Some people have hidden agendas

Recently, I received an email from a reader:

“I loved your July 27 column on the multitasking Lothario who spent half the night — and a considerable sum —juggling two concurrent dates, without gaining much from the exercise other than the not-so-cheap thrill of getting away with it.

The last line reminded me of my own foolish self some 50 years ago, when I worked at a deli in Santa Cruz after escaping from college. While chatting with Lynn, a co-worker slightly older but considerably wiser, I mentioned my latest amorous adventure with a cute girl who happened to be living with a guy but promised she’d soon leave him.

Lowering her head and fixing me with a mother-knows-best stare, Lynn waited for a long moment while staring directly into my eyes over the glasses perched on her nose: ‘If she did it to him, she’ll do it to you,’ she said.

I laughed it off, of course, young fool that I was, and sure enough, that’s how it went down a few weeks later.”

It reminded me of an experience of my own. Her name was Marla. I was a short-order cook then — my first real restaurant job — and I wasn’t really cooking; I was merely assembling ingredients, very much like what I do now as a bartender. The only real differences between that job and bartending — outside of the money — were the audience and the immediacy. Drinks are fast, and bartenders are always on display, whereas food takes longer to assemble, and the only audience a short-order cook has are the food servers. And they can be pretty unforgiving.

Marla seemed so much older then. A wise older woman. She was 21 years old, and to a 19-year-old, that’s quite a bit of difference. An entirely different world was open to her. Mine would have to wait two more years. But she seemed to take a liking to me, and we often chatted in the breakroom or in the smoking area.

“Never mix vodka and tequila,” she told me once, after probably doing exactly that the night before.

That advice has stuck with me to this day.

I, meanwhile, was still with my high school girlfriend, in my very first year of junior college. I was cooking at night and taking classes during the day. I wrote a column for the college newspaper, so, in the greater scheme of things, maybe things haven’t really changed that much for me since then — except for the audience, perhaps, and the ingredients.

And the girlfriend. We were on the outs. Neither of us was old enough nor mature enough yet to know it.

One day, I was on my break, and so was Marla. I was wrestling with the ramifications of that “outs” with the girlfriend, so I attempted to get a different woman’s take on the situation.

I began what I expected to be at least a short diatribe on the subject when Marla cut me off.

“You know, Jeff,” she said, looking me straight in the eyes. “I don’t have any tolerance for people who want to complain about a situation but then do absolutely nothing to change it.”

She then flipped her short, sassy ’80s hair, snuffed out her Marlboro Light and walked away.

I was shocked. In fact, a little hurt — maybe even more than a little. But then I started thinking about what she said. The worldly wisdom evidenced by those two scant years welled up inside me. I reached an epiphany right then and there. I was going to end my relationship with my high school girlfriend. It took me more than a little while to figure out exactly how to do that. And when it happened, I think it was as much of a relief to her as it was to me.

At the next break Marla and I ended up on together, I confessed that fact to her. Everybody loves when folk wisdom works out right? I expected her to be pleased.

Instead, she did something that I never expected and did not see coming. She asked me out.

“I’m free this Friday” were her exact words.

We dated — if you can call it that — for a few weeks until I discovered that she was married — separated, but still married. And I didn’t find out from her, at least not initially.

Which left me with these realizations:

• Advice is only as good as the agenda attached to it.

• “Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example,” once wrote François de la Rochefoucauld, the famous French moralist.

• It is possible to get good advice from a bad source.

• Marla got back together with her husband, if in fact she had ever left him.

• If you can’t look back and see how foolish you were when you were younger, then you are probably still foolish.