Start With His Taste in Music

Story Sent in by Evelyn:

Thomas met up with me in front of a restaurant for our first date, and he was very, very high on something.

"Heeeey!" he yelled when he saw me, and gave me a colossal, unexpected bear hug, "You look beautiful!"

I said, "Thanks. Are you okay?"

"Heeeey!" he said again, "You look really beautiful."

My excitement soured into a tangy, annoyance-saturated disappointment. "I don't think you're in your right mind, Tom."

"Okay," he said, looking up and down the row of parked cars on the street, "Want to see my car?"

He shakily pulled out a set of keys and tried them on a nearby Nissan. They didn't open the door. He turned to me and said, "I know what will solve this," and laughed, then pulled out his cell phone and played "Jenny From the Block" over its speakers.

He did a strange sort of dance to it in which he kind of bent himself in half, straightened up, then bent himself in half again. He danced over to the next car, an Acura, and tried his keys on that one.

"Tom, come on," I said, not knowing at all what to do, "Let's… let's…"

He kept dancing to that awful song and trying keys in two more cars. At the last one, he turned to me and said, "This one is mine. I'm sure!" and then he elbowed the passenger-side window.

"Ow! My elbow!" he yelled, and cradled his arm back and forth as the music kept playing.

I grabbed his other arm and said, "Let's go. Come on."

Going what I felt, in retrospect, was above and beyond the call of duty, I shoved him into my car and drove less than a mile to the nearest hospital. On the way there, somehow or other, while he was in my vehicle, he had the presence of mind (between shouting about his elbow and dancing) to hook up his cell phone to my speaker system and blast his music over my speakers.

I turned the sound off. He moaned, closed his eyes, and was quiet for the rest of the short trip. Once we made it there, I dragged him inside, sat him down, spoke to the triage nurse, gave him one last glance (he had seemingly forgotten about me - he was back to dancing in his seat), and left.

To his credit, a few days later, an email from him with the lone word "sorry" appeared in my inbox. Apology accepted. Get help.