“Comedy is the imitation of the worst kind of men,” –Aristotle

“Dark humor is like food—not everybody gets it!” Josef Stalin

I was waiting on a friend who would never show when Marilyn Dartman sat down next to me. I spent the last half-hour looking back at the door whenever someone entered, when she sidled up next to me in an aged sports bar that the owner hadn’t renovated in twenty years. It happened so many times before, that I had the old ‘shame on me’ dunce cap on for expecting that this time would be different.

I don’t care how angry, bitter, resentful and just plain fed up I get here, the friend who wouldn’t show wasn’t an awful person. Was he inconsiderate, sure. Did he abandon me the second a hint of something better, more enjoyable, and just plain fun arose. He did, I’ll admit that, but he wasn’t rude. He was inconsiderate, unless the considerations involved himself. What’s the difference? I wondered sipping slow on a dark, stout beer. The difference is that he’s one of the expected, and I am the type that is always left expecting him to show up. I play the Charlie Brown character in this production, always running up to the football, expecting Lucy to continue to hold it, every single time, until you can’t bear to read any further. 

While sipping on that delicious brew, I thought about the few times in my life where I was expected to show up. They made plans, and those plans involved others, but they made it clear that they expected me to be one of the ones who showed up.

“Are you going to be there?” they asked with a small amount of plea in their voice. It felt odd being on the other side of this paradigm, and I assured them that I would be there. Throughout the course of that day, some double-checked, some even triple-check. Even though those triple-checks sounded cringey desperate, I understood. I’ve been there.

“I want to assure you that I would never do that to another person,” I said when they double-checked me, “because I’ve been on the other side of this so often that I could write an article on it.”

I’ve been the pre-teen soccer player expecting that the set of headlights that washed over me were from my father’s car, bringing a merciful end to me sitting there in the dark all by myself for nearly an hour. I’ve worn that expectant smile when the sounds of the bar or restaurant’s swinging door cue another’s entrance, only to see a foreign shape fill that space. I know how that expectant smile dissipates when the laughing, fun shapes fill that entrance. I know the sense of vulnerability that drives another to the proactive measure of triple-checking, and I know what it feels to sit there so long that I vow, once again, to never put myself in such a vulnerable position of counting on anyone for anything ever again. As deeply entrenched as those feelings of resentment are, I would never reveal them by triple-checking.

“I’d never do that to another,” I say to try to put an end to what I considered the painful revelations inherent in their triple-checking. “I’d never damage the expecting the way they’ve damaged me.”

How does a friend blowing off another at a bar do so much damage? I consider the general practice of no-showing abhorrent regardless the circumstances, but if I were to dig deep, I’m sure we’d find some pre-existing conditions that lead me to such straits, and my guess is that it’s this congealed ball of so many flavors that it’s impossible to nail one. It’s probably so deep-seated that it would take deep, intrusive therapy to fully define, but most of us are not so damaged by such matters that we seek therapy.   

“Sorry, I forgot,” is what the expected say the day after pulling a no-show, when they’re not lying or providing an excuse. The excuse I heard most often from this friend who would never show was that needed to spend time with his son. Who can argue against that, and how do we verify it? Years later, I found out he reversed this lie to his kid, telling him that he was hanging out with me on the nights in question. (On an illustrative side note, his kid, now a grown adult, still resents me for taking so much quality time away from he and his dad.)

“That’s fine,” we say after they apologize. It’s not fine but it feels odd, petty, and even a little dramatic for a grown man to say something like, ‘No, you know what, it’s actually not fine. You left me sitting there by myself, feeling like a fool, staring back at that ever-swinging door, thinking it might be you.’ We also know that it won’t prevent future incidents, and we know that holding onto that anger and resentment won’t do anything either, so we just say, “It’s fine.” If anyone else can call them out like that, I applaud them for being honest to the point of revealing how vulnerable they felt, but I just don’t do vulnerable well. I’ve also learned how skilled, and some might say artful, others can be when diminishing and dismissing another’s pain.

 It was in that void that a woman named Marilyn Dartman stepped.

“I’ll buy the next round for you for … your soul,” Marilyn Dartman said, stepping into this tangled web. She said it over my shoulder, with as much baritone as she could muster. She then extended a hand. “Marilyn Dartman,” she said. “May I sit next to you.”

I was in no mood for humor, but Marilyn sold that line so well, and she was so serious, that I burst out laughing. “Has that ever worked before, Marilyn Dartman?” I asked shaking her hand and inviting her to sit.

