Gibe talking

Am I an evil person, or do I say the wrong things for the right reasons?

by Chris Wright

At the age of 13, I was a horrible little shit. My best friend Vince was even more horrible than I was. Together, we made a truly odious pair. While other boys our age were out climbing trees and kicking balls, Vince and I would sit around devising ways to be shitty. Our favorite lark, our coup de grâce, was a game called My Mother. One of us would go up to a girl -- Maggie McAdam, say -- and strike up a conversation:

"Did you know Chris's mother is a famous dancer?"

"She's not."

"She is."

"No."

"Yes. Go ask him."

So Maggie would march up to me and say, "Is your mother a famous dancer?" And I, my face a mask of anguish, would respond, "My mother hasn't got any legs."

Though there were subtle variations -- "My mother hasn't got any arms," "My mother hasn't got a tongue" -- the basic result was always the same: our victim would squirm, redden, sputter, and, if we were lucky, cry. Oh, the laughs we had.

Life, of course, has a way of paying you back for these things.

Over the years, I have found myself playing the role of Maggie in countless excruciating faux pas. It happened just the other day -- I ran into a friend of mine who, last time I'd seen her, had been pregnant. "When's the baby due?" I asked. "I had it three weeks ago," she replied, folding her arms across her still-ample belly. Squirm, redden, sputter . . .

This sort of thing happens all the time. I am the king of the crippling slip of the tongue, the maestro of the conversational pratfall. Give me a person in a wheelchair and I will admire his ability to think on his feet. Give me a hunchback and I will have a hunch about something or other. Give me a person who's suffered from mental problems and I'll eventually say, "What, are you nuts?"

It's not that I enjoy the game. I live in fear of finding myself in the company of divorcées, recovering alcoholics, bald people, short people, plump people, big-nosed people, people with speech defects, with dandruff, scars, or wandering eyes. And then there are those from whom I flee in sheer terror, those who never fail to inspire a baleful solecism: the recently bereaved.

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In some sense, we all share this impulse. We'll be sitting across from a person with a blimp-size boil on his or her forehead, and we'll be thinking ignore the blimp, ignore the blimp. And yet the very thought makes ignoring the blimp impossible. Despite -- because of -- our efforts, our eyes return magnetically to the offending pustule. We can't help ourselves. It's human nature.

I, however, take this a step further and contrive to work the subject of boils into the conversation. Often I'll go the direct route: "I had this godawful zit on my ass last week." Failing this, I'll let go with some inadvertent pun. "Oh," I'll say, "it's boiling in here."

So why don't I just keep my mouth shut? I've tried it. It doesn't work. A family friend recently died of an unexpected illness. "I haven't just lost a sister," said her sister over drinks one night. "I've lost a friend." There were a thousand things to be done: a hand on the shoulder, a few words of comfort, a shared tear. What did I do? I grinned. "That's terrible," I said. Ha-ha, good one, the grin said. My friend was too polite or too stunned to object, so we just sat there in silence. I haven't heard from her since.

Sometimes my flubs take an even more sinister edge. Another friend recently introduced me to his fiancée. She was attractive, friendly, and overweight. No big deal. Her mother, though, was a big deal, a very big deal indeed. I'd managed to avoid staring, but I couldn't help being aware of the way the mother filled a couch. We were sitting in her living room, teacups balanced on our knees, making polite conversation. Had anyone seen South Park: The Movie? I inquired. No one had. God, I wish I'd said The Matrix.

Before I really knew what I was doing, I had broken into a rendition of a song from the movie: "Kyle's mom is a big fat bitch, a big fat, big fat, big fat bitch . . . " The atmosphere in the room could not have been any more charged if I'd taken a flamethrower to the mother's knickknack shelf. The fiancée's father looked as though he might actually get up and hit me, but I couldn't help myself: "A big fat, big fat, big fat biiiitch . . . "

To make matters worse, a subsequent re-viewing of the film revealed that the song goes: "Kyle's mom is a stupid bitch." I don't think the word "fat" enters into it.

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The American Heritage Dictionary defines a Freudian slip as "a verbal mistake that is thought to reveal an unconscious belief, thought, or emotion." If this is the case, then my unconscious emotion during the South Park incident was expressly malicious. And yet I am positive that this was not the case. I honestly believe that there was not a hint of malice underlying my howling affront.

I certainly wasn't feeling hateful when I made what may be the mother of verbal blunders. It was during Thanksgiving, at my wife's great-aunt's house. The entire family was assembled around the large table. There were three, possibly four kinds of cranberry sauce. My wife's father sat diagonally across from me; he is, and has been since his teenage years, blind. I have nothing but affection for my father-in-law, and I know there was no harm intended when, after someone took my picture with a flash bulb, I clapped my hands to my eyes and hollered, "I'm bliiiind!"

In a way, I think these relentless gaucheries arise -- bear with me here -- from feelings of generosity rather than spite. I grin at the death of a friend not because this is funny, but because it is the antithesis of funny. Overwhelmed by grief, I retreat into grief's opposite: ha-ha. And my blurted insults? You could say they are a sort of empathy overflow: I am so conscious of the words that cause discomfort, and I am so determined not to utter them, that . . . well, ignore the blimp.

Then again, perhaps it's true that the horrible little shit is alive and well within me. Perhaps there is still a perverse pleasure to be had from doling out pain and humiliation. But then how does one explain the fact that the pain and humiliation are largely my own?

And I do feel terrible about all this. I am sorry. I'm sorry I said to the son of a sickly-looking 85-year-old, "He's looking pretty good for 95." And the guy who has testicular cancer -- I'm sorry I called him "ballsy." And Maggie McAdam, if you're out there: I'm sorry. My mother has an excellent pair of legs.

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com.

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