Ya Don't Say!

When I was a kid, Nintendo games were huge. All my friends bragged about how many games they owned and how good they were at playing the games. As one of five kids living in a low income household, it was pretty tough to keep up with the Jonses. That's why I usually had to make up some phony story about how I had tons and tons of Nintendo games and that I finished them all days after I got them. Looking back on it, I think that a lot of my friends did the same. It was compulsory. The trick was to try to trip them up and find holes in their stories so you could call them out on their dirty, filthy lies!

Fifteen years later, I find that people are still weaving intricate tales to try to make themselves look like hot shit. One person in particular makes me roll my eyes and tune out whenever he starts another story about his fabulous party life. For the sake of simplicity, let's call him "Bill" in honor of Pecos Bill, one of my favorite tall tales.

Every week, we'd go around telling each other about how our weekends were. My stories were never very exciting because I'd usually sit at home and masturbate. Then Bill would tell about how he went to a bar and met a really cute 23 year old grad student and took him home, making my story seem like a real snooze fest. Sometimes Bill got into a scuffle with a drunk person and he became the hero of the evening for pummeling the guy before he could do any more damage to the property. Once, Bill even managed to get cruised and picked up by two 21 year old boys from Indiana while walking across the parking lot of the 7-11.

How does a freak like Bill manage to get so much exciting and sexy action so easily, while I have trouble getting people to tell me what time it is? He smells like an old French whore, for fuck's sake! Then one night I went to the famous bar where he supposedly made more connections than Southwestern Bell and I just happened to see the grande dame in action.

Bill was alone, and stayed alone for most of the evening. I know because I could follow his scent from across the room. I later met him around midnight at the non-busy coat check and he left alone. Fast forward to the weekday after, and you'll find that Bill is telling yet another story about his wonderful Saturday night where he met and went home with the cute barback who doesn't go home with just anyone! According to Bill, he and his friends stood in line at the coat check for an eternity and finally got their coats at 1:30. Then he went on about how he went to another bar afterward.

Hmm... did Bill forget that I saw and talked to him that night? And what happened to the barback that he supposedly went home with? Did he go to the other bar with him? Why did he insist on keeping up the facade of the jetset party guy who has so much sex, even after I caught him alone and pathetic at the empty coat check line? I can only guess that Bill was so immersed in his fantasy world that he completely lost all sense of reality.

It makes you wonder if the people he talks about in his stories even exist. I'm starting to feel like I'm hanging out with my old friends in my neighborhood, trying to figure out if their Nintendo stories are real or not. You'd expect such wild stories from kids, but to see it happening to an adult is just plain scary!

There really isn't any need to tell stories to impress people. Half the time, no one even believes the things that people tell them. Lying to people like that just sets off a shockwave of unbelievable stories where people try to one up each other and then you end up with some cracker jack story about how someone is a direct descendant of Jesus and how another person saw Lance Armstrong at Taco Bell.

One good thing to come out of this mess is that I can sleep easier knowing that Bill wasn't getting more play than I was. Whew!