“Actually it did, yeah, it did sort of … on me,” she admitted, sliding into the seat diagonally. “I sold my soul to the devil a decade ago.” She stopped to mentally count, “Yeah, it was almost a decade anyway. I was all young and stupid, and I thought Beelzebub might be able to make me the greatest writer who ever lived. I’ll take the ‘L’ for it, my bad, but I thought I was so close to becoming the greatest writer who ever lived that I thought if anyone could put me over the top, it was Beelzebub. I now chalk it up to youthful exuberance, or naïveté, but if you’d ever read anything I’ve written since, I think you’d agree I got screwed.”

“I’m sure you’re not that bad,” I said.

“Well, I’m not that great either,” she said, “which is kind of the point.”

I enjoyed this beyond it being such a wonderful distraction from all my sulking, so I bit, “I’ve seen the movies and read the literature, but what are the procedures, or the process you have to go through to get Satan to grant you your wishes?”

“I did research on the best way to do it, but I don’t even remember where I read that to do it right you need to fly down to the corner of highway 61 and highway 49, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, but that’s what I did.”

“Robert Johnson,” I said. “Old blues singer, allegedly sold his soul on that corner.”

“That’s it. That’s the name everyone dropped on Reddit,” she said. “It’s so plain that it’s almost hard to remember some of the times. Other people, in line, mentioned the group Led Zeppelin, and some other guys named Niccolo Paganini, and Bill Murray who sold their souls, and we thought if he could do it for them, he might be able to spin some of his black magic on us.” 

“You said we,” I said. “There were other people selling their souls?”

“Oh my gosh, how about lines were around the block,” Marilyn said. “Had I not flown on such a limited round-trip and paid for a one-night stay, I would’ve turned around and come back another day when the lines weren’t so long. It was so ridiculous that Satan’s minions eventually installed a self-checkout aisle.”

“C’mon,” I said. “You had me till that. I can’t believe that they addressed customer complaints-”

“Believe what you want,” Marilyn said. “Someone in line said, and I quote, ‘it’s just good business, and they received a ton of complaints.’ Believe what you want though.”

“After standing in line for so long, I’ve since found that if you know what you’re doing, you can sell your soul to the devil from the comfort of your own bedroom, or you can find local chapters, or whatever, but I didn’t know any of that back then, and I was so dying to be a great writer that I would’ve done whatever it took, and I would’ve flown wherever just to get it done.”

“Did you get out of it?”

“Out of Satan owning my soul?” she said. “I did eventually. I told one of his minions, in his customer relations department that if Satan didn’t release me from my contractual obligations, I would accept the Lord Jesus Christ as my savior, and I’d go about saving all kinds of souls with my story of redemption. His minion says, but you don’t believe, and I said, and you’re going to love this, I said, ‘Does the car salesman really believe that the Smart Fortwo is the best car on his lot?’ I was so proud of that comeback, which I thought of on the spur of the moment, that I don’t remember much of what he said after that, but a week later one of his minions calls me back and says, ‘Satan says fine, he knows you’re coming to him anyway.’”

“That is such a bunch of …” I said, “You’re joking, right?”

“I’m not, unfortunately,” Marilyn said. “I wish I was. It was pretty dumb.”

“Because from what I’ve heard you can never get it back, or, at the very least, that it’s harder than you’re making it sound.”

“I’m condensing bit time, here,” Marilyn said. “After I submitted my request to his council, I had to go through all of the displays of the powers he uses to scare people. He put on a big show of letting me know his presence, with the theatrical opening and closings of doors, rocking chairs moving, and he even possessed my favorite aunt for a time. I wasn’t buying any of it. I knew he was just trying to scare me, but I didn’t fall for it. I laughed at it as a matter of fact, until he released me.”

“That is quite a tale Miss Marilyn Dartman,” I said. “Quite a tale.”   

“And it happened,” she said in closing story mode. “It all happened. So, what are you doing here all by yourself anyway? I’ve never seen you here before.”

“It’s a long story, but suffice it to say that I don’t pick my friends very well,” I told her. I proceeded to tell her some of my tale, leaving out the vulnerable elements of course. I also told her the theories I developed, while sitting there for a half-hour, about the differences between the expected and the expecting.

And then, as if to prove to me that she was not one of the vulnerable, expecting types, Marilyn told me how she ghosted one of her friends, a woman named Andi, at a restaurant.

