Brave Tales of Bravery.

Today I was at the bookstore, and I saw this amazing girl. She looked at me a few times, but I didn't have my ready-to-smile-face on, and so I sorta looked away quickly. I hate hate hate when I do this, and every time it happens I tell myself, "ALWAYS have your smile-face ready when you see a cute girl, dammit!"

I wanted to go up to her, to say something, whatever, just to kill the feeling of regret that was already building. I knew that if I didn't say something I would hang around the bookstore for an extra 20 minutes hoping against all experience and logic that she would suddenly talk to me, before finally walking to my car with a feeling of dilution and enervation, hollowly attempting to sell myself "wasn't-meant-to-be" soft-soap about destiny.

And that is exactly what happened, because I did not in fact talk to her.

I wondered about my bravery, and I wondered why it is that I can over and over again make the mistake of not simply talking to someone. What is there to lose, really?

That incident put me in mind to tell you this story:

When I was about five years old I was terrified of the high dive. The thought of getting up there made my inner-crotch flutter. I decided one day that, fluttering inner-crotches aside, it was time for me to do it. Because my little sister already had.

Somehow between the time that I started climbing up the ladder and the time I was actually looking over the edge of the board, the high dive had grown almost 500 feet, and still was growing.

There I was, nearly fifty stories up, staring down at the pan of water that the previously Olympic-sized pool had become. Far below I could vaguely make out my mother, signaling to me with her compact mirror in Morse code: "JUMP OR CLIMB DOWN HONEY STOP OTHER PEOPLE ARE WAITING TO DIVE TOO STOP" On the horizon I could see Oklahoma, where threatening storm clouds gathered. A passing raven perched for a moment on the handrail and, I swear I am not making this up, croaked "Rawk! From this height water upon impact is as hard as concrete! Rawk!" before flapping away. "A raven," I thought outloud, "at this altitude?" The sun, a mere fourteen feet above my tender head, threatened to cook me alive.

I had to climb down, to jump would mean my grave...

NO!

Even at that tender age I had balls the size of coconuts (and about as hairy) and I knew that if I didn't go through with it, I would never forgive my cowardice.

"Raven-borne factoids be damned!" I cried. Striding purposefully to the edge of the board, I looked down the half mile to my azure, algae-free destiny, and after a 30 minute stare-down, I shimmied magnificently, feet first and on my belly, off the board, until only my brave hands held on with the bravest of white-knuckled grips. I hung there resolutely for another five minutes, savoring this moment, the moment of the knowledge of my own mortality, before the board slipped from my brave, exhausted grasp.

The nearly fourty seconds of my free fall stretched into days... Into years...

Into a lifetime...

I saw in my mind's eye myself, 20 years hence:

"Why am I so afraid to go up and talk to girls?" I asked Chris Zane, a foreign socialist agitator, but a friend none the less.

"Is not for be afraid, if girl turn you down or something, she is probably lesbian anyway," he replied in his lower-class immigrant's brogue.

"Quaintly spoken, my swarthy friend, and so true. But let me relate to you a story:

I was at the grocery store with my sister, ruing the lack of microwave tatertots that don't taste like some sort of paper byproduct, when I saw HER: Legs like POWPOWPOW and an ass the curves of which I could actually hear.

Turning with a look of bewilderment to my sister I said, "Holy cow, I must have that ass in my hands! What should I do!?"

Always the calmer of us two siblings, my sister said in effect that any girl wearing workout shorts in a grocery store was kinda asking to be asked out, and also that if I truly loved this girl, which she could see in my eyes that I did, that it would be sad if I were to pass up this chance to make what was obviously a perfect match.

She was right... But how to do it? I decided on the direct approach.

Steeling up my nerve, I boldly walked over to the hot girl's ugly friend and said "Hey, um... Do you girls, like to..." My nerve wavered, Courage young man! "...Do you girls like to party? Cause I have some friends coming into town and they want to go out and party and if you like to party, or come with us... I mean?"¹

Stifling a laugh, the ugly one slowly shook her head "no" as her hot friend looked on in fear/shock. I can only imagine what expression I wore as I walked backwards for a few paces before turning and quickly disappearing into the pet-products aisle.

