The LARPer

This story turned out much longer than I had anticipated; I had forgotten how many people were involved. As I told my friend Chris, "I mean the whole thing is just such a goddam disaster. [The LARPer] had an online girlfriend I'm convinced was a man, and he had a crush on me, and he asked out somebody else we worked with who went batshit insane on him, and then he hooked up with an old friend with benefits the coworker got insanely jealous of. Meanwhile, I was chasing [the One That Got Away], dating [PAG], totally fucked up in front of [Doctor Who], very nearly had something incredibly awkward happen with a clown who worked nearby, and got hit on by the appallingly creepy manager of the shoe store nearby. I mean, how do you NOT tell that story. The only problem is, will anyone understand it?"

Probably not, but between methodical over-explanation and reference to the ARSE dictionary (which I wrote while working on this story) for all the acronyms, I hope this makes sense.

In the fall of 2008, I took a seasonal job at Borders, the bookstore. I was still working at Linens 'N Things, but they were in financial trouble, and I needed the extra cash to pay for a lot of dental work. Indeed, only a couple of weeks after I started at Borders, Linens 'N Things announced it was going out of business, and I left to work full time at Borders not long after that.

The Borders job was not actually in the bookstore (which in turn was in the mall) but rather the calendar kiosk. Every year, from October till sometime in early February, Borders rented two kiosks in the mall, one on each end. The year I worked there, instead of two kiosks, they had one kiosk and one small store. Like most of the seasonal employees, once I had finished training on the cash register in the bookstore, I spent all my time selling calendars at either the calendar kiosk or calendar store and only entered the bookstore to sign in and out.

After about three days of training at the bookstore, I went down to the calendar store for the first time. Another seasonal employee, whom I shall refer to as the LARPer, was supposed to train me. He had worked there before, but it was some years previously, as I later found out. So I walked into the calendar store, which was only three doors away from the bookstore, and guessed quickly enough who he was since he was the only person in there. I approached him and introduced myself.

The LARPer instructed me to get ready to be bored for the next six weeks because nobody bought calendars before Thanksgiving. He was right: There were no sales during the entire three and a half hours that I spent in the calendar store that afternoon. The LARPer and I passed the time by discussing our nonexistent love lives, though not before he told me all about Amtgard, the live action role-playing game in which he was quite active. He described himself, enthusiastically and sincerely, as a knight and went on about tactics and techniques. Not particularly interested, I surveyed him critically as I considered the impracticality of him literally as a knight. LARPers, I knew, were notoriously reputed as the quintessential uber goobers with little to no social skill. The LARPer was a high-functioning LARPer but a LARPer nevertheless; he was seemingly unable to pick up on my disinterest in his game. No matter. I told him all about the One That Got Away, whom I was still chasing. I started off innocently enough, not mentioning my feelings for the One That Got Away. As usual, however, I was completely transparent, and within five minutes, the LARPer matter-of-factly-yet-intently asked,

"Were you in love with him?"

There was the briefest of "oh shit (not again)" pauses, and then I answered softly,

"I still am." I was kind of relieved to have it out in the open, really; it made my description of the situation much easier. There followed an excruciatingly awkward twenty minute question-and-answer session, during which I glowingly described the One That Got Away, and finally the LARPer interrupted me, expressing a desire to change the subject. As he said,

"I know more about him than I do about the lady standing in front of me."

I froze. I knew where conversations like that headed. And I was not heading into a discussion on me "technically" being single and how cute he thought I was and so on. I stuttered and promptly resumed discussion of the One That Got Away. Apparently taking the hint, the LARPer changed the subject to something relevant, and we looked at the calendars in the store. I mentioned how at the comic book store where I used to work, we had Doctor Who calendars, and I lamented the absence of any here.

"Don't," the LARPer said.

"What?"

"You don't want to talk about Doctor Who to me."

"What? —Oh, are you not a fan? I'm sorry, because I've always been a big fan of—"

"No," he said. "That's what I mean. I mean, you don't want to go there."

I eventually figured out that he was also a big fan of Doctor Who, and since he had already expressed an interest in me and been rejected, hearing me talk about my liking of Doctor Who would make him like me more, which would be frustrating. I didn't see how it could be that big a deal since he'd known me for all of an hour.