“She called me and asked if I wanted to meet for lunch at this place she really wanted to try,” Marilyn said. “I was hesitant, but I eventually said yes. She broke me down, made me feel guilty, and all that. I wasn’t into it then, and I really wasn’t into it when that afternoon rolled around. I just wasn’t in restaurant mode, if you follow.”

It wasn’t a test, and I looked for it. I scoured her face to see if she was somehow testing me, but it wasn’t there. It was impossible to know for sure, it still is, but I wondered if this was a simple case of me bringing up a subject that reminded her of a story from her life. I still wonder, to this day, if it was equivalent to the almost impulsive reaction some have to our warning not to touch that one very specific subject that bothers us most. If we tell people that we’re sensitive about lions, just to randomly pick a subject to set a premise, and we tell them that we’ll entertain stories about any animal in the animal kingdom, except lions, what do you think their first joke will be about? Lions, of course. It’s just what some types do, and I’ve met such a wide variety of those types. It’s almost equivalent to that wound you have in your mouth that you can’t stop licking, even though you know it will only make it worse. Except this is another person’s wound, and they can’t help but lick it with their infected tongues.

Even though Marilyn, and all her stories, proved a more than sufficient distraction from my feelings of anger and resentment, I was still in a particularly vulnerable mode, but I don’t get squishy and sad when I’m vulnerable. I grow resentful and even angry.

“When did you decide you wouldn’t be going to this restaurant with Andi?” I asked. I interrupted Marilyn after she started in on another subject. Her no-show at a restaurant tale was so meaningless to her that she tossed it out as if it were nothing more than another tale from her life, and she started in on another subject before I would bring her back. Her reaction was equivalent to ‘Hey, I’ve done that whole no-show thing to someone too, but what do you think of this weather, huh?’

“As I said, I wasn’t really into her whole luncheon plans to begin with,” Marilyn said with an almost playful smile, “but Andi sounded so needy that I just couldn’t say no. It was one of those moments we all have. When that afternoon rolled around, it was a weekend afternoon that followed such a rough week at work, and I just wanted to veg. I was so far away from restaurant mode that I just said nah.” 

“The point I’m trying to get here is did you tell her, this Andi, any of your feelings of nah at the time, at any time, before the fact?” She said she didn’t. “Did you, at any point, text her to let her know that you wouldn’t be there?” The answers to all of the above were no, followed by detailed explanations of the rough week she had at work, which led me to ask, “So, you just decided to leave your good friend sitting all alone in the restaurant?” Yes. Marilyn didn’t actually say the word yes, but it was pretty obvious, at this point, that a lack of no was tantamount to a confession.

At this point, it is safe to say that Marilyn and I were no longer hitting it off. She was giving me that scrunched up, “Move on!” look. Her no-show was so meaningless to her that she was trying to convince me that it should be just as meaningless to me. I mentally said, ‘Nah!’ My three progressive questions led to some silent tension between us. I didn’t care. I didn’t seek more information to make her feel bad, I wanted the mentality of the expected explained, framed, and enshrined in my head to help me try to see another side to it.

Marilyn said a whole lot of things to plead her case. She brought up things Andi did to her in the past, and those things were so meaningless and unrelated that it was pretty obvious that she was searching for circumstantial evidence to prove her case. She was no longer interested in me in anyway at this point, but she felt a need to clear her name. Marilyn was no different than any of us, and our need to prove that we are the good guys in our scenarios in life. Marilyn Dartman wanted her ‘good guy’ crown back.

“So, these things she did to you,” I said. “What you did, by ghosting her at a restaurant, leaving her to tell the wait staff to wait another couple of minutes, until she felt so foolish she either left or ate alone? This was your retribution?”

“Yes,” she said without conviction. “I mean, no, but she’s no angel. Let me tell you that much. If you’re trying to say that she never did anything to me you’re wrong.” She then went on a rant, continuing to talk about Andi, and all of her faults. 

Our conversation did not progress beyond this point. It was the contextual equivalent of yes huh and nuh uh that often concluded with me saying, “I still think it was wrong.” The only notable element of this part of the conversation was our tone, as it progressed from conversational to the two of us trying to speak over one another to the point of almost yelling.  

“I don’t need this,” she said to put an end to it. “What is wrong with you anyway? I sat down here to have a drink, and a decent conversation, and you’re all like … uh.” She made some kind of expression here to suggest I was badgering her, and making her feel bad about herself.

