Larry, WPITW, Part Seven, or "The Bitchening"

Visit the archives please to read parts one through six. I am lazy.

In the morning, Larry realized that he had been smoking crack the night before if he really expected me to draw other people into his net.

He sent me this email at 8:01am:

From: Larry@spacefuckcrazy.net
To: Nina@you'readeadman.org
Re: everything
Date: June 4, 2007 8:01am

N,

I never intended any of this to happen. I didn't want anyone to get hurt. I just didn't know how to end it, how to get out.

:-(.

L

It was at this point when Nina went SpaceFuckCrazy herself. This shit pissed me off. Because by this time I had figured out that Larry, as a semi-professional athlete who was constantly giving us swag, was making money from endorsements. Fuck.

Maggie asked in comments why I would care if Larry knew about these posts, since I obviously hate him. Well, friends, readers, internetters, I don't hate Larry. I love Larry. I joke a lot about being a droid and gosh that is funny, but LARRY IS A REAL, LIVE, ACTUAL DROID. And there is nothing anyone can do about it.

And it's awful. It's awful not just because he is so unimaginably miserable, but because he is surrounded on all sides by people who now know how utterly fucked up he is, and would forgive his horribleness instantly if they thought it would help him get better.

And I, Nina, despite all reports to the contrary, am not a droid at all. I am the kind of person who, when she wakes up in the middle of the night and finds Osama, Jeff Dahmer, Charles Manson and Josef Stalin at my door asking for directions to the nearest strip club, gets up and makes them eggs and pancakes and gets them all drunk while we all wait for the police to arrive).

I get that Larry was fucking my friends. He is an evil person. But gosh, I never worried about Bee or Sri or Kerri or Darci or any of them. They are human. I knew they'd cry it out and be ok. I knew Larry wouldn't be.

Also, if I was really honest with myself, which I was, I had to admit that Larry, though the Worst Person in the World, had helped me get through the worst crisis of my life. My breakup with FB sucked. I was not ok. Larry never cared about me or about that, but he also never cared whether I had the body or the temperament to climb or to ski or to volley. He didn't care about the past or what I thought I could do or didn't think I could do. What he was interested in was making money, and getting more ass - that much is clear. But intentions be damned, what he made me do in the process straightened me out. Through him I entered a world that was not about feelings or complications, but about doing. It was not about process, innuendo or ennui. It was about stop your fucking whining and do something. I was about not talking. And about finishing shit that was scary and difficult.

Have I said yet how unprepared I was to do that, on every level? Until I met Larry, I had a lifelong, debilitating fear of heights, so bad that the first time we were up high, I looked at Larry and said, "I am going to make you wish you were dead by the time this was over." Larry ignored me. He was right to do so, because believe me when I tell you that I was, in my past, so scared of heights that I could barely go to a standard shopping mall with escalators. Because of the whatever.

Have I said yet how many times he knew he was taking me somewhere I would freak the fuck out, and took me anyway? Sure, he did it for the money. But I didn't know that at the time and gosh, I needed to be taken to those places and forced to climb.

Here's Larry at his best: one day we were somewhere we had no business being. I was climbing, but I was also running my mouth and being scared and just generally being... myself. We got to a really tough part of the climb which is to say that it was an edgy part with no margin for error. If you've never had a phobia of this nature, I don't expect you to understand this, but I couldn't go on. My knees buckled, and I started sobbing and could not talk. I was clinging to a rock and I was sure I would not live another ten minutes. I did not want to live anymore. I was... well, you know.

Here's what Larry did. He sat next to me without saying a word for a good ten minutes. Then he said, "open your eyes."
I did. He had stretched his legs out over the gap I was afraid to climb. He said, "Step on me. I won't break. Just get to the other side."

So I got up and walked over the gap, the one with 1000 feet of nothing below it, and I trusted Larry's legs to carry my weight. At the end of the day, Larry said nothing to me about this. When I got out of the car, covered in mud and shaking with fatigue, all he said was, "see you next weekend."