To this day I think about this incident as I am shopping for tatertots; the embarrassment manifests itself as a sudden and involuntary slap to the forehead. As a "cover," should anyone happen to see this spasm, I hurriedly check my watch and missing-an-appointment-ly stride away.

"Ho, ho, ho, you said this my friend?" Chris shook his head in that foreign way, expressing his amazement at my skill with the English language, a language that had proven so, so very difficult for him.

"Yes, but I told you that story to tell you this story:

Fresh from my traumatic experience at the store, I was loath the try my luck again, but the opportunity quickly presented itself and this time in yet more dangerous hunting grounds than the grocery store... the corporate cafeteria.

Indian, with beautiful long black hair and an amazing warm copper skin tone, she was stunning. Having seen that she often got a Sprite before heading back up to work, I hung around the vending machines, pretending to have trouble with my dollar bill. As she approached, I lunged towards her and said quickly, "Hey what's your name?" She responded with something that sounded like Keisha or Keysha... "Cool," I said, as I strutted away. I had a plan.

I used the company's employee database to look up her email, and I sent her this classic of the genre²:

searching..

keysha? nope...

keisha? nope...

kaysha!

hello..

everyday as i drive to work, this plays in my head, american beauty style:

"my name is ben george. i am 22 years old, nearly 23. i have a good job. i have a good apartment. i have a good car."

i feel like driving my car up the stairs, into work, and right up to my cube.

i think it would be especially funny if i had an alarm, and i turned it on when i got out: "chip-chirp!"

my co-workers wouldn't even know what to say, this would give me ample time to be really calm and say "hey doug, what's up. bob! how's it goin'? umar! the umar-man! woo!"

i would sit down at my computer and log in.. about this time people would start to get over the initial shock of having someone drive into the building, and my boss would run over and be like "dear god! what in the hell has gotten into you!?"

and i would look him in the eye... and calmly say:

"it's easier for me this way."

...and go back to working.

i guess that's when they'd call security and all that, so that's where my little fantasy ends.. sigh..

i guess the point is that corporate life is tiresome, dull, and also tiresome, as well as being dull.

so if you ever feel tiresome or dull, and feel like talking with someone who is marginally less tiresome and dull than usual, then let's have lunch or sit outside or what-not.

ben.

ps. i'm usually a lot more smooove about this kind of thing, but i think i've seen you like three times total since i started working here, and the thought of going one more day in this company without knowing at least a few interesting people makes my stomach go flippy flop.

My gambit paid off! Amazingly, unbelievably, astoundingly, she emailed me back! And positively:

hi ben,

nice to meet you. i think it is so odd that you've chosen to write a complete stranger about your fantasies. i think it's even more odd that your fantasy is completely whack.
however, i think it makes you the kind of person that i would like to have lunch with. i guess you could say that i share your sentiments on corporate life. just let me know what day and time.

kaysha

For that small act of bravery on my part, I was rewarded with lunch with a beautiful girl, a lunch that eventually became a daily rendez-vous, and finally became a relationship that lasted more than a year and taught me an incredible amount about love and how it works.

"You write email for girl is work good in America? Strange country! In my culture, we sing the pretty song for girl, like I Want to Know What Love Is by rock band Foreigner."

"Haha, 'foreigner' indeed, though not as foreign as you, I would wager! Where the hell are you from, anyway?"

"Is very sad story, very brave story too, I tell: I cross big ocean in old van with air-tube strap to side. Is I, brother, children, but only I..." he began, unpromisingly.

"Oh, haha, wait a sec, that reminds me of the time that I was five, and I went up on the high dive, I stood up there, like, forever, but I finally did it, it felt like it took me ages to fall..."

...all those thoughts and more passed through my head during the interminable plunge to the water. I crashed landed, finally and aged, deep into the chlorinated world of blue I had set out for all those years previously. Frothy domes of air bubbles raced me to the surface, and awaiting me there, greeted my emergence with wild sizzling adulation, "We owe all of our ephemeral gratitude to you, Benjamin, it is your bravery that brought us into this brief but blessed existence! Thank you and goodbye!"

I had done it: I did it.

"Yeah, that wasn't hard," I recorded for myself, "Yeah, I think I'll do that again."

---

¹This really is a true story and I actually did say that.
²Both of the following emails are real. They were sent Thursday, September 14, 2000.