I knew this was the point of no return, and I knew she would be leaving in seconds, so I just launched: “I just don’t know why you people don’t just say no. That’s really the part I just don’t get. Would you like to hang out with me tonight? No. Now I might ask why, but all you have to say is I think you’re kind of boring, or you’re so boring that I cannot bear spending another hour with you. Or, I want to hang out with Steve, because he’s so much more fun. You know what I say? I say fine and dandy, because no is better than a no show. No leaves me wondering why, but I get over it just as quick. No-show leaves me in a bar, by myself, looking back at the door, like a damned fool. What’s wrong with me, you ask. I ask, what’s wrong with you? Why would you do that to another person, anyone, much less a friend, or a best friend?

“If your plans change, or you fall out of restaurant mode,” I continued, speaking over her. “Why don’t you pick up the phone and push a couple buttons that say, ‘I’ve decided I don’t want to go.’ Why, who cares, thanks for telling me bud, because I’d rather you text me that you’ve decided you don’t want to hang out with me, because I’m boring, that someone else is more fun, my breath smells like European cheese, or you’ve decided not be friends with me anymore, because you’re starting to consider me an unpleasant and smelly orifice on the human body. Would it hurt, sure, but it’s all better than leaving me sitting in a bar or restaurant, all by myself, looking at the door, feeling like an absolute fool for believing, once again, that you’re a good friend.”

“There is something wrong with this guy,” Marilyn said to the few patrons in the bar, to try to drive some kind of dagger home. “There is something so wrong with you that I don’t want to know anything more about,” she added picking up her drink and her drink napkin. She appeared all ready to march away, but she turned back, “I’m a good person, and you don’t know me. There’s something so deeply wrong with you that you’d say such things to a complete stranger. You don’t know me, and how dare you?”

Marilyn Dartman did not appear tears. It was all anger, disgust, or righteous indignation that drove her to sit in the opposite corner of the bar. The fella she sat next to in that dark corner gave me a look, nothing on it, just a look. I turned back to my beer, took a drink, and began watching the hockey match on the television set.

I’ve since told this tale to a wide range of people, and the reactions were mixed. Mixed. I didn’t bother keeping a ledger on their reactions, but they were about 50/50. I did everything I could to tell this interaction as objectively as possible to try to get true reactions. I included the stories Marilyn told me about Andi, and any information I could to support Marilyn’s cause, because I wanted an objective answer for what I considered a bullet proof case. Even though I didn’t think much of what she added, I tried hard to remove any tones to her story to seduce my listeners to my side. The 50/50 reactions shocked me. How could anyone agree with Marilyn? Some agreed agreed with me, but the others shocked me by saying, in various ways, that I was wrong. Some said I was harsh, and I admit that there were some time and place emotions that drove my spirit. Others said I was just wrong for calling out a complete stranger without knowing all the facts, and they admitted that aggressively saying such things to a woman prejudiced their opinions. “A man should never say such things to a woman,” they said, “and if you were near-yelling that’s just beyond the pale, and it’s just not something a man should ever do to a woman.” Still others said it was none of my business how anyone chooses to conduct their personal affairs. If her friend was upset by the matter that’s between Marilyn and Andi, and I had no business subjecting my views on her.

“Ok, fair enough,” I said, “but isn’t it about respect, or even basic human decency? If I say I’m going to meet someone at 7:00, I usually show up at about 6:50. That’s me. I understand not everyone abides by my self-imposed edicts, but a complete no-show? If you’re fifteen minutes late, I consider that a subtle show of disrespect, but it’s so negligible that I won’t remember it two minutes later. Thirty minutes doubles the disrespect, but a complete no-show, that’s when we move into the uncharted waters of basic human decency.”

Did I lay it on a bit thick? Probably, especially to a woman. As for all the other arguments, I just think I value friendship far more than most, and I now know how that puts me on the weak end of those relationships. There is this sense they must have that because I’ve always been there, I’ll always be there, and that leads them to value our friendship less. They don’t expect more, because they’ve never put that much thought into it. You’re a friend not a lover, so why should they bend over backwards to make it work? Then, after you’ve finally had enough, and you unceremoniously end that friendship, because you know they won’t show up, and you get back together with them, after ten years apart, you might expect some sort of nostalgic apology for all the violations of the conditional tenets of your friendship, but you find yourself left expecting, because they aren’t really that big on nostalgia.