Departures: Boyfriend Guy

Encounters in small-town non-romance.

Shift Drinks & Shifty Friends

I met Katie Tindle at Miller’s one night. I was cook at the time, probably the worst cook Miller’s ever had—and there was a lot of competition for that title—so I was always a bit disgusted with myself. I had become a cook to learn to cook and learn patience and multi-tasking. Also I needed money. Instead I learned to curse and dislike myself for how much I didn’t care how well-done a hamburger was. But one pleasure of being bad at a job is the relief when every shift is over. So I’d finished my shift drink at the bar and was turning to go when my buddy whom I’ll call Parker appeared and said there was a woman out on the patio who wanted to meet me.

I’d known Parker for years, he was one of my closest friends, so immediately I was suspicious. This was when downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, was a small town, so the dating pool was very limited. People were not generous with the unattached. And Parker is one of the town players so he’s especially not generous with the unattached. He senses my distrust, and quickly tells me Katie has seen plays I’ve written or acted in or something. He’s vague about the details, probably because he’s lying, but I was planning to leave anyway, and the only exit is through the patio area, so outside we go. But we don’t make it to any seats before Katie joins us in a standing bunch just outside the door, like one of those bunches in the doorways of parties that I hate.

Katie has curly, brown, shortish hair. She’s wearing an olive blouse. She’s thin, friendly, fairly attractive.

Immediately, I dislike her.

She’s one of those confident happy people, those people who seem overly familiar with getting their way. And when she talks it’s like advertising, she puts a positive spin on everything. She’s new to town and loves it! Her boss is great! Her job is really interesting! Luckily, she’s finally single again so she has some time to do fun things! Mostly she talks to Parker while I stand there, and Parker’s eating it up. Presumably he dragged me out here as some sort of prop, but I don’t know. I never understand anything. So after ten minutes that feel like ten hours I claim it was nice meeting her, and leave.

A few days later I’m coming out of the movie theater with another friend when Parker rushes up. We were planning to meet him for drinks. At Miller’s of course, because in downtown Charlottesville at the time the drinking options were even more limited than the dating options. But Parker has come to announce that Katie Tindle is also at Miller’s. Waiting for me.

“She was very impressed with you the other night, and would like you to have a drink with her.”

Which is absurd. I’m guessing he hooked up with her and now wants an out. But Parker and I have been friends for years, through ups and downs, good times and bad, so I can’t just ask him. Instead I ask how the hell she could have been impressed by me when all I did was stand there trying not to show that I didn’t like her.

“She said she’s tired of dating around and wants to settle down.”

He’s telling me this to push my buttons and I know it and he knows I know it. And it works. Because I’m not a player. I was and am a boyfriend guy. A person somehow identified as boyfriend material. Not because I’m actually a great boyfriend. Believe me, I’m not. But in tight communities, like downtown Charlottesville at the time, what you were didn’t matter as much as what people thought you were. Everywhere people think they know everyone else and treat them accordingly and newcomers see how others are treated and hear what they’re supposedly like before they even meet. And at this point I’d reached the point in my life where I was sick of it. I was sick of being treated as the road for other people’s journeys, the platform for their performances. I was especially sick of people so cluelessly wrapped up in their own extroverted self-importance that they can’t fathom that I am not here to be the passive road for her dramatic journey, the platform for her higher-stakes drama.

I was sick of it even when I liked a woman and wanted to be with her. And that definitely wasn’t the case with Katie Tindle. Who the hell does she think she is? Tired of dating around and wants to settle down. What—am supposed to salute and report for duty?

So when we got to Miller’s—and through the front window I can see that Katie is there and is perched on a stool back near the end of the bar— I insist we sit at a table outside on the patio. I don’t like her. I don’t want to have a drink with her. And I shouldn’t have to.

But after forty-five minutes what I do have to do is go to the bathroom.

Katie’s stool is near the end of the bar which is near the bathroom door. How do I get to the bathroom without saying hello? If I say hello, I’ll be nice, and if I’m nice I’ll feel some duty to care. I could walk two storefronts down to Bizou and use the bathrooms there, but no, Miller’s is my place. I can’t surrender.

I take a breath and pull open the door. I can do this. I start toward the back, gritting my teeth in resolve, I will not be sucked in, I will not be sucked in, and as I approach Katie she’s trying to make eye contact, but not too much eye contact, so I smile a little like I might speak to her, and in the instant when she turns to do a triumphant hair flip, I slip past and into the bathroom. As if I were in a hurry and might talk on the way out.

When I’m done in the bathroom, I crack the door and wait till she’s looking the other way, so with a few steps and a brisk pace I’m past her, walking toward the front, and out the door again, back out to the patio, back into the late afternoon sunshine, back to freedom and friends and an unfinished gin and tonic! Take that Katie Tindle! I guess this time you don’t get your way! I guess you might be dating around a little more after all!

And I know it burns her because only a few minutes later, she pushes out the door in a huff and marches off, arms folded, chin high. And no one at our table laughs or sneers, but inside I was smiling.

And when she got home, we found out later because downtown Charlottesville was a small town, when Katie got home, she killed herself.

…

Now obviously, it wasn’t about me or because of me. We barely knew each other. And I don’t know the exact timing. Who knows who she talked to or didn’t talk to on the phone, or who she might have seen that weekend after she strode away. I was just the pivot where the sprawling apparatus of her pain swung around. I was the arbitrary name written in the blank. It had nothing to do with m. But I was the pivot, I was the name. And that is a strange sensation.

If you’ve ever thought about killing yourself—and what thinking person hasn’t?—my advice is, don’t. It doesn’t work well for anyone.

I’ve tried to tell myself that I should have been nicer to her, and I am nicer to people these days. But it’s easier to be nicer now that I have a wife and daughter who (mostly) love and respect me. I can’t say I’d be nicer now if I lost them and once again was a mediocre cook in a small town where I felt disrespected and unappreciated. I certainly couldn’t have been nicer to Katie Tindle. I needed to hold my ground.

I’ve tried to feel grief or compassion, because I assume the world depends on grief and compassion, but since I didn’t know her, there’s no shape or weight to either. I can sort of remember what she looked like but not enough to imagine anything that she might say or do; I can’t picture her face or her moods, how she talked or how she laughed. She’s so abstract I don’t know her enough to imagine her not existing. I don’t know here enough to feel anything about her.

Mostly, since I have so little content for my memories of her, I keep falling back into my memories of me. If I try to imagine who she was, it’s just me making stuff up. This event in my life was entirely her doing, and Parker’s I suppose, in which I had no choice at all. I was the passive road for her dramatic journey, the platform for her higher-stakes drama. As if I ended up a sort of boyfriend after all.

---

Thanks for reading Blame Cannon! While on vacation I’ll be alternating between departures and prehistoric global warming.

Please subscribe and share!

Comments are welcome but please no personal insults or profanity.

---