Posted by Stan on May 29, 2008 1:15 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

May 9, 2008

Lucy: Source of Unending Disappointment

So Lucy texted me yesterday to tell me she’d be coming into town for Mother’s Day weekend, so I was to clear some time to hang out. Fair enough.

Then she called me this morning — actually, she frantically sought me out by IM, text, and VoiceMail, although I was wandering around town and didn’t take my phone with me, so technically I called her (back) — to let me know she wouldn’t be coming into town. She does this often — any time there’s a light rain or something, she’ll cancel the trip because she doesn’t want to drive in it. I can relate, so it’s not a big deal, but it does get a little old.

Of course, I can’t say anything because it leads to the inevitable “Well, you can always visit me” conversation. It’s not that I mind the drive to Iowa, or that state’s delightful manure-caked-on-popcorn stench; it’s really a lot more personal and depressing. She keeps the most disgusting place I’ve ever seen. In my life. I shit you not. I’ve visited her at three separate apartments (and now she’s officially in a fourth), and each is more disgusting than the last. The last time I went out to see her, I refused to show. I had a hard enough time just sitting on her toilet. When I glanced into the shower and saw brown-black grime in the basin and soap-scum clotting the tile grout…all I gotta say is “yuck.” I’m not a dude known for thorough cleaning, but even I have my limits.

On a shallower note, I don’t like visiting her because, more often than not, when she comes out here, she’s officially on my turf. We do what I want to do. Not that I don’t mind giving her the option, but her option is almost always “let’s go to a bar so I can chain-smoke in your face and take the edge off your rambling with a few light beers.” At the very least, since Illinois is now delightfully smoke-free, even if we did go to a bar, she wouldn’t be inflicting that shit on me. (Hilariously, last summer she came into town with her boyfriend, and the three of us plus her brother went to a pool hall in Schaumburg that was actually really awesome, but I only thought it was awesome because it was, like, a real pool hall. Not a bar with a pool table. They were all freaking out about the “giant” pool tables, which meant I won despite seven years passing before I retired my hustling cue, and were so blindingly enraged by the lack of smoking — Schaumburg had already imposed a ban. They were so disappointed, we ended up going down the road to a shithole Hanover Park — with no pool table — because you could smoke there.)

Anyway, this cancellation had nothing to do with weather or laziness; it had everything to do with her brother acting like a dick. He recently separated from his wife. His grounds were that she’s an awful mother — in fact, his main goal is to fight for custody of their kid before she destroys his young life. Unfortunately, his wife comes from a well-off family who have both the financial and physical means to support the kid. He doesn’t have that luxury; plus, he’s a dude, and somehow that always hurts in custody battles. Oh, and also, the moment he got separated, he ditched the kid with the wife and started dating three women at once. And, yeah, Lucy’s pissed because he made a date even though he knew she was coming into town, and he wouldn’t cancel it when she said the only reason she was coming into town was to see him. (She omitted the part about seeing me, or maybe I’m not a reason. I’m just there.)

I feel kind of bad, because when I talked to him that night last summer, it sounded like he was really hurting over this stuff with his wife and son, but now…he’s just kind of acting douchey.

Also, this means I don’t get to hang with Lucy. She insists she’ll be coming into town “in two weeks.” She said that two weeks ago.

Posted by Stan on May 9, 2008 2:22 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

March 20, 2008

Ultimate Prank

For the past few weeks, I had reason to believe one of my Internet nerd friends was in a military jail for unknown crimes. An important distinction: having reason to believe doesn’t mean I believed it — not at first, at least. In fact, I was first told this by another friend, who said he was IM’ed with the news by a close personal friend of our li’l Marine. She signed on, said, “Oh my God, Peter’s in jail,” then signed off — and never signed on again.

“I don’t believe it,” I said. “He was just online, like, yesterday. I don’t think they give you online privileges in jail.” Still, it made me wonder. It’s perfectly reasonable for somebody to be online, then go out and commit a crime, then be found out and jailed for it. Or, perhaps, commit a crime many weeks ago that has just now been traced to him.

I remained cautiously optimistic until he fell of the face of the planet, and everyone kept going back and forth about what could have possibly happened. I found myself looking up news articles involving Marines, and when I couldn’t find any I wondered briefly if he had given us all a pseudonym (and since he’d sent nearly everyone in my online nerd hovel a package at one time or another, that would add mail fraud to his list of charges). It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility.

After all, my name isn’t even Stan.

[Cue dramatic musical sting.]

I do have issues, however. No denying that much.

After a few weeks of Peter disappearing, I didn’t know what to think…until tonight, when somebody using his moniker signed online. He remained for a few minutes, didn’t acknowledge anybody, then left. Was this a practical joke? FBI agents playing around with his seized computer? What the hell happened?

Then came the big reveal: he had sent one of us a letter. He didn’t want to mention it because he was afraid to even open it. It bore the typewritten return address of a USMC brig in San Diego.

Finally, he opened it, and…what the fuck? Baffled, he scanned its pages for the rest of us to try to understand.

That is some big-time craziness. I can’t argue with it.

If you’ll notice, page three has a reference to myself and this blog. For those too lazy to read, here it goes:

I am sure once that the Stanley cousin obtains the word of my situation thus it will launch and to then disseminate a diatribe of million-word on his under-ground-tighten the bulletin…

For a little while — too long, actually — I believed it, and I fully intended on posting the letter as some kind of plea for understanding. We spent far too long poring over the pages, trying to assess whether or not it was written in some elaborate code (and whether or not we could crack said code) or just the product of a drug-addled and possibly insane mind.

As uncomfortable as it made me, I still thought there was something off about it. On his worst day, Peter could construct a coherent sentence. Plus, certain parts — the section about iPods running from the bottom of page one to the top of page two, for instance — screamed “prank!” to me, but enough of it disturbed me and I suddenly started feeling guilty for shrugging at the alleged charges.

After awhile, Peter’s handle signed on yet again. This time, he started to talk. Plus, his IP checked out. It was him, and the whole thing was an elaborate, goofy prank. It was mostly just a matter of timing it with a period when he knew he wouldn’t have any Internet access for a few weeks.

How’d he get the appropriate level of crazy for the letter? He initially wrote out a “crazy rant” but decided it didn’t sound crazy enough. Solution: use Babelfish to translate it into French, then translate the French back into English and transcribe it onto note paper.

Why? Why not? I love a good prank, and this is probably the best one I’ve seen pulled since the time, several years back, that Jive “came out” to a couple of our friends.

The world needs more high-quality pranks, so Peter, I salute you.

Posted by Stan on March 20, 2008 10:47 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

March 17, 2008

Laurie

I’ve been friends with Laurie for awhile (now would be a good time to take advantage of the new Cast of Characters link on the sidebar), a friendship built largely on awkwardness and miscommunication. To wit:

When I first met her, I felt an instant attraction, so I asked her to go to the movies. Now, ordinarily, I could understand why, in film-student circles, this wouldn’t be instantly seen as a date. But when I asked Laurie, I could see from the contortions on her face that she knew what I was asking — she took the time to process it, then broke into a wide smile and said, “Yeah,” all fake-shy-like.

And then we never, ever went to the movies. Ever. See what I mean? It’s confusing.

The friendship kept going. Despite my inability to seal the deal (or even getting her to acknowledge there was a deal there to be sealed), I discovered she was a person I wanted to know. I also got involved with somebody else, so after awhile the romantic notions with her just dissolved like they did with Gina. We were just friends, like normal people, for a few years.

Then, I got on MySpace. Then, she found out I was on MySpace. Then, things got weird. Weirder.

