Tag Archives: Andre

Andre and his extra Mets ticket

I was on the Internet the other day, when I saw on my Facebook news feed that my old friend Andre put up a status update: “I have an extra ticket to the Mets game tonight. Hit me up if u wanna come!” And I haven’t seen Andre in close to a year. We’d been really old friends, but all of our recent interactions had this way of self-destructing. I was actually a little surprised that we were still even Facebook friends.

But I figured, why not? So I sent him a message and said, “Hey man, I’d love to go to the game with you!” and I waited. He didn’t get back to me that day, or the next couple of days after that either. I tried not to think about it, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t driving me a little crazy. Because, come on, why are you going to put something like that out on Facebook? Obviously none of your close friends are interested, and so now you’re just kind of reaching out, all of your second and third tier friends. And if I’m really honest here, I wouldn’t even consider myself a third-tier friend. But still, I’m on some tier, and I responded.

Game day arrived, and I still hadn’t heard from him, and I really shouldn’t have done anything, like, I know, the better grown-up adult part of me knows that I should have just left it alone. But I couldn’t, and so I sent Andre a follow-up message. I wrote, “OK, well, I guess you don’t want to go to the Mets game with me. Thanks for getting back to me.”

And he wrote back within an hour, “Hey, yeah, I’m going with Cliff, sorry.” That was it, no hello, no how’s it going, nothing about how we haven’t talked in over a year, how it would’ve been nice to catch up. And whatever, you don’t want to spend a whole game with me? That’s fine, I get it. Yeah, maybe three or four hours together would have been a little much. But he could’ve at least responded, maybe put out an offer to grab a drink and catch up some time. You don’t even have to follow through with actually getting together. But you just put it out there, it’s nice.

OK, Cliff’s going, fine Again, I tried to get it out of my head, but the way in which he ignored me, how I had to go fishing for that response. And then the way he just wrote me off, the nope, sorry. Oh yeah, what a sincere apology. I’m really glad that you’re sorry. Why do you put something like that on Facebook anyway? You really think I care about going to a Mets game? Why didn’t you just send a text to Cliff in the first place?

And then I really couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wondered, who responded to that Facebook message first, me or Cliff? And so I tried to pull up Andre’s profile, but it wasn’t popping up. Did he unfriend me? Because he was on my news feed just a few days ago. I was getting a little obsessed over this, but at least I acknowledged that I was getting obsessed, and so I didn’t feel as bad searching my news feed, going through every single post for the past week. As long as I was aware that I was acting kind of crazy, I didn’t mind so much.

And yeah, finally I found it, the original post. It wasn’t actually Andre’s post that had popped up, it was one of my other friends, Steve. The way Facebook displayed it, I guess I can see my own confusion now. It showed me, “Steve commented on a post,” as if Steve’s comment on Andre’s post was worthy enough news to be displayed on my news feed as a standalone story. Steve wrote, “Oh man, I’m busy, but we should catch up soon!” And then, even though I clearly wasn’t Facebook friends with Andre, for whatever reason I could see all of those comments to that post, maybe because I was still friends with Steve or something, I don’t know.

“Definitely! Hope all is well by you!” Andre posted underneath Steve’s message. And down the line it went, lots of people responding in the negative, Andre replying with a friendly acknowledgment, he clicked the like button next to each response. And there was my comment, finally, all alone, unliked, unacknowledged. A day after mine, Cliff wrote, “Yeah, sounds good, I’m in.”

So whatever, again, I don’t even care anymore. I mean, that’s not true, I’m obviously still pretty keyed up over being ignored, but what am I going to do, right? It’s just, I was trying to be the bigger person here, which sounds like bullshit, right? Because I was going to be the one getting the free ticket. But it wasn’t about the ticket. I just thought it would have been cool to rekindle an old friendship. But that’s fine, you want to be a jerk about it Andre? I don’t care. You be the smaller person. I’m not getting involved anymore than I already have.

Reconnecting with my old friend Andre

It’s like, sometimes things have to get really bad before they start to get good again. That’s what it was like for Andre and me anyway. I’m telling you, we had like a whole year of fights and slights, the last time we got together, it wasn’t even a get together really, I wound up kind of just bumping into him by a fro-yo place. Whatever, it’s unimportant who ignored who. All I’m saying is, I thought that was it, I thought we were done.

