Cowpox
Part I of our three-part series, “Missed Connections”
I like drunk people. If everything else falls through I’ll become a bartender. I like the pratfalls and the goldfish-memory; I enjoy watching people make the same incredibly witty remark or having the same profound insight, at seven-minute intervals over the course of an evening. My favorite, though, are the affectionate drunks, who discover, when their better judgement is gone, that they love everything and everybody. A pity it is that we have to be poisoned to declare it, but when you peel away sense and reason, underneath you discover inarticulate, universal love. What? I take my encouragement where I can get it.
We were sitting outside doing whatever it is that people who don’t smoke do when they are tired of the music and noise and trying to make themselves heard over other people trying to make themselves heard. “Getting a breath of air,” maybe. I asked her how she was enjoying herself, not having much else to say.
She looked over at me. “You’re so cute!” she declared, and laughed until she snorted. Having lost her bearings slightly, she peered around until she had fixed my location again in her field of vision, then put her hand up on my shoulder, equal parts camaraderie and steadying herself. “Do you know,” she announced after a minute, “I used to have such a crush on you.”
I didn’t say anything. “No, I mean it! Isn’t that funny. For years! I - You were-” I think I made some kind of acknowledging noise, but I still said nothing. She was in vino to the point of veritas, and there was no stopping her, but anything I said would have fixed it in her memory as an exchange rather than a revelation, and would make it all the more embarrassing to recall the next day. Besides, what do you say to something like that? “Oh really?” “Thank you?” “I had no idea?” “Yes, I kind of figured you did but honestly I never found you all that attractive?” Drunk or sober, rejection stays with you, it leaves an acrid taste in the heart for years.
“Not any more, of course! I got over that years ago.” (Belatedly afraid of misinterpretation.) “I never thanked you, no, I never did.” She looked up from her hand until she found my face. “Thank you,” she announced in time-lag earnestness. “It was very good for me. You did me a great service. You were my cowpox.”
“Eh?”
“Cowpox! No! Listen! It makes perfect sense! You’d infect somebody with cowpox because it gave them immunity to smallpox, which was much worse. And see- Everyone’s bound to suffer… misplaced affection. Bad relationships-” She brushed at the front of my lapel with her fingers, I think she was afraid that she had spat on me with that last ‘ps’. “And thanks to you, I was inoculated against heartbreak. It wasn’t fun, I mean, but it could have been much worse… Because of that crush I’m immune now to crushes now, immune to loving the wrong people, my heart unscarred.”
“You’ve been thinking this out for a while!” I said, suddenly suspicious and slightly annoyed. “No one who’s as drunk as my personal olfactory breathalyser proclaims you to be would be capable of sustaining that analogy. You’ve thought this whole thing through already. Did you just have to get drunk in order to tell me this?”
“No, just in order for you to take me seriously,” she replied with sad, sodden sweetness. Then she blinked, and in the same movement folded herself up against my shoulder and fell asleep.
What a beautiful story. I enjoyed both the reflections on humanity (although I’ve recently started coming across more people who are belligerent than I have previously) and the thing that metaphor’s pointing to.
July 27th, 2008 at 1:55 pmTo be clear, belligerent while drunk is what I meant.
July 27th, 2008 at 2:31 pm