It’s possible you aren’t a cretin outside of the setting where I met you, but I doubt it.

If people got graded solely on three-minute impressions, you’d be held back a few years. Single, late 30s, better-looking than most until you opened your mouth as I was slipping into my jacket.

“Hey, lovely—where you running off to? It’s early.”

I granted this a half-smile and said it was late enough for me, which brought more insistence and your pushy, not-to-be-refused offer to buy me a shot. Here we go, I thought.

“I’m not drinking tonight,” I said—new to the phrasing, the words sticking to my cheeks like little cotton balls—”or not at all, actually, I’m here with a girlfriend, she’s drinking.”

Thus casting myself as the prude in this little play, and my friend (innocently off to the ladies’ room) as the alcoholic. You tossed back your Jaeger, looked me up and down, snorted—and then said it.

“Pussy.”

I’m not sure what role my vagina was now supposed to play in this little vignette, but there it was, suddenly exposed at the bar—figuratively yanked up and out of my panties where it had been minding its own business, certainly not expecting company; and in public no less. It doesn’t even drink—never has—so why it should be invoked for its owner’s refusal of a shot had us both perplexed.

“Really?” was all I could think to say.

“Yeah. Pussy,” you snickered again, glittering dangerously. “Not drinkin’? What the fuck you doing here then?”

Yes. That is the question, isn’t it, Cretin? (Sorry; we were never properly introduced.) What the fuck, indeed, am I doing here?

What I am doing here is surviving. More than that some days, thriving—and yet more than that—climbing and clawing and bleeding my way to the top of a mountain that is my own rad fucking life, a life that is enormous and overwhelming and filled with the kind of love that weaves a safety net around and beneath me. The very net that waited tonight, calm and powerful and present, in case that little glimmer of meanness and fear in your eyes flickered into something more torturous.

Oh, Cretin!—I almost wish you’d brought me a little something more substantial to play with. Something a little less petty, a little less childishly silly. As it was, you had no idea what you were talking about or who you were talking to; no chance of learning, nor brains enough for conversation. There was nothing to do but laugh at you, laugh it right back into your good-looking (until you opened your mouth) uncomprehending slurry-eyed face.

My girlfriend came back from the restroom and we had a good laugh at your expense, poor Cretin, while you tried to follow along, vaguely angered without knowing why, you and your insult that seemed to you, at the time, so barbed and clever, so calculated to bully another pretty girl into drunken consent.

Late now, and home safely, and thinking of you—weak, drunken predatory Cretin, and wondering how many younger softer speechless flattered ones you’ve caught in your clumsy grasp. Frightened groundless girls who are clinging to the sides of the mountains of their own lives and longing for a net, when you come along and whisper it: “Don’t be a pussy—let me buy you a drink.”

 

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Assist Ed: Judith Andersson/Ed: Sara Crolick