Free Giving Up by Mike Steeves Page B

could put the whole encounter behind me. I was desperate for him to shut up, to stop adding insult to injury by asking me these ridiculous questions about where I went to school, where my parents were from, what my father did for a living before he retired, and whether or not I had any children. Each question was like a whiplash, a dagger, an icy slap, or a combination of all three (and any other physical assault you can think of), which I could see coming from a great distance but for some fucked up reason was powerless to avoid. It was as though I was being tortured, or had already been tortured, and now my torturer wanted to make small talk, not realizing (or realizing, but not caring) that by acting as though the torture hadn’t taken place he was revisiting the whole encounter upon me with a sort of casual cruelty that was literally soul-destroying. ‘I can’t fucking believe this guy,’ I thought. ‘Isn’t it obvious that I know he’s full of shit? Isn’t he ashamed to look me in the eye and make small talk when both of us know that all he can think about is the moment that I cash this phony money order and give him four hundred dollars out of my personal banking account? If I were him,’ I thought, ‘I would apologize and run away and hope that I never saw the person I was trying to rip off (i.e. me) ever again.’ My embarrassment had shifted to fury, but I wasn’t furious with him for trying to con me out of four hundred dollars – this, I thought, was understandable. The reason that I was so angry with him was because he’d done such a bad job of it. His approach had been so clumsy and the lies he’d told me were so obviously lies that it was impossible for me to believe him. If he’d been more artful, had he taken the time to develop a more plausible story, had he worked on his delivery so it came off smoother and more believable, then I would’ve been able to fork over the cash with a clean conscience. As it stood, he had forced me into the shameful and humiliating position of either pretending that he had fooled me, giving him four hundred dollars, and returning to my home, to my basement, to contemplate how pathetically I’d reacted to what for most people would be a mildly annoying encounter, or accusing him of lying, calling him out on his bullshit story, and exposing him as a cheat and an utter fraud. ‘Why couldn’t he have just left me alone,’ I said to myself, ‘instead of more or less forcing me to expose him, and myself, to unbearable shame?’ In short, I was enraged by what I perceived to be an imposition. He was obliging me to share in his degradation, which in my opinion, was even worse than cheating me out of four hundred dollars, and no matter what I did (give him the money or refuse to give him the money) there was no way I could avoid the fact that this good-looking and, by my estimation, intelligent stranger had sunk so low that he’d been reduced to approaching guys like me on the street and screwing them out of their money. If he’d been more resourceful then he could’ve come up with a story that might have flattered my self-regard, while preserving the illusion of his own good character. ‘But this idiot,’ I thought, ‘this crackhead , has made the whole situation so glaringly apparent, that there’s no way to get out of it without feeling like a complete piece of shit. The genie is out of the bottle. Pandora is out of her box.’ Blah blah blah. ‘Just go away,’ I thought. ‘Leave me alone. Disappear.’ But it was evident that he had no intention of leaving now that I had agreed to cash his fraudulent money order. ‘There’s no way I’m going through with this. There’s no way I’m giving this guy four hundred dollars,’ I thought, and just as I was thinking this we arrived at the bank machine and he held the door to the vestibule