She started to drop awkward comments on my MySpace page, there in public, for everyone to see. Things about how she missed me, but the way they were phrased (which I am not going to quote verbatim because I just Googled them and they’re comically easy to trace back to me) led me to the pretty clear conclusion that…she’s into me. For real.

But this just led to more awkwardness. She promised to call and didn’t; I promised to make definitive plans to see her and didn’t. After an ill-fated attempt to go to an Oscar party in a blizzard failed, we didn’t talk much anymore…

…until a month ago, when it started all over again, with another random comment, this one even more unusual and salacious than before. After calling herself “a fool,” she decided it was “imperative” that we get together. Written as if the world would literally crumble to pieces if we didn’t not drop everything and rush into each others’ arms, I elected to respond. I told myself, “This isn’t really worth the effort. I’ll respond, and if something happens, it happens. If not, whatever.”

Responding to the comment led to catch-up text-messaging, after which I didn’t hear from her at all. Out of the blue, a day or two ago, she sent me a private message on MySpace, explaining to me that her life has been hectic, she’s also unemployed, she’s had car troubles that needed taking care of, and she has neither forgotten about me nor of our plans to see each other. She closed by saying, “Just let me get things together, if you know what I mean.”

Somebody, please explain to me what that means. I don’t know!

But when the time I got this message, I was hooked again. I know I shouldn’t. I know it’s going to be a series of mishaps resulting in us seeing each other for maybe five minutes in the year 2008. And that’ll be that…

There’s just that small part of me that I can’t seem to kill, the one that listened to too much Cheap Trick as a lad and believes the main priority is wanting to be wanted. Even if it never gets to pivotal phases like “seeing one another on a regular basis” or “not crassly manipulating each others’ emotions” (I can’t claim she’s the only one guilty there), part of me is merely happy that there’s someone out there who wants me, even if it’s only for 15 alcohol-fueled sections prowling MySpace late at night.

Posted by Stan on March 17, 2008 5:52 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

September 11, 2007

The Fake Fiancé, or: Show a Little Faith?

I have an obsessive nature and a strong desire to turn into Jim Rockford. These personality traits don’t mesh well with my sea of largely dishonest friends. The fact that all but a small few of my friends are notoriously full of shit probably speaks more to my character than to theirs. Nonetheless, I want to trust my friends. It’s difficult when you catch them in lies; it’s even more difficult when you catch them in repeated lies, especially when they’re lying repeatedly about the same stupid things. However, I get some sick pleasure from grilling them on the lies and watching the whole fabrication spiral out of control until they either admit they are bullshit artists (but I’m better!) or run away. And by “run away,” I mean “hang up on me” or “sign off of Instant Messenger,” because many of them have a hard time lying to my face — that’s usually how I figure out they’re lying.

Such is the case with my old friend Kelly, who I’ve known since junior high, and since that time she’s been full of shit. On top of that, she’s loud and abusive, pathologically hostile and emotionally crippled. These things might make you wonder why I’d be friends with her, but if you’ve ever read this blog, you understand we’re two peas in a pod. Except for all the lying.

I accept many forms of lying. There are a lot of shades of gray to dishonesty, many purposes for deceit, and in fact quite a few acts of bullshittery can be considered morally just and ethically sound.

For instance, I recently watched the M. Night Shyamalan movie Unbreakable for the second time ever, and the ending was as shitty this time as it was the first. I watched it with my dad, who borrowed it from a friend at work. It’s this guy’s favorite movie. Ever. He’s watched it dozens of time and is so enthusiastic he lent my dad the DVD. We watched it and agreed that it was actually a pretty good movie — by far Shyamalan’s best, which maybe isn’t saying a whole lot — until that stupid ending. Even the melodramatic “You should have known because they called me Mr. Glass” monologue worked. The “twist” is the only Shyamalan twist that holds up under repeat viewings. But those stupid title cards just ruin everything. Everything. It’s like, “Bruce Willis called the cops, and Samuel L. Jackson spent the rest of his life in a nuthouse.” Did some studio executive get all freaked about its sequel possibility and add those? They come out of nowhere, they obliterate the “show, don’t tell” rule, and it’s just fucking stupid to end your movie about a superhero discovering his power with, “He pussied out and called the cops.” The fuck?

My dad and I agreed on this point, but then he did something I would have never done: he told his friend, who loves this movie, that we both hated the ending. There are really only two consequences to this unnecessary honesty: either the friend gets angry and decides you’re full of shit, or you get to watch the wounded look on his face as he realizes you’re absolutely right. Enter the white lie: “Oh shit man, I loved it — I wish they made a sequel.” Because see, then you’re subtly suggesting maybe the ending was a little off because it was clearly designed as a franchise if you ignore those title cards, but you aren’t ruining his life by dumping the cooler of icy Hatorade all over him.

Lies with purpose can be used for the powers of good. Sometimes they can be used to hurt and torment, and while that can be fun depending on the person, when the lies have no apparent reason to exist, I get frustrated. This brings us back to Kelly. She’s kind of had a habit of manufacturing boyfriends out of — well, “thin air” is an unfair assessment. Let’s say it’s like that heavy, humid air of midsummer, just before a storm, that seems to have thickness and a physical weight. Kind of cumbersome, but more accurate. These boyfriends are real people who exist on this planet, people she knows but assumes we’ll never know and never know anyone who knows them; so she’s doing what clever liars do, mixing reality with her bullshit to make it sound more convincing. She’s been doing this since junior high, when she told us this dorky guy kissed her in the playground near her church. We didn’t know him at the time; when we met him in high school and he vehemently denied it, she had the typical excuse of that era: “Of course he’d deny it — he doesn’t want anyone to know.”

Considering it happened with at least four people I knew at the time (and was the subject of at least 10 Brady Bunch episodes), I guess it’s fairly common to manufacture lies about dating at that age. It’s cool to date, but few people actually do, and the lies about needing to keep things a secret are pretty reasonable since many parents I knew of wouldn’t let their kids date until high school, and even then it was a risky proposition. So even in high school, the idea of “secret dating” was kind of reasonable, although if a person got caught lying they risked utter humiliation.

Other than the made-up kiss from junior high, I can’t recall a time when Kelly made shit up about boys. I have a foggy memory about her saying “something” happened with a friend at a dance, but hey, maybe that actually did happen. I don’t remember it well enough to know, but you better believe if I had confirmed the stench of bullshit I would remember and document it here.

No, Kelly waited until college to start a boyfriend-manufacturing assembly line. It’s an awkward “you’re way too old for this” type of situation, but with one exception I managed to confirm that every boyfriend she had was not her actual boyfriend. See, it’s easy to fool people when you’re going to school hundreds of miles away; problems arise when you ignore the fact that the people you tell these lies to might have other friends at that school. It gets even rougher when one of your friends at this school happens to be your best friend.

That’s right, I talked to Kelly’s best friend a lot. In fact, we were all part of the same circle-jerk of friends, so most everyone I was friends with from high school was some degree of friends with Kelly. The two of them lived in the same dorm (not in the same room, though), hung out a lot, moved into a house together in their second year — so she’d have the dirt. She was the one who confirmed most of the fake boyfriends; the only two she didn’t confirm were the “real” boyfriend and this guy who was friends with her brother (and still in high school), who some of my still-in-high-school friends mentioned she was stalking. It’s hard to blame her when I essentially did the same thing with a different girl, but at least I didn’t pretend like I was dating the girl. I was merely optimistic that we’d get together when she was telling all my friends she wanted to file a restraining order. (The joke’s on her — I was 250 miles away and still able to frustrate and terrify her!)

