Awkward Situation #233b

When I moved to Denver in the summer of 2000, of course I didn't know anyone in town, so my pal Josh Vanek gave me the contact info of his friend Sarah, whom he'd lived with in Latvia as part of the Peace Corps. A couple weeks later I got up the gumption to give this girl a call, not knowing a single thing about her other than that she was in the Peace Corps in Latvia.

Since I didn't have a car yet, Sarah drove out to my uncle and aunt's house, where I was staying for a few weeks, and picked me up to go out to dinner. We went to Swing Thai on Alameda & Pearl and made heroic amounts of small talk, which as you probably know, is not really one of my strong points. Luckily for me, the small talk was constantly being interrupted by calls to her cell phone. She seemed to think that was really rude of her to keep answering the phone, but I didn't mind at all. So we parted company after that, and made plans to get together in a couple weeks.

She called again as expected, and we went to some frat bar downtown where there was some awful Evanescence wannabe band playing. During one of the between-songs interstices, she made a passing reference to a boyfriend, which caught me really off guard. For some reason I had assumed that since we had hung out twice, that we were on the path to dating each other. In reality, of course, she felt obligated to hang out with me since I was new in town. I had to quickly refactor the whole shtick I had planned for tonight to adjust for the fact that we were no longer in Date Mode. After the initial surprise, it didn't really bother me much that she had a boyf', since I didn't find her terribly attractive or interesting (she had gone to college in Champaign-Urbana, IL, but had never heard of the Poster Children or the Didjits! [but was presumably familiar with REO Speedwagon]). I was mostly just angry with myself for being such a numbnuts as to assume that there was romance afoot based on two Obligation Dates.

I didn't hear from Sarah for about a month, and then in early December of 2000 she e-mailed me and invited me to a Nuggets game. With the boyfriend. I was to meet Sarah and the boyfriend, whom we'll call Biff*, at Brooklyn's Bar near the Pepsi Center. As soon as I arrived at the bar, I could tell that Biff was not too keen on the idea of having me there. But I could also tell that he was under strict orders from Sarah to be polite to me. Biff, as it turned out, was a hi-falutin' corporate lawyer and lived in a swanky loft in downtown Denver. He had access to his company's box seats at the Pepsi Center, which is where we would be sitting during the game.

The box seats were most impressive, I must say. There was a mingling area with a full bar and a couple of TVs and hors d'oeuvre being constantly replenished by a staff of white-suited caterers. Not being a sports fan or a wealthy person, I'd never been in anything quite like it before or since. I would later learn that Biff was big on showering Sarah with lavish experiences such as these. Weekend getaways to Manhattan and Aspen, tickets to the U.S. Open, etc.

As the game commenced, Sarah and Biff and I took our seats. Sarah was in the middle seat, trying valiantly to make me feel welcome and simultaneously make sure Biff wasn't getting upset. I was quickly getting the idea that the BiffMeister was pretty needy and jealous, and that there was some pretty blatant alpha-male thing going on that I was expected to participate in. Whenever the conversation would turn to me, which by virtue of the seating arrangement prevented Sarah from making eye contact with Biff, Biff would put his hand on Sarah's thigh and massage it quite arduously, almost as if to try to coax the conversation back to his side.

The whole night went on like this, with Biff doing the smarmy passive-aggressive thing to me. Everything he said to me was skillfully crafted to seem polite and friendly, yet still calculated to point out how inferior I was. At one point he inexplicably reached across Sarah to high-five me, which was very representative of his vapid attempt at civility. It was, without a doubt the most agonizingly awkward situation I'd ever found myself in.

About a week later, Sarah e-mailed to apologize for Biff's behavior. They had a big fight after that night at the Nuggets game and had decided to put the relationship on hold for a bit. All of my intuitions about Biff turned out to be accurate as Sarah confided in me that Biff was indeed very possessive and clingy. Having exhibited these traits myself in relationships in my younger days, it's usually pretty easy for me to identify.

Several months passed before I heard from Sarah again. She and Biff were back together, although I could tell from her countenance that it was pretty rocky. At one point they had gotten a puppy together, which is almost always a sign of a doomed relationship, with the poor puppy charged with the task of bringing stability and warmth to a faltering relationship. Then it dawned on me that I was the middleman in this whole thing, the guy who serves the purpose of making the boyfriend jealous and the girlfriend feel not so lonely.

That same summer I was out on the town with my friend Rick and his then-girlfriend Ellen and her friend Lisa. We were at a Colorado Rockies game, and after a few Coorses, I confided to Ellen that I thought Lisa had beautiful hair. A few weeks later Lisa called me and said we should meet for beers at the Hofbrau Haus. We met, and had very little to talk about other than our mutual friends. I later learned from Rick that Lisa and her boyf' had broken up, and our meeting up for drinks was carefully engineered by Lisa to make the poor sap jealous.

Single men take note: as you can see, there's a vast untapped market for this sort of thing!

* Probably not his real name

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