengagement or advance. Dimmed by food and drink, heady with success and anticipate, I elect, most foolishly, to press forth an invitation for dinner.
Silence ensues, a deep, heavy curtain of stillness, a choking fog of gaucherie, the deadly quiet after the fall of a great building. The atmosphere grows cold, Jadis returns to Narnia to bring an everlasting winter without Christmas, a blanket of ice and snow covers the once brightly lit boulevard. “I have a boyfriend,” she relates, and I now realize that all that I perceived to be interest was mere politeness of a dedicated employee, the courtesy all too rare in retail environments today, and I have violated that trust. Disgust and revulsion are now in evidence, and I highly suspectg she was glancing around for some heavy object to dash upon the head of this obviously raving lunatic before her. Having now engaged in an embarrassment that would make fodder for a film by celebrated auteur and pseudopaedophile Woody Allen, I now attempt to disengage with what little tact I can still muster. “Sorry, I didn’t…I mean…never mind,” or somesuch, and slink off like a particularly detestable member of the suborder serpentes. As I endeavor to make as swift a tactical redeployment from the scene of battle as possible, a manager comes over to the coordinates I have recently vacated, questioning the young lady and then offering to me an especially contemptuous look. I make all forward speed to the checkout in order to evacuate the premises and seek medical aid, in the form of three fingers of Black Bush, as quickly as possible.
And so, faithful witnesses to my mea culpa, I reinforce before you the necessity of Rule #14: “Don’t mess with the help.” In the future, I will restrict my advances to persons and situations who are just free to slap me in the face or throw a drink at me for my presumption, or online where I can be even more conveniently ignored.
Idiot.
Stranger