The next few times I worked with the LARPer were much the same. I talked incessantly about the One That Got Away; the LARPer talked to me about his online girlfriend. Over the next couple of months, I grew increasingly convinced that his girlfriend was more likely in actuality a man. I discovered that the LARPer had been talking to this girl for a year and a half but had never met her in person. He only had two pictures of her, he had never spoken to her on the phone, and she continually made excuses why she couldn't be with him in person. Her excuses almost always involved her sister, whom I grew increasingly certain was fictitious. Indeed, the girlfriend herself sounded suspicious: According to the LARPer, she was a ballet dancer who rode a motorcycle, lived in a two million dollar bungalow in Hawaii, and had a huge trust fund. I tried to tactfully suggest that the existence of such a person was a bit unlikely anyway, but it was nigh impossible that such a person would go for a barely employed LARPer in central Texas. The LARPer, of course, did not see it that way and insisted that my hopes regarding the One That Got Away were equally doomed. On the contrary, I felt I at least stood a chance with the One That Got Away on the grounds that we had actually met. Some months previously, the One That Got Away and I had more than kissed, but in the ensuing time, he had lost interest, and the last two times I had spoken to him had been uncomfortable. Despite the awkwardness that reigned supreme at the moment, I was determined to pursue him anyway until I had regained that blissful state I held so briefly months before. The LARPer insistently informed me that it was doomed and that I just didn't want to accept it. I countered that the last time I had spoken to the One That Got Away, awkwardly as the conversation had initiated, we had nearly kissed at its conclusion, smiling at each other as we parted.

The LARPer would have none of it and quickly developed a crush on me, which he frequently and insistently reminded me of despite the fact that I frequently and insistently reminded him that I was in love with someone else, and he was supposed to be too. He frequently complimented me, telling me I looked nice. Sometimes—more often than not, it seemed—his variant on telling me I looked nice involved him commenting on the tightness of the jeans I was wearing. I don't wear skin tight jeans (they're unbelievably uncomfortable); I wear jeans that fit well in the hips. Pants that don't fit well in the hips are a real nuisance when you work in theatre. The last thing I need when working an electrics call is the weight of my wrench pulling my pants down. Thusly, all my jeans are fairly sturdy and fitted (in the hips, at least). I explained this to the LARPer and insisted that my jeans fit me for my benefit, not his, but he was reluctant to believe me. He even insisted that after the Shoe Store Manager began hitting on me, I changed my style of dress to become more attractive. He said SSM would think I was dressing the way I did just for his benefit. I choked back a retort along the lines of "Kind of like how you think I do it for you?" What rubbish. With the exception of the One That Got Away, I dress to please no one but myself.

SSM had a bit of difficulty accepting that. The calendar kiosk was located about ten feet away from the entrance to a shoe store, so of course we seasonal folk saw a lot of the shoe store folk. The LARPer took a second job working in the shoe store, which lasted less than two weeks due to SSM's micromanagement, not to mention SSM's drug habits and multiple underage girlfriends. The LARPer, while working at the shoe store, would of course take advantage of the proximity to the kiosk to talk to me. One day he informed me—more like warned me—that SSM had been creepily checking me out and was going to try for me. I thanked him for the warning. There's more to SSM, of course, but that's another story. Said story could have been much worse had it not been for the LARPer.

Anyway, returning to the topic of my wardrobe, I wore a skirt to work one day. It was long, but it was still a skirt. Inevitably, as I knew it would, it elicited the LARPer's opinion. Luckily, he kept his comments relatively tasteful. However, I made the idiotic mistake of teasing him by saying I was thinking of wearing a shorter skirt to work one day. He said if I did that, I'd up against the wall. ! As my friend Chris later observed when I described my discomfort, "Remarks like that stay in the head, never out loud, idiot!" I don't really mind guys thinking like that, but I do mind hearing about it. I don't even care if it's about me or not. Anyway, when the LARPer made remarks like that (and regrettably, there was more than one instance), the usual result was in a deer in the headlights look from me (and not in a good way), followed by me spouting off something random about the One That Got Away, as a totally unsubtle reminder that it would never happen.

