Category : Various Text files
Archive   : BARRY.ZIP
Filename : BARRY19.ASC

Total amnesia is the only way to forget

By Dave Barry

Have you ever really embarrassed yourself? Don't answer that, stupid.
It's a rhetorical question. Of course you've embarrassed yourself. Everybody
has. I bet the Pope has. If you were to say to the Pope: "Your Holy
Worshipfulness, I bet you've pulled some blockheaded boners in your day,
huh?", he'd smile that warm, knowing, fatherly smile he has, and then he'd
wave. He can't hear a word you're saying, up on that balcony.
But my point is that if you've ever done anything humiliating, you've
probably noticed that your BRAIN NEVER LETS YOU FORGET IT. This is the same
brain that never remembers things you SHOULD remember. If you were bleeding
to death and the emergency-room doctor asked you what blood type you were,
you'd say: "I think it's B. Or maybe C. I'm pretty sure it's a letter." But
if the doctor asked you to describe the skirt you were wearing when you were
doing the Mashed Potatoes in the ninth-grade dance competition in front of 350
people, and your underwear, which had holes in it, fell to your ankles, you'd
say, without hesitating for a millisecond, "It was gray felt with a pink
flocked poodle."
Your brain cherishes embarrassing memories. It likes to take them out
and cuddle them. This probably explains a lot of unexplained suicides. A
successful man with a nice family and a good career will be out on his patio,
cooking hamburgers, seemingly without a care in the world, when his brain,
rummaging through its humiliating-incident collection, selects an old
favorite, which it replays for the zillionth time, and the man is suddenly so
overcome by feelings of shame that he stabs himself in the skull with his
barbecue fork.
At the funeral, people say how shocking it was, a seemingly happy and
well-adjusted person choosing to end it all. They assume he must have had a
terrible dark secret involving drugs or organized crime or dressing members of
the conch family in flimsy undergarments. Little do they know he was thinking
about the time in social studies class in 1963 when he discovered a
hard-to-reach pimple roughly halfway down his back, and he got to working on
it, subtly at first, but with gradually increasing intensity, eventually
losing track of where he was, until suddenly he realized the room had become
silent, and he looked up, with his arm stuck halfway down the back of his
shirt, and he saw that EVERYBODY IN THE CLASS, INCLUDING THE TEACHER, WAS
WATCHING HIM INTENTLY AND KNEW EXACTLY WHAT HE WAS DOING, and he knew they'd
give him a cruel nickname that would stick like epoxy cement for the rest of
his life, such that when he went to his 45th reunion, even if he had been
appointed chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the instant his classmates
saw him, they'd shriek: "Hey, look! It's ZIT!"
Everybody has incidents like this. My mother is always reliving the
time she lost her car in a shopping-center parking lot, and she was wandering
around with several large shopping bags and two small children, looking
helpless, and after a while other shoppers took pity on her and offered to
help. "It's a black Chevrolet," she told them, over and over. And they
searched and searched and searched for it. They were extremely nice. They
all agreed that it can be darned easy to lose your car in these big parking
lots. They had been there for an hour, some of them, searching for this black
Chevrolet, and it was getting dark, when my mother remembered that several
days earlier we had bought a new car. "I'm sorry!" she told the people,
smiling brightly so they would see what a humorous situation this was. "It's
NOT a black Chevrolet! It's a yellow Ford!" She kept on smiling as they
edged away, keeping their eyes on her.
My own personal brain is forever dredging up the time in 11th grade when
I took a girl, a very attractive girl on whom I had a life-threatening crush,
to a dance. I was standing in the gym next to her, holding her hand, thinking
what a sharp couple we made -- Steve Suave and His Gorgeous Date -- when one
of my friends sidled up to me and observed that, over on the other side, my
date was using her spare hand to hold hands with another guy. This was of
course a much better-looking guy. This was Paul Newman, only taller.
Several of my friends gathered to watch. I thought: What am I supposed to do
here? Hit the guy? That would have been asking for a lifetime of dental
problems. He was a varsity football player; I was on the Dance Committee. I
also had to rule out hitting my date. The ideal move would have been to
spontaneously burst into flames and die. I have read that this sometimes
happens to people. But you never get a break like that when you need it.
Finally I turned to my date, dropped her hand, looked her square in the eye,
and said: "Um." Just like that: "Um." My brain absolutely loves to remember
this. "Way to go, Dave!" it shrieks to me, when I'm stopped at red lights, 23
1/2 years later. Talk about eloquent! My brain can't get over what a jerk I
was. It's always coming up with much better ideas for things I could have
said. I should start writing them down, in case we ever develop time travel.
I'd go back to the gym with a whole Rolodex file filled with remarks, and I'd
read them to my date over the course of a couple of hours. Wouldn't SHE feel
awful! Ha ha! It just occurred to me that she may be out there right now, in
our reading audience, in which case I wish to state for the record that I am
leading an absolutely wonderful life, and I have been on the Johnny Carson
show, and I hope things are equally fine with you. Twice. I was on Carson
twice.

[Copyright 1986 Knight-Ridder News Service. Reprinted with permission]