Larry sucks, but I climb now because of him. Larry sucks, but I love the people I met because of him. Larry sucks, but it's hard for me to picture what my life would look like right now had I never met him. And despite most bitching to the contrary, I actually like my life a lot.

All that said, people in real life know that though I love people, I do not love shitty behavior. When my own integrity is questioned, I am a judgmental bitch and I hold back nothing.

Hence, the following email, sent to Larry, WPITW, at 9:00am:

From: Nina@your'refucked.org
To: Larry@spacefuckcrazy.net
Re: This
Date: June 4, 2007 9:00am

Larry,


When I got Sri's voice mail on Sunday morning, I was terrified. From the sound of her voice, I thought someone had died.

When you asked me to call you, I knew that whatever was wrong had to do with the mess that I already knew was your personal life. What you didn't say on the phone confirmed that... And when you asked me to try to calm people down, it seemed reasonable to me.

However, listening to S on Sunday morning, it was very clear to me that it was far beyond my skill to have any calming effect whatsoever. There was nothing "reasonable" I could say that would have helped anyone.

You can't un-drop a bomb.

Since I failed at being the voice of reason with Bibi and Sri, let me give reason a try with you.

You have noticed that I have made no comment in the last few days about what you have been doing. I have tried to resist judgment, but even if my relationship with you is not personal, my relationships with Bibi and Sri are, and I spent most
of my time this week exchanging email and text messages with people who are destroyed by what you have been
doing - and I am talking about people OTHER than the girls. This fact personalizes my relationship with you - against my will and I know against yours.

Out of respect for my time, the time I am taking to write this, please thoroughly read what I now have to say.

You have built a business, a very successful one, based on goodwill - by creating positive regard for yourself and converting that regard into business. Yes, I said business. Sure you, have a job, and sure we all benefit from the time you spend planning things for us to do. But everyone knows, that you get endorsement money for head count, not for sales, and everyone knows that you take a cut from some of the events you plan. We were all fine with that. We valued what
you did for us. But people hang out with you not just for what you do, but because they like YOU and think you are good person. I am sure that you think you are good person too - almost all people believe that they are.
Ask anyone if they are "ok" with themselves, and they will say yes, and they will believe they have good reasons for saying so. And yet it's clear that the world is run half over with people who are less than decent, and some of them are just plain evil. Many or most of those very same people believe that they are "good".

How is that possible? It's possible because good people know what good and evil are, and they choose good over evil. But bad people don't know anything about good - or anything about evil - either. This ignorance allows them to
believe that they are "good people" when in fact, they are not. And of course, there are a select few who choose consciously and consistently to do wrong. I, personally, have only ever met one person in this special category. And it's you.

Larry, you just kicked the shit out of more people than I can count on one hand. Two fo them are close friends --- people I thought you cared about too. Did you really, truly have no idea what you were doing?

Whatever your answer, I no longer think you kept your cards to close for honorable reasons. Your "privacy" created the illusion that you were available, and you used that illusion to get foolish, ignorant women who thought you were "good looking" to come out with us. Your "privacy" permitted them to think that you might someday look twice at them if they just showed up a few more times. Your "privacy" made it possible for you to get royally laid with a variety of women whenever
you wanted - and get the women you were laying to give you money to spend time with them. You let Gwen follow you around like a dog, knowing full well that she did it because she was crazy about you and would have done anything
to deepen your relationship, including work for you for free. And Kerri? Wow. You did all this all the while knowing that they guys were showing up and increasing your headcount to get access to the all the "supposedly" single women in the group. You did this knowing that the very nature of what most of what we all did together accelerated the process of establishing trust, and you did all this so you could get laid, make money, and, most important, make
fools of everyone around you.

The women you chose, are, as you know, not silly or ignorant or foolish. Among the rabble of women you could have chosen for casual sex, you chose not the women who would have wanted sex only, but the smartest, the prettiest, the most accomplished women you could find - the very women who would mind being lied to and manipulated the very most.

And you made a project out of it. You deceived them - not by lies of omission - but by looking them in the face and lying. You made them believe that they were special to you, that they were your girlfriend. You counted on their integrity - the quality you yourself lacked - to make them keep your relationship a secret so you could have them and keep the ignorant rabble of hopeful girls around... and make lots of money at the same time.

