Tales From My Past - What's French For Asshole?

There was this guy in my college, I don't want to use his real name but if you want to call him Zach then that would be fine by me. He was rich, privileged, clueless and rude. Plus he thought he was funny but actually wasn't, which in a college full of smarty-pants overachievers isn't something you want to aspire to. He was also loud, and had that young-man's habit of bellowing the first thing that popped into his tiny brain, especially if that thing was unkind or abusive.
   Zach was not well-liked, is what I'm trying to convey here.
   Sure, he had a few people who tolerated him and allowed him to hang out, but as the semester wore on you could see people avoiding him in the lunch room, having somewhere else to be on Friday when he showed up at a party, conveniently remembering missed study opportunities when he wanted to get a hack going.* It almost made me sad for him, but then he was a total dick so I didn't mind him being left out of stuff.
   My friend Ben spent a calendar year in Paris, so when he came back for his last two semesters one of his friends from Paris came to visit. And she was a girl. Yup, a young, attractive, Parisian nurse came to Sherman, Texas to visit Ben. Way to go, man.
   Anyhoo, Zach decided he like Claudette - really her name, I swear - and tried to talk to her. She spoke English better than he did, but he tried to be clever with French-ifying English words, which Claudette did not find endearing in the least. She endured him with a polite nod and pretended not to understand him so he would go away. Which he did.
   My friend Rene asked her 'What's French for redneck?'
   And I asked 'What's French for asshole?'
   Claudette mentioned that he seemed like a very lonely, sad person, an insight that hadn't escaped me, but when she said it I felt like I should at least pretend to care. And Zach continued to be a colossal tool.
   Fast forward to Spring semester. Zach had started binge drinking - as many college students did and still do - but, because he was such a conflicted mess he binged like he was trying to set a record. Even had a minor intervention that did no good.
   One Friday his frat and a sorority started having a water balloon war. This action escalated and moved off the frat house grounds to the local convenience store then to the local highway, 75.
   I was with my roommate in his truck waiting for a stoplight to change when Zach and his buddies pulled up and started lobbing balloons at sorority chicks in another car. The light changed, we drove on, and Mark said, prophetically, 'someone's gonna get creamed if they keep that up.'
   Not five minutes later Mark and I were long gone, he blew the yellow to get away from them and Mark never disobeyed traffic laws, but the water balloon fight continued at the next stop light. Zach, three sheets to the wind, ran out into traffic and got creamed but good. Really. He ran from the left-turn lane into Southbound traffic, where some poor young mother plowed into him at sixty miles an hour. He got busted up bad, his pelvis was crushed, both legs with multiple compound fractures, broken ribs and vertebrae, the whole nine yards. We were guessing that if he hadn't been completely drunk he'd probably have been killed.
   Fast forward to the next semester. Zach had been out of school and recovering for something like seven months. He came back to school with a cane and a limp and a slightly lopsided smile. We were thinking that perhaps his waltz with the Grim Reaper would have taught him some grace and humility.
   He was still a dick, the only difference was the cane.
   The moral of this story? People aren't going to change unless they're good and ready. And an asshole is always going to be an asshole.



* kids, I'm talking about hacky sack, which ranks up there with drum circle on the stoner hit parade of time wasters whilst coming down from the buzz of some righteous bud