But then a few weeks ago I got a notification from Facebook. Apparently Andre put some video online from when we were right out of college. Andre had just gotten the Nintendo Wii, and I had just bought one of those Flip cameras. What a waste. Man, if I had only waited like a year or two, it’s like, everyone has a Flip camera on their iPhone.

Anyway it’s this video of me playing Wii bowling, Andre must have been shooting the whole thing, and right as I go to line up, I fling the Wiimote, it flies out of my grip, out past the little string thing that’s supposed to attach it to my wrist, and it smashes right into the wall. I remember that happening too, which totally sucked at the time, but man, it’s like you totally blow things out of proportion, the stuff that seems like such a big deal at the time, but I mean, man, I couldn’t even tell you where any of my Wii stuff is now. I bought my own Wii after I broke Andre’s remote, and I think I wound up buying like three extra remotes, just in case there were ever four of us that wanted to play Mario Party or some other four-player multiplayer. I think we did it like once or twice.

Anyway, he tagged me, which was cool of him, and all of that animosity I had built up toward my old friend, everything kind of melted away. It was just like that remote, it was like, why did we ever let ourselves get so bent out of shape in the first place? I liked his photo, then he sent me a friend request, which, I didn’t even know that we weren’t friends. Did he defriend me? Whatever, I could have defriended him. Either way, that meant that someone else must have tagged me in the video, which, if it was from my Flip camera, how did he get it on his computer?

It didn’t matter. I reached out with the like, he reached around to me with the friend request, and so I figured I’d take it to the next level with a message. “What’s up man? Long time. You wanna grab a drink some time?”

To which he replied, “Sure man. Sounds good.”

And we did, we met up that Thursday for drinks after work. And seriously, it was like all of that stuff from the past year, the fishing trip, his grandma dying, it was all like it never happened. Or like it happened, but neither of us was thinking about it. I mean, I was thinking about it, but not in any way harboring any sort of ill will or anything, I was just thinking about how I wasn’t thinking about it. And sure, I couldn’t tell exactly what he was thinking, but he was smiling, and so was I, and it was good. It was good enough.

“How did you get that video?” I did wind up bringing it up after we had a couple of beers.

“Oh, the Wiimote?” he said, “I found my old Flip camera lying around, and there it was.”

Did I want to get into it with him? That it was my Flip camera? That either I left it over his place, or he borrowed it and must have forgot to bring it back? You know what? I really wanted to, I really just wanted to get in there and be like, Andre, dude, that was my Flip camera. But like I said before, this thing was useless to me now. I have a better camera on my phone. Why risk getting into it with Andre over something so stupid?

We had a great time, catching up, laughing about old memories. And then I went home. I went back to Facebook to check out that video again, only, it wasn’t posted directly to Facebook, it was linked to Facebook from YouTube. Andre must have posted this clip online like six years ago. And I couldn’t believe it, but it had something like seven hundred thousand views. Was this one of the original Wiimote to the wall videos?

Were there any ads embedded to this clip? There were. So I did a quick Google search on how much Andre could be looking at earning just on ads, and it was pretty substantial. Nothing to retire over, but still, I could use an extra couple thousand dollars.

I sent him a long message, it was nice, I made sure to write out everything very nicely. I explained to him that I was pretty sure that it was my Flip camera, that I wasn’t looking for all of the ad revenue, but just a cut.

He shot me back a message saying how it was my camera, but after I smashed the remote, that I offered him the camera in exchange. Which, I don’t remember that, at all. If I remember correctly, a brand new Wiimote was something like fifty bucks, whereas the Flip camera was easily over a hundred.

I closed my laptop and tried to cool off, remembering that I didn’t want to ruin our barely reestablished friendship over what was clearly a simple misunderstanding. But later that week I went home to my parents’ house and I started telling my dad about it. He seemed kind of uninterested, but I didn’t let it go, insisting that he watch the video. Only, when I tried to pull it up, it wouldn’t show me the video on Andre’s profile. It didn’t show anything, just his photo and the “add friend” button.

Did he really defriend me? Over a couple thousand dollars? What the hell man? What are you trying to hide? Are you seriously just going to hope that this all blows over? Because that’s not cool Andre, you can’t just keep ignoring my calls and my texts. Dude, I thought we were friends, again. That’s not cool dude, I deserve a little cut. You can’t just post stuff on the Internet and keep all of the profit to yourself.

Come on man, seriously, not cool.

