In the waning days
of a college Summer I was compelled, along with my good friends Forrester and
Sebastian, to play a game of croquet.
The circumstances surrounding this are a bit involved, but it’s really
just this simple: we were led to believe that if we went to a certain place on
campus at a certain time, ice cream would be presented to us. Though we had to overcome a great many
obstacles on our journey—mainly of the metaphysical and personal nature, i.e. laziness,
forgetfulness, and so forth— we managed to arrive at the proper time, in the
proper place. Despite all this we found our
journey was all for naught; there was no ice cream, only croquet.
And so we played,
me and good old Forrester and Sebastian and a complete stranger who had a name
that sounded like ‘Jerry’ or ‘Terry’ or ‘Larry’ or something. Now, none of us had ever played croquet in
the past, or had any real interest in playing at the present. Forrester claimed to have once given a speech
about how to play croquet, which gave us a general idea of how the game
went. Now, Forrester was very clear in
saying that he had only given a speech about the game, he’d never actually
played it. Bullshit, I thought, because
he was kicking all of our asses.
If you’ve never
played croquet, it goes something like this: everyone takes turns trying to hit
their balls through all the hoops in a specific order. When it’s your turn, you get to hit the ball
once, and if it went through the right hoop or knocked somebody else’s ball,
then you get to go again and again until you miss. When it’s not your turn, you run around in
circles screaming at each other and pretending to have sword fights with the
little hammers. Jerry wasn’t very good
at this part.
The game continued
in this fashion, with Forrester’s ball making progress through the course and
the three of us all stuck smashing into each other in the vicinity of hoop
number two, until it was inevitably interrupted by a woman.
“Hey you!”
Screamed the woman at all four of us. I
continued swinging at Sebastian like I was Thor.
“You!
The one with the floppy hair!” At this
point, Terry was kind enough to nudge my shoulder.
“Dude”,
said Terry, “I think she wants to talk to you.”
He pointed up at a third floor window of a nearby dormitory. If I shielded myself from the sun, batted the
hair out of my eyes and pinched my face into a tight squint, I could barely
make out the shape of a face.
“Give
me your number!!” screamed the shape. This
was unusual.
“You
should give her your number”, says Larry. “She looks hot.”
I
looked over to Forrester and Sebastian, but they had apparently decided to be
mute on this issue. They were shuffling
around and grinning like idiots, which meant they thought this was funny.
I looked back up
at the girl, carefully examined her features.
Only about one third of her face was visible over the windowsill, and
she kept turning around to giggle to her friends. I have to say, I think Larry was letting his
hormones get the better of him when he called her ‘hot’. That said, she was pretty. She had blonde hair, and I could clearly make
out that she had at least two eyes. I
like hair. I like eyes.
“Give
me your number!!” she demands. I look
around at the people strolling past on the sidewalk. This was starting to get awkward, I’d better
say something.
“Well”,
I begin, trying to be diplomatic. “That’s some awfully private
information.” I limply gesture towards
all of the complete strangers that are in the general vicinity, attempting to
mind their own business. “Maybe you
could come down here and we could talk about this, in a more civilized—in a
more… a more ordinary, private way?” I
state it as a question, which makes me mentally kick myself. Wincing at my own mistake, I await her reply:
“No!
Give me your number!”
This
is making the both of us look ridiculous.
It’s not fair either, since she has the luxury of acting ridiculous from
the privacy of her own dorm room, while I’m being forced to look ridiculous in front
of the general public!
Now,
if I was some sort of confident or witty or charming man, I would have kept my
head, would have found some suitable way to defuse the situation. I would have said something to make her laugh
while I slipped my kerchief out of my scrupulously smirched petticoat, would
have delicately dabbed at the sweat on my brow and convinced her to meet me for
a more private rendezvous at a later date.
Or no.
Actually, if I
were some sort of confident or witty or charming man then I wouldn’t have
trouble meeting women in the first place, and I could have just shut her up by
telling her I was seeing someone.
Of
course, I’m me, so all I did was shut out the world and hurriedly lose a game
of croquet. At some point the blonde got
bored of screaming at me, and at some point after that, our trio departed.
Like
any good anecdote, this one is hungry for embellishment. It’s a wonderful little story with absolutely
no ending. Good old Forrester and
Sebastian and I didn’t go on to make any profound or humorous or insightful
observations about Relationships or Men or Women or their places in Traditional
Western Society. We very deliberately
had no such conversation—instead, we went off to go watch a movie about a tire
murdering people with its psychic powers.
Still,
it was an interesting experience, being on the receiving end of a bad come-on. It’s almost as if nobody ever taught that
girl how to be a gentleman.
