Like I said, I have these tics, these things I do in broad daylight that drive me nuts. They may seem like nothing to you, but I know what I’m doing and I don’t like it one bit.
The least innocuous but most irritating tic I’ve got is wincing. Yeah, wincing. I know it doesn’t sound that bad. It doesn’t look that bad, either. I just kinda squint my eyes, maybe shift in my seat a little. To the person I’m talking to, it probably looks as though I’ve got a very minor pain in my leg or something. No one would ever get the impression that I’ve totally tuned them out and that my mind is now entirely focused on events that happened in the long-distant past–that I’ve dredged up some goddess-awful memory and am fixated on it, thinking, “Jeez, what on earth made me do that?” It’s like I’m watching a movie of myself that no one else can see, and I cringe at the awkward parts.
There are five very specific incidents in my life that make me wince when I remember them. In chronological order:
1. I’m in junior high–probably 8th grade–and I’m sitting in Sunday school, and someone spills his drink on the table. For reasons unknown to me, I toss my bible in the middle of the puddle. I guess I’m thinking it’ll soak up some of the soda. Who knows? Everyone just turns and looks at me as if to say, “Man, you’re a total freak.”
2. I’m in college–probably a junior–and I’m with a bunch of friends in my hometown, and we’ve been out all night drinkin’ and hangin’ at the Cha Cha Palace (yes, honey, even Tinytown, Mississippi has a queer bar). It’s still reasonably early–probably midnight or so–and we stop at a late-night diner for something to eat. I wander off to the bathroom to piss, but when I get there, I realize how totally drunk I am and wanna sit down, so I drop my pants and sit on the toilet–not like I have to shit or anything, I just figure, “I’m sitting on a toilet, I gotta drop my pants.” An hour later, one of my friends has to crawl under the locked door, zip me up, and carry me to the car. I can barely remember the entire waitstaff giving me the evil eye on my way out.
3. I’m in grad school, and I’m teaching a literature course, and we’re studying a play that I particularly despise. (Unfortunately, I have no control over the syllabus.) Anyway, I’ve read this play before–several years before–but I can’t bring myself to read it again, so I do something students do all the time: I watch the movie. Of course, the movie is quite different from the play, so when the students start asking me questions about things that happen only in the play, I look like an idiot.
4. New Year’s Eve 1996: I’m working at Lucky Cheng’s, and we’re packed to the gills, and the staff is comprised of nothing but drag queens and hipsters, and we’re all trying to be cool and get schnockered in plain sight of our customers by swilling champagne straight from the bottle. I’m sitting with a table, taking a lengthy drink order, when a co-worker comes up and holds the bottle to my mouth and urges me to drink and it goes down the wrong way and I nearly choke to death. There’s nothing like showin’ out (as my father calls it) and bungling it.
5. Spring 1997: Precious Moments and I are driving back from the Audubon Hotel and we’re sloshed–I’m sloshed–and we’re singing along with some crappy Dash Rip Rock/Better Than Ezra bullshit on the radio and I’m belting out the tune and she just stops singing and looks at me like I’m some kind of freak. Which brings us back to where we started…
Since three of the five incidents detailed above involve hard liquor, maybe cutting down on my booze consumption would prevent me from having too many more embarrassing moments to relive in the future. But of course, if were a good listener and my mind didn’t wander so much, I wouldn’t be dredging up these thoughts and wincing, now would I? See, that’s the problem: I’m a Leo with ADD.
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