Andre, my new boss

I got a new job through a temp agency, nothing to write home about really, typical office work, but they said that if I played my cards right, I had the possibility of getting promoted to something permanent. Is that a promotion? Or a new offer? I don’t know, I guess the big difference would be that I’d be getting a paycheck through them and not through the temp agency which, how much of a cut are they getting anyway? How long do I have to keep giving them some of my pay?

But I got way ahead of myself, because guess who just happened to be my new boss?

“Oh, he’s such a cool guy,” the guy sitting next to me said, “Yeah it’s like he’s more of a colleague than a manager. He even hangs out with us after work sometimes. We had this karaoke thing last week, he was so cool, and right before he left he paid for the whole tab on the company card.”

What was this, Google? I mean, this sounded too good to be true. And of course, that’s exactly what it was, way too good to be true.

“Andre?” I said when he turned he corner, holding a cup of coffee in one hand, a stack of papers on a clipboard in the other, he had on this really skinny tie, a short-sleeved button down that you could just tell he was only wearing to go for that cool-nerd look. “You work here too?”

“Hey, yeah, I work here. I’m your new boss!”

And he just stood there and smiled for a little bit, eventually putting down his coffee and extending his hand, as if we’ve never met before, as if this were some kind of mock-introduction. I already knew Andre. We used to be pretty tight, rolled with the same group of friends. But we haven’t talked in like half a year, ever since he blew me off at that fro-yo place by the subway.

“So let’s just get some of this paperwork taken care of, OK?”

“Andre, why do I have to fill out paperwork? I already filled out a ton of paperwork at the temp agency.”

And this stack of paperwork Andre had clipped to his clipboard, it was a ton of stuff, I knew it was going to be all of the stuff that I already wasted my time filling out, useless information like, “What was your major in college?” or, “Are you sure you’ve never been arrested for anything?”

“Yeah, it’s just that HR likes to have everything in our own format, you know what I mean? It’s just an easy way to streamline all of the information.”

Streamline. Please, now he was just showing off, using all of his fancy corporate terminology. Look at me, I’m wearing a tie, my short-sleeved button-down is slightly untucked in the back, like is that on purpose? Or am I just so cool that I don’t even notice that it’s untucked? And I could tell that it was a deliberate stylistic choice.

“Andre, come on man, that’s going to take like forty-five minutes. Can’t you just have the temp agency send everything your way? What’s the point of having me fill this stuff out twice?”

And really, I should have said three times, because after I submitted my resume to the temp agency, they had me basically retype everything into their website, a little separate box for each piece of information, so I couldn’t even copy and paste anything. Actually, it was four times, if you count me actually writing out the resume, and then guess what the first thing they made me do when I had my interview at the temp place? Yeah, another stack of papers, “OK, just fill out these forms and someone’ll be over in just a sec.”

“Rob, it shouldn’t take you forty-five minutes …”

“Come on Andre, how long have we known each other? Do you really need me to write out where I went to college? Come on man.”

He kind of just looked at me for a little bit before picking up his coffee.

“All right man, it’s cool,” and then he turned to the guy sitting next to me, “Morris, how’s everything man? Karaoke on Thursday?” and Morris was like, “Yeah boss, sounds great!

I looked at Andre. He didn’t extend the invitation to me. Or, I don’t know, maybe it was an implied invitation. But maybe not. Probably not, because the temp agency called me when I got home, they said that there was a mix-up, that they’re actually going to send me to work at a sorting facility at some shipping place.

And I couldn’t help but thinking that it was Andre, he didn’t want me there, cramping his style, I was undercutting this ridiculous bullshit professional image that he’d obviously spent way too long trying to cultivate, the cool boss, look at me, I sing karaoke. I wish that I got to be Andre’s boss, just for a second, not a second, but a day, maybe a week, I wouldn’t toss him out the door after one day, not even a day really, it was just once, just that one interaction, I didn’t see him again until the end of the day, but he didn’t even say goodbye, not really, he just kind of half-waved at me from his desk as I was on my way out.

And later the next day I texted him, about everything, about me getting switched, about the karaoke night. And I got a reply within an hour, “Sorry, wrong number.” What the fuck dude, did you change your number? And you didn’t let me know? I mean, my contact should still be in there. What if it’s an emergency? Or are you just messing with me? Fucking Andre, man, I really hope it’s a while before I run into him again.

