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As I remarked many times to Aron and Justin, "What is it with me and guys named Donald?" It's true. Every single guy I've ever met named Donald, even if only through someone else, has been a goddam disaster. It doesn't matter whether they were just friends, less than that, or wanted more; they somehow managed to fuck up my life every time. Therefore, I'm simply going to have to start avoiding guys named Donald, even if they go by something else. First, the least horrendous. A guy named Scott Beard whose real name (I think) was Donald. He was in my Spanish class my freshman year of high school, and he was one of those guys who I could tell liked me but never did anything about it. I hate that. He was the one who taught me to hate it. Perhaps it's just as well, because I knew he hung out with some people I didn't like, but meh. He was still violating the ever-important "Will you just talk to that girl!" rule. Okay, silly fluffiness aside, and moving on to the more assholic guys, we now have Donald Hunt, who went by Rhett, but so what. He was in my eighth grade English class, and he seemed nice enough. As far as I can remember, I only talked to him once. I was on the way to class one day, hauling my heavy English book, and he was walking near me, saw me, and said, "I don't think we needed our books today," or something like that, and I said, "Oh," and that was the end of that. But what I remember was that he seemed really nice. I mean, it was a silly little bit of small talk, but he had this ridiculously sweet smile on the whole time, and so I thought he was a nice guy, and he also seemed smart, and he kind of had his own style, which was cool. And then high school happened. He hung out with jocks and turned into a jackass. I saw him in the halls from time to time, and he always had on this perma-frown, and he dressed like everyone else instead of having his own style like he had before, so I lost the respect I'd had for him. Not that he cared (or even noticed), I'm sure. Yeah, well, if you're reading this, Rhett Hunt, you suck. Okay. Another guy named Donald was someone I never met but Aron had the misfortune to know all too well when he was living in Dallas. This guy went by Donny, and he was forty years old, sporadically single, lived with his mother, and . . . had some mental issues, to say the least. He drove a spray-painted pickup truck, welded without a mask on, and painted without ventilation. Let's just hope that one day, nature takes its course and he wins a Darwin award. Another Donald who Aron knew but I didn't was named Donald Abernathy. He was Aron's statistics professor when Aron was going to school in Dallas, and he was a real jerk, according to Aron. I decided to play a practical joke on him with Aron's assistance. Aron gave me the guy's email address, and I subscribed him to a furry mailing list and then emailed him from an anonymous account saying something like, "I saw your email address on here, and it was disturbing, to say the least, to note that a professor was using his university email address for this kind of thing." I never heard back from him. Heh. And then there was a guy named Donny Peltier. When I was a freshman at UT, I dated an exNROTC guy named Michael, who once gave me some nonsense about wanting to experiment with an open relationship. I was extremely not okay with that, but I decided to blow it off. So, a couple of days after that conversation, I was sitting on a bench in the hall of some building on campus, waiting for an RTF screening, and this guy came up to me and asked if he could sit next to me. Thinking that he just wanted a place to sit, as opposed to starting a conversation, I barely glanced up and said, "Sure." So he sat down and introduced himself, we talked for a little bit, I made a point of mentioning that I was dating someone, and he left. I later told Michael the whole story, and he said I should have told Donny that I was in an open relationship and should have gone ahead and asked him out. So I emailed the guy and asked him out for coffee. Mercifully, he replied that he was busy that week but would get back to me, and I didn't hear from him again. Not that Michael knew that. Hee. A couple of days after that incident, Michael was at the pool in Gregory Gym on campus, and he ran into an old ROTC friend of his named Brian. Brian was still in the unit, so Michael asked him if he knew a guy named Donny. "Yeah. He's fast," Brian said. "No kidding; he's moving in on my girl!" Michael answered. "You're dating Marley?" Brian asked. "What? No, my girl's named Lauren," Michael answered, confused. "That's weird, cuz Donny's dating a girl in the unit named Marley," Brian said. Michael relayed this conversation to me later, and I found out a couple of weeks later that Tiffany Marley actually sat next to me in my Government class. Small fucking world. And now we have Don Munson. Don Munson was a middle-aged, unemployed, homeless Vietnam vet who went to UT and was working on his second degree. I met him in the Cactus Cafe one day, or