WINGMAN....Notes from 2005.
I am a terrible wingman.
I blame it on my best friend Corey. She’s a worse wingman than me and I really learn best by example. She’s a bad example, so I am a failure as a result. Now, this is a troublesome area to fail in because a bad wingman is the equivalent of a lame or just plain bad friend. The job of the wingman, afterall, is to help his or her friend score and the wingman must do anything necessary to help ensure his friend’s success. A good wingman is accommodating, patient, and nearly invisible. A good wingman stays out of the spotlight and attracts very little attention to the fact that he’s present. He’s nice to the friend or friends of his buddy’s object of desire and he dutifully takes as many for the team as humanly possible before the mission is complete.
I am not good at blending in to the group. I blame it on astrology. After all, I was born on the Day of the Entertainer -- seriously, June 7, look it up -- so being in the middle of the action is not only the place I’m most comfortable, it’s the place destined for me by the stars. There are very few rooms that I can’t work, very few men I can’t charm. It’s in my nature -- it’s an attractive nature. I like to be the funny one, the one who pushes the audience to participate or accept the consequences of a Gemini attack. I will say outrageous things. I will touch faces, throw arms around bodies, stand nose-to-nose with anyone.
This makes me a bad wingman.
Once when I was an undergraduate at Kent State, a dorm-friend Natane begged her trusty friends Hollie and yours truly to go to a bar so she could casually, nonchalantly, run into a boy she’d met online. Natane was always meeting a guy online. “Please, I really like him,” she said. “But I don’t want to go by myself.” So agree we did and the bar turned out to be something like a golf course pub and the boy -- I think his name was Jason -- found us pretty easily for a guy who’d never met us.
Back in college, I was kind of overweight -- maybe fifteen, twenty pounds plump, and had a reputation for being more of every guy’s trust-worthy sister than object of desire. This particular night, though, was my first time out as an official wingman and, well, my own power frightens me sometimes. As the four of us crowded in a booth, Hollie and I on one side, Natane and Jason on the other, no one was talking but Jason and me, and even though Jason had specifically wanted to meet and spend time with Natane, the only woman at the table he offered to buy a drink for was me.
Oops?
I think I turned some horrible shade of red and stuttered a no thanks as Natane sharply kicked me in the shin. Well, excuse me for being a good conversationalist. As far as I know, none of us ever saw Jason again after that night.
From that point on, though, I became strangely aware of how good I was at being the pivotal member of any given social setting. I was my group’s go-to girl when the good times were slumping.
But let me get back to why this is all Corey’s fault. Corey is my best friend and I love her more than anyone else that I know, but she pisses me off when it comes to my relationships with men. Mainly it’s because she’s like me -- she likes being the eye candy, the one with anonymous drinks being set before her, compliments of some dude across the bar. She wants the guys to like her first and best and when they don’t, well, fuck you very much. She’ll insist that we leave, move on to greener pastures, even if the people she’s with are having a good time, making love connections or not.
It might also be important to note here that Corey has always been in a relationship. When she and I were randomly assigned to be roommates at Kent State, she had just gotten together with her boss’s son Mike and, for better or worse, she’s married to him now. And before Mike, there were other juvenile relationships, long term or otherwise, so the girl doesn’t know what it’s like so much as to be picked second, let alone not at all.
I know what it’s like to be picked second or not at all and it’s pretty demoralizing. So when you have a best friend, who is so much fun to be around but who has trouble stepping back and letting you catch a guy’s eye, well... It’s some kind of evil education that teaches you how not to be a good wingman and instead how to be sultry and invading and the prize. Really, those aren’t bad things to learn, but when you’re supposed to be helping a friend hook up, falling all over yourself to stay in the spotlight can be counterproductive, to say the least.
More or less, I learned not to consider The Hunt for Mr. Right when Corey and I were out together. If we got hit on, fine. If not, fine. She still got to go home to Mike every night, anyway, so it was pretty win-win, and since she and I always have a fabulous time out, it was fairly win-win for me, too. I’d go out on the prowl with my other girlfriends, my single girlfriends, and see what kind of water we could squeeze out of rocks.
Part of the problem, though, is I’m not good at asking for back up. I am too independent for my own good and I make flashy, impulsive decisions when it comes to men. Plus, I spent years out with Corey and I knew that asking her to be my wingman was like asking her to compete for the same guy’s attention. Not a genius plan, you know? I like to be the one the guy’s focused on. I don’t want there to be any confusion about whose number he should be jotting down.
Makes you wonder, really, how dudes do it. If two attractive women start talking to you, where does your mind go? Do you decide you like one more than the other and does it occur to you that choosing one over the other right away might eliminate your chances with either? Do you drag one of your buddies into the conversation to feel out who has a better connection with which chick? Do you wonder when your date’s going to return from the bathroom, or do you immediately wonder if these two women would consent to a little sexual indiscretion?
Well, I, for one, don’t want to get bogged down in the details. I want to be the only one up for the part. So I tend to fly solo and crash and burn -- crash and burn, that is, if my intent is to form a lasting bond of any sort. Recently, I was at a friend’s party where I participated in some down and dirty dancing with any variety of fellow guests and I maybe remember three of their names. My roommate was also at the party and could give me detailed accounts of some of these men’s lives, past and present, because she’d had old fashioned conversation with them.
Huh.
I hadn’t been there to meet someone. I had been there to drink and dance and have a good time, which is exactly what I’d done. Some nights are like that. If I made every social event about finding my soul mate, the pages of my memoir might read like a Lifetime movie. Plus, I had another mission at this party -- just call me Goose.
The Tom Cruise to my Anthony Edwards is Whitney. We used to work together and now we just terrorize dance floors all over Boston. I officially accepted my title as her wingman a few months prior to the before-mentioned party when she fell flat on her face for a bassist named Tom. He was rockin’ out on the stage, we were panting on the dance floor, she liked him, he came over and made nice to the both of us, and she introduced herself. I just stood there and grinned like an idiot. Don’t get me wrong -- I was OK with Whit making a love connection instead of me. Tom’s a swell guy, but he’s not my type. The long and short of it is that Whit and Tom started dating and things seemed to be going pretty well for them...
Until the night of the party in question. It was Whit’s party, her birthday party no less, and Tom was a no-show. We’d seen him just the night before at one of his gigs and he’d repeatedly mentioned the party and asked what he could bring. He said he’d be the first one there, drink in hand, but as the time crept past midnight, to one, to two, still no bassist babe. Whit was a bit more than miffed about his absence, with good reason, so as her wingman, I fielded questions and distracted people from hounding her about her man’s absence. I stood outside in the cold with her while she called him at one a.m. and I told her the message she left him was calm and collected. And for the next two weeks, until they finally spoke person-to-person, I analyzed and overanalyzed every moment of Whitney and Tom’s relationship. She would call me and we would go over every excruciating detail, step by step. I didn’t really have any answers for her, but we all know that’s beyond irrelevent.
A good wingman is also a good listener. I’m a better listener than I am a wingman, but that has to count for something..
There’s something honorable about being a wingman, something righteous, almost, about putting the needs of your friend above and beyond anything you want or need. I would do anything for a friend, anything. So I’m trying to forget all those bad years of training I got from Corey. I’m turning over a new leaf and pinning on my flight badge. I am going to try. Which is more than I can say for most men.
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