Fro-yo with Andre after work

I got off the subway and I ran into Andre, he must have been in the same car as me, but I didn’t see him, which is fine, I mean, if I saw him, like if I looked in his direction, I would have been like, should I wave? Should I go over and talk? But this was better, just, here were, bumped right into each other. “Hey Andre, what’s up?” and he was like, “Oh hey man, just coming home from work.”

Did he see me on the subway? Like if we hadn’t run right into each other, would he have said hi? No, that’s a crazy thing to think about, and besides, we were on good terms now, mostly good terms. I mean, the last time we saw each other, we didn’t have like a direct confrontation or anything. Maybe enough time has passed where a random encounter like this didn’t have to be awkward or forced. Maybe we really could be friends again.

“So what are you up to?” I asked, “Do you want to go grab a drink or something?” He told me, “I’m actually on my way to that new frozen yogurt place a few blocks down. Do you …” and normally I would have said something like, frozen yogurt, gross, something way too aggressive, like I would have been joking around, kind of, but that’s not really a funny joke, it’s just me opening my mouth and putting people off. So what if I think frozen yogurt is gross?

“Sure, let’s do it, I love fro-yo.” And even though I paused to consider my words before speaking, fro-yo still slipped out. Why did I say fro-yo? Who says fro-yo? “Ha, fro-yo,” he said it, he said ha, but he wasn’t laughing. Was he making fun of me? I have no idea where fro-yo came from.

We get to the frozen yogurt place and it’s got this Greek name. “Hey Andre,” I ask, “Is this one of those sour yogurt places?” and he said, “Well, all yogurt is a little tart, just add some honey or fruit, it’s really good.” The cups were all the same size, and so I incorrectly assumed that it was like at Seven-Eleven, when you fill up a Slurpee, you fill it up all the way to the top.

I held down the crank on the yogurt machine and made myself a ridiculously oversized serving, way too much that I’d actually eat, and I was just complaining about Greek yogurt in my head, I don’t know why I automatically went for as much as the cup could handle. And then I got to the register, the clerk made me put it on a scale. “You have to pay by weight?” I probably said it a little too loudly, Andre looked over from the next register, he had like a golf ball sized portion in that oversized cup, “Thanks a lot!” he tried to avoid my gaze as he paid the cashier and left her a dollar in the tip jar positioned in front of the register. “Thank you sir!”

A tip jar? “Twelve seventy-nine,” the cashier interrupted my train of thought. I’m serving myself yogurt, spooning on my own toppings, putting the cup on the scale … what would I be tipping for? Here’s a tip, thanks for letting me buy yogurt from this yogurt place. I dropped the twenty cents or so in the tip jar, but the cashier didn’t say anything.

Andre and I walked toward the back and I tried to be like, “A tip jar? Can you believe they …” but he cut me off, he started waving toward a group of people in the back. They were all like, “Hey Andre! What’s up man?” and I didn’t know anybody. I think I maybe recognized a face or two from Andre’s grandmother’s funeral a while back, but I couldn’t think of any names or anything.

I waited to be introduced, but nothing. Andre took the last chair at the table so I had to go to a different table, this one lady was on her laptop and so I kind of had to interrupt her, “Hey, excuse me miss, can I use this chair?” and she said, “No, I have my backpack on that chair, sorry,” and even though that’s totally not how you do it, like, take your bag off the chair, you don’t get two chairs, I kept my cool and asked someone else at a different table.

Finally I’m back with Andre, with his group of friends, he was talking and I couldn’t really squeeze in between where he was sitting and where his two friends were sitting on either side. I found a sort of empty spot at the other end and I tried to do a really quick round of introductions, but it was all just, “Hey,” “Hello,” stuff like that, nobody was really talking to me.

After ten minutes or so of unsuccessfully trying to interject myself into the conversation, I made a move to get up. Nobody said anything. I walked over to Andre, “All right man, I’ve got to get going,” and he was just like, “All right dude, see you later,” like that was it, no objection, no effort to make plans for some other time. Like why invite me out to yogurt? I didn’t want yogurt. I fucking hate Greek yogurt. I tried not to show how pissed off I was, but I didn’t feel like interrupting everyone to say goodbye so I just made a beeline to the door, dropping my yogurt in the trash on the way out. It must have been too hard of a drop, because some of the yogurt wound up flying up out of the trashcan onto the wall, the cashier was like, “Hey! Wait!” but what was I going to do, ask for a mop and a bucket? No, I took off, I didn’t look back. How about buying a bigger trashcan for your stupid oversized yogurt cups? Fucking fro-yo, fucking Andre, never again man, never again.

