Fran Lucas leaves us his experience with this nefarious character that many times we meet … or are.
Along with Enrique Iglesias' mole, the food flavored with anise and the polar divers, this guy, the extroverted idiot, ranks among the things that I find most difficult to tolerate. Maybe they don't remember, but he was by our side all the time and he wants to continue to be. It was that midget from elementary school, who asked you if your parents were separated, hardly knowing you. It was that eager lady in the grocery line enthusiastically recommending a certain detergent, forcing you to remove your headphones. It was your girlfriend's uncle, who at family lunches made jokes about the size of your dick, spitting pieces of chicken rice at you while laughing on the verge of a heart attack.
I find it very difficult not to want to kill myself when I have a conversation with him. I dream of one day stop being so cowardly, look him in the eye and tell him “I don't want to listen to you anymore in my life, don't take it personally”, but it doesn't come out. I'm one of the types who stares at them, but not in the eye, but at the septum, which produces the same optical sensation, without having to bother you with eye contact. This allows you to save lost time and in parallel to be able to reschedule your week or remember if there is no grated cheese at home. But the monologal fly gets closer and closer, drinks more wine and speaks louder. He suffers from a kind of neuronal stuttering and is never ashamed, it is irreversible.
A few days ago I ran into the person I spoke to. As he greeted us, he yelled over his left eardrum that he knew me. I did my best not to ask him from where, but he reiterated it five times in the first thirty-four seconds of conversation. I had no choice but to say, “oh, where from.” So, as it sounds, without questioning. He replied that he had gone to a recital of Bajo Efecto, a band that I had in my adolescence and that later we met again in a wedding, for which he added “Do you remember the amazing brunette in a blue dress who danced next to the bar?” Before I finished sighing a no, he said “she was my wife, but I got divorced, cogetelá, if you want I'll give you her number.”
The guy sold his story as if it were an MP3 CD with Latin music on a line bus and did not lend you the floor at any time.
I cut off the conversation sharply and said “excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom”, but not as the blonde from the bowling alley says, I genuinely said it. I got up from the couch with nausea, fever and panic. It reminded me of my puberty, when I silently vomited the sixteen alfajores of cornstarch that I ate secretly in the middle of the afternoon. When I got back I sat on the far end of his radio and carefully watched all the fights leading up to Mayweather. Something very boring for me, since boxing interests me as much as eukaryotic cells. However, watching two millionaires crawling in a ring, was the least hostile scenario in front of the gossip of whom I speak.
While I was digesting my first handful of peanuts, contemplating the oiled torsos of the fighters, the genocide of silence again caused me a new spasm, “Francisco, Francisco, look, listen to this,” he said, while playing a pop song with the cell phone speaker hideous honeyed. “You have to do something like that with Low Effect,” he advised me. I explained to him for the fourth time, that I haven't played in that band for eight years anymore, because the singer wanted to stab me in our last rehearsal.
For his part, my friend Joel, who is a fantastic person, but totally intolerant when there is a screen with sports in front of him, bit his teeth like after-hours amphetamine and was looking for some concrete or marble object to throw at his head. The night had turned into an unspoken pact of pain, with any hope of comfort squeezed into this idiot's speech. But who said that once you hit rock bottom, you won't fall anymore?
I always thought that a Creole guitar was the best decoration a home could have. Until that moment, in which Humberto, yes, I invoke you, Humberto, began to offer a tribute show to Maná and León Gieco. I felt at that moment, the same as when my parents separated for the first time. My psychologist says that it is an emotional rigidity that superficially protects me from possible future trauma. And so I ended the night, alienated, shivering and squinting.
Yesterday, as I was writing this, I realized how much I like to play guitar at any social gathering and how excruciating my words can be when they get drunk. I wondered with great fear, am I also an outgoing idiot?