The thing about Kelly is, I can pretty much tell when she’s lying. There’s an indescribable difference in the way she talks, her body language (like I said above, it’s rough on her to lie to my face, so if we’re out and I ask questions, she gets a little weird), her tone — things you can only pick up when you’ve known a person for more than a decade — so when she tells me things, I can always tell when she’s being completely honest, when she’s exaggerating for comic effect, and when she’s flat-out bullshitting. When she tells me things about teaching, I believe her. When she tells me thing about many of these boyfriends, I didn’t. Confirmation is nice for the sake of proof and peace of mind (not that I ever called her on it; the situation makes me a little depressed rather than angry), but I could pretty much tell just from talking to her that she was lying.

With the case of the “real” boyfriend, even though they only went out once, the whole situation was a lot more believable because of the way she talked about him — ignoring the fact that she forwarded me e-mails and text messages for my expert “guy” opinion, there was a whole different vibe with this guy. She was detailed but not too detailed, didn’t strain or evade when I asked “tough questions,” and the barely perceptible differences in speech and body movement all showed me she was telling the truth. Either she became a much better liar, up to and including manufacturing fake evidence of this guy, or it was true. I never confirmed it one way or the other, because by this time she was in grad school with nobody I knew, but I believe it was all true.

The question lingers: why all the fake boyfriends? This is something I have a hard time understanding. I’ve speculated that it roots back to her best friend, who share what I’ve inexpertly taken to calling the “hot-girl/ugly-girl” dynamic, which is not to say Kelly is ugly — just, in comparison to the utter hotness of her best friend, she can’t compete. Not even slightly. Spending her adolescence watching dorky idiots like me have their hearts broken by her best friend, all the while ignoring her, can’t be healthy. Kelly has always had somewhat of a “keep up with the Joneses” attitude; when she finds out something about one of her girlfriends, Kelly has to do the same thing only better, even if it means making up bullshit to keep up. I kept up with this theory for a long time, until I realized she wasn’t telling her girlfriends about these fake relationships; for a long time, she was only telling me and my friend Doug. Now she doesn’t seem to talk to Doug much, so she’s only telling me.

What’s up with that? The new speculation, the only possible rationale I could think of, is that she harbors long-standing crushes on both myself and Doug, and she was trying to make either one of us jealous in a rather juvenile effort for us to step up and win her blackened heart. She lives in a world where the guy always has to do the asking-out, which is not something I do. And at the time she was at the height of this fakery, Doug and I were both in relationships. Maybe that had something to do with it. It would have been awesome if she had turned us against each other in some sort of blood-soaked battle royale to get her, but that didn’t happen.

Along came a new guy, about two years ago. Going back to thing where I can tell whether or not she’s lying, when Kelly brought this guy up and told me about their initial rendezvous, I believed everything she said. When they spent a weekend in St. Louis with a bunch of her college friends, I believed everything except the part where he left a Post-It note on her forehead saying “Call me” because she was still asleep when he had to leave (it was just a little too cutesy and Cameron Crowe-esque). I believed her when she said she didn’t think things would work out because he’s an ultra-right, Bush-supporting Republican who — gasp! — isn’t Catholic, leading to a rant about how she’d never marry anybody who wasn’t Catholic (hint?!!) so what was the point of getting involved?

That was that. Or was it? Within a few months, Kelly announced she and this guy were still together (after not mentioning him for weeks), and then I started to see a new side of Kelly. Gone was the morally confused “let’s drink and smoke weed but no sex before marriage” girl I had grown up with; in her stead, somebody who was spending all her time at her new boyfriend’s apartment — so much time, in fact, that he was trying to convince her to move in with him. This really wouldn’t surprise me, since the transition from “this sex thing is dirty and not for me” to “oh wait, it’s kind of awesome” happened to pretty much everyone after high school. It took her a little longer, so was this a sign of her first real long-term relationship?

Maybe, but I had my suspicions. Fortunately, I…just couldn’t give a fuck at the time. She was happy, or said she was, so I was content to be happy for her. I wasn’t quite believing the relationship was as perfect as she acted, but that’s not uncommon with most people I know; the only one who is consistently honest is Lucy (often too honest — when I’m hearing the intimate details of a vagina I am not interested in plundering, I start rooting through my desk for leftover painkillers). I also wasn’t sure I believed how “conflicted” Kelly was over whether or not to take the plunge; the source of the conflict, she said, were her uptight Catholic grandparents. Much as she enjoys denying it, I know she’s the only uptight Catholic in her family (at least when it comes to stuff like “living in sin”). I’m still not sure how that happened.

The whole thing grew steadily less believable around the time she announced her engagement. I’m not saying she needs my approval or anything, but it struck me as bizarre that I’d never even met him, despite us having been out a dozen or so times since they started “dating.” Any time I brought up meeting him, or of chillaxin’ in their apartment, she’d get evasive and say something noncommittal like, “He’s really busy, but maybe next time.” Wanting to believe in the honesty, or at least the positive nature of her lies, I thought maybe he was the jealous type and wouldn’t like her gallivanting about town with somebody as cool and latently homosexual as me. Suddenly she was engaged, though, and I felt my willingness to suspend disbelief near its end. Who, exactly, was this guy? When were they getting married? Why did she always seem so full of shit when she talked about him?

The engagement itself supposedly happened in a way that creates a “romantic for people who aren’t interested in romance” vibe; he proposed last Christmas Eve, seemingly at random, without much fuss (or a ring), just a whim-like thing. “You look lovely in the light of the tree — let’s get married!” It’s not that it’s impossible to believe; it just seems more like something Aaron Sorkin would write than something that would happen in reality. It could have happened, and I was prepared to believe it — until the practicalities of an impending wedding (or, at the very least, of repeatedly putting off the wedding date) never crept into her life. No complaints about his uselessness in planning. No complaints about coming up with themes or color schemes. No bitching about costs (though that, at least, could be explained if her parents decided to pay; considering her parents’ cheapness, though, you’d think there’d be bitching about them insisting they keep costs down). Not even references to negate all the potential complications with something like, “We want a simple ceremony with just a few friends and family members.”

And then, out of nowhere…they bought a house. A struggling teacher who barely found a full-time position for this fall — and doesn’t exactly have tenure — and a guy trying to hustle through DeVry grad school bought a $250-$350,000 house? Unless they benefited from the subprime mortgage clusterfuck, this was the lie that broke the camel’s back. All the little bits and pieces of bullshit I had collected over the past year and a half came flooding back, and I became obsessed with proving the lie, to the extent I considered tailing her from her school to see where she was living and who (if anyone) she was living with. I checked the public home-sale records, but they updated very slowly. I didn’t find out until July that their house, supposedly bought in mid-May, doesn’t exist. From the time period she gave me, nothing was sold in either of their names, nor any “corporate” purchases or anything from parents. Unless one of them has wealthy relatives with Latin or Indian names, she was full of shit.

I still felt uncomfortable using this lack of information as my “smoking gun” — it’s too easy to prove wrong, and besides, what if they did like a “rent-to-own” thing that I’m not sure would register as a “sale” at first? I didn’t really believe any of that because when I asked pointed questions (“When are you moving?” “How are you settling in?” “Should I send you a link telling how to match duvet covers to curtains?”) she entered evasion mode. I needed to dig up more dirt. I used all the Google-/Myspace-/Facebook-stalking methods at my disposal to dig up dirt on her or her future husband but found very little worthwhile information…

…until Sunday. You see, it had been a month since I’d heard from Kelly, so I punched her name into Google and found…a court docket from Phoenix, listing her name as someone who faced an arraingment the day after Labor Day. I decided it was a coincidence, but it seemed suspicious that somebody with the exact same first and middle name, coupled with her long Polish last name (spelled in exactly the same way), would exist. It weirded me out, especially when combined with the lack of communication from her, but what am I supposed to do? Ask her what she did in Phoenix and why? Like everything else, I decided to just let it go, assuming it was just an unlikely coincidence or maybe a relative for whom she was named.

