"Oh, you mean Dr. Hands McFeely?"
You can fill in the blanks. And this was a very well known insurance company, by the way.
Ew ew ew ew ew.........Use my name on this one or not--and definitely use his, the creepy effer... doesn't matter.
There was only one person in Rick's group of friends who showed any interest in me at all and took the time to get to know me. His name was Mark and he was actually a really nice guy. His wife Krista, however, who happened to be stunningly beautiful, was pretty chilly towards me. During the last year of my relationship with Rick, Mark got into a very serious motorcycle accident and was in a coma for months. He recovered, but had significant brain damage and was paralyzed from the waist down, could use only one arm, and his speech was slurred. Krista basically became his care giver—she had to dress and feed him, help him use the toilet, transfer him from his wheelchair to bed, etc.---and Rick moved in with them to help out. Krista and Mark ended up getting remarried because Mark could not remember marrying her the first time.
Rick and I had been broken up for a while and I was getting ready to move to Chicago to go to graduate school. We went out to dinner to say goodbye before I left and Mark and Krista came along. They invited me to their apartment afterwards to watch the video of their second wedding. Mark and I talked for a long time. He read me some poetry he'd written and said that his accident was one of the best things that had ever happened to him, because it had changed his perspective on life, made him stop drinking, and had shown him what and who were most important to him. While we were talking Krista interrupted us several times, asking if he was ready to go to bed. It was still early and she seemed to want to get rid of him, but he wanted to keep talking to me. Eventually she insisted.
I got ready to leave, but Krista and Rick wanted me to stay a while longer. Krista asked me to come into the kitchen to help her make some (very strong) cocktails. She said that she'd never really thanked me for all of my help right after the accident. She complimented me on my hair, which she began to run her fingers through, and said she'd always thought I was very pretty. Starting to feel a bit uncomfortable I went back into the living room with Rick, who suggested we watch a movie. Krista said (with a completely straight face) that our choices were either “Raging Bull” or a couple of porno movies. Again, I said it was time for me to head home and pack for my move, and again they asked me to stay longer. Against my better judgment, I agreed to watch part of “Raging Bull” and lo and behold the TV in the living room, which we had watched the wedding video on earlier, suddenly was no longer working and we had to use the one in Rick's bedroom where the only furniture was his bed. It's not like I didn't understand what was going on here, but more that I was curious to see just how far they were going to try to take this, though I didn't let it go much further. Once Rick was touching Krista and trying to unbutton my shirt I got up and left, despite their protests of "but the movie's not over yet!"
Ultimately, I suppose this is about a creepy guy and a creepy girl. They apparently had planned all of this after I'd called Rick to say goodbye. They wanted to have a threesome with me while their disabled husband/best friend was in the next room. I'm pretty sure that this was meant to be a step toward Krista and Rick getting together---having a third person there would enable them to think of it as something other than what it actually was. Rick did admit to me about six months later that he and Krista were sleeping together, but that it was “only because they both loved Mark so much.” Ew! Those freaky creeps deserved each other, but Mark didn't deserve either one of them.
The eldest of the bunch, a PhD candidate in the department of classical studies, proved himself to be a shameless flirt already well on his way to becoming a dirty old man; any time he wasn't on stage rehearsing he could inevitably be found chatting up the younger girls and making bawdy jokes. We endured it with good humor for the most part, but there was plenty of eye-rolling whenever his back was turned.
The show was being staged in the round, with seating arranged in multi-tiered towers completely surrounding the main performance area. As traditional stage wings weren't an option, the venue boasted all manner of alternative accesses through which actors could make their entrances, connected by a maze of stairwells and passageways.
Of course it just so happened that at one point I had to share one of these stairwells alone with our vulgar friend between scenes. Ordinarily this wouldn't have been an issue since he went on stage almost immediately after I exited, leaving little time for interaction. But then tech happened.
As any actor can tell you, tech rehearsals are one of the longest and most tedious necessary evils that come with pursuing the stage. During a cue-to-cue you spend 99% of the time doing nothing but standing around as lights are moved, scene transitions mulled over and sound levels adjusted. If you're lucky you might get to say a line or two here and there, but otherwise you're essentially scenery for the duration.
Or maybe you're cornered in a cramped, dark stairwell by a lewd bald guy two decades your senior.
I can't remember why it took so long to get that particular transition's lighting right. What I do remember is that after an admirable stretch of disarmingly normal and innuendo-free conversation, Mr. Lascivious paused to look me over appraisingly, then leaned in close and murmured, "I know your initials are K.J., but I wish they were K.Y. I find the idea of you and K-Y very pleasurable."
Aaaaand that's when I noped the hell out of there. Everyone knows you save the personal lubricant talk for the cast party.
The creepy guy. He is intrusive, elusive, revulsive and offensive. He makes our skin crawl and us want to sequester our daughters until they are 26. We have all met our own, but you are about to meet mine.
My personal experience with creepy guys started with a neighbour who lived across the street from my grade school. He began my creepy education, no word of a lie, by asking me to come in his house for cookies when I was 10. Creep factor = 9.
Then came Uncle Sleep Drink. As his name suggests, whenever my fake-dad-best-friend uncle would visit he did little more than sleep and drink. With one exception. He tried to kiss me on the lips. He thought it was a game and my dad always had the camera ready. It was not a game to me. Creep factor = 8.
Then it was university and I thought my creep days were done. I went to the bar one night (it was just that one night, I swear) and the bouncer wouldn’t let my friends and I in. He had to determined if we had shaved our legs by running his hands down our shins and calves. I laughed in an “OMG is this really happening?” kind of way. Creep factor = 6.
That takes me to present day. Just weeks ago I had occasion to visit an establishment that served alcohol. I was with a group of women bloggers and I was wearing jeans and a cowboy hat. Here is the conversation with the clearly drunk, much older gentleman (cough) when I entered with my friends.
“Hey, are you all hashtag, hashtag?” said my new friend drunk #1.
“I like your jeans,” he continued.
“Will you help me with my Tinder profile?”
Creep factor = 4.
I guess I am getting better at handling the creeps. Or maybe, I just have a higher tolerance threshold now that I am at an advanced age. At this pace, I can be gang raped in a meth lab while fundraising for homeless children and it will rate as a 3. Sounds like progress.
At some point while I worked there, they had Underwriting Trainees come in from Colorado. There were three or four of them. All dudes. One of the guys was a cross between Porky Pig and Yosemite Sam, I swear. Short, fat, with a pig nose and a perpetually red/pink face. I will call him Dumbass in this story. Dumbass was the king of crude humor and found himself hilarious.
One day, I was looking for a specific policy on the desk of the Female Underwriter that was training Dumbass. She had short hair, and kind of dressed in a cool way, so for some reason I thought she was kinda cool and for women’s rights. Dumbass was sitting there with her as I proceeded to discreetly pick up and look for policies behind them. Dumbass turned around, and looked straight at my chest and said out loud, “Damn I want those tits!!” I just glared at him and said “YOU WISH!”. The Female Underwriter actually laughed at Dumbass’s joke.
A couple of weeks later after I refused to talk to Dumbass for a few weeks, he actually tried to corner me in the file room and discuss WHY I wouldn’t speak to him anymore. I just glared at him and walked away.
Hs is SO lucky that he doesn’t live in the same state as I do now…
OK, these are just the first set of stories. I have another set to share in the very-near-future. Believe me, you will want to come back. I'm waiting for the last stories to land in my email inbox. And it's not too late to participate! Send your own creepy guy story (short or long) to my email address listed on the sidebar. You can be completely anonymous. Do eeeet!