He Brought Out the Worst in Me

He was handsome at least. Irritating, but handsome. It was obvious that he felt like he had never been seen before—that he was better than everyone else in the room because there was some invisible, immaculate, disciplined quality to him that made him 'above average'. That was why every word he said was so damn loud. Why every sentence was a bit that refused to die. Why provocation was first nature to him. He suffered from a superior form of loneliness—one symptomatic of a person who has never interrogated himself.

In the dimly lit courtyard of my local jazz bar, as I chainsmoked cigarettes, lighting each one with the butt of the one that came before, he confessed, “I think I hate jazz.”

It made sense. He seemed like he hated everything that couldn’t be defined. Poetry, jazz, abstraction, subtext. I watched him absentmindedly fiddle with the zipper of his puffer jacket. Our only mutual friend was the most abrasive person either of us knew, and he decided not to show that night. This guy and I quite literally had nothing in common. I listened as he made assumptions about me and everyone else at the bar. He reminded me at least four times that he didn’t smoke, or drink, or vape. “I just don’t need that stuff,” he scoffed. Between sips of my old fashioned I stared at the open fly on his Old Navy khakis. I said nothing.

Between his exhausting gay jokes, and poorly-masked eyerolls, and subtle jabs at everyone’s “wastedness,” I felt dragged in by the gravity of his loneliness. Nastiness crept out of me like a shadowy bile. I put out my last cigarette, chugged my drink, and decided to indulge him in banter. It was violence. The scatty drumbeats and muffled bass solos trickling through the door made our conversation feel like a dance.

Every word he said was a gunshot and I couldn’t help but fire back—jest, debate, disdain. He was the kind of person who thought everything was simple. It was easy to imagine him telling a fat person to order a salad, or an Amazon employee to go on strike. I could picture him frowning at an addict thinking just quit, or explaining the 'meaning' of a Tarantino film, or refusing a girl’s finger up his ass because that would 'make him gay.' He was so unbearably defined.

By the end of the last jazz band’s performance, my jaw was swollen from ground teeth and my throat was shredded from arguing. His provocation was seductive. Impossible to ignore. Every moment with him felt like an exercise in tolerance, and boy was I failing. With enough time, I’m sure he could fish the hatred out of anyone. Together, we were Carl Jung’s wet dream.

I knew that if only I got to know him, there’d be some sensitivity, some inner child lurking in the oyster of his heart waiting to be held. To be told “I see you, it’s okay.” But, for the first time in a long while, I didn’t care to look.

If he wasn’t a mutual friend, and his skin wasn’t so clear, and he didn’t have the ethos of financial stability—if his eyes didn’t sparkle, and his jawline wasn’t sharp, and he didn’t have abs beneath his sweater—I suspect he never would have known the grace of another person’s patience.

He was a walking migraine. An echochamber of his own self-righteousness. A funhouse mirror that emphasized all of my ugliest qualities.

In short, he was just a man.

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