Benny Jay: That’s Pathetic

I’m sitting round the kitchen table with Kiki, a friend of my older daughter, and we’re playing the pathetic game.

That’s the game where you swap stories to see who was more pathetic back in the day. It’s an easy game to play. You might want to try it. Lord knows, we all qualify.

She gets off to a strong start, telling me about how she used to pay some kid named Kevin to do her math homework. It was freshman year of high school; Kevin had just moved to town from India. He barely spoke English, had a heavy accent. But he was a whiz at math. She paid him five dollars an assignment.

“Five dollars?” I ask.

“Five dollars,” she says.

“You should have called me. I’d have done your math homework for $4.50 — saved you some money….”

He’d do her homework in the lunchroom or during homeroom. By the way, she wasn’t his only client. Other kids were buying his homework-doing services, too. He probably thought he’d landed in the richest – and dumbest – country in the universe, if ordinary working-class kids could afford to pay him so much money to do something they could have just as easily have done by themselves.

“That’s pretty pathetic,” I say.

“I know,” she says.

“But not as pathetic as this….”

I tell her how I used to hang out in my bedroom, listening to the local rock `n roll station unveil the week’s top ten songs. I’d keep track on a piece of paper. The deejay would say something like “at number ten `Only the Strong Survive’ by Jerry Butler.” And I’d write: “10.) Only the Strong Survive by Jerry Butler.” And so on and so forth right on down to number one.

“This was your freshmen year of high school?” she asks.

“Actually, I might have done it through sophomore year….”

“Oh, my goodness….”

When the countdown was over,  I’d take that piece of paper and store it in a plastic three-ring notebook I kept on the bookcase by my bed. I still had that notebook when I went off to college.

“Really pathetic,” she says.

“For all I know it’s still in my parent’s attic….”

“But not as pathetic as me paying Kevin five dollars to do my homework….”

“Okay, well, how `bout this?”

When I wasn’t sitting in my bedroom listening to radio count downs on my transistor radio, I was sitting in that same bedroom listening to Bulls games on that same transistor radio and keeping track of the score on another piece of paper that I filed in another three-ring notebook.

“No….”

I tracked everything – shots taken and made, points, rebounds, assists, steals, block shots, etc. This was back before the Internet – way before the Internet – so my running track was pretty much the only compilation of who was doing what on the Bulls.

“Now that’s pathetic,” she says.

But, wait – it gets worse. During breaks in the game I’d write down the names of my favorite Bulls. Bob “Butterbean” Love; Chet “the Jet” Walker; “Stormin’” Norman Van Lier. Just write them down – sort of like doodling.

“You wrote their names on a piece of paper?” she asks.

“Yes….”

“Why?”

“I dunno — cause I was pathetic….”

“Wow….”

I sit back in my chair, like I’m proud.

“So what’s more pathetic?” I ask. “Me obsessing over the Bulls or you giving some kid five dollars to do your math homework?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ll have to think about that….”

“Let’s just call it a tie….”