Cherish

          So there was actually a Crest Figure in my life a few years after college classmate and creator of the Crest Figure, D, put that image into my head. There was a guy I dated.......briefly.....when I was working at Roswell Park. He was not an employee there, in fact, he was younger than I and still in college. At first he showered me with all kinds of attention, phone calls, lunch dates, long drives. And I got used to that real fast, so when flags started going up that he was not so great, I ignored them because I liked the attention.

          An armchair psychologist might say that this guy hated himself, and he looked down on anyone who might like him because he was not worth liking? One day we stopped at a Buffalo toll booth to pay the toll. The young man, who I guess I will call CF for Crest Figure, was super cheerful to the guy in the toll booth – the toll taker's face lit up and he was cheerful back to us – CF had clearly made his day. As we drove off, CF muttered under his breath “Loser!” That ticked me off – he couldn't cheer up someone's day and be happy about it himself? He had to diss a fellow human being?

          CF wanted me to be totally sensitive to the heartbreak he had had in his life (all 21 years of it) – and when I thought it would open a dialog to say I had had my own troubles, he made it clear, with a grunt of disgust at my immaturity, that I needed to get over it and my stuff needed to stay in the past. The martyr imagery was beginning to emerge from the tube of toothpaste.

         The most famous story of all about CF, one that I have told in public to great response is one day when he asked me to lunch. It was a work day, and in the brief past, we had gone to a nice restaurant or two in the area for lunch. When I got in the car on this particular day, however, we drove to the nearest parking lot. He parked the car, but left the radio playing, and he explained that he forgot to tell his grandmother that morning that he had lunch plans, so she packed him a lunch. And the lunch was not enough for the both of us, so he ate at McDonalds on the way! CF handed me the sandwich and honestly expected me to eat it. My appetite was honestly completely gone – especially when I spied the olives in the sandwich and he did too and knew I did not care for them. “Try them, maybe you will like them after all.”

         We did manage to chat a bit – I was trying very hard not to reveal displeasure, because, again, I had gotten used to the attention and wanted it to continue in spite of the olives and bad attitude toward humanity.

         If a song came on the radio he did not like, he would push buttons to change stations until a song was playing that was acceptable to him. Suddenly, in the midst of conversation, he told me to shush! I looked over at him, and he was leaning as far away from me as possible, head almost on the driver side window, and his eyes were closed. I said, “What?” and he shushed me again but this time explained that nothing comes between him and Cherish – a sixties song by a group called The Association! I sat there dumbfounded while he kept his eyes closed and mouthed the words to the song as it played – it was as if he did not want to sing out loud because that would be like sharing the song with me and he did not want to do that – he was somewhere else completely, just him and the song.

          Many years later, I was watching an episode of Seinfeld one night – and almost the exact same scene played out for me on the television. Elaine was talking in the car to a new beau, and suddenly he completely zoned out – he said that Desperado which had just come on the car radio was his song! Elaine had to be quiet while the song played and the beau's eyes glazed over as he was clearly in another place. Hysterical to everyone else watching the episode – goosebump chillingly eerie to me who had lived through it myself!

          Well, finally, when Cherish was over, we resumed conversation, such that it was. More songs played, and CF pushed the buttons looking for something acceptable. At one point, after pushing all the station buttons and not finding anything okay, CF stopped trying and made a sound of disgust. I quite foolishly, and many would say this was wrong for me to have done, I foolishly thought that if there were no songs he liked that were playing and there was one song that I especially liked that was playing, that it would be okay to listen to that song, and that it would also be okay to push the button to the station that was playing it. And so I changed the station.

          The sounds of Judy Collins and Send in the Clowns soon filled the car and almost as quickly as the first notes were heard, the radio was turned off. “No one touches the buttons to the radio in my car! When you have your own car and your own radio in the car, then you can play whatever you want on your own radio. But no one touches the radio in my car. And no one will listen to that song in my car!”

          I don't know if it was before or after this heartwarming speech that the subject of toothpaste came up in the conversation. But CF asked me what kind of toothpaste I used. I told him that since I live on my own, my brand of toothpaste was whatever I had a coupon for the day I went shopping for a new tube. He made a tsk tsk sound and said that the only kind of toothpaste there is, the only kind worth using – is Crest. It was said in a way that was not an opinion and everyone is entitled to an opinion, no it was said in a way that suggested that I was an inferior creature if I did not used Crest.

         And so you see how I have indeed used Crest – not for brushing my teeth, but for squeezing this self-loathing creature out of his tube of martyrdom in story form, ever since!

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