The LARPer was not always so shallow with his compliments. Indeed, he often waxed overly analytical about my personality. It made a pleasant change from hearing his opinion on my ass but was equally unasked for. I'm not sure how accurate he was; after all, his opinion of me was skewed, as if I weren't already inclined to doubt the judgment of someone who didn't see anything wrong with regularly commenting on my ass. Now, it's common knowledge that I am stubborn, contrary, and cynical. I don't need to be told that. I also have a reputation for a sharp tongue, despite being soft spoken and reclusive. I am finicky with new people, and I determine how I like people by a bizarre set of rules that are pedantic enough as to seem completely arbitrary. In other words, I have some strange methods for choosing my friends . . . and deleting them. The LARPer picked up on all of this and described his studies of my personality in great detail. It's fascinating to hear about oneself, but only to a point, especially if those points are inaccurate. Most of his guesses on how I deal with the opposite sex were wrong. You'd think after all I told him about the One That Got Away, he might have had plenty to go on. Then again, the One That Got Away was, well, the One That Got Away and thusly bound to be different.

Of course by this point, the LARPer had rather given up on not talking about Doctor Who with me. We frequently discussed the show at work, and he bought some yarn so I could make him a Doctor Who-esque scarf. The colors were much simpler, but the length was to be outrageous. Sometimes I gave him rides home from work as his car was not working, and we would listen to covers of the Doctor Who theme during the ride.

With our joint obsession with Doctor Who in mind, it stood to reason that the LARPer was the sole witness to the Doctor Who incident at the calendar kiosk. Following that catastrophe, the LARPer informed me that he could help me pick up geeky guys I liked, but he wouldn't tell me how. I think it was a punishment for me not liking him. Unfortunately for the LARPer, he forgot that I can outstubborn a mule, and I pestered him so much that he finally gave in and gave me a few pointers, which proved fairly anticlimactic. (It was another detailed analysis of my personality.)

In the process of analyzing my personality, the LARPer, I noticed, decided that I was interested in every guy I remarked on. There was a part time employee at the game store across from the kiosk whom I recognized vaguely, and in the process of trying to remember where I'd seen him, the LARPer became totally convinced that I liked him, which I denied. Then I commented on enjoying watching the clown work in front of the candy store near the kiosk, and the LARPer matter-of-factly said, "You like the clown, don't you." I pointed out that I saw him from a distance, with clown makeup on, and had never spoken to him. I eventually spoke a bit to the clown and did rather like him, but nothing came of it.

It didn't really matter, though, since right around then I met—or perhaps I should say re-met— PAG. PAG was thirty-two, nearly thirty-three at the time. I was twenty-five, so he was a little out of my age range, which annoyed the LARPer no end since I had previously listed the eleven-year age difference between us as one reason I wasn't interested. I observed that seven or eight years was still less than eleven. I preferred guys who were between two and five years older than I, and I drew the line at ten years on the grounds that at that point it became something of a generation gap. (Granted, I later discovered that PAG had the maturity level of an eight-year-old, so my age rules were totally discredited, but no matter.) The LARPer found it hypocritical of me to turn him down because he was too old for me but go out with PAG even though PAG was a bit old for me too. I couldn't quite bring myself to inform the LARPer that I really did not find him at all attractive, though he must have intuited that. PAG I did find cute, though not as cute as he imagined himself to be. He certainly wasn't on par with the One That Got Away. But I digress.

It could have been that the LARPer, with his excessive description of my personality, was trying to impress me and make me forget about the One That Got Away. The LARPer was definitely interested in me, despite not only the One That Got Away and PAG but also his own online girlfriend. That, however, inevitably petered out when she made one too many excuses for not visiting him in person. There was a dramatic blow up around Christmas when she was supposed to visit him. He gave her an ultimatum and she failed to comply, again using the excuse of her sister. The LARPer finally accepted that eighteen months of not meeting this girl at all was ridiculous, and he broke it off and promptly made a date with a woman who worked in the Borders with us. I was a bit surprised that he went for someone else so quickly, especially when he still had a crush on me, but I was relieved that he at least knew not to ask me out. I wished him luck with his date with the coworker. Predictably, that was doomed because said coworker was severely bipolar and off her meds. After one date with the LARPer, which he described as having gone very well, she inexplicably spiraled out of control and made work a living hell for him. She started talking about everything that could go wrong even though nothing had; she ignored him in group conversations; and she took away his notebook (to doodle in when it was slow) and phone, telling him he wasn't allowed to have them out at work. Once she stopped by the calendar store (where he was) on her way down to the kiosk (where I was) to bitch at him about not being allowed to have his notebook. Then she came down to the kiosk and told me I couldn't have my notebook either. Upon her return to the bookstore, I phoned the LARPer at the calendar store, and we discussed it at length. We realized that the girl had done a drive-by bitching; she had not needed to visit either location and only did so to gripe at us. We told our manager, who told the girl to leave us alone. Fat chance. She again took the LARPer's personal possessions away from him on the grounds that he wasn't allowed to have them, and he almost walked out on the spot. Luckily, he called me first, and I talked him out of it.

