Adrienne Nadeau

A while back, I started dating a guy that my friends called Fast Eddie.  He earned this inauspicious nickname because he tried a particular method of seduction that I have only experienced in Chicago.  It goes something like this: the guy gets you back to your place, starts kissing you and whatever else, then — instead of trying to take your clothes off — they just start undressing.  It’s amazing in its simplicity.  Sure enough, whenever a guy takes his shirt or pants off (and more than one Chi-towner has tried this on me) I start to think “oh, are we undressing? It’s weird being clothed while he’s half naked.”  I have to fight some strong impulses in order to not take my clothes off just to normalize the situation.  The psychology involved is stunning.

However, Fast Eddie is probably too dumb to understand psychology.  But he is really good looking and amazing in bed . . . which was enough to compensate for stupidity for about 3 weeks.  He called me from a restaurant where he was hanging out and drinking excessive amounts of wine with his brother, and wanted to me join them.  Sure, it was last minute and I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t been told about one of his rare days off sooner, but hell, I didn’t want to fight and I definitely wanted some wine.  I threw on some clothes, jumped on the train, and headed over to the restaurant.

I did not expect Eddie to be tripping on shrooms in celebration of his day off.  This crucial bit of information had not been imparted over the phone.  I ordered wine, some calamari, and hunkered down for the inevitable insanity.

His brother, D, turned out to be a doll.  Very sweet and funny.  He, like Eddie, was a cater-waiter. Unlike his younger brother, D was trying to launch his own catering company.  As a business owner and an MBA candidate, D and I chatted about the trials of entrepreneurship.  At some point in the evening, as I chatted about marketing strategy and accounting grammar, I turned to my date.  Pupils dilate to the size of dinner plates, he stared at us with an uncomprehending expression.  He made some joke about getting drunk, the beauty of organic hallucinogenics, and I thought to myself what am I doing here?

Then he kissed me and I remembered.

But nothing could make me forget what happened next.  Fast Eddie started dropping the N-bomb.  Now, he is Hispanic, and I understand that there is some question about the use of the N-word by Hispanics.  Either way, I hate the word and his excessive use of it was making me uncomfortable.  D was also uncomfortable and we requested that Fast Eddie stop with the racial slurs.

Eddie, drunk and tripping, was not about to give up his ignorance.  He started arguing with us about his right to use the N-word, that there weren’t any Black people at the table, etc. etc.  Not wanting to fight, I just told him to stop saying the word around me.  He was a grown man, I couldn’t control him, and probably couldn’t change his mind, but at this moment, to make me happy, he should shut the hell up.

This tactic did not work.  Angered that his girl and his brother were teaming up against him, he called D a “faggot” and proclaimed that bad words were only offensive if the speaker had an offensive intention. There was nothing wrong with what he was saying.

Oddly, I found this lack of respect for language more infuriating and offensive as the words themselves.   Proclaiming that communication was an agreement between the speaker and the listener, vocabulary was built on collaborative definitions of words and expressions, by claiming that the harm is in the speaker’s intent and not the agreed upon meaning of a word negates everything I try to do as an educator, a writer, and a performance poet.

Okay, maybe I had also had too much wine.  But I wasn’t wrong.  D cheered me on as I shouted self-righteously about the power of language.  Then, sensing the night would not improve, I asked to be taken to the train.

It should not surprise you to learn that I have not heard from Fast Eddie.  This is not the first time things have ended with a guy because of stupidity.  But it is the first time my poetic radicalism was the motivating factor behind my rage.

The moral of the story: don’t date on shrooms and don’t piss a poet off.

Gentlemen, I am accepting applications for boyfriends.  Try not to stall my internet connection with the inevitable flood of e-mail submissions.