the something moment of the day

[rushthatspeaks]

I was walking back from Davis Square, where the gods of used clothing had delivered into my hands two pairs of jeans just when I was down to owning only two pairs of pants, and a guy tried to pick me up.

This happens. Not frequently, but not infrequently. They tend, of course, to be people I immediately want to cross the street to avoid. This guy wasn't-- groomed, not leering, polite-- so I would ordinarily have turned him down with a smile and a 'no thanks' (instead of the I-do-not-see-you nose-in-the-air they get if they make remarks about my anatomy).

Except... he was crying. As in, he was crying before he tried to pick me up. Tears streaming down his face. Little choking sobs. Hoarse voice. And he kept crying while he was talking to me, despite the fact that he was literally dripping on the sidewalk.

I have to admit I was a bit unnerved, especially since he seemed to be trying pretty fiercely to ignore it. He'd scrub his knuckles over his eyes every so often and clench his fists, and then he'd ask again if I was sure I couldn't come for coffee.

I asked him outright what was wrong and he pretended not to hear me.

Eventually I said 'Look, if you need to talk I'll go for coffee with you at the place down the block, but you should know that I'm very happily married and you haven't got any chance of my doing anything other than listening to you', but he made it pretty clear that he wasn't interested unless it was A Date, so I left.

It was just... very, very odd. Because it was like he'd got this social code ingrained about How You Talk To Women, and so he had to stick to it even when whatever he was crying about made it absolutely impossible for that code to mean anything at all. It was definitely emotionally related crying; I've seen the kind of tears one gets in the eyes from strong breezes and the kind of watery-eye one can get from allergy medicine, but this guy was crying as though somebody had died. And he wasn't using it to try to get me to pay attention to him, either, although I got the feeling he pretty desperately needed attention from somebody. He was just trying to present himself as though this didn't exist, as though he weren't nearly incapable of coherent speech.

I'm not sorry I left, because I don't think there was any way I could have been helpful, but I do hope he manages to get someone to talk to him or listen to him or whatever it is he needs. And I don't feel particularly upset about it or anything myself, but it was just... how very, very strange and wondrous.

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Oh how strange. As if there were some disjunction in the wiring, poor fellow.

Story?

Nine

Random hypothesis

[redbird]

Maybe the attempted pick-up was a (clearly doomed) effort to distract himself from his sorrows.

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I sort of wonder if he'd just been broken up with or something like that, and he somehow had the idea that the first thing he should do was try to get another date, and that he was somehow supposed to ignore whatever previous thing there had been, and thus was doing his best to live to up to that standard. (And, wow, that was a terrible sentence.) I can certainly imagine someone getting those sorts of ideas in our culture, anyway, though if that was the case here he was taking them quite a bit more to heart than most.

[jedibl.livejournal.com]

This was exactly my first reaction.

[mixedborder.livejournal.com]

What a bizarre experience. How did the conversation begin?

[q10.livejournal.com]

very odd indeed.

y'know, it's almost certainly just as well that you handled things the way you did, but, from a literary point of view, this probably would've turned into a much more interesting story if you'd said ‘yes’ somewhere in there.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I suspect he did not know how to deal with a woman outside a dating/romantic context. Was this a young man? He might not have interacted with many girls or women in settings where he didn't meet them with an expectation of seduction (or attempted seduction, at least.) It makes sense to me that you could see him crying and reach out to him as a human being and a potential friend...and for a person to be unable to see you as a friend and a potential friend because he's so overwhelmed by you being a woman. Sexism is pernicious.

If his mother was the only woman he'd interacted with outside the dynamic of masculine and femininine seductive expectations, it's no wonder he couldn't see beyond those expectations in a moment of distress. Of course it's worse if he's coming out of an intense relationship that started with a woman getting close to him as a friend (colleague, teacher, not conventional dating) before friendship turned into love and then heartbreak. So he concludes he has to avoid any interactions with women, between bare civility and dating, to avoid having another one break his heart.

I agree with you that this is pretty strange and wondrous. It's like Davis Square is finally so saturated with manga that it's oozing out the sidewalks.

[sovay]

Er . . . my wires may be crossed, but my first reaction was, "May I take that image and use it for a story?" (My second reaction was, I think, "I hope he'll be all right," but I wouldn't swear to it.)

[mixedborder.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking somebody should write a mystery story around it-- "Rusherlock Speaks and the Case of the Weeping Wooer"!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Little Mermaid?

I mean that's what it immediately reminds me of. Someone who has to do something within a certain period of time, despite some handicap that prevents it. Or Beauty and the Beast either for that matter.