But it did encourage me to continue the stalker quest. After the suspicious home sale, I looked up her supposed boyfriend on MySpace. I found a page for him that hadn’t been logged into for over a year. It stated he was single, despite the fact that this would have been after they were dating. Then again, there were no friends but Tom, so maybe that was just the default option. But when I looked up the name on Sunday — I found him, along with some suspicious differences between what he says and what Kelly says about him.

1. He says he still lives in Orland Park (where the apartment they supposedly shared was), not Flossmoor (where Kelly claims they bought their house). This is despite the fact that this page did not exist until after they would have moved. Oh, and for those unfamiliar with the local geography, this towns are not nearly close enough to be interchangeable.
2. Despite what I said above above him deciding to buy a house while he’s still going through grad school, I didn’t hear that from Kelly; she has claimed on more than one occasion that he finished grad school before she did, even though his MySpace page says he started it after she was finished and is still attending.
3. It says he is in the IT field, which makes me wonder why Kelly still comes to me for computer troubleshooting advice (especially when I’m so out of touch, technology-wise, that I haven’t had a clue what the fuck I’m talking about in five years).
4. He doesn’t have many friends, but the overwhelming majority of the ones he does have are hot chicks (real ones, too, not the fake porn-spam ones). To top that off, the only indication of personality on his sparse profile is that he’d like to meet Danica McKellar. This tells quite a different story than the girl who claims to have this guy on one of those dog-training choke-chains.

Smoking gun? Yeah, not quite. I talked it over with Lucy, who has been keeping up with (and in many ways perpetuating) my obsession, and while she’s believed ever since the house incident that Kelly is full of shit, she didn’t suggest I present this profile as my smoking-gun because it’s pretty easy to poke holes into:

1. Two points: first, maybe she only lied about the house, and everything else is true (or at least, if confronted she might admit the house lie but not the others). Second, she has made several big deals about the uptight-ness of their parents, especially his “downstate hick” parents. True or not, here’s an easy bluff: since his sister is a MySpace friend, he needs to keep the house a secret. Home ownership is a pretty big lie to maintain (what if they decide to come for a visit?), which makes you wonder why they’d buy a house if they needed to lie about it until after they’re married, but hey, it’s plausible as a lie.
2. For as long as I’ve known her, Kelly has seen level of education as a status symbol. I remember getting really pissed at her when she suggested one of my friends was an idiot because the friend’s parents didn’t go to college. She also, in a lot of ways, has a confusing 1950s mentality about relationships, so it’s plausible to me that she’d consider having more education than her future husband an embarrassing secret that must be kept hidden, like how my grandma is five years older than my grandpa but insists she’s five years younger even though everyone knows the truth.
3. It’s unlikely but possible that Kelly, concerned about us drifting apart, comes to me with bullshit computer questions because she’s afraid at some point we won’t have anything else to talk about. Also, since he’s an IT guy for the army she might think it makes him look like a pussy that he’s defending our country by keeping computers running at a VA hospital in Illinois. (Not saying I agree, but considering her obsession with classical masculinity, I could see her trying to hide this. Besides, Lucy was the one who came up with that sub-point.)
4. Lastly, while it’s hard to believe his only friends in high school were hot women, it’s pretty easy to believe that Kelly exaggerates the tightness of the leash she has him on. She can’t control who he befriends on MySpace, or who he ogles in “men’s magazines,” no matter how much she wants us to believe she can.

Most of these points are kind of flimsy to me, but Lucy’s point stands — if I present this “evidence,” it’s easy to come up with bullshit defenses off the top of your head. It’s harder to show someone a smoking gun when they can make a good case that there’s no powder residue and a still-burning cigarette in the room. Feel free to applaud the absolute worst metaphor I’ve ever concocted.

“Fine,” I said to Lucy. “The next time I talk to her, I’ll ask specific questions about what’s going on with her beau.”

“Yeah,” she said, “and ask about the wedding date.”

Oh yeah, that. It’s been almost a year since the engagement and, to my knowledge, they’ve bought a house but not set a date. If any of it is true, it’s still weird.

Turns out, I talked to Kelly last night. It’s weird, because somehow I ended up even more suspicious, even though in theory the conversation should have allayed my fears.

It started simply enough, with her complaining she wasn’t feeling well. I prepared myself for the “unceremonious breakup” section of her fake relationships; in the past, she usually breaks off contact completely for a month or two (maybe fearing I’m too close to the source of the bullshit trail I’ve been following), then reappears miraculously over a breakup that happened in her absence from my life.

Kelly shook things up a bit this time, perhaps realizing that an engagement and home-ownership make it harder to walk away from this fake relationship. But it was just…so weird. She started off telling me that she and her fiancé went to the beach for his birthday and stayed at a hotel in the city, and while she was there she hit her head on an awkwardly placed hand-rail in the shower, which required stitches and, when she started complaining of the worst headaches she’s ever had, she ended up having a CT scan.

I tried to play coy in an attempt to potentially shake up the situation and catch her in a lie. “Why’d you stay in a hotel? Did you go to the Indiana Dunes or something?” I marveled at my handiwork. I’m imagining this type of thing happens in other cities, but what the fuck do I know? I’ve lived in many major cities, but I’ve never really noticed this same phenomenon. If I’m wrong, here’s the deal: it’s pretty common for suburbanites from the Chicagoland area to go and stay “in the city” for a romantic weekend or a vacation or something, because most of them neither have the time nor the inclination to go into the city unless they absolutely have to. I knew all this but feigned ignorance to subtly prod more details out of her.

“Oh no,” she said. “We went to North Avenue Beach, had dinner reservations at [some restaurant whose name I’ve already forgotten] and booked a room at the Drake. Of course, we ended up spending around four hours at Northwestern Memorial and didn’t get to dinner until 9:45. After that, we went to a jazz club.”

Maybe this is because one of the rare occasions where I’ve taken interest in things she says and does (Jesus, that sounds so mean — guilty!), but she doesn’t usually gush forth with such specific, unasked-for details. The first clause of the first sentence would have sufficed, and yet, here I am knowing all her evening plans including the trip to the emergency room and the specific hospital she went to. I could pick apart minor details like if it was a crowded restaurant in the Loop on a Saturday night and they missed their reservation, there’s no way they could just show up and get a table, or that if I banged my head so hard it required stitches and complained of headaches for the next two days, the last thing I’d want to do is listen to brass instruments.

Making the conversation even more bizarre, she decided to go and get some rest, then signed online a few minutes later. She said she was on her laptop but didn’t think she’d be able to get on the wireless network her fiancé set up without a password (which she didn’t have), but he apparently didn’t secure it. This is the first reference she’s ever made, in the entire course of this relationship, to him having any interest in or knowledge of technology. Then, about four seconds later, she started talking about how great The Wonder Years is — raving about this long-finished show while she watched one of the nightly reruns on a local independent station. It seemed like weird timing to me that the day after I find the guy’s profile, she’s making sudden allusions to it. Maybe it was a coincidence?

For some reason that I can only assume was accidental (if she is toying with me somehow, I have to give her far more credit than I do), she initiated a “Direct IM” session, which flashed her IP address. Of all the things she could have flashed, this would have been near the bottom of my list, but it did give me some valuable information. I punched it into a geolocation service:

ORLAND PARK, IL

H…uh.

