damonjustisntfunny.com

If you were to poll my acquaintances I do not believe you would find the general consensus to be that I am a flirt. Of course there might be dissenters to this opinion, but I don’t tend to believe anyone’s view of me except my own so that is what we will work with. And I believe that no one thinks I am a flirt. I am obnoxious, certainly; cold, perhaps; funny, occasionally; but not particularly flirtatious. For the most part, I am a straightforward guy, I like to keep to myself with my seatbelt fastened and my arms and hands safely inside the cabin.

However, when Ben is around, it is another matter entirely. I even embarrass myself, often, and most often it involves a waitress. I don’t know what it is, or why it is the way it is, but if you put Ben and me alone in a restaurant with a waitress, it is a recipe for disaster. A twinkle comes into my eye and a little more pep in my step and suddenly I am tap dancing, walking the thin red line, singing in the rain, producing punch-lines and emitting that undeniable male odor that reaches out a hand to squeeze a woman’s olfactory organ and says: “I am a loser, but perhaps you will find me attractive if I say stupid things and stare at you incessantly and generally make fool out of myself.”

Ben shudders and shrinks, typically, low into his booth seat and pushes the menu close to his face as if he were, perhaps, far-sighted or hoping the menu contained scratch-and-sniff components. This only encourages me further, however, and I am inspired by his unease and embodied with the feeling of cleverness and wit. I vocalize inane and troubling thoughts, such as:

“Hello. How are you? I’m well thank you; better now as a matter of fact. I like your name tag. Quite clever. Do you have a veggie burger? What about a restroom? Exquisite! I must wash off this dirt and grime and arrange my unsightly eyebrows. Etcetera. Etcetera.”

If the waitress is at all open to this type of banter, it becomes quite disturbing and Ben is mortified and most often sits silently in horror and disbelief. Because of this, Ben can never date a waitress. He tried once, for a short period of time, but it couldn’t have lasted long. When the moment came for him to introduce his lady-friend to me at the restaurant where they both worked at the time, the most amazing confluence of universal forces collided. Ben and I were in a restaurant; I was introduced to a waitress; this waitress was Ben’s girlfriend. Suddenly, a terrible feeling washed over all of us, as if something were dreadfully wrong and the poor woman, having no idea what sort of cosmic force she was interrupting, took one look at me and forcibly ushered us both out the door saying:

“Please go. I don’t want you here. Please. Just go.”

They broke up shortly thereafter.

The question as to why Ben has been blessed with my unnerving behavior remains unanswered, but I believe it all has to do with innate animalistic urges that exist between two males of the same species — but wait, don’t laugh, this is not an unreasonable hypothesis. Ben and I are, undoubtedly, in a biological competition of sorts. Though we are Heterosexual Life Partners we must be, in the Darwinian view of things, trying to prove ourselves better than the other and a part of this competition is based on the ability to attract the most females (the other part has to do with eating the most cookies but I think that I have resolved myself to having lost this aspect of the evolutionary battle).

Ben’s biological benevolence is that he is good looking and kind and shy around women — which seems to work well for him. Mine is that I am gaudy and obnoxious and sporadically amusing — which doesn’t help my case in the least but it’s all I have to work with at present. When I am talking to his girlfriend, for example, I make do as best I can with comments like:

“Would you like to sit next to me? Maybe our knees will touch. I would like that. Touching of our knees. The rubbing of our cartilage. You can call me anytime, you know, not just when you are looking for Ben. You have my number and my knee is always there for your knee. Two knees now as one.”

Conversely, when Ben is around — say, #6, for example — he says things like:

“That’s really interesting graduate work; tell me more about your artistic endeavors; I, too, believe that Oprah has done much good in this world.”

And still we are both in love with wonderful women who claim to love us equally. (Not both Ben and I equally, but return the love we give them singularly to the person giving it unilaterally). It can be observed that while we both posses different innate abilities when it comes to attracting the opposite sex, this seems not to influence the outcome in any specific way except that we can say that Ben has dated a waitress he met in a restaurant and I have not. But I do not want to date any waitress willing to flirt with me in a restaurant, and Ben — well, let us just say that Ben — learned his lesson the hard way.

This all goes to prove the universal truth that despite the utter depravity of the male sex it seems to matter very little if he is a great guy, or a good guy, or even a guy you would trust to watch your children, because, in the end, no one seems to care much about these things — what is most important is whether or not he will pick up the check and leave a healthy tip.

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