"Now I see why you're not supposed to date people you work with," he told me.

"No," I said, "that's why you're not supposed to date people who you know have serious mental problems." I advised him to tell the manager again.

"No. I don't think I'm coming back tomorrow," he said.

"No, just tell [our manager]. You don't need to quit; she needs to get her behavior under control."

"But that's the whole point. She can't control it. She obviously wants me gone."

"So? Don't give into that. She's not being professional; at least you can."

"It'd be easier if I just left."

"That wouldn't accomplish anything; she'll still be out of control and just cause trouble for somebody else. Probably me. [Our manager] needs to know this. If you don't tell her, I will. . . . Besides, coming from both of us, it's more likely that something will get done."

He agreed with me on that at least, and we spoke to our manager separately. The girl was still inexplicably cold to the LARPer, but at least she no longer griped about us having notebooks to doodle in when we got bored during the slow periods.

Of course, the relative quiet couldn't last. Within about two weeks, the LARPer got in touch with an old friend with benefits of his, who was apparently very good looking. She picked him up from work one night, and the bipolar girl saw and freaked out. She confronted him about it the next day, and he pointed out that she (the bipolar girl) had given him the cold shoulder with no explanation after one date, so as far as he could tell, they weren't involved. Besides, all that the bipolar girl had even seen was some girl picking him up; it could have been entirely innocent. It wasn't, but it could have been.

Needless to say, this had repercussions for me too. The LARPer began talking at length to me about his not-so-new friend with benefits, describing how good looking she was and how much fun they had in bed. Good grief. He told me he was hung like a horse and made remarks about "what he could do for [me]." Ew. I had already explicitly stated approximately nine thousand times that I wasn't interested and didn't find him attractive. Also, I was dating PAG and in love with the One That Got Away. I certainly didn't need to be sleeping with someone else to complicate matters even further. I definitely wasn't about to sleep with anyone who was that boastful, condescending, and disrespectful. To paraphrase something I once told the One That Got Away, modesty is pretty sexy.

The crowning irony, really, was that everyone we worked with was totally convinced that I had a huge crush on the LARPer, the one guy I was definitely not interested in. Just because I found his company alone enjoyable out of everyone else. I was rather spoilt for choice—The manager was sweet but believed in astrology; the assistant manager was a raging control freak bitch; and of course there was the bipolar girl. Then there was the pregnant teen, her heavily tattooed friend (who called in almost every day), the total moron who got fired (and it was almost impossible to get fired from that job), and the lazy girl who complained of being tired after merely operating the cash register. The rest of my coworkers I mostly did enjoy talking to, but sadly, I rarely worked the same hours as they.

Finally, the LARPer decided he had had about enough of me not liking him, and one night when we were hanging out after work, he insisted on going somewhere to eat to "talk this thing out." I didn't really see what there was to talk out since I was emphatically not interested. I don't remember whether I were yet dating PAG, but that's rather a moot point as I was still in love with the One That Got Away. And even that is a moot point since the LARPer would never have appealed to me anyway.

So the LARPer and I drove to a restaurant downtown and sat and ate and talked again about my lack of interest in him. I really didn't see what good talking would do since, as I predicted, we went around in circles, reaching no new territory.

At length, the LARPer reached the topic of his now-ex, the girl from Hawaii whom I suspected was a man. The LARPer commented on how he developed a crush on me while still with her, and he said,

"You drove a wedge between me and [her]."

I hit the ceiling.

