Public Apology
Unlike Arlen Specter or Richard Cohen, I firmly believe in apologizing when you’re wrong. Sometimes the apology can be a long time coming, and what follows is one of those instances. The story below does not portray me in a very good light, nor should it.
The other day, I bopped by my long-neglected myspace account, where an email from a young woman I haven’t seen in 16 years was waiting for me.
Hi Brendan,
Hope you are doing well. I am not sure if you remember me, I am the librarian’s daughter from… I was wondering if you could give me a call sometime. My # is XXX-XXX-XXXX, or I can call you. There is something very brief I want to talk to you about. (Don’t worry I don’t sell Amway.) Sue
I sat in front of my computer dumbfounded. Sue (name changed) was a girl I’d hooked up with just before leaving Newport in 1991. My parents had already moved onto New Haven, and I was finishing up the last month of summer at my restaurant job, living in the empty house on Kay Street. I don’t remember the exact chonology, but at some point I ended up giving Sue a ride downtown on the back of my bike during the day, and inviting her over to my place that night after work. She said yes, and we ended up screwing the night away in my parents basement (which, incidentally, gave a thief the chance to steal my bike). And after that we would meet wherever, whenever, to get it on. She still lived with her parents, next door to the private school we’d both attended as kids, and perhaps it’s no surprise that we usually ended up meeting in the shadows of the oak tree around midnight.
I was pretty clear that all I was interested in with Sue was no-strings-attached sex, and that I was leaving Newport for good in the next few weeks, but that is no excuse for the way I treated this girl. I was nothing short of a fucking bastard.
In return for the unholy crime of having sex with me at any hour of the day or night, I trashed this girl’s reputation all over town. It wasn’t enough just to mutually use each other, oh no. I was a cocky, arrogant disrespectful piece of shit, and began referring to her as “Piglet” to my friends. Because she was slutty you see, and not worthy of respect. Something for piggish me to fuck.
I worked with Johnny “Eggbone” Eckhardt at Scabby’s Rest, where his bad luck with women had been a running joke for years. I felt bad for him, and in a monumental expression of perceived male privilege (not to mention outrageous douchebaggery), I decided I would “give” Sue to Eggbone as a going-away present. Wasn’t I just the kindest guy? In any event, Sue found out about my brilliant plan, and left an angry message on my answering machine telling me we were through. It was the last I thought about it until I returned home for a visit the next summer.
Newport is a small enough place that nicknames catch on quickly: my friend Tim has always been known as “Stu”; Frank and John Eckhardt have been “Frenchy” and “Eggbone” for as long as I can remember; Tim Miner, never the brightest bulb in the Christmas tree, has always been called “Dim”, and his brother Tommy has always been “Tinkles”; for awhile I was the “Psycho Kid”, until Bob “Bobbles” “Bobby Cocktails” Burke came up with “Squirrely”.
I’d was away from Newport for about a year before my next visit to the island, and had grown immeasurably as a human being. I worked for Greenpeace as a canvasser, where I met all sorts of people with very different beliefs from the people I’d grown up with. I’d gotten a lot more aware of my own beliefs, and a lot more self-critical as well. Being alone in a city had made me a lot less self-assured, a lot less of an asshole.
I was walking down Thames Street with Stu, Heather and Mark, when Sue and some of her friends came heading down the sidewalk in the opposite direction.
“Hey Piglet,” Mark said, as if it was her given name, and Sue responded “Hi Mark”. Heather used the name too, casually and without malice, like any other nickname. But I knew what it meant, and I knew who’d given her that label: it made my knees weak, and my guts turned to liquid. Sue gave me a barely perceptible glare: I flushed, nodded at her as if we’d never met, and kept walking. Shameful. Cowardice. I did that. It was the last time I saw her or heard from her.
Ever since that day, I have carried around the guilt on the back burner, not as an item to remedy, but something to remember for always. Sometimes when you break something, it can’t be fixed: reputations are one of those irreparable items. Over the past 16 years, the incident still appears in my mind’s eye occasionally, waking up in the early hours before dawn feeling like the creep I was in 1991.
When I saw the email, my first reaction was “Uh-oh. Sue’s working on her self-esteem, and I am about to get the reaming of my life for what I did in 1991.”
My second thought was “Oh man. I do NOT want to be on the receiving end of that one.”
My third and final thought, as I dialed her number, was, “I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to be a coward in the present on top of being a total bastard in the past. If nothing else I can apologize and she can throw it back in my face.”
I heard her voice on the other end of the phone, and haltingly said, “Hi, it’s Brendan Skwire…”
And instead of yelling at me, Sue apologized to me. “I didn’t respect what you wanted back then,” she said, “And put you in a weird position.”
It was the last thing I expected or deserved to hear, and I felt even worse.
“No,” I said. “No no no. You don’t owe me an apology at all. Frankly, you could kick me in the balls repeatedly until my scrotum was flat as a pancake, and you wouldn’t owe me an apology. It’s me who owes you an apology. Sue, I treated you like crap, and I have literally never forgiven myself. Will you forgive me?”
As much as I’m glad that she forgave me my trespasses, I am not sure if I am ready to forgive myself just yet. How many times, I wonder, have I behaved like this without even knowing it? How many times have I made excuses for my friends when they’ve acted the same way? And what can I do to prevent this from happening to other young women?
I think I will have forgiven myself thoroughly when my son is old enough to learn about respect for women, respect for women’s sexuality, and respect for his own sexuality. I’ve learned from my own bad example, and hope I can use my past bad behavior in some kind of constructive way.
I hope I do a good job. I’m sorry I was such a creep.
One Response to “Public Apology”
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March 21st, 2007 at 10:44 am
We all were awful, Skwire.