misery's a river, children. everybody row.

[the_siobhan]

I was talking to bcholmes today about an incident that happened once and that has had me completely mystified ever since. It's been close to two decades, but something about that "poem" I wrote just knocked it loose to rattle around in my head.

I had a friend - lets call her Sue for the purpose of this blog. Note that she bears no relationship whatsoever with any actual Sue either living or dead. Sue and I used to hang around a lot - we were both single, heavy drinkers and had jobs with sufficient income that we could support all of our bad habits. That's usually a killer combination for me. Anyway most weekends we were out causing some form of mayhem together.

At the same time, I had another friend. Let's call him Bill. Also bearing no relation to any actual Bill living or dead. Sue and I both knew Bill, and thought he was a good guy and enjoyed his company. We didn't really "hang out" per se, but we liked the same bands, drank at the same watering holes, occasionally ended up at the same parties. That kind of thing.

So Bill lived under the poverty line, and it came to pass that he needed to get out of his apartment. And he sent a general message out to his friends asking if anybody could lend him some cash to put towards first and last. Not asking for pity or saying poor me, just "if you could do this it would really help me out".

I didn't know him that well at the time, but it wasn't a huge amount of money that he needed, and I was doing pretty good financially back then. So I offered. So he showed up at my apartment, wrote out a little contract - to my somewhat impressed bemusement - we both signed it and I gave him a cheque. And once a month for the next two years an envelope would appear in my mailbox with a cheque in it, taking another small slice off of the debt. Once - maybe twice - he phoned and said it was a particularly tight month and he couldn't do it, was that ok? And I said yes and the following month another cheque would appear right on schedule.

I never really thought that much more about it. More importantly to the point of this story, I never told anybody about it. Mostly because it was a deal between me and him and it never really occured to me to mention it to anybody at the time. I have no idea if he told anybody or not. But, the fact that he had sent out a call asking people for help was public knowledge, along with the fact that he moved the following month.

So it happened that one night I was sitting around at Sue's place with a handfull of people all sitting around and drinking. And for whatever reason Bill's name came up. And Sue started talking about how she didn't really like him that much, talking about him dismissively in way that indicated that she thought his character was in some way flawed. And then the kicker came. She looked me right in the eye and said, "You know when he moved last year he borrowed a whole bunch of money from people and never paid them back."

In retrospect I probably should have said spoken up given that there were other people there. I did later take a couple of them aside and tell them privately that Sue was full of shit. And in my defense, I haven't noticed that Bill's reputation suffered much as a result.

But what really went on my head at that exact moment is that a little filing drawer marked "Will Make Shit Up About You And Tell Those Lies To Other People When You Are Not Around" opened in my head, Sue dropped neatly into it, and the drawer closed. From that moment on I didn't believe a single word that came out of her mouth. I didn't make a big deal about it, but there were times that it was pretty obvious that I was treating her as an unreliable witness and if anybody asked me why, I told them the truth. And I was supremely unshocked when she finally turned her nasty habit on me and we just stopped interacting altogether.

You know I've never told Bill this story. Maybe I should - I still hang out with him sometimes.

Sue, on the other hand, I haven't seen in well over ten years. She left town at some point, angry and hurt that over the years all her "so-called friends" had abandoned her and I don't know what happened to her afterwards. I hope she managed to get her shit sorted out because I think she was a pretty unhappy person.

But to this day I can not figure out what the entire purpose of that little incident was. Why the fuck would anybody do something that... pointless. It's not even about the lie itself, I just don't get why she would do that when there was absolutely zero profit in it for her. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

You know, some days I wonder if maybe I'd stop getting headaches if I stopped insisting that people make sense.

Comments

[panic-girl.livejournal.com]

How do you perceive that kind of thing as gaining power?

For interest, was Sue a very popular person, or someone who usually sat on the periphery of a group?

From my experience, the person with the "best" gossip is going to get a lot of attention, whether or not it's true. Attention is power, at least to the person seeking it.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Sue was very outgoing - she was likely to focus a lot of the attention at a party on herself because of that.

She didn't have a huge number of friends, but she was no wallflower.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

*Ting*

Aha. So about a long time ago, I shared a house with a 'Sue'. I'm not aware that she had (m)any old friends, just an awful lot of people who she'd fallen out with because they'd done something terrible to her.

Life and soul of the party, mind. And God help you if you told better stories than she did.

Eventually I became one of those people when she failed in ripping me off for 2k5.

[strang-er.livejournal.com]

I've caught myself, and been caught out too, talking crap about other people in the past - not making stuff up, so much as expressing opinions on things i don't know enough to have an opinion on - just to have something to talk about and sound like i'm 'in the know'. I put it down as an insecurity thing (at least it was for me at the time) and can well imagine the temptation to add a bit of malicious gossip in to the mix for extra schadenfreude value.

I've also known people who were big on the "putting down everyone you felt was below you in status, sucking up to everyone above you in status, undermining the status of people close to your own level" thing mentioned by someone below, in a social rather than career sense.

[panic-girl.livejournal.com]

Ahhh schadenfreude.
You're on to something there.
All the people in Sio's posts, saying "ooooh where's the drama at?" are a good example of it too.
I've been there; hung out on LJDrama for a while.