I’m not prepared to suggest she was still living with her parents. Living in an apartment, alone, maybe, but this took me by surprise. Still, could this be a coincidence? When we found the original MySpace profile, the one that hadn’t been logged into for ages, Lucy suggested Kelly made it herself. The timing of the last login matched the approximate time Kelly announced they were “still together.” But this new profile — could this be fake, too, but with a little more effort put into it? It’s sparse, but if Kelly has decided to go the route of “retconning” to add some new quirks to her fake future husband, an equally fake MySpace profile would go a long way… The only reason I find it hard to believe, other than the insanity, is that she doesn’t even have her own MySpace profile. Unless she’s just that good…

At the very least, I know she was lying about the house purchase. I’m not sure what to make of the rest of it. Unless she’s a mega-stalker, putting even my best work to shame, I can’t accept this as a coincidence. Would she really end up living in the same town as this guy, when there are places cheaper and closer (to her school) to live, for any other reason than that she’s dating him?

The past dishonesty prepared me for the worst, but now I don’t even know what to think. Lucy suggested the next time I talk to her, I really grill Kelly hard about the wedding plans. I can’t think of another strategy, but when I’ve made the effort in the past she usually just changes the subject. Where in the past that would have led me to assume she’s bullshitting me, now I can’t help wondering if maybe there’s a little more to it. Upset because he won’t commit to a date? Angry because maybe they settled on a date but he won’t help with the arrangements? I had a lot of circumstantial evidence that could just as easily point to honesty, if I’d just look at it that way. Then again, if she didn’t have such a lengthy history of big, pointless lies (including the house!), I’d take it all at face value.

If anybody has any advice on how to deal with this situation (even if it’s just “shut up, she’s not even lying, you retard”), I’m all ears.

Posted by Stan on September 11, 2007 10:26 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

April 22, 2007

Bulletin!

I’ve been on MySpace for almost a year at this point, and I’ve seen the following bulletin posted by at least four different people in just the past month or two:

You’re on my friends list. I’d like to know 25 things about you. Just hit reply. Thanks!

You’ll be surprised how much you didn’t know about your friends after this!

1. Ever punch someone in the face?

2. How old are you?

3. Are you single or taken?

4. Eat with your hands or utensils?

5. Do you dream at night?

6. Ever seen a corpse?

7. Have you ever wished someone dead?

8. Do You Like Bush, the president?

HERE COMES THE EQUALLY INTERESTING PART…

9. Whats your philosophy on life and death?

10. If you could do anything with me, and have no one know, what would it be?

11. Do you trust the police?

12. Do you like country music?

13. What is your fondest memory of me?

14. If you could change anything about yourself what would it be?

15. Would you date me?

16. What do you wear to sleep?

17. Have you ever peed in a pool?

18. Would you hide evidence for me if I asked you to?

19. If I only had one day to live, what would we do together?

20. What is your favorite thing about me?

21. Do you think I’m attractive?

22. What’s your favorite color?

23. If you could bring back anyone that has passed, who would it be?

24. Tell me one interesting/odd fact about you?

25. Will you post this so I can fill it out for you?

The first couple of times I saw this, it seemed pretty innocuous. I didn’t read through all the questions, and I actually think some of the early questions could lead to a little more insightful rambling than your average online survey. I’d start filling it out, and then I’d get to the later questions and get tripped up.

15. Would you date me?

How can you answer this honestly and elicit a positive response from the person who sent the questions? It’s a simple yes or no question, with enough of a gray area for you to say something retarded like, “Durr, I don’t know, maybe if the right cirucmstances presented themselves and blah-blah-blah, then I guess so, but it’d be complicated.” That seems like the only road to prevent awkward feelings.

If you answer yes, either out of honesty or politeness, the only way this will have a happy ending is if you are being honest, and if they feel the same way and both are unattached. If you say “yes” and you’re lying, but the sender is interested, that’s an unnecessarily rough situation to get into based on a MySpace bulletin. If you say “yes” and you’re being honest, but they don’t reciprocate the feelings, it’s just going to lead to awkwardness, especially if they’re seeing someone.

But what if you’re both into it and one, the other, or both are involved with someone else? What happens if you feel like this MySpace bulletin has caused the stars to align, and you can finally be with this person you’ve had a crush on since fifth grade, so you each dump your significant others to get together and…it’s the worst possible relationship in the history of time, and each resents the other for being forced into a corner based on something as stupid as a question on a MySpace bulletin?

Saying “no” is equally hazardous, but for the opposite reasons: whether you’re being sincere or not, telling someone “No, I’d never date you,” is offensive. I mean, how could it not be? It’d be way easier to go the half-assed “Gee, maybe if things were different, I don’t know,” staying wishy-washy enough for them to not do something crazy like dump their boyfriend of seven years for your middle-of-the-road non-answer. But then what if you say “no” and are lying, but you get a response like, “Phew, I’m so glad you said ‘no’ because I always thought you had a crush on me but you and me dating would be horrible!” And then you have to hide the hurt feelings and pretend to be friends with them, all the while resenting their casual dismissal of you as a lover and secretly plotting to break them up whenever they start dating.

13. What is your fondest memory of me?

18. Would you hide evidence for me if I asked you to?

19. If I only had one day to live, what would we do together?

20. What is your favorite thing about me?

21. Do you think I’m attractive?

These are all, to varying degrees, loaded questions that all seem to be fishing for the same thing: how interested are you in me and/or will we ever be “more than friends”? Give the wrong answer, and you risk ruining a friendship forever. Even a “funny” question like #18, depending on the answer, could speak volumes about how serious the respondant feels about the sender. It’s rough, but it reveals a bigger question that I’ve started to wonder every time I see this bulletin posted:

Why is this person posting this particular bulletin and searching for answers to these uncomfortable questions, buried near the end for people who aren’t smart enough to read ahead?

For this question, I have no answer. Sometimes I wonder if they’re looking for sincere answers from their opposite-sex friends, and if I had a crush on the girls who have sent it, maybe I’m missing the boat on something because I usually ignore it for fear of humiliating myself if I admit the crush, or humiliating myself if I don’t.

This is why online survey questions should never be more insightful than “Coke or Pepsi?”

Posted by Stan on April 22, 2007 4:36 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

October 29, 2006

The Accidental Hustler

After about 15 months of antisocial behavior (aside from a few quiet evenings with close friends), I decided it’s time to stop being a hermit long enough to remember why I became a hermit in the first place. I got an invitation to a Halloween party being thrown by a girl who I haven’t seen since high school and probably haven’t talked to since junior high or earlier.

Why? No clue. She found me on MySpace, and with nothing to back me up but a hunch and some strangely phrased messages, I get the impression she’s harboring — or, at least, harbored for longer than anybody should — a crush on me.* I figured this would lead to awkwardness because she mentioned in several messages how much she talks about me with her boyfriend of seven years, and my initial thought was, “Gee, a party where I get to hang out with a girl I have no interest in and her jealous boyfriend? Where do I sign up?” But shit, it’s not like people are beating down my door to invite me to parties of any kind, so I thought I’d seize the rare opportunity to wet my beak in the social world yet again.

Turns out, the only people I’d know at the party is this girl and her hot best friend*. That was somewhat discouraging, even moreso when she subtly let slip that her immediate and a lot of her extended family would be populating the party. It was sounding less and less fun by the minute, but I was secretly pleased; it’d be easier to justify a life of solitude if my ever-decreasing forays into the world are rip-roaring wastes of time.