Andre and the big race

I was training for this race for, I don’t know, for forever, a marathon, and the big day was fast approaching. I saw on Facebook a few days before, it was Andre, we had since reconnected, you know, on Facebook anyway. He put up this status update, “Getting pumped for the big race!” and there were something like a hundred and twenty likes. No way, I thought, I didn’t know Andre was a runner.

So I sent him a private message, I was like, hey man, are you running the big race? The same race I’m running? I didn’t know you were training. And he responded back, but not on a private message, he wrote on my wall, “Yeah man, it’s my first race! I’m getting really pumped up!” It was basically identical to his own Facebook post, the one that he written earlier. And still, his comment on my wall got something like sixty likes, like people that only I knew, like my mom and cousins and stuff.

Which, whatever, I wasn’t going to let it piss me off. This was about me, about my training, about me hitting my personal best, my goals, my time. Still, I couldn’t stop myself from hitting refresh on his page, all of these, “Good luck tomorrow!” wall posts, after somebody would write something, somebody else would write something else, and Andre would go down the list, liking every single comment.

“Really feelin’ the love!” he threw somewhere in there. It didn’t matter. I had to focus on envisioning my goals, stuff like that. The big day came, I got up early, I tried to keep a low profile at the starting line. I wore this hooded sweatshirt and huddled in a corner somewhere to wait for the announcement for the runners to line up.

But I couldn’t help but notice to my right, there was this group of runners all wearing bright yellow team jerseys. And wouldn’t you know it, Andre was in the middle of the pack. I had to see what was going on. They were all like singing these songs, something about a team, I don’t know, there was a lot of chanting.

“Hey Andre, what’s up? What is this, you’re part of a team?”

“Oh, hey man! Yeah, you know, no big deal, we all donated a bunch of money to kids with cancer. We figured, might as well run for a cause, right? Try to make a little bit of a difference, you know what I mean?”

I knew exactly what he meant, “Jesus man, those charity teams, what are those like a couple grand?” I had considered trying to get a spot in the race through a charity, but two thousand dollars, even if I did hit up all of my friends and family, would I be able to make it happen? And if I didn’t, I’d be liable for that amount. I couldn’t do it.

So I went on craigslist and bought some guy’s ticket for four hundred bucks, still a lot more expensive than it would have been had I just qualified or won the race lottery. It’s so tough, these big races, they make it impossible for regular runners to run. And I’m better than regular. I think so anyway. I’m just not good enough to qualify on my own. I’m just short, just a little.

And this guy, he contacted me, I said, where’s a good spot for us to meet up so I can grab the ticket? And he tells me to come by his office in Midtown. Well, I asked, can we meet somewhere a little in between? It’s kind of tough for me to get all the way over there. What about, where do you live, could I swing by your neighborhood? And he repeated the same email, to meet him by his office.

So I showed up and there were like a thousand people outside of his office building. I called his cell phone, he told me to wait outside. I waited like fifteen minutes, I couldn’t tell who he’d be, what he’d look like. I called him again but he didn’t answer. Finally he showed up, he just kind of stuck his hand out, like give me the cash. I gave him the cash, he handed over a manila envelope with the race number.

“Hey man,” I asked, “What about the race t-shirt?” Every race gives you a race t-shirt. It’s awesome. It’s great to wear it around town afterwards, it’s like the next best thing to wearing the medal around your neck. He started walking back toward his office, without even turning around, he was like, “No race t-shirt.”

Whatever, I ran the race, it was great, a personal best. I was still a little shy for next year’s qualifying time, but I’d get there, I was improving. Still, I went onto Facebook that night, Andre had posted tons of pictures, like during the race. Like he must have stopped several times along the course to have conversations with friends. He posted his time, something like just under six hours.

“Congrats Andre!” “Way to run buddy!” Like. Like. Hundreds of likes. Hundreds of comments, dozens of “Thanks guys! Just trying to make a difference!” My mom, I don’t know, Andre must have friended her on Facebook, she wrote something like, “So proud of you!”

And I saw him running in the park later that week, he was wearing the race t-shirt. He gave me a wave. Two other runners ran by, they were wearing race t-shirts too. They passed Andre and they all gave thumbs up, “Way to go!” “Great race!” and then they ran by me, and one of them spit to the side, toward me, I don’t think he saw me, it didn’t get on me, but it was close enough.