So Smooth!

When you are part of a small group of foreigners living abroad, you don't get a wide selection of people from which to choose your friends. Sometimes you're stuck hanging out with a drag, a bore, a jackass, or someone supremely annoying.

Case in point: Mani.

Mani is a tall, handsome English-Indian guy. He has light brown skin and a strong chin and often has a sharp, thin goatee going. He fancies himself a real smooth operator. He claimed once to me that he has a high standard in women, but I've never seen him with any good-looking women. I think they all know better, even the dumb ones.

Korea played Uruguay in the round of 16 on a Saturday night. My friend Ken and his girlfriend were having people at their place to watch the game. His girlfriend had invited some people from their salsa dancing club. He invited me and Miju and Moise. We all met downtown at an end-of-season softball party.

Mani was with Ken at the party, and was at the stage of drunkenness where he was still fully in control of himself, but excessively loud and friendly and jubilant.

My friend Paul had never liked Mani. He thought he was smug and obnoxious and pushy. It's probably one of the reasons Paul opted not to watch the game with us.

I had never really minded Mani, although I could understand why someone would find him obnoxious. This night really changed my mind though.

As we were walking to Ken's apartment, Mani latched onto Moise and wouldn't stop talking about hip hop. Mani has a terrible taste in hip hop, from what I could tell, and Moise has no taste for hip hop at all. But Moise is black and Mani just assumed that black people and hip hop go hand in hand. Fortunately, me and Miju were talking with Ken the whole walk and didn't have to deal with Mani at all, but I couldn't help feeling bad for Moise.

At one point, behind me I could hear Mani rapping to Moise, and then for the rest of the 20 minute walk, he was holding a tiny MP3 player to Moise's ear, blasting tinny rap. Moise was miserable, and this is on top of the fact I had to drag him out to watch the game, against his will and desire to sleep.

During the game, Mani gobbled up about half of the food that Ken's girlfriend had prepared, and was later complaining about having to help pay for it.

He squeezed on to the couch amongst some terrified Korean girls, loudly claiming he was "bringing together cultures" or something like that. Everyone eventually moved away and the once full couch was nearly empty. He noticed and joked that he had all the couch to himself, but seemed to fail to understand why.

He pronounces my name in a stupid accent so it sounds like "E-fin!".

He got a phone call from a girl who was downtown. She must have been Korean, because he kept slowly repeating in English that he was "at a friend's house. I cannot meet now. I will call you when I am free." Over and over he did this, until he was yelling at her and everyone around was wondering why he was being such a dick, and at such a volume.

Earlier in the evening, he asked Miju if she had been out of the country before. Surprised, Miju said, "Huh?"

Very slowly, Mani repeated, "Have. You. Been. Out. Of. The. Country?" with little arm gestures.

Miju asked, "Which country?"

"Koh-ree-uh."

"I'm from Canada."

"Oh."

The icing on Mani's brilliant social performance that evening really came out of the blue. I had my arm around Miju who was on my left. Mani was on my right, having scared everyone else off the couch. He turned to me and said, "Maybe this isn't the best time, but is that the same girl you were with last time?" I couldn't believe he was be so dense to ask such a question almost right in front of Miju's face. I knew something else remarkably stupid was coming, but said, "Yeah. At the Indian restaurant." This was an occasion when he accosted me and her crossing the street on our way to a big dinner with friends. He was with a Korean girl on a date, and he wound up having dinner with her, ditching her, and crashing our dinner and insisting on taking a lot of pictures.

"No, no, I mean at the theater thing, before that. The girl from Seoul?"

I couldn't believe how fucking moronic he was. This was not a whisper. There was no doubt Miju was hearing all this, she was leaning against me, after all. Miju is not the girl from Seoul. That was my last girlfriend. I really couldn't process his depth of idiocy so I just shook my head and stared straight ahead at the TV. This seemed to dawn on Mani, and he started mumbling weak apologies and qualifiers. I did my best to ignore him for the rest of the evening.

Korea lost that night, but walking home, the only thing Moise, Miju, and I could talk about was Mani. We all had our own stories about him that night that the others didn't know. How could he be so socially retarded? He wasn't even very drunk.

It's a sad fact about foreign communities abroad: they're very often largely made up of misfits and morons who just can't make it in their home countries.