Rudeness comes to roost

I am a raging hypocrite. Sometimes I don’t mind very much, but tonight I am remembering a simple farm boy I knew in college whom I treated like a leper. I helped make him a pariah.

I discovered an air of superiority in college I never felt in grade school or high school. I recently told a friend that as an undergraduate, I was a big fish in a small pond, a tired metaphor, but apt. And I swam waggling my fins in my aqua world, preening on my intellectual beauty. In class, professors always asked me if I would consider changing majors to their subject area. Socially, I was invited to every party, and I even reached the pinnacle of my social life one semester when the cool kids all called me to ask where the party was. I sparkled.

In college, though, I also learned the power of meanness, the flip side of the popularity coin. I enjoyed the superior odor I gave myself when I scoffed at some poor sap’s less than stellar social record. But the second those people I honed my anger skills on started to act less than ingratiating, when they started to mirror my ugliness back at me, I relented. It was OK for me to loath someone for the most superficial of reasons, like their bad poetry or their too-good poetry, but everyone MUST like me, dammit! When a poor, spurned classmate returned my hostility, I ingratiated myself to them until I could reach a state where we mutually tolerated one another. No more animosity.

But tonight I was thinking of that pathologically lying, socially insecure farm boy and regretting the way I treated him. We liked to say that my best friend in college collected strays. Outcast lonely misfits of all stripes just found her and she kept them—for a little while at least. Somehow she found this guy, the farm-boy. He was a little tall, a little heavy, and badly googly-eyed. He was also the kind of non-stop talker who had nothing to say, which was what irked me about him. I rolled my eyes when he came around and puffed snootily on my cigarette, exhaling disdain. He never reflected my hostility though, and now I give him credit for being a much nicer person than me.

I saw him last on the eve of college graduation. My brother, my sister, and I went to Olive Garden (the third fanciest place in Bowling Green, Kentucky at the time), and he was waiting outside for someone. I don’t remember anymore how it came to be, but me and the farm-boy ended up on the Olive Garden front porch, alone. I gave him my usual cold shoulder, and the poor guy just kept talking. My brother walked up and said, “Do you know that guy?”

“Yeah, but I don’t like him.”

My brother said, “Yeah, I can tell.”

As if that farm-boy deserved to be treated rudely by an arrogant, elitist, faux urbanite. His only fault was that he badly wanted to have friends, and he tried so hard that he always said the wrong thing to me. I was the one who was wrong, though, since I didn’t reciprocate any effort, or didn’t even take the time to rebuff him politely. Instead, I was rude to him for years.

Tonight I wondered if I might be paying for my past since I thought of him and a recent incident in the same evening. I wondered if retribution were descending upon me in the present life, instead of in the afterlife.

In the evenings I ride the bus home with the same people because we all get off work at the same time. We’re all friends, and we know each other’s names, and we talk about the normal stuff like workloads and families and vacations. But the other day, a man and a woman got onto the bus that I didn’t know, but they knew my friends. The woman was saying, “Fox & Obel isn’t any more expensive than Trader Joe’s.” This pricked my ears because it’s absolutely untrue. Fox & Obel is Ligne Roset to Trader Joe’s CB2. There’s nothing wrong with that, but they aren’t the same.

The gentleman replied, “That is so not true. Fox & Obel is a lot more expensive.”

I looked him in the eye and muttered, “I agree.”

He turned to the woman and snarked, “See, she thinks you’re a crazy liar.”

The woman whined, “Why did she call me that?”

I turned around and said, “I did not say that!”

And the man sneered, “That’s what you insinuated.”

There was no winning this fight, I knew, so I leaned back into my seat with my book. But I was stung. We all know each other on the bus, and they knew the people I know, so why would my comment be treated so hostilely? What did he gain by making me out to be a monster? It was the farm-boy’s revenge, though he didn’t even know it. Living on angry judgment requires that you fall by angry judgment as well. Cruelty begets cruelty.

I applaud myself for having learned my lesson all those years ago from the farm-boy’s persistence. I no longer treat people spitefully just because I can. No matter how rude someone is to me, I try to smile and compliment them more ardently. The farm-boy was the nobler of us two because he kept trying and kept an open heart. I prefer to aspire to his nobler qualities, than to jockey for social disparraging.