So I took a drive to where she lived, suspiciously close to the major technology company where I worked for several months last year and earlier this year, and as I rumbled down a street heading away from said tech firm, the road narrowed, the speed slowed, and the street dead-ended at a cross-street that reminded me way too much of Illinois’s Lake County, my least favorite county on Earth: cracked, narrow roads running through heavily wooded, faux-rural countryside. This was a little slice of Cook County for which I held immediate and extreme disdain, but I pressed on, following the confusing MapQuest directions to a side-street cul-de-sac that branched out into an even narrower road, barely the width of one car. Like the horror show of Lake County, there were no streetlights whatsoever, so I was fumbling around looking for the address in pitch black.

I finally found it, a gargantuan house with one of those U-shaped driveways that my dad always joked existed so that when realtors drove you up and told you the price, you could keep right on driving. The driveway was the only one loaded with cars, and the only one with a porchlight on, so I assumed this was the right place even though I couldn’t see the house number.

I went as The Dude from The Big Lebowski, because my wardrobe and current unkempt state allow for a reasonable and cheap facsimile. More specifically, I went as The Dude from the first scene in the movie, buying a quart of half-and-half from Ralphs in the middle of the night, wearing a bathrobe, a t-shirt, sweats, and sunglasses. I thought later, on the drive home, that I should have brought my checkbook and passed around 69-cent checks for everybody. It would have been somewhat appropriate because my “custom checks” are tie-dyed. But I didn’t think of this for the party. Instead, I fumbled up the driveway in a pair of sunglasses like an idiot. I had to take them off halfway up because I couldn’t see where the fuck I was going.

Even though I got to the party fashionably late, not many people were there. This was because, apparently, the hostess told everybody different times, between 7 and 9. The only people there at the time of note were her boyfriend of seven years…and the odd-girl-out they were very obviously and unsubtly trying to hook me up with. She was decently cute, but like most women, she had absolutely no interest in me, and I wasn’t about to flirt. Baby steps, cowboy. This is the first big, non-funeral social event I’ve attended in a very long time, so I had no intentions of running around flirting with every uninterested girl there. I didn’t plan to be there all night.

I didn’t want to mingle, either. I hadn’t seen the hostess or her hot friend — who didn’t show up for about 45 minutes — since high school, and it’s not like we were best friends back then, although the hostess seems to think we were. That’s neither here nor there; part of the reason I never go anywhere is that half my friends live out of state and the other half are married and use that as an excuse to avoid me. I thought maybe, since both of these girls were so excited they found me on MySpace, if their boyfriends weren’t jealous nutbars, maybe I’d have a new circle of friends to latch onto until I reveal myself to be the needy and neurotic mess I actually am and they suddenly find themselves too busy to “hang.” So I decided this party would be a good opportunity to get to know all of them and see how comfortable I was in this group.

The initial answer: not very. For one, the painful attempt to get me involved with that cute, uninterested girl would be annoying on a regular basis. If she’s not interested, stop trying to push us. I couldn’t care one way or the other. I wouldn’t turn her down, but I wouldn’t exactly see a lasting relationship coming from it. For another, I felt incredibly awkward and embarrassed around the hot girl. It’s kind of hard to get over the humiliation of stone-cold rejection, even if it did happen almost a decade ago. She really shut me down, and although my feelings toward her are completely different now, it’s impossible to not feel embarrassed or self-conscious. I feel like if I look at her too long or if I give her any more attention than I give anyone else, everyone will start thinking I still have the hots for her.

Their boyfriends were surprisingly cool, though. Well, actually, the hot girl’s boyfriend was kind of a douche to me, maybe because he knows The History and wants me dead. The hostess’s boyfriend was really nice, though. We didn’t have too much in common, but he spent the whole time trying to make me feel comfortable, so in return I pretended to be really interested in all his gearhead stories. Okay, I actually was interested in all his gearhead stories, but I barely understood what he was talking about, and I didn’t want to keep stopping him with questions like, “How much does it cost to rebuild the engine on a 10-year-old Blazer?” or “What’s an oil change?”

The only problems came when they would leave. The hostess would go off to mingle, the boyfriend would go off to “talk shop” with the hot girl’s ice-cold boyfriend (also a mechanic), and I’d be left pretty much alone. But, of course, the pool table had been beckoning me all night. Little known StanFact™: during my first semester of college, I hated life in rural Iowa and the college in particular so much that me and my friend Amanda would go to the commons and play pool together for 6-8 hours a day. Sometimes more. Every day. For more than three months. I wouldn’t exactly go pro, but I got good. Real good.

Then I left and never played again, aside from casual games where I’d be ruined by having to deal with those nonstandard baby tables or some other bizarre restriction. But here at this house was a regulation size table in pretty good condition, just sitting there unplayed. When the boyfriend suggested we play a game, I jumped all over it. The hostess put the kibosh on it, fearing that too many guests would show up and we’d end up accidentally cracking someone’s ribs with the cues. However, about an hour after that, when I was left pretty much alone to hit on the cute uninterested girl, an older gentlemen busted out the equipment and racked a game to play with the hostess’s next-door neighbor, a short, middle-aged single woman.

I watched them play for a bit and, realizing I was getting nowhere with my half-hearted flirting, I said I’d play whoever won. They were both agreeable enough. The older gentleman, who was pretty good, seemed to get frustrated by the total incompetence of the neighbor. I think he wanted more of a challenge and thought I’d bring it.

Then he lost. It was one of those stupid things where he cleared the table and then scratched on the eight ball. He seemed a little pissed and had no interest in playing me, under the guise of being a gracious winner. So it was me and the incompetent neighbor. Eh, I thought. Pool is pool. Maybe I’d crush her and she’d leave me alone. I had a pretty good run, nailing several before I just had no options but to clear out a small cluster. When her turn came, she just kinda rested the cue practically on top of her thumb and shoved it forward, with no control over the direction, speed, or english. I’m not exactly Mike “The Mouth” Sigel, but I was embarrassed just watching her. She was having fun, though. I tried to be encouraging, but it was kinda rough. She was very giggly and good-natured about her lack of ability.

After I crushed her for two games, we decided to play a third (nobody else was interested). This time, after her fumbling slaps at the ball, I decided to suggest a better technique for holding the cue. I gave her some pointers, and she looked baffled. “Show me,” she said. So I demonstrated with my cue. She watched, making exaggerated attempts at looking but really seeming like she wasn’t getting it. I sighed and came over behind her, took her hand, placed it on the cue, and as soon as she arched up, essentially sticking her ass into my crotch, I realized I had walked into something really, really moronic. Where are old, world-weary pool-playing men when you need them? Or, more importantly, why couldn’t Amanda have stuck her various sexy parts into my crotch so many years ago?

I gulped and felt a bit flushed, moreso when I felt an involuntary stirring in Li’l Stan™. But I pressed on, showing her how to hold the cue like a normal person. She glanced back at me, grinning skeletally. “I’ll give it a try,” she breathed. This could not be going worse.

I backed up as quickly as possible to give her room to take the shot. She did, like a total dunce, then turned toward me, arms outstretched like she wanted to hug me. She still had that goofy grin on her face, and she shook her head wildly. “I’m just not getting it.”

I suddenly felt like Jack Tripper during one of those moments when Lana Shields would come around and make some kind of really awkward plumbing-related sex puns. “You’re doing fine,” I muttered, trying to keep my distance. She could tell, and for whatever reason she didn’t want me to slip away. But slip away I did, inching closer to the pseudo-bar near the pool table, where there were more than enough witnesses for her to be cool — I hoped.

