Beautiful Fiction, Beautiful Fact: An Anecdotal Paean to Positivity

When the guy turned around and took a big gulp of my beer, I knew it was no accident. 

The dance floor at a club we’ll call Club is small enough that it’s hard to be oblivious of even the most inconspicuous; but this guy (call him W., for weird) was making himself stand out, shuffling his feet with hands in pockets, then going dead still, repeating the cycle ad nauseam. Plus he kept repositioning himself in relation to the three or four women trying to get their groove on, not quite dancing up on them but definitely making incursions. My companion found herself in his sights, and while trying to chat her up he said some things she found (to put it politely) odd.

All this to say, he was on my radar. But when I’m dancing, I’m all about the music, so he wasn’t much on my mind even when he went out of his way to obstruct my path to my beer (perched on the drink rail he’d posted up in front of). I noticed but simply stepped around him. His trip was not my problem.

Fifteen minutes later, though, I clocked him as I came back from the loo, struck (by his body language?) with the strangest feeling that he was about to swig from my beer. And sure enough…. A bit stunned, I watched him very carefully set my glass in the exact spot it had formerly occupied (right next to my glass of water, which was directly above where my bag was hanging and right next to my companion’s balled-up coat, on the other side of which were her glasses of wine and water, with no other drinks anywhere nearby).

“Hey,” I said, walking over, “um, that was my beer you just drank from, man.” 

He sort of half-looked in the direction of said beer, then half-heartedly shrugged. “Sorry.”

Except he wasn’t. I’ve been there. Differences of affect notwithstanding, the moment you realize you’ve mistakenly sipped from a stranger’s drink, there is a combination of recoil (you didn’t want their germs), embarrassment, and compunction (you weren’t looking to take from or otherwise inconvenience the stranger). W. displayed nothing of the sort. Also, such errors tend to happen only when more or less identical-looking drinks are located near each other, with no obvious “landmarks” to help you pinpoint which is yours (but as noted above: many landmarks). 

So no doubt W. was lying. But I would play along, curious as to how this would unfold.

“Okay, fine, but you had some of my beer, so I think you should have the rest of it and buy me a new one.” (He shook his head.) “Why not? You took some of my drink. [It’s worth saying that this was not a small sip but a manly quaff, like half of the 10 oz. in the glass at the time]. You don’t think you should be responsible for that?”

“I said I’m sorry. I thought it was my drink.”

Another lie: he had no drink. As noted: small dance floor + conspicuous behavior = on radar. He had no drink.

“You thought this was your drink? Okay, and where is yours?”

He started to turn his head as if to look for it, but the performance was too silly to follow through on, so he just stood there dumbly.

“Uh-huh. So, like I said, how about you buy me a new drink and have the rest of this one?”

“I’m not buying you a drink.”

On the few occasions when I’ve unwittingly sipped from strangers’ drinks (lifetime over/under: 3.5), they did not ask for a replacement. If they had, I admit that I wouldn’t have been crazy about it — but to me there would be no choice. My screw-up, my responsibility, like leaving a note on a parked car I just dinged and ultimately paying for the damage. 

But in the past when I was the “victim,” I let it slide without thinking twice. Accidents happen, and I’m not especially germophobic. But being that the present case was anything but accidental…. 

“Well, you took some of mine, so isn’t it your responsibility to replace it?”

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Really?”

Needless to say, this was a potential inflection point. For lots of men-folk, “fuck you” equals, if not fightin’ words, at least upping the ante to aggro — getting in the bro’s face, “No, fuck you,” etc.

That’s not me. My “really” came out of bemusement, even amusement. W. was being a weirdo liar, but he hadn’t once raised his voice and basically avoided even eye contact and certainly wasn’t up in my face, so clearly neither of us was going to take it there. 

That left me at a sort of impasse. In my head I’d already mentally mapped out a decision tree that had very few limbs: Physical Altercation – NO. Threat – NO. Yell – NO. “Fuck you” was hella rude but not a threat, so Fetch a Bouncer was a NO. I could complain to a bartender/manager, but W. would simply repeat his lie and say he apologized (true, even if another lie). The theft of my beer was not Club’s responsibility (this would be labeled a “homeowner-to-homeowner dispute” in the world of HOAs). They might replace my beer to be nice (while thinking I was the douche — because who would intentionally drink from someone else’s beer?), but that wasn’t the point. All I could do was amuse myself a little more by keeping W. engaged until he simply walked away (Follow – NO).

It’s at this point that X. — our main character [talk about burying the lede] — enters the story, coming up to W. with friendly familiarity. Because neither W. nor myself had become animated during our conflict, X. had no idea what he’d walked into. But seeing that we were in conversation, he politely turned to me, extending his hand. “Hey, how’re you doing?”