"How dare you!" I spluttered. "How dare you. Don't you dare fucking blame that on me. I never encouraged you at all. I never did a goddam thing. I told you right from the start that it would never happen, and you knew I was in love with [the One That Got Away], and that even without him it would never happen. You did that all by yourself. How dare you." Shaking with rage and blinking back angry tears, I gulped down my coffee as the LARPer sat in stunned silence. Finally, he said,

" . . . That was impressive, actually." He conceded my point, and he later told me that my outburst had helped him to get over me. I reflected that if he couldn't handle my notoriously sharp tongue, there was no way it would have worked. Well, he didn't seem to mind it directed at other people, but he might have known he wouldn't be immune. Even the One That Got Away was not exempt from that. I would never sharpen my wits at the One That Got Away's expense, but he and I had had our spats. The LARPer knew this and, I thought, should have expected that he'd be on the receiving end of my temper sooner or later.

He met my temper again sooner rather later.

One day toward the end of the seasonal job, when there were only a few days left, the LARPer did not show up for work. I arrived at nine-thirty a.m. and was scheduled for lunch around one-thirty, when the LARPer was supposed to arrive and take over while I ate. He never showed, and unfortunately, the bookstore was understaffed. The manager was there by herself, and in order for me to go to lunch, the only other person on the clock, who was working in the calendar store, had to close the calendar store to come down to the kiosk to relieve me for lunch. When I found out the calendar store was closed, I ran back to the bookstore, grabbed my lunch, ran back to the kiosk, and sent my coworker back to the calendar store. In other words, I effectively sacrificed my break, eating my lunch while working in the kiosk in order that the calendar store could remain open.

Meanwhile, the manager, the other employee (also a friend of the LARPer's), and I all called the LARPer trying to figure out what was going on. For hours, nobody could get in touch with him, and we all feared that he was lying in a ditch with a broken leg.

I was supposed to leave around five-thirty, but I agreed to stay until we closed that night because no one else could cover the shift that the LARPer had missed. Around seven o'clock, as I was eating my dinner in the kiosk, someone got a hold of him. The other employee had somehow managed to contact a friend of the LARPer's, and it transpired that he had spent the whole day cleaning his apartment and ignoring his phone.

Obviously, I was livid as shit. I did not appreciate working twelve hours with only one all-too-brief break because the LARPer didn't feel like going to work. I confronted him after work, and he said he'd seen that I'd been trying and trying and trying to call him, but he ignored every one. I was, I think understandably, very "WTF!" Instead of apologizing for me working so long or him not calling me back, he instead said that he ignored his phone because he had a life, that I didn't have to stay late, and I could have said no. I observed that if I had not stayed late, we would have had to close early, losing business. I especially appreciated his heavy implication that I only worked the double shift because I had no life. I couldn't say anything to that. I stood there dumbfounded for a second and then left without a word. He said "Lauren," but I left anyway. He did not contact me again, nor did I contact him again.

A few days later, I gathered the yarn he'd bought that I was supposed to be knitting into a scarf for him. He had told me he had a friend with a knitting machine who could make the scarf in less than a day, so I hadn't bothered to start the scarf. Given the circumstances, that was just as well. I stopped by the LARPer's apartment on my way down to PAG's late one night and left the yarn hanging on the doorknob. Or at least, I think it was his apartment. I hope it didn't get stolen . . . not that many people would steal a bag of yarn, but plenty of people would grab a bag without looking in it first.

Anyway, only a few days after leaving the yarn at the LARPer's place, things ended with PAG. I wasn't terribly upset, just irritated about his passive aggressive drama. Only a couple of weeks after the last time I saw PAG, I finally got somewhere with the One That Got Away. I wondered what the LARPer would have said and reflected that it was probably just as well that he didn't know. I didn't need a resurgence of remarks on how it wouldn't work out with the One That Got Away, nor did I feel like listening to more gross remarks about his—the LARPer's—nether regions resembling a barnyard animal's. On that tangent, incidentally, I did eventually discover his friend with benefits online, and she was hideous. I was never jealous as he'd intended me to be anyway, but still, her picture made me laugh out loud and understand why the LARPer wasn't honest in his description of her. Faced with the evidence that she was not as hot as he described, I wondered if anything he'd said about her was true, or indeed if he had ever been truthful with me on anything.

Still, as with LD, I really miss his friendship. I miss the intelligent conversation, but I don't miss the disturbing remarks. I wish I were immature enough to get in touch with him purely to say "Neener neener; I did get somewhere with the One That Got Away after all you said it wouldn't happen." Sadly, I'm only immature enough to post the whole story on the Internet. Oh well.