Down, but not out

By Tony Carnevale Catalyst

Send comments to: catalyst@wildcat.arizona.edu

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Tony Carnevale

"So what'd you do last night?" Phil asks from around his burger.

"Nothing," I say.

"I went out with Karen," he says, though I didn't ask. "We saw the new DeNiro movie, then we got coffee... "

His voice trails off, his eyes glance behind me. He wants me to ask what they did after "getting coffee." There's no way I'm going to indulge him like that. No way.

"What did you do after getting coffee?" Clearly, I have no willpower.

"Oh, not much," he says, pretending to hold back a grin.

Phil, as they say, gets all the chicks. I have no idea how.

I met him in a programming class, a field of study for which my mind is just not properly structured. He was able to help me enough between exams for me to pass. Phil himself is going to be a big-shot programmer one of these days. Last summer, interning with a small company, he wrote what turned out to be "the most successful crossword-puzzle software in the world." I didn't know there was a lot of competition in the crossword-puzzle software industry, but apparently there's enough that one of them can be deemed "most successful."

Clearly, Phil's got smarts. But that's pretty much all he's got. He's about as charming as a dog mounting your leg, and he's not much to look at, either.

Once, a girl in the process of refusing to date me performed a long, drawn out speech. I usually don't get speeches. I'm used to the old pepper-spray-and-subsequent-restraining-order. So I relaxed and watched the show. She said a lot of nice things, actually, about how I made her feel clever and beautiful, and she loved being around me. I waited for the bad part, but it never came. I would've taken it for a marriage proposal if she hadn't maced me immediately afterward. On the way home, I puzzled over what she'd said, sifting through my memories to see if I'd missed something. I had, of course.

"Looks aren't everything," she'd said, over and over, as if repeating a mantra to herself. "Looks aren't everything."

Translation: "Looks are everything, and you ain't got 'em."

But as homely as I might be, I swear Phil's worse-looking. When Phil bumps uglies, his entire body is eligible to be bumped, if you know what I mean. So why, then, does he bump uglies with such amazing frequency? And why do I love the phrase "bump uglies" so very, very much? These are both mysteries.

Phil reaches over and grabs a handful of my fries. "You opened that letter from Susan yet?"

I nod. "Yeah, it was fine."

Phil shakes his head. "You're fuckin' weird," he says.

He's talking about a letter from an old girlfriend I haven't seen or heard from in years. I dumped her in the immature, scared manner of boys who start going to college. Last month, she sent a letter to my parents' house, and they sent it on to me. For a long time the envelope was sitting on my floor because I couldn't bear to open it. When I finally did, it was with the sort of numb terror that you have when you're waiting for a doctor to tell you whether you have a life-threatening disease. But it wasn't a life-threatening disease. It was a letter. A perfectly cordial one, as it turned out. Phil's right; I am fuckin' weird.

The waitress comes by to leave the check. I watch Phil intently for some sign of his innate attractiveness to women - a playboy's wink, perhaps, or a squirt of pheromonal musk from a heretofore hidden gland - but see nothing. I quickly redirect my gaze to the waitress, hoping that her reaction contains some clue to her inevitable enchantment. Bad move. She interprets my enthusiastically sudden stare as "checking her out," and scowls nastily at me before she stalks off.

"So no, wait, what did you do last night?" asks Phil. He wants to hear me say "nothing" again.

"Will you pick up the check for once?" I say, already halfway out of the booth. "I'm going to get our waitress's number."