After years of this, of nurturing an elephant in the room, we were fucking around in a bar, as usual, having some drinks and laughing about this and that, and, as usual, we got to the point where bets started being made. I’m not much of a bettor. She lives for them. So it goes without saying that lady trumps man and the bet was on.
“You can’t make me cry. There’s no WAY you could pull that off.”
“I bet you twenty dollars I can make you cry right now.”
Her face furrowed into a dubious challenge. One eyebrow up, one down, lips pursed in a playful “whatever” curl.
“Fine. Let’s see what you got.” She started to take a pull on her beer but stopped in mid drink, mouthful of bev, waving free hand and mumbling an “Mmmmm! Mmmmm!” sound until she swallowed. “But you can’t hit me! That’s not fair. No violencing.” She inhaled, and I’m guessing here, to kill a burp or a hiccup that was rising up due to her interrupted drinking.
“Don’t worry. I know you don’t cry when I hit you… you whine. And since you do that every twenty minutes it wouldn’t be a challenge. No, I bet I can make you cry.”
“OK, dick, bring it.”
So I took a drink, phrased it again like I had a million times before in my head, stepped up to the plate, and shot that elephant in the face, the elephant that had wanted nothing more to kill me for all of these years. Though to be fair I had been feeding the fucking thing all this time knowing damn good and well that it wanted nothing more than to maul me in front of a circus tent full of paying adults and their idiotic, spoiled children.
“OK, I’m going to ask you a question and I bet you answer with a “no”.”
“What? That’s absurd. I can’t promise to answer how you want me to without knowing the question.”
“Look, this is a bet. Do you want to win or lose twenty bucks? It doesn’t have anything to do with anything gross or challenging. Just say “no” as a response to my question. That’s my dare. And I need the twenty bucks to pay for this tab.”
She looked at me, head slightly askew so she could read me at an angle, to try to figure out what I was up to.
“Fine, OK,” she said hesitantly.
“OK, thanks. Alright, you ready?”
“Sure, do it,” and I sensed a slight tinge of apprehension in her voice because she knew as well as I did that there was something that needed to be put down like a sad, old dog. She also knew that I was an emotionally retarded, hyper-sentimental fool who felt too much about too little on most days and that, to rewrite a famous quote, I could take a sad song and make it sadder.
“OK, here’s my question:” and I looked down and into my left elbow-pit, observing the soft whiteness of it, the tenderness and vulnerability, and the question spilled out:
“Will you ever love me the same way that I love you?”
My hearing, never good to begin with due to loud concerts and giant headphones, became muffled due to an avalanche of awareness and fear that soon, in nanoseconds, any and all good cheer would be gone for the night; the plans for a pinball competition would be put on the back-burner for Lord only knows how long. This sucked because I had very few people in my life that enjoyed playing the pinball.
I looked up from my elbow bend, up and to the right of her face. There was a painting of a matador pulling a matador pose, presumably right after the bull had run through his red cape and out of frame. That bull, the one that was never painted, probably felt like a fool. I could sympathize with said unpainted bull. Of course, that bull didn’t volunteer itself for that game, so it probably felt more cheated than the fool. I knowingly put myself here.
Then my eyes tracked to the left on the way to a blank spot on the wall, but on the way noticing her head, in all of its loveliness, etched in a different way now, just her forehead, a furrow of a sharp pain in the heart. Her eyes welled up and she shook her head a little bit. If you were sitting at the next table you wouldn’t have even noticed it.
“Don’t…”
My eyes welled up too; killing elephants is a rather traumatic experience, I’ll have you know.
“No, I didn’t ask you to say, “Don’t”, I asked… dared, you to say, “no”.” My voice was tight, my chest sore, my uvula was even a bit tender.
A tear fell down her face; she was looking into my eyes. A tear fell down my face too. I was looking back to the bend in my elbow. She knew that even without being tied to having to answer this way that it was the truth.
She mouthed the word “No” and I felt everything break, again. Which as much at it sucked, it meant I could finally start rebuilding.
We were never the same after that moment. I mean, we were still friends, and after the trauma of the situation faded things were, for the most part, fun again, but yeah, it was never the same.
At least I won that bet. Twenty dollars never tasted so sad.