I’m bad with small talk and broad generalizations, but ask me a specific question — or a general question to which a specific answer is apt — and you’re gonna get a real reply. “Well, I’m alright, except I’m having sort of an odd moment with this fellow here, because he drank some of my beer, and so I want him to replace it, but he won’t.”

I wasn’t sure X. had followed this, unexpected as it surely was and coming in the midst of loudish music; but after digesting it for a couple of seconds, he surprised me: “How about I buy you a beer and we just end it there? Would that be okay?”

Now it was my turn to digest. The beer wasn’t the point. Unlike water, more beer I could live without; and I didn’t know whether X. was merely acquainted with W. or his friend — but in either case, the situation had nothing to do with him, so I was uncomfortable with his reaching into his pocket to rectify it. At the same time, the gesture was compelling, and sometimes the most gracious thing to do in the face of generosity is accept it. So I sort of hemmed and hawed: “Well, that’s a really nice offer, but it’s really not your responsibility….”

“Don’t worry about it, man. If that’ll end it right here, I’m happy to do it.”

I hem-hawed a bit more, but X. jumped in: “Is that what you want: you want someone to buy you a drink?”

No hemming/hawing here: “No, I want you to buy me a drink because you…”

“I got you, man,” X. said, smiling with what appeared to be a genuine lenity. “What are you drinking?”

***

Presumably W.’s behavior was a sort of ersatz territorial pissing, something along the lines of: After failing to seize what on some (macho, animalistic) level he perceived as my property (companion), he sublimated his frustration by a dominance display of obstructing my path, then claiming what actually was my property (beer).

Weirdo stuff, sure, but unprompted or even random aggression is commonplace in this stupid world. Not so long ago at Club I returned to the drink rail to find someone had dropped a neon blue wad of chewing gum into my full glass, despite the fact that there were several empty cups around it that could have served as receptacles. I had not interacted with anyone that night, so I doubt that I was specifically targeted; rather, someone just wanted to be randomly mean. People do lots of strange, shitty things, including wanton cruelties of the highest order. Everyone’s on their own trip. 

But by this point it was no longer W.’s but X.’s trip that was my chief interest. After he handed me my new beer, we chatted briefly. He was, in fact, W.’s friend, and while of course he didn’t know what had happened, he simply believed that it’s always worth squashing conflict. I assured him that the situation would not have escalated, but that I appreciated his gesture nonetheless. 

A bit later the DJ announced that there was a birthday in the house: X.’s. So when I almost literally ran into X. in the loo, where the acoustical environment was more conducive to conversation, I had to find out more. I wished him a happy birthday and again thanked him, noting that his gesture was all the more compelling for coming on his birthday, when tradition holds that it’s others who do for you.

“Well,” he began, “you already understand this, because I see how appreciative you are, but it’s about putting positive energy into the world. If I can do a little something to make a situation better, I’m going to do that every time. A few bucks, whatever — it doesn’t matter. And you know, when you do that, it comes back to you.” He smiled warmly. “It’s a beautiful world, bro. Anyway, that’s my story.” 

“It’s a nice story,” I replied, “and a good ending.”

My words were chosen carefully, because I feel X. is indeed telling himself a story — a fiction. If forced to generalize, ugly, unfair, awful, and brutal might be among my top descriptors. By no stretch of the imagination do I feel the world is beautiful and that what goes around justly comes around. 

But it’s a nice fiction, and clearly X.’s believing it is motivating him toward good ends. Plus, he’s certainly right about one thing.

Undoubtedly, each of us has some ability to affect our immediate patch of space-time; and considering the unfathomable complexity of existence, there’s no telling how even the smallest of our actions — whether cruel or kind — will ramify. Although we can never know exactly how way will lead to way, it’s not unreasonable to presume that kindness is more likely to beget more kindness than cruelty, just as aggression is more likely to beget more aggression than peace. If we’re simply playing the odds, our odds for having a beautiful experience of the world are increased if we’re putting beauty into it.

I don’t care whether X. is right or wrong about the world; I simply want him to keep doing what he’s doing and to encounter no reasons to stop. I want people to put positivity into practice, because the more positivity of action, the more positive the world will be. 

To be sure, on his birthday X.’s generosity made the world slightly better. He rescued W. from an uncomfortable situation (just because I wasn’t willing to let W. walk all over me doesn’t mean he’s undeserving of compassion. Everyone’s on their own trip), and he took a negative (if slightly amusing) experience I was having and supplanted it with a more powerful positive interaction, so that on the whole my night turned out better than if W. had simply left me alone.

That’s a neat trick, and it’s a good reminder for a quasi-nihilistic pessimist like myself that there’s more good than I know in this big bad world, a world we can always make better. And even when the possible betterment at hand is so incremental that it’s almost too small to measure, it’s still worth doing. Better, after all, is better.