rather, he started talking to me while I was trying to study, I couldn't get rid of him, and eventually made up some excuse and left. Unfortunately, Don began hanging out and talking to me all the time in the Cactus, and I would sit with him and talk and not have too terrible of a time, even if he did annoy the hell out of me. But I can only take so much shit, you know. He was always teasing me and touching me—not like in a wrong way, but still, I really don't like people touching me—and he'd also do this thing where he made a big production of checking my neck for hickies, which was just that much more tasteless since I was single. It didn't matter how many times I told him that I didn't like it or how I phrased it, he'd always either ignore me or just laugh at me and say that I might find it annoying now, but someday I'd be laughing about it. Ha ha, asshole, it's my life, and I'll decide whether or not I think something is funny. Finally, one day I walked into the Cactus and was setting my bags down, and I hadn't even sat down yet when he started checking my neck for hickies again. I picked up the bag I'd just set down, said, "I'm eating lunch somewhere else," walked out, and never spoke to him again. That didn't stop him from emailing me a couple of times and telling me that he thought I was being really bitchy for walking off for "no reason," though. I ignored the emails and am now blissfully middle-aged-leech-free. I've saved the best (or rather, worst) for last. Donald Hoy. Donald Fucking Hoy. Ye Gods, are there stories about him. I first encountered him in sixth grade P.E., which was coed, only I didn't have the misfortune to speak to him. I just noticed the name on his P.E. outfit and mentally linked it with his jackass behavior. The following year, he was in my science class. Not that Mr. Haley's class was at all enjoyable anyway, but it got that much worse when we got a new seating arrangement and, for the remaining couple of months of the school year, I had to sit next to Donald Hoy. He annoyed the living shit out of me by constantly inquiring "How are your ovaries today?", making fun of the books I read (usually by accusing the author of being gay), and other typical adolescent nonsense. Finally one day I'd had enough and smacked him with my pencil bag. Mr. Haley called me up to his desk and wanted to know what was going on. Pissed as I was, I still didn't feel too comfortable tattling on anyone, but I couldn't escape, so I finally mumbled something about Donald being annoying. Mr. Haley told me to sit down, called Donald up to his desk, and proceeded to give him a lecture. I wasn't paying attention to most of it, but I did catch the phrase "if you so much as breathe in her direction." Heh. The following day, I arrived in class, sat down, and told Donald to stop breathing on me, to the amusement of the other kids sitting near us. I'm sure they enjoyed the sideshow. Glad someone benefited from the farce that was Mr. Haley's class. Anyway, I thankfully did not have any classes with Donald in eighth grade, but I was not so lucky in ninth grade. He was in Coach Brooks' Physical Science class, but mercifully sat on the other side of the room with the rest of the dumb jocks. I escaped any immature comments of his this time around; he reserved his "it's that time of the month" comments for the airheads who sat near him. I only had one minor incident towards the end of the year when, at the end of class, everyone was headed toward the door, and we reached it at the same time. There was an extremely unpleasantly long pause, and Donald told me to go ahead. I fled. Nothing else happened until the end of my sophomore year, when, after my second period English class, I was standing at my locker and talking to my friend Aron and minding my own business, and Donald came up behind me, put his arm around me (at least I was wearing a jacket), and said, "How's it going, babe?" I shouted, "Get the hell away from me!" and shoved him violently away. Then I turned to Aron, who had watched the whole thing without so much as blinking, said, "Well . . . that was interesting," and went back to searching my locker for my Spanish book. Aron half-shrugged, said, "Okay," and we proceeded with our conversation as though nothing had happened. . . . Other miscellaneous facts about Donald Hoy include the fact that he was obsessed with homosexuality and was best friends with someone who'd been caught masturbating in class. I also heard a story about how he—Donald—once rescued his younger brother Zach from a Jacuzzi; said brother had been masturbating by inserting his penis into one of the jets and got stuck. And let's not forget the time Aron got called out of class to repair one of the school's security cameras, and when it came on, Donald Hoy and his best friend appeared on it, beating up some freshman. The administrators told Aron not to tell anyone about it. Hee. So, there you have it. Every single person I've encountered named Donald has been some kind of fuck-up. They're bad luck to me. That's why I should from now on avoid guys named Donald. |