You wouldn’t have liked me if you knew me then.
I mean reallyknown me.
On the surface, I could have easily been mistaken for a nice guy:
I had enough friends, I always gave up my seat to old ladies on the
bus, and I only insulted people when they were out of earshot. I’d
even been working on developing a side of me that I never knew
existed before, my good side. At the time it was just a tiny seedling,
and that it existed at all I must credit to the care of a beautiful
botanist. Unfortunately, she’d been in Africa for a year and
consequently I’d gone back into the ground.
It’s true, people did generally refer to me as a “nice guy.” It went
something like this: “Oh, Jake Rippy? Yeah, he’s a nice guy. I think I
got drunk with him at a party or something—he always drinks port
wine. Brown hair, brown eyes, yeah, that’s the guy. Nice guy.”
The comedian Stephen Wright made this joke: “I went to buy a
shirt and the shop girl asked me what size I wore. I told her, ‘Extra
medium.’”
That was me. Brown hair, brown eyes. Extra medium. Nice guy.
You thought you knew me. But you didn’t. On the inside I was an evil
prick.
I would say this: “Congratulations! I think its great that you got
a high-paying job making buckets of money and that you just bought
a new Porsche 911 Turbo, and that you’ve got a hot girlfriend.” But
what I really thought was this: I can’t believe you don’t have a job
checking elastic waistbands in an underwear factory. If you ever park
your Porsche on my street, I will put sugar in your gas tank. And your
girlfriend has been comprehensively rumored to be a gold digging
slut.
Come on, Rippy, don’t be so hard on yourself, you might have
said, Every insecure young man has feelings like that. That’s what Dr.
Bloom, my therapist, said. He got four thousand dollars for saying
that. He drove a Porsche 928 convertible. I loathed him with all my
heart.
To make matters worse, I worried that everyone else might feel
the same as I did. Which was why I tried to be so nice all the time—
so that people whom I hated would not hate me back. I can not
BIG AMERICAN BREAKFAST
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