My First Sociopath

Posted on January 13, 2006 in Adolescence Scoundrels

I met him and never saw him again after a summer debate camp. High school debate lends itself to slipperyness: you have to advocate both sides without your true intentions. The lesson that is taught, I suppose, is that both sides may have good arguments. The old “many truths” fallacy may have its origins here. And Ed, like the wave of soon-to-be-vile neoconservatives who run contemporary affairs, found a foothold on the pretense of free speech.

Free speech until you got control of the major networks.

Ed lived in the room next door to me. He came from somewhere on the fringes of Los Angeles, from one of those suburbs which insulated their fringe-thinking populations from the diversity of the central metropolis. Ed suffered from grandiosity and he could back it up: he was a slick talker. Every claim he made about himself he could prove by inundating his audience with words. You couldn’t argue with him. He positioned himself so that he could only win. If he was about to lose, he would wrest the discussion away from you and jeer.

The debate camp did not like us becoming too serious about our work. So it imposed a few evenings and a few days of “forced fun”. On one of these was a dance. I remember standing shyly in the back of the room. Ed was there. He pointed to one of the girls.”

“See that girl?” he said. “She’s got a face like a squirrel.”

A few minutes later, I saw him dancing with her. Later they fucked. He told us all about it. Ed hung her up like a rack of antlers. And because it was a boy and girl thing, nice guys like me couldn’t tell the girl because if we did so, we’d end up cracked over the head with a heavy stack of leatherbound denial. I think one of the reasons why Ed told his stories to us nice guys was that he knew we wouldn’t tell. He’d worked it out, always to his own advantage.

He never had anything to do with the girl for the rest of the camp.

I haven’t kept track of Ed. No idea of what became of him has entered my consciousness. He may be a lawyer or a businessman. A developer slashing down the chaparral to make away for a wealthy subdivision on the pretense that there is a housing shortage. That’s the California Way that guys like Ed were inventing back in the 1970s when we were all in high school.

I imagine him doing well, much better than I have. Back in high school, I experienced the first rock-hard cottony flashes of confusion that accompany my disease. Ed had no such suffering to bear. He went on, I am sure of it, as he began. And I remember that night at the dance, when he insulted the girl to us and then went off to seduce her. I did not find her attractive, but I found what Ed did downright unattractive and vile. I imagine that, later, he found himself a trophy wife of a lower order. And repeated the pattern of marriage and divorce many times over the years because Ed, ever the predator and the deceiver, knew well the winks and soft words of courtship but nothing at all about Love.