It didn’t stop her. She got very touchy-feely after that, always grabbing my shoulders, my wrist, my hand, winking periodically. As a result, I was playing even worse than a pool player who once was kinda decent but hasn’t played for six years. This made a game that could have been ended with a couple of simple runs stretch out way longer than it should have. Worse, it was loaded with stolen glances and awkward smiles and assorted lovey-dovey crap that, really, isn’t even okay with a woman who isn’t double my age.

Finally, it was down to me and the eight, and I had a pretty clear shot. There were a couple of stripes in my way, but if I got the right angle I could have nailed it. But just as I was about to ram the cue forward, motion caught my eye: the neighbor slid her hands up her torso, trying in vain to shove her breasts up even further than her push-up bra would allow. I jumped the cue ball, right the fuck over the eight ball, and right into the corner pocket, losing the game.

“Good game,” I said quietly, and she came over and gazed into my eyes and shook my hand for way longer than she should have, talking about how much fun she had had and smiling and just utterly thrilled to be somewhere near a swarthy idiot half her age who wasn’t “taken.” I told her I’d play another game but I was getting hungry, at which point I ran upstairs to the kitchen and found the hostess, the hot girl, and their boyfriends. A few minutes later, the neighbor came up and — looking over her shoulder at me much of the time — told the hostess’s mom what a wonderful time she had had and how sorry she was to leave so soon. She still seemed very happy and giggly, so I thought maybe I had made more of the situation than necessary.

Then she winked at me. Not for the first time that night, but it was very obvious and definite, and she turned around and sashayed away. Shortly after, my dog allergies (the hostess has two) started to ruin my life, so I decided to make some polite excuses and leave. In addition to not having much fun to begin with, the strain of having my favorite game ruined by awkward, MILF-y flirtations made me want to get as far away from this house as possible.

I went out into the darkness. and felt my way through the cars until I got the street, where mine was parked. As I sat there and waited for it to warm up, I noticed a light on in the upstairs of the house next door. I thought for a long, pathetically serious moment about the pros and cons of me stepping out of the car and knocking on the neighbor’s door. Because it’s not like she was hideously unattractive; she was just uncomfortably old, and I wouldn’t want to be accused of being “age-ist” or some other equally made up and stupid term.

I continued to think long after the engine was warm and the vents had been blowing hot hair long enough to make me a little sweaty. I cut the engine, and sat there for a couple of seconds in silence, eyes fixed on that lit window, one hand on the door handle. After an indeterminate amount of time (probably not more than 10 seconds, but I don’t have a clock in my car and time is funny when nobody’s keeping it), the light in that window went out. I started the car again, did a 10-point turn around the tiny road, and left this odd little neighborhood.

*This goes into my hilariously misogynistic “hot-girl/ugly-girl” dynamics theory, which states that when two girls become best friends, for whatever reason, it’s always a hot girl paired up with the ugly girl. And, invariably, a dorky and unattractive nerd like me will fall for the hot girl and make pathetic attempts to woo her, which will be ignored by the hot girl but embraced by the ugly girl, who will either witness with her own eyes or hear secondhand the sadness of my existence. I shit you not, in high school this happened to me every time I got a crush on an attractive girl. So in this case, the girl who found me on MySpace is the “ugly girl” of the scenario, and I had a crush on her hot best friend for, like, three years between seventh grade and freshman year of high school.

Posted by Stan on October 29, 2006 4:40 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (1)

August 10, 2006

I’ve Made a Huge Mistake

It’s been a pleasant month, interning for The Manager, reading some of the worst screenplays in the history of mankind for no money. For me, it’s actually kind of nice. You learn similar things from bad screenplays that you do from bad movies. It’s nice to read a script and say, “Jeez, this was bad — but why, and do I have the same problems in one of my screenplays?” Even better, it makes me say, “Good God, this is a piece of shit — I can do better.”

This happened to me recently; reading an awful adventure script, I said, “Fuck, I can do this better,” so I dusted off an extremely old and awful script I wrote, gutted it, and rewrote it from top to bottom. I sent it to my friend Mark — the guy who told me about The Manager in the first place — who loved it. He said it “could be an Adult Swim series,” which insulted me but it was meant as a high compliment. It’s nice when something inspires me to do better, even if it’s “Adult Swim series” better. What would happen if the flow of bad-to-slightly-above-mediocre scripts dissipated?

This week, I almost found out.

Exactly one week ago, The Manager e-mailed me a new batch of scripts, one of which was — to my surprise — co-authored by The Manager himself. At first I wondered if this was a conflict of interest; would he really expect that I’d give a totally honest response to the guy who might very well make or break my career? Maybe he would, but I knew if I hated it I’d never tell him that. I’d give the feedback a sugar-coating so thick it would even repulse Krispy Kreme.

I read it almost immediately, and I didn’t like it very much. It wasn’t the worst thing he’d ever sent me — not by a long shot — but it had a lot of problems. Was it that it was bad, or was it not just my cup of tea? I decided it was a combination; the poor execution of what could have been a decent story really sunk it, writing-wise. Even if it was well-told, I’d be able to respect the writing without actually enjoying the script. Considering it’s about dance, there’s no way I’d enjoy it. I hate watching dancers in general, I especially hate hip-hop dancing, and there are few things less exciting than reading a bunch of pages that say, “He wows them with his great dancing.”

I told Mark that The Manager had sent me his own script, and over the weekend he asked how it was. I wrote him back, bluntly and honestly, “The Manager’s script sucked.” That’s an actual quote from my e-mail, and I can’t say it gets more direct than that. I went into details, explaining my specific issues with it, but that was how I opened the paragraph and that was my bottom line. I actually felt I had my work cut out for me trying to find something to latch onto to improve it. If I were being completely honest, I’d say to fly out a safe distance and nuke the script from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

I spent the weekend thinking about the script, wondering about its quality. Eventually I settled back on the characters, who I even admitted in my e-mail to Mark were interesting. They just weren’t developed as well as they could have been, and they suffered from typical commercial-character illogic that frustrated me. “This person, as established, wouldn’t react like this.” I felt I had some stuff to work with approaching it from that angle, so on Sunday night I decided I’d read another of the scripts he’d sent. I hoped it’d be worse (and holy shit was it ever) to soften the blow of feedback that tried to be positive but still didn’t work around the fact that it needs a lot of work, then I’d send the coverage for both on Monday.

There’s another layer to this story. Shortly after sending the scripts last week, The Manager sent another in an “urgent” e-mail, saying there’d be an opportunity to make money to cover a script. I’m hard up for cash, so I did it first thing Friday morning. I called The Manager, who was surprised at my promptness; he asked me to e-mail my address so he could cut a check and sent it out. He called back a few hours later and left a VoiceMail suggesting I e-mail him my bank account number so he could direct-deposit it. What the fuck? I sent him my PayPal address and figured if he didn’t like that, I’d be done with him. Until this setback, I had been very close to trusting him. My investigative work (i.e., calling production companies) was overwhelmingly positive. He’s as legit as somebody just starting out can be, so I was happy to hear that. But this worried me, and I sent a semi-annoyed, semi-paranoid diatribe about this to Mark.

Monday rolled around, and I awakened to an e-mail from Mark in my inbox:

Subject: I screwed up…

Uhh…okay? I opened it up to see what that was all about and found a rude awakening: Mark had written a reply to my e-mail in which he wrote some of the following:

• He was sorry but not surprised to hear The Manager’s script wasn’t very good.
• I should try trusting The Manager but if I have a problem, maybe I should set up a dummy savings account for him to deposit cash, then transfer it immediately to my real account.

