The vainglorious lizard-man

I was accused today of trying to pick up a straight boy whom I know from uni. We are enrolled in the same subject, and as such both attend the lecture on Tuesdays, although we are in different classes. Today I went to his class, two hours earlier than mine, because I got to uni early and really had nothing better to do. I wasn’t, of course, trying to pick him up—I was just being nice—but he appears to be one of those “he’s gay so he must be interested in me because I am a guy” guys. He’s not even that good looking nor, as I learnt today, the most socially capable guy either. He actually reminds me of the “Lizard with a Ladder”, from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland movie, the cockney newt named Bill the Lizard.

I came lumbering down the corridor to the class and saw everyone sitting on the ground outside the room. My lumbering was due to a combination of lack of sleep (due, in turn, to reading a maddeningly good book—the kind that makes you play the “just one more chapter” game for hours) and having caught a tangara train uni, whose seats were apparently designed by those behind Guantanamo’s torture regime. I slumped to the ground and said hello to nobody in particular. “Why do you use a cane?” Bill asked without preamble. I was so taken aback, and not in the chirpiest mood, so I answered primly “I have fibromyalgia”, hoping to settle the matter. He pressed on; “What’s that?” he enquired. “A neurological condition,” I said, “makes my legs and back painful and weak, among other things”. “Oh,” he said, “I’ve never heard of it. Is it degenerative?” There was something about the way he articulated the word degenerative that had a certain gay lilt to it. I answered in the negative and explained that its not being degenerative didn’t really help me, since there is no cure anyway. “Still,” he said, determined not to let the subject drop, “it doesn’t seem to affect you too much.” This could not have come after a more traumatic month of migraines and insomnia, a three-day period of nearly non-stop diarrhoea, a week of sinusitis and the morning’s backache-by-public-transport. “There’s much more to it” I said curtly.

Mercifully he took me at my word. He asked what course I’m doing and what subjects and all that kind of thing. With each question I detected the lilt. I really didn’t think about it much beyond “that’s nice”, since I’m not in the habit of jumping a guy just because he’s gay. After class we exchanged MSN details and I went home.

Tonight, on MSN, after the hi-how-are-you pleasantries were out of the way, he asked, again without preamble, if I am gay. Although I wasn’t looking in a mirror at the time, I suspect a wry smile crept across my face. The conversation continued like this:
LL: are you gay?
Me: haha yes why do you ask?
LL: because i thought you were
Me: fair enough

At this point, I was either expecting an impish “me too” or another abrupt topic change. I knew he was socially inept, but he forged on to new heights (or lows, depending on how one scores these things) in a stellar display of machismo:
LL: i am straight
Me: thats nice?
LL: it’s not nice. it just is.
Me: im not trying to pick u up LL, you’re safe lol
LL: many a true word said in jest ;-)
LL: but i just like being clear, that’s all

I was about to ask if he felt it necessary to tell all men (or was it just all gay ones) that he encountered this small, but apparently vital, piece of information. Furthermore, I was about to suggest that either he is stupendously narcissistic to think I’d automatically want to hook up with him just because he happens to be a man, or he is himself gay and in denial and wants no doubt to exist as to his heterosexuality, lest my gaydar pick up on his lilty little signals and try something on. I chose to leave it and steamed silently to myself. Incidentally, the only other man I’ve ever heard using the word jest turned out to be a closeted transgendered liar. Needless to say, LL’s use of the word sent up a little rainbow flag.

The TV show Spicks and Specks has just started so, in a vain (and ultimately fruitless) attempt to resurrect the conversation, I asked him if he watched it. He said that he didn’t but he did know of the show. I commented that I love it and he said “I can imagine you loving it”. This struck me as a very odd thing to say, considering that although we’ve been in the same lecture for the past ten weeks, we’d never spoken until that morning, when he’d broken all conventional rules of etiquette for speaking with the disabled and then accused me of hitting on him and not accepting my assertions that this was not the case. I asked what made him say such a strange thing—“what makes you say that?”—because that is the kind of thing you say to someone whom you know intimately (and can therefore legitimately imagine loving something) or to someone whom you do not know intimately but have been fantasising about them and therefore feel like you know them intimately. It seems I overestimated him. He replied, to my infinite amusement, “because it is a friendly thing to say”.

I guess I should give him points for at least attempting, however unsuccesfully, to be friendly even if he undid all his good work by telling me it was nothing more than a friendly gesture. The conversation ended there. I certainly hope, for his sake, he is a lot more suave with women.