She told me that I was a bad guy. Via inter-office email I received a well-written note explaining that every time she was around me she left feeling a little “emotionally bruised.” At first I laughed. I rested my chin on my folded arms and chuckled. Emotionally bruised? Now that was funny. How weenie. I closed the email and returned to the task at hand which – that day – happened to be packing up my desk. I was quitting. But as I crammed my box of unused business cards into my messenger bag, something bothered me about what she had said. Something bothered me about how I laughed after having read it and I started to wonder if maybe she had a point.

It would have been easy to dismiss her points were there not a prior history of that kind of thing. She was nice but was the kind of person who, once comfortable, liked to try and get me with occasional zingers if witticisms. Fine, was my feeling. My friends and I did that all the time, so it was open war as far as I was concerned. When she would throw a rejoinder my way, I just turned it back on her twice as hard. It wasn’t on purpose, it was for survival. With my friends, you did it or it just never stopped. Unlike my friends, however, she was rarely able to turn my response back to me and whatever the mood before hand was, it was now something to be associated with a frown. “Emotionally bruised,” I said to myself, “is just a new-age term for poor loser.” But as I thought more and more about things, the burning wreckages of friendships started to pile too high for me to see straight.

Isaac Goodman was the first from eighth grade. The two of us had been friends since I transferred to his elementary school four years earlier. He was a funny guy who emulated Robin Williams more than was probably healthy and had grand plans of being a writer. He even had his pen name picked out. At the beginning of our last year of middle school, the two of us with a few other guys started role-playing a “company”. It was an ad hoc game with the rules made up as we went along, but it was a lot of fun. We held Board-of-Directors meetings where we decided on important new strategies and talked about what we were going to do with all of our money. As a founding member, I blocked the addition of a new kid to the board and in abstentia the next week, was elected out of the game. Fights ensued. Things were said. I was definitely a bad guy then.

It bothers me that there was not just one incident but two in eighth grade. The second was with a kid named Billy McIntosh. Billy was a rich kid who lived up by the high school ours fed into. His family was well off, his dad having earned all of his money by setting up a gun shop in a town a half hour away. Billy was cool because his parents allowed him to subscribe to Playboy and because there were more than a few Saturdays we spent at his dad’s store talking about Star Trek and the girls in class we both had crushes on. I don’t know what happened with Billy except that during the last week of school, before I was going to be leaving my classmates and going to the high school in my neighborhood instead of the one they were all attending in the fall, he asked me to stop hanging around with him and wouldn’t return my phone calls. It didn’t take much to clue me in that something had changed.

Between middle school and my freshman year I made friends with a kid who was on my swim team by the name of Mike Todd. He was a cool guy who loved Sci-Fi more than I did and who had not only the best collection of Lego’s and movies, but also a selection of pornography to rival Billy’s. He liked to write and reading his work made me more and more interested in attempting it myself. Being the age I was, I gave it a go by writing some dirty short stories. Over the summer – between the two of us typing away – we had managed to compile a large library that contained more fiction than Harry Potter since neither of us had ever experienced the subject on which we wrote. When school began and I started to become friends with his friends, the two of us had an argument. It never seemed to get that vicious, but Mike was going to make sure he had the last word.

When my dad purchased a printer for the Tandy 1000 EX – a monster machine bought six years earlier – which I used for my “writing”, I doubt he had any idea what I’d do with it. Using MultiMate as my word processor, I compiled all of my stories into one document and attached a clean and simple cover page that read:

The title left a good deal to be desired but it didn’t matter since the only one with copies were Mike and I. It did prove invaluable when Mike gave it out to the people I was trying to make friends with though. The stories got xeroxed during what looked like a late night session at Kinko’s and I was finding copies everywhere for the next couple of days. It proved difficult to deny something when your name is so proudly emblazoned on the first page. It took two years for people to forget about it. It should almost go without saying that the rest of my high school career was spent trying to find ways to destroy Mike, though it should be noted that all efforts were to no avail. Of all the experiences, that was perhaps the most valuable because it taught me two things: To stop writing dirty stories and that if I did, to only put my name on it if I didn’t mind everyone seeing.

During my sophomore year, my best friend Aaron and I started to hang around with a guy by the name of James Del’Ara. James was one of those guys who was a mouse all the way through until high school when he suddenly hit puberty and became a tall strapping young man. He lived with his dad only a few blocks from me which meant that Aaron and I started to spend our school hours at his apartment watching Aliens in the full surround sound of his dad’s entertainment system. The three of us, before long, proved to be an inseparable team who went everywhere in my ’72 Super Beetle and saw as many free movies as my job at the Drive-In would allow. All was well until senior year.

At church – where the three of us went more for the girls by then than for God – there was a chick named Jenny. She was cute. She was a strawberry blond who had enough baby fat left over to give her an intoxicatingly soft look. I’d already tried to her to go out with me, but in high school, I proved to be less than popular with the girls. Jenny had a friend, however, who looked like she might have been interested. I was never going to get anywhere though if Jenny tagged along every time so I asked James to take one for the team and divert her attentions elsewhere. He complied and the two of them currently reside in Olympia, Washington while he and I hardly talk any more.

Women. I’ve lost not one, but three friends to their women. With James it was stating my disbelief that he could have actually been interested in her – despite my own attraction – that killed our friendship. With Nick and Bret it was just plain not liking their girls and telling them so that did us in.

Nick and Bret were brothers who I was friends with during my senior year and afterwards. The two of them lived way out in the suburban boonies with their mother who had recently started to suffer from Muscular Sclerosis and needed full time care. Nick was my age and I had become friends with him because the two of us were both failing Algebra and would hang out after school to share our miseries. Bret was seven years Nick’s senior and had recently quit work so he could care for his mother. It seemed that Nick slowly became more and more threatened by the friendship blooming between Bret and I and soon started spending more time online in AOL chat rooms than out in the kitchen talking with us. He met a girl online that he started to see in person and before long was pretty serious about her. It was ridiculous, I thought and unfortunately told him. A relationship made through a chat room was not one that was going to last. Nick wasn’t appreciative for my opinion and told me as much.

When Nick joined the Navy – a symbolic middle finger to his brother who also didn’t like his girl friend – and Bret’s mother moved to Michigan for professional care, Bret and I moved in together to my first apartment. We were great friends but poor roommates. I wanted the kitchen clean, he didn’t care to wash his dishes. He wanted to have people over while I insisted on a quiet apartment. He thought I was too controlling and he was right but it ended badly when, like his brother, he met a girl online and started seeing her. I felt that she was far from beautiful and was frankly irritating, neither of which I possessed the tact to withhold from a man who believed he was in love. The day before I moved out, I came home to find a note on my bed written in a fierce script detailing out the reasons why he could no longer stand me, ending in a description of how badly I would be beaten were I to speak of his girlfriend again in anything less than glowing terms.

Which brings me to now. It’s been a good couple of years since I burned someone and – since I thought those days were long past – I can feel a creeping sense of apologetic guilt from the whole incident. She was a decent sort of person and we got along okay. Strangely enough, we even shared the same birthday, which I figured meant that the two of us sat on the same page with a lot of things – both of us being Gemini’s and all. Apparently we weren’t because on my last day – when I’d been rude to her one too many times – she’d had enough of me and told me so. When looking at the past, the list of names and people who at one point or another have decided that they no longer want anything to do with me, I would think anyone would agree. Yes, ladies, I am a bad guy.