Unfortunately, instead of sending this reply to me, he had accidentally sent it to The Manager. He didn’t even realize his mistake until receiving a response from The Manager asking him to call, with Mark’s original e-mail pasted below it. Mark asked for advice on how to spin it so he came out well. Him?! What about me?!

There was no way this could end well, I thought. At first I was terrified that maybe Mark had my original e-mail in his response. Had this been the case, damage control and spin doctoring would have been impossible. It’s very difficult to spin “Your script sucks,” stated so plainly. I sent a response to Mark with a few choice suggestions for spin, but I told him I couldn’t do anything without knowing exactly what he had written to “me” — he needed to forward me his message so I could see what he wrote, how he had phrased it, et cetera, to construct a plausible deniability scenario.

I dismissed the idea that my original e-mail had been in his response — if he had done that, he would have had to actively work hard to accidentally send it to The Manager. I figured he wrote a new message, with no original at the bottom, and just sent it to the wrong person. Otherwise, he would have realized his mistake right off the bat. Relieved by that, I suggested that Mark tell The Manager that he was just abbreviating things. In my coverage, I intended to state that it wasn’t the best thing since sliced bread, but certainly not terrible. Mark should just say he was exaggerating to paraphrase; saying “I’m not surprised his script wasn’t very good” is plainer than “I’m not surprised his script has a few bright spots, some interesting characters, but needs a lot of story work.” Aside from my “sucks” comment, this is close to the truth.

As for the banking stuff — fuck, he could pin that on me all he wanted to. I have no problem calling the man and saying to his face that I am immediately distrustful of a guy who’s asking me to give him banking information. Of course, by that time he’d gotten back to me to say PayPal was fine, so I was sort of embarrassed for even flying off the handle, but I figured that could be explained away easily enough.

Once I sent this off to Mark, I started immediately on the coverage for both of the scripts I’d read. I hoped that, at least, would buy some goodwill. I was actually more honest than I probably would have been otherwise, since I needed to go in-depth on its problems to justify Mark’s phrasing. I hoped he at least appreciated the honesty; secondly, I hoped he appreciated the fact that the other script I read was a total dog of a piece of shit*, thus brightening any negative impressions on his own script. As I went back over the script to write the synopsis, I felt kind of guilty about even saying it “sucks” to begin with. It really wasn’t all that bad — all the character and story beats are there; they just need to be stronger.

Shortly after I sent this coverage to him, I got a text message. This was a first from The Manager. “Hi. Did you read my script? If so, what r your thoughts”

Clearly he hadn’t received my coverage, but I knew he had received Mark’s reply to me. Either he didn’t know Mark had written it to me (perhaps he had sent his script to several readers?), or he was trying to set some kind of trap. Well, two can play at that game. I’d already sent the coverage, so there wasn’t exactly an elaborate series of lies to wriggle out of (at least, not yet…), so I wrote back honestly, “Sent coverage 1hr ago. Good characters, story needs work.”

Two minutes later: “thanks. ya, i read the e-mail mark sent you.”

The trap is sprung! Except, wait, what? I had no idea what he was getting at. Was he saying, “This jibes with what Mark wrote you”? Was he saying, “Ha-HA! I’ve caught you in a rare instance of truth-telling. You can’t pull anything over on me”? I had no idea, and without Mark’s e-mail to make sure our stories were straight, I did the only thing I could think of: I completely ignored it. I shut off my cell phone for the rest of the day, didn’t read that last script The Manager had sent me (if I was going to be “fired” over this, why bother?), checked my e-mail obsessively with the hope Mark would get back to me…

More than 12 hours later, Mark finally got back to me, not with a forwarded message but with a new e-mail subjected “Sigh of relief.” He explained he had had a long phone conversation with The Manager in which he explained away everything, convinced The Manager that he had phrased the comment about the script in his own words, and now The Manager was only interested in moving forward. He told Mark, “All is forgiven,” his way of saying things are okay but Mark is still a dick, and he liked both of our work enough to keep us on. However, I felt like this resolved things for Mark but not for me. I figured if The Manager didn’t get back to me by morning, I’d send him a note explaining my side of the story.

I didn’t hear from him, so I decided to read that final script as yet another peace offering. I also attached a note that was an elaborate series of lies — I didn’t get his text message until late the night before, by that time I already had explanatory e-mails from Mark (otherwise I wouldn’t have known what The Manager was talking about) that also said he resolved it, but I figured I should explain that I never said anything negative and I didn’t know where Mark was getting that. I did own up to the banking paranoia and explained I had just flown off the handle a bit and Mark was trying to calm me down, but by that time I was already calm because PayPal was fine.

The next morning, I had two scripts waiting for me in my inbox, along with a note: “No worries. I could have been a lot angrier than I was.” Again, his way of saying things are okay but I’m a dick. I’ll take it; I deserve it. My big regret is that I doubt I’ll ever see that money for the coverage, but things worked out all right for now. As Mark said initially, hopefully the worst thing that’ll happen is The Manager will realize we know each other (we’d kept that a secret because we both planned to send The Manager our scripts and thought it would be mutually beneficial if we were sent copies of each others’ work to cover). Mark explained that away by saying he assumed The Manager knew we knew each other.

Mark and I also made a pact: in the future, on top of triple-checking who we’re sending e-mails to (something I always do anyway), if we have any gripes about The Manager in particular, we’ll call each other. That way, if we accidentally call The Manager (doubtful), we’ll at least know right away and not say anything stupid. We decided we can still gripe all we want about the quality of the scripts we’ve both read, so long as they aren’t written by The Manager.

The main thing that disappoints me about this incident is that I feel like now The Manager has something to hold over our heads, and he’ll use it to fuck us around. “Hey man, I didn’t fire you and I could have, so you’ll clean my pool.” But hey, we’re struggling and we’re foolishly adamant about being 2000 miles away from where we need to be to succeed in our chosen industry. I guess we deserve to get fucked around.

*The blandest of bland romantic comedies, loaded with dumb clichés and what Roger Ebert aptly calls the Idiot Plot (i.e., the characters have to become total idiots for the machinations of the plot to work; if anybody was reasonably intelligent, the story would end on page five) with this painful running gag about “nuts” being synonymous with “legumes,” which might have been funny and in-character (the main characters are portrayed as idiots) if not for the fact that a supposedly intelligent surgeon explains that he’s allergic to legumes, which he says are nuts. Here’s the thing: they’re not, with the exception of the peanut. And I fucking hate scripts that make me look shit up in the fucking dictionary to make sure I’m right because they were too lazy to do the research. How hard is it to make sure that “legume” actually means the same thing as “nuts”? The “you got kicked in the legumes” stuff just falls flat because every time the author mentions it, he keeps reminding me that he’s as borderline retarded as his characters. This culminates in the characters scraping walnut shavings into the surgeon’s salad, provoking an allergic reaction.

Here’s how to fix this fucking joke and actually make it laugh-out-loud funny (at least, I laughed out loud when I thought of it, and I usually don’t find anything I say, do, or think very funny): the characters are fucking idiots, right? So the surgeon says, “I’m allergic to legumes.” He doesn’t say, “They’re nuts.” The idiots pretend they know what it means. Soon as he walks away: “What the fuck does that mean?” Retard debate on the definition, resulting in them agreeing it means “nuts.” It means all those stupid “kicked in the legumes”-type nut jokes could work because it’s showing how fucking stupid the characters are. It still peaks with them coming up with this elaborate, supposedly clever plan to scrape walnut into the guys salad, except this time — nothing happens. No reaction, and they can’t figure out why. I’d laugh, especially if they change the plan to something really simple like trying to kick the shit out of him (and failing at that, too).

Posted by Stan on August 10, 2006 11:41 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)