This used to be one of my main getting-to-know-you anecdotes until people’s reactions finally clued me in to the fact that I come off as an asshole in this story. So I stopped telling it for a while. Then I realized that I am an asshole, and that I’m pretty much okay with it.

Anyway, this story is about someone who is a much bigger asshole than I am, but doesn’t have femaleness or marginal attractiveness to distract people from his less-savory characteristics. Should I say his real name? Okay, you twisted my arm. His name is CARL. What an asshole name, it sounds like an acronym for something bad. Carl is one of those kids whose parents are so rich that he’ll never have to work a day in his life but who goes to college anyway to learn about fartsy literary theory and filmmaking and such. He is of course a big hipster scenester type who decorates his walls with record covers and probably says on his friendster profile that his favorite book is by Roland Barthes and his favorite album is by T. Rex.

When I first met him he lived on 7th Street between A and B, which of course is basically the center of the universe and, economically speaking, is off limits to people like you and me unless we plan to live in a one-bedroom with 12 roommates or in a refrigerator box on the sidewalk. (Now I hear he lives in a giant loft on Bedford Avenue, which is similarly overpriced and much less worth it.) But lest you think that I only hate this kid because he is rich, let me hasten on to the rest of my anecdote.

One balmy night in the summer of two summers ago, I was out drinking at a bar in the East Village. I don’t exactly remember what the occasion was, but for some reason I was very, very drunk and I ended up going over to a complete stranger’s apartment. Not in a sex way, but with a whole gang of people. Someone I was with knew someone that lived there, I think. Anyway we got to the apartment which had a lot of expensive-looking home theatre equipment but which was otherwise kind of crappy. I remember the rooms were divided by those weird 3/4 length walls that have a gap at the top so that light can come in to the windowless rooms of the apartment, which I tend to think of as roommate sex-noise transmitters. The only furniture other than the huge TV and stereo was this gigantic, ugly grey couch which we all sat on. We met the people who lived there: Carl, his ugly girlfriend, this other girl, and maybe another guy as well. We smoked pot and then left and went home. Fun story, huh? Have patience, I am just setting up the plot elements.

Months later I was meeting a new friend to go out. Since I only lived a few blocks away from her, I offered to come by her house and pick her up. I

buzzed

buzzed her and she came down, but as soon as the front door of her building clicked shut she realized that she’d forgotten something important-- her flask of peach schnapps, perhaps (she was and is a pussy and a cheapskate). She went back inside to get it, beckoning me to accompany her.

“My roommate’s having, like, a little party,” she explained as we walked into the apartment. Little? The room was packed totally full of people and there were bottles of name brand booze everywhere. I was struck immediately by the apartment’s familiarity -- something about the record covers on the wall -- and then I spotted Carl. “Is that your roommate?” I asked my friend. She nodded in the affirmative. Carl saw me at the same time and began walking briskly in my direction with a sneering smile. “Hi Carl! Is this your new place?” (or some other meaningless small talk) I said. He didn’t respond. Instead, he grabbed me by the arm, hard, and shouted, “Hey everybody! HEY EVERYBODY!”

The room fell silent as everyone turned to stare at me, in a way that I had previously thought only thought happened in movies. “This is the girl who burned a hole in our couch!” Carl announced. “I what?” I said. “A cigarette hole. You burned. In our couch,” he said, pointing. And there it was, in the corner, the same huge grey monstrosity. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never owned a couch valuable enough that I would care (or notice) if someone slightly defaced it. That’s just not the point in our lives that we’re at. I hope not to get to that caring-about-sofas stage for quite some time yet, actually. But aside from the inappropriate nature of Carl’s feelings for his couch, let’s consider the fact that he had absolutely no way of knowing that it was me who burned the hole in the couch. Each and every person in the apartment that night, if memory serves, was smoking fistfuls of cigarettes. Saying that I had burned the hole was almost as ridiculous as me accusing Carl of coming into my apartment and eating the last bowl of Frosted Miniwheats.

Carl still had his pudgy hand clamped tightly around my arm. “Do you want to SEE what you did to our couch?” he asked, taking the tone that girls take with their yippy lapdogs when they poo on the carpet. “No!” I said very reasonably, and started trying to squirm out of Carl’s grasp. But I was too dumbfounded to protest very strongly as I was summarily led over to the couch and held there as Carl shouted, “LOOK! LOOK WHAT YOU DID!”

My friend later moved out of that apartment because Carl and his ugly girlfriend had period-sex in her bed. To sum up, Carl is an asshole.