Saturday, June 12, 2010

Speechless

There are very few times in my life when I have truly been left speechless. There have been times when I haven't though of an appropriate response until 5 or 6 hours later. You know how i is. You're laying in your bed late that night and suddenly you think of it.

"I should have said..."

I do that a lot. Still, there is one incident in my life in which the "I should have said" never came to me. More than 15 years later, I"m still not sure what

"I should have said..."

His name was Jesse, and he was recently divorced. Jesse had a thing for me. Oh, he didn't want a relationship. He just wanted for me to...as he said, "Come over to my house and we'll sit on my couch and whatever happens will happen."

I do give him credit for honesty. At least he was up front about what he wanted. No smooth words, talk of love, or promises he had no intention of keeping. I appreciated his candor. I also appreciated that he didn't push me into anything I didn't want to do. After a while, Jesse got engaged to a nice Italian girl. I figured that he would forget about me. I figured wrong.

We'd been having trouble with one of the transmitters. As I went in to work that night, my shift was relieving Jesse's shift.

"Come here, Becky," Jesse said. "I want to show you something." Thinking that he had some schematics or notes on the machine to discuss with me, I followed me to his locker. He flung his locker door open, and I just stood there waiting for him to pull out a log book or tech manual, but he didn't. He finally had to point to the picture. It was a Xerox, actually. It took me a moment to figure out what it was. It was his business.

The man had taken his stuff out of his pants, laid it up on the xerox machine and run a photo cop of it. As soon as I realized what I was seeing, my jaw dropped. I stood there--speechless, my mouth hanging open. Then Jesse said the last thing I wanted to hear:

"Well, what do you think?"

I didn't know what to say. I mean, what do you say to a question like that? I finally just stammered out, "It's nice, Jesse." And Jesse replied, "It kinda makes you want to do stuff to it, doesn't it?"

I said, "I think you'd better leave that to [your girlfriend].

There are very few times I am left speechless.   Very few.  But this was one of them.  

2 comments:

Lizzie Woolley said...

That's really disgusting and creepy!!!!! Why would he think that girls would get turned on by that??? I would have definitely been turned way off and thought he was a creeper.

Becky G said...

Yeah, it was kind of creepy, but in the Navy, pretty much everyone is creepy.