There are no words to describe what this makes you. Evil is too kind a description. You not only chose to do harm, but you chose it knowing what you were doing, and that makes you not only a bad person, but one of the special few who is bad...and knows it and is so thoroughly selfish that he does not care.

Do not pretend that you never meant to do any harm or that you simply got in over your head. You chose to do what you did. You had more than one opportunity to stop doing it. But you didn't. You let it go on for months, and you slept with everyone without a condom, having apparently no regard for their health at the same time as you had no regard for the very
real feelings they had for you. You sent them identical text messages. You called one to make plans on your way out of the apartment of the other. You had sex with one of them in the morning and the other in the afternoon. But worst of all... You let them think you cared about them.

The ignorant rabble of hopeful girls? You treated them like cattle - and, well, OK. You get a pass for that. It was good business. But what you did to Bee and Sri and K (and you know, we all think L and D and many others too. We'll
find out soon enough) is what a person would do to people he vehemently hated, people he was trying to humiliate and destroy. Obviously, you took them on the same trips and watched them innocently rooming together, blindly obeying your command that they never, ever tell anyone who they were dating. Obviously, there were nights when you had the arrogant, prideful satisfaction of deciding which one of them you were in the mood the sleep with. Obviously you had, for months, the thrill of sending them the same text message and then waiting to see which one would get back to you first. So never, ever, say that you never intended for anyone who get hurt. What you intended was to get what you wanted. The fact that people might get hurt was absolutely fine with you.

I have had moments in the last twenty-four hours when I have felt very, very sorry for you. I feel sorry for you not because of the consequences you now face, but because I fear that you are unable to understand the nature of what you did. To understand it, you would have to know what it is like to love someone and to want good for them more than gratification for yourself. To understand it, you would have to know what it's like to feel anything other than lust or greed. When I consider how awful it must feel to have people yelling at you and walking out on you and telling you to fuck off, I
don't pity you. But to be a person who is content to do people harm to get his needs met, to be a person who devises a way to make money in the process, to be a person who does people harm just because he can? To be a person who is so lost in his own lies that no one could possible weed through it all and really, truly know him? To be a person, therefore, who is not only incapable of loving anyone else, but also completely unable let other people know who he really is and love him in return? I wouldn't wish that on anyone, including you. You must be very, very lonely.

Sadly, no matter how many women you sleep with, no matter how many "friends" you make, you will always be lonely. In addition, you will create a never-ending list of people who tried to really know you, people who thought there was more to you being a badass, and were saddened to find out that there wasn't. The women you abused will move on, and they will be
fine. So will all the girls you did this to before. But I doubt you will ever be anything like fine, in any sense of the word, and that is heartbreaking.

I have known for a year that you had an appalling record with women - but I didn't know who the women in question were. And I thought that since I, personally, never liked you in that way, it was of little consequence to me. But the consequences to me are now enormous. For one thing, we, meaning you, Bee, Sri, Mischa, and Pax are supposed to go to Peru together. We've already paid you for the trip. But now, at least half of my friends aren't going, and I haven't noticed you offering me a refund. The fact that you sold me on the idea that you were a "good" person made me trust you enough to let you book
the entire trip for us. I now know better, and thankfully, all I risked was money.

I am sure that reading this, you think I being terribly unfair. I know you are thinking "but I never thought to myself how it would be fun to have nine girlfriends all that the same time. It just happened." Larry, if you were walking around all day with a loaded gun and somehow by pure accident nine people got shot, no one would excuse you for shooting people on the grounds that you forgot what guns are for and you had no idea why you were carrying one and you weren¹t really aiming when you pulled the trigger. Nine times. And you should not excuse yourself. You can try to explain and make amends,
but there is absolutely no excuse.

Nina

What followed is what I call "The Bitchening"- the period in which all the women he had betrayed came forward and confronted him. Ever hear that phrase? Hell hath no fury? Oh, my. Fury, indeed.