Creepy Old Guy
My friend Melissa and I are too nice.
We are the sort of people who will tolerate just about anyone, only because we don’t have the courage to tell them to piss off.
Melissa and I have known one another since the third grade. I asked to borrow her ruler, she borrowed my crayons, and ever since, I have been able to call her my good friend. During our second year in college, we enjoyed lunch together everyday. Every thing was swell. Lots of girl talk.
I vividly remember one afternoon when a classmate from my computer class intruded on our lunch gossip to ask me about a question he had on an assignment. I had never talked to this classmate, but I of course, was not going to deny the man some help. He sat himself at our lunch table asking some vague question that I was unable help him with. It turned out that he also had a trigonometry class with Melissa.
After that initial meeting, he continued to join us.
At first, we did not mind. Although it was a bit strange to include this man into our conversation, we assumed that if he was uncomfortable or unintrigued with it all, he would simply leave.
Slowly, however, we began to sense some kind of desperation in him.
He would spend a large part of his conversation with us talking about his family members, a brother who was in the C.I.A. and a sister who worked for Dell in Austin and had secret ties to the government, apparently. Needless to say, there were many strange and unbelievable stories that emanated from this man.
We tolerated it, at least it was interesting.
Then it started to get weird.
We asked him how old he was. It was innocently asked and we expected an honest answer. He said he was twenty-one. I’m not sure if the look on Mel’s face was one of held-back laughter or horror.
He was obviously not twenty-one.
He was a thin man. He liked to jog and cycle. He didn’t have a car so he was always on foot or on his bike. He did look like a fit man but not fit enough to pass as twenty-one. His face was exploding with wrinkles. Deep, creased obvious wrinkles. Around his mouth, his eyes, his forehead. He had long hair which he wore in a ponytail. A greying ponytail. Melissa and I had absolutely no problem with the fact that he was an older man. We had a problem with the fact that he thought us gullible enough to believe he was twenty-one years old (he could have at least said 30..perhaps we would not have gotten suspicious). After that, his lies and perpetual come-ons started becoming both creepy and outrageous. Not to mention completely unwarranted.
He brought me a silver ring and Melissa, gold earrings. We insisted that the ‘gifts’ were unecessary and asked him to take them back, but he proclaimed them as a symbol of friendship. Melissa and I, being the ’too nice’ girls that we are, did not want to offend him so we accepted the gifts but never used them. Later, he followed me onto the trolley, sat next to me, put his arm around my seat, and told me of a quiet little place he knew of where we could go have lunch. I said I wasn’t hungry. Days later, he borrowed a book from Melissa and started phoning her place to ask inane questions and make presumptous courting statements. He asked her if it would be okay with her if he bicycled half way across the city to drop of the book. She said he needn’t bother. When he asked me out to the movies, I reminded him I had a boyfriend. Another day, out of nowhere, he brought Melissa some hand lotion (which looked used by the way), and as soon as he disappeared around the corner, she trashed it. We were convinced he was trying to bewitch us. (He had told us of a witchcraft lady he knew of, after all.)
We literally began dodging the old man. We moved from our usual eating place, to another part of the eatery. Time and time again, though he would find us. When it became obvious that we were uncomfortable with his come-ons, he would then announce that he had a girlfriend. She was a nurse. When we probed for more information, he had nothing more to say about her, but he let us know that he was not interested in us romantically, only on a friendship level.
We didn’t want to be his friend. We no longer wanted to know his stories. We had enough of getting weirdly hit on. We hated his smile, for it no longer looked like a smile, but a sly grin of deceit. We never actually told him to leave us alone. One day, when he mentioned that I had a ‘nice figure’ but that I could stand to do some tone up exercises that he could teach me, Melissa lost it. She ridiculed him for daring to speak to me like that, for making me feel bad about my body, and for thinking that he could teach us anything. After that, he left us alone.
We never spoke to him again. Even in passing, whenever we would see him, we completely ignored him.
It might seem callous. Maybe the poor man was just trying to find friends, but we didn’t think so.
We later found out that after us, he began a ‘friendship’ with Melissa’s friend Virgina. He pulled the same tricks on her. Told her that he was twenty-one. The whole shebang. Virginia worked in the tutoring lab. To receive services you have to show your id. She caught a glimpse at his once.
He was actually 53.
He was a 53 year old man, trying to pass off as a man half his age. Literally.
We were eighteen at the time.
After Virginia, we saw him ‘courting’ other groups of girls. He quickly became known as the ‘creepy old guy’.
