My father gave me the single best piece of advice that I’ve ever heard. He popped it out about 12, maybe 13 years ago, when I was still living near my parents. I’d come over to do some laundry, and get a free meal, and we started talking about this girl I worked with, who I was kinda into. She was weird. Not legendary weird, no cutting herself to prove her love, or choosing kids names the second time we hung out, but definitely odd. So, I was going on about Weird Girl, when Dad stopped me and, in a world-weary tone, said, “Carter, just keep in mind: They never get less crazy.”
I almost fell over. Damned if I can remember the name of the girl I was talking about, or any other part of the conversation that evening, but those words burned themselves right into my forebrain. They also made me laugh my ass off, but that was just the shock of having raw truth spoken out loud. And from my Dad, no less. To be fair, my father is a really bright, well-read cat, but it was still a trifle unexpected.
Every schoolboy should be given these words, as protection. When the girls get sent to watch the film on their menstrual cycle, the boys should get a lecture with They Never Get Less Crazy as the theme. I might just have a statue made, of my father, with those words inscribed in it.
Because it is absolutely true. However crazy a woman is when you first meet her, that is the best it’s gonna get. Be ready. If a woman tells you, on the first date, that she talks to fairy’s, be prepared to hear a lot about what the fairy’s say for the duration of your relationship. Be prepared to hear their opinions about how both you and she look, where you should go and what you should do there. Get ready to deal with the fact that she’s gonna lend more credence to their opinion than yours. After all, she’s known them longer. And get yourself into the mental space to deal with the repercussions of the fairy’s telling her that they like her better when she doesn’t bathe, and she starts to cover herself in Patchouli Oil, because they like that smell a lot. Otherwise, one day you’re going to wake up next to a ball of human stench, composed of toxic levels of unwashed body funk, not covered but increased by liberal amounts of old and new Patchouli. It’s a smell I used to run across when mingling with Lower East Side ‘artists’ in New York and it cuts into your brain like an ice-pick.
The only thing I’ve ever encountered that was worse was being exposed to CS Gas in Basic Training.
I forgot my father’s advice once. I started dating an ex-crackhead. This was while I was working for the circus, and do I need to explain that I was really horny? Anyway, for some reason, I thought the ‘ex’ part of the phrase ‘ex-crackhead’ was the important part. See, I thought she’d BEEN crazy, and was now OK. Whereas the truth was that she just WAS crazy, and now needed a new expression for it, crack being passé and all. And this new expression emerged in her making out with a mutual friend named Brian. I actually caught them at it. But, being the clever bastard that I am, I decided to not do the soap-opera thing, so I didn’t just leap out and yell, “AHA! J’accuse!” No, I caught her about an hour later and gave her a kiss. Then I looked at her funny, and said, “You taste like Brian!” To which she asked, quite correctly, “How do you know what Brian tastes like?”
Things went downhill from there.
Now, I have to admit, I’ve been the crazy one on occasion. One time in particular, I was walking a girl home from what had been a very nice first date, when she suggested that we do something together the next day. I responded enthusiastically, telling her to meet me by the schoolyard a couple of blocks from her building, at about 1:30pm the next day.
“The schoolyard?” she asked, wrinkling her nose in mock disgust. “Are you a pederast?”
“Of course not,” I was shocked, shocked I say, at the very thought. “That’s just the time of day when the little kids get out for recess.”
“Oh, you like to watch children play?” She was visibly delighted at the thought, perhaps thinking denoted a person of deep sensitivity.
“No, don’t be stupid. I like to watch little kids run around, lose control, and fall over!”
She seemed a bit taken aback, so I tried to explain the pure joy of little kids hitting the ground. I explained how young kids are built like peanuts characters, with their heads being about a quarter of their body weight, and how, when running, their comparatively massive noggins would often get too far ahead of the rest of them. I told her about how you could spot the difference between a child who was just running, and one who was desperately trying to get control of it’s wayward head. I waxed poetic about seeing them hit the dirt like a drunk falling down a flight of stairs, all ass over teakettle, and how sometimes, times I called ‘the jackpot’, one would run into a fence, or a tree, or, best of all, another group of oblivious kids, taking them all down like a wrecking ball into the side of a house.
And she just walked into her building, and wouldn’t speak to me again.
Now I save that for the second date
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