Why Ask?

So Patrick for some reason wants to wait for me in the lobby and walk out of the gym with me tonight. We usually leave at separate times and go our separate ways. But not tonight he wanted us to leave together.

Now I’ve known Patrick for about 12 or 15 years. He is an Italian-American and kind of dark. Sometimes I’ll have fun at his expense and tell him about his ancestry and the supposed obvious African influence that must run in his family. I will sometimes speak of his one, or so he says, relationship with a black man, James, and that it was inevitable only because of like attracts like, birds of a feather and so on. I will warn him sometimes that if his mother ever found out about him and James she might be so pleased for acknowledging his heritage or just shoot him because of the shame he’s brought down on her house. I don’t think he likes me to speak about her that way but I enjoy it. It might be a little sadistic but I only do that when he says something silly or racially insensitive and he needs to get his left nut tweaked a little.

“Is there some reason why we are meeting here?” I asked as I saw him sitting watching the TV in the gym lobby.

“No,” he says.”I just wanted to walk out of the gym together.”

Thank God, I thought. The idea had crossed me that perhaps I had agreed to go to dinner or something and that I had forgotten a promise that I had made.

Anyway, as we leave the building, I tell Patrick that I want to go to Naked Chocolate and get some cup cakes. There is nothing in the world like doing a really intensive workout and then pigging out on stuff that you shouldn’t be eating in the first place. But what the hell you only live once and I don’t want to say on my death bed, “I should have had more cake.”

So we head in the direction of the store and he starts to tell me of maintenance man where he works and that he thinks that he’s Russian, and that whenever he works late, the man always comments about how he is working late. At least I think that’s what Patrick tells me, but in all honesty I had lost interest in what he was telling me as soon as he said, “let me tell you.”

I realized soon enough that Patrick was starting to get upset when he suddenly complained that I wasn’t listening to him and that what had taken him 50 seconds to tell everyone else was taking 15 minutes to tell me. I could have said that this wasn’t the Johnny Carson show with a boring ass monologue at the beginning but a dialogue and that my so called interruptions were making his crap interesting, but we aren’t that close.

Well, I finally got from him that the Russian had one night followed him into the men’s room and while he was at the urinal, the Russian had reached out and touched his earring. Then later on this month, the Russian and he were in the elevator together and the Russian proceeds to adjust his own family jewels. Not in the way that you do when one of your testicles slips out of your briefs at an inopportune time, or when you wear boxers and the material has bunched up so much that you feel that the circulation has been cut off. No, this was a deliberate move by the Russian for attention and Patrick wanted to know what to do.

“Report his ass so that this doesn’t happen again or at least if it does there is some record of it happening,” I said.

“Noooo. I don’t want him to lose his job,” Patrick said.

Alright enough of that story. I am upset now. I just wanted to know, why do people do that to me? Someone will always go out of their way to ask me shit and then when I give them my answer, completely dismiss it. It’s like the whole point of asking me something is just to get me to think about bull that I had no interest in and then yank the rug from under to me to see how I fall. Come to think of it, I think I’ve had to tell all of my ex’s at one time or another, if you don’t want my answer then don’t ask me shit. I guess that’s one of the reasons I’m by myself. But damn, there no chance of Patrick and me bumping dick together, so why do that to me? Is this some kind sick game that I’m just unaware of?