Throughout my 20s and a good chunk into my 30s, I would rather eat urinal mints washed down with Buckley's cough syrup than sit home in my apartment, alone like an owl, staring at the four walls and my oversized laminated poster of Michael Jordan stretching out his arms.
So I went out, baby! I would have gone to the opening of an escalator, a greenhouse, an outhouse. I turned down nothing but my collar.
[line space]/note>
But socializing, as I now know, is primo Damage Control country, a minefield of faux pas, zingers, everyone taking your measure …
Of course, I didn't pay much attention to that in those days of yore. I loved the shenanigans.
One of my all-time favourites, one that still causes me to snicker down the sleeve of my pyjamas, in the middle of the night, when I can't sleep was a relatively minor incident.
A friend of some friends of mine - call him "J" - was stumbling down the stairs at a football game, in a sudsy stupor, balancing a beer in one hand and a pizza slice on a paper plate in the other, when suddenly he tripped and accidentally pressed the pizza slice onto the back of some random (and fairly huge-seeming) guy's expensive-looking cashmere coat.
For some reason the cashmere-coated guy didn't feel the slice being pressed to his back.
And like a weird kind of anti-miracle, the slice just stuck there, cheesily clinging to the guy's back.
Now, obviously, the noble way to go in this circumstance would have been to tap the huge guy in the cashmere coat on the shoulder and say: "Pardon me, old chap, but it is my unfortunate duty to inform you that I have, unwittingly and without meaning to, pressed my pizza slice into the back of your obviously fine, dry-clean-only garment. My deepest apologies and regrets. Here is my card. Please send me your dry-cleaning bill as soon as you get it and I will make instantaneous reparations. Once again, I'm awfully, deeply, personally sorry about this terrible mishap and ask you only to attribute it to clumsiness and possibly a soupçon of intoxication on my part."
But "J" didn't go that way.
Instead, he stood, swaying, for what seemed like a long moment, staring with glassy-eyed beer-goggles and an almost … childlike wonderment, and incredulity, at the miraculous way the cheesy, saucy, pepperoni-dotted triangle remained affixed to the guy's back; and then, with a guilty look, he melted, like cheese in a 600-degree oven, into the crowd.
Which is, allow me to reiterate, absolutely the wrong and the contraindicated thing to do in the situation described above.
But I confess, folks, when I think back on the incident, when I picture that pizza slice clinging with cheesy tenacity to the back of the unsuspecting dude's coat - well, I've been chuckling myself to sleep over that one for nearly 20 years.
[line space]/note>
And I, David Eddie, was not incapable of the odd shenanigan myself.
Once I was at a gathering at the home of a certain Mary Jo Eustace, noTORIous, now, as the ex-wife of reality-TV thingamajig Dean McDermott.
Back then, we were all just fresh-faced, innocent kids in our mid-20s. Life hadn't really started happening to us yet. Mary Jo still lived with her parents in their elegant townhouse in a swish, fashionable part of downtown Toronto.
Anyway, we were sitting in the dark in her living room, by candlelight, for some reason that I don't remember. I suppose to create an elegant, romantic atmosphere.
A gesture that wound up kind of … backfiring, thanks to me. At one point I went out in the backyard to smoke a cigarette. And I must have stepped in … something.
After I finished my cigarette, out back, I returned to the living room and the spot on the couch I'd occupied before.
But then, after a while, in the candlelit semi-darkness, as we were all chatting and sipping wine, my nostril hairs began to detect the unmistakable odour of doggie doo-doo.
"Good Lord, that's revolting," I remember thinking. "But what's that disgusting smell doing in the well-appointed living room of this fashionable townhouse?"
It took me a while, but eventually it came to me: "Oh, no. The … horror …"
And then I did a dumb thing. Poor damage control! I tried, almost literally, to cover my tracks. While everyone else was innocently chatting, I sidled, as if casually, under cover of the candlelit semi-darkness, over to the fireplace, and scraped the bottom of my shoes on the brick, hoping that, when it all came out, it would not be attributable to me.
This was before I realized (a) my whole life was laid out for the amusement and entertainment of some divine and/or quite possibly infernal figure, or a rare collaboration between the two; (b) people will always sniff out the truth, sooner or later - especially if it smells like dog shit.
Sure enough, after a while, one of the group sniffed and said, in the crepuscular, candlelit semi-darkness: "Can anyone else smell that?"
"I know, it's gross," someone else chimed in. "I've been smelling it for a while!"
"It smells like dog shit!" someone else said.
Mary Jo stood up, obviously to hit the lights. Just then I had a horrible realization: that a track of poo-prints probably led straight to me; then to the fireplace; then back to me; and that if the lights came on I would unmistakably be identified as the culprit, the guilty party.
All this occurred to me in the split second when Mary Jo was reaching for the light switch …
Which is why, without really thinking, I cried out, in a strangulated voice: "Wait! Don't turn on the light!"
But, of course, in that exact moment Mary Jo snapped on the light, and there, like something from out of a cartoon, it was: a trail of shitty footsteps leading, first to me; then to the fireplace, where it became obvious to everyone I'd tried, in a vain effort to exculpate myself, to scrape the offending load off the bottom of my shoe; then back to where I had been sitting, in the dark, hoping no one else would notice the smell.
Busted! Oh, that one took a long time to live down, ladies and gentlemen.
"Don't turn on the light!" became a catchphrase people used whenever they felt guilty about anything and were afraid of being found out.
So one person might say to another: "Hey, someone saw you making out with Alison Stephens at a party on the weekend. Aren't you worried [your girlfriend]Priscilla might find out?"
"Don't turn on the light!" the other person would say.
And everyone would glance over at me - then burst out laughing.
For, like, 10 years.
Excerpted from Damage Control: How to Tiptoe Away from the Smoking Wreckage of Your Latest Screw-up with a Minimum of Harm to Your Reputation by David Eddie with Pat Lynch. In stores Saturday, March 20. Published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.