October 5, 2004

• GEORGE –
  
  the final chapter

  It’s final… my diagnosis:  definitely NPD!

  “Carelessness” concerning commitments, a tendency to promise anything
  he thinks would be to his advantage to promise, without any concern for
  follow-through in keeping those commitments, is very common behavior
  among pathological narcissists.  George promised me dry, seasoned
  firewood at my specified length for $120.00 a cord. 

  He delivered a mixture of dry and green wood.  He told me when I
  asked how much wood his truck would hold that each load was “just a tad
  shy of half a cord.”  On trust, I paid him sixty dollars on
  delivery of each of the first two loads, and he promised me an extra
  load “at the end,” when all four cords of my winter’s wood was
  delivered, to make up the difference.

  The first clue I had that there was something fishy about his
  measurement was the way he kept repeating how overburdened his poor
  little truck was at that.  I have learned through long intimate
  association with an NPD case (Greyfox and I will celebrate our 14th
  anniversary this Halloween) that any lament or complaint he reiterates
  excessively is either an outright lie for manipulative purposes, or a
  useful truth thrown up as a smokescreen.

  I might have let it go and accepted his measures, except for his
  carelessness about keeping his commitments.  He had promised me a
  load of wood last Thursday.  On Friday I tried to call him several
  times and his cell apparently was turned off or the system was
  down.  I got the “subscriber is unavailable” message. 
  Finally, Saturday evening I got through to him.  He was obviously
  drunk, slurring his words and not quite grasping what I was trying to
  tell him.  But he knew who I was and he started running his usual
  tape loops about the quality of his wood, the workload he puts on his
  poor little truck, and how far out of his way he goes to please his
  customers.

  It was mostly the usual bullshit except for some new stuff about how
  the cell company won’t accept his debit card over the phone to add more
  minutes to his account and he had to go to town to give them cash,
  which was why I couldn’t reach him.  He said he had the wood and
  would get it to me, “tomorrow”, which would have been Sunday.

  He kept on talking and I just listened.  Another thing I’ve
  learned from Greyfox is that listening to a drunk talk can be revealing
  and instructive.  “In vino veritas,”
  the Romans used to say.  It’s not always true because a seasoned
  liar will lie drunk or sober.  Sometimes, though, a truth slips
  out.  In the midst of one of those laments about his overworked
  little truck, out popped the words, “three-tenths of a cord,” just as
  clear as a mushmouth drunk can say them.  I wasn’t really sure I’d
  heard right the first time, but he went on and embroidered it, saying
  that three-tenths was almost half a cord and a lot of wood for such a
  little truck to haul.

  I let him keep talking, thinking I’d just let him run down of his own
  accord, but then his cell phone cut out.  At the moment that his
  voice was shut off, I was doing the math.  At his stated rate of
  $120 a cord, I’d been paying him $60 for $36 worth of wood.  This
  disturbed me.  It had bothered me somewhat that the wood’s quality
  wasn’t what he’d promised and that his cuts were uneven and irregular,
  making some of the wood too long for our stove.   Let’s just
  say that the “three-tenths of a cord” revelation was his third
  strike.  That discrepancy between his initially stated, “tad under
  half,” and this new disclosure of its actually being a tad under a
  third of a cord, meant that I had to take some action.  I had to
  confront him on it, I knew.

  Sunday rolled around and past, and no George, no wood, no call to
  explain.  Monday while I was busy in the back of the house, he
  called.  I told Doug to take the message.  The message was
  that George had been unable to deliver my wood Sunday because he’d had
  to take someone who had been involved in an auto accident to the
  hospital.  He said he’d have my wood here at ten this morning.

  When I relayed that bit about the “auto accident” to Greyfox, his
  response was just what mine had been:  “Yeah, right!”  Given
  the condition George was in when we spoke Saturday night, the real
  problem had been a hangover, I’m sure.  I knew then that I also
  had to confront him on the effects of his addiction on his
  business.  By the way, nobody
  is better at detecting NPD bullshit than a narcissist who has become
  aware of the condition.  They are also very quick to pick up on
  the signs and make the diagnosis when they meet someone with NPD. 
  I just wish Greyfox were a little better at picking up on his own
  bullshit before it pops out his mouth.  But he is getting better,
  I must admit.  This unorthodox therapy we’ve undertaken is working.

  But to get back to my dealings with George….
  I explained to Greyfox about the “three-tenths” disclosure.  He
  did the math and agreed with me that paying $192.00 a cord for wood was
  unacceptable when the going rate is $100 around here.  We usually
  pay a little more because we ask for shorter lengths than standard, and
  often our suppliers have a long way to drive to deliver out here. 
  George’s regular rate is $120 for split wood, and that’s the rate he
  gave us for our shorter lengths because we take it in the round and
  split it ourselves.  One-twenty was acceptable; one-ninety-two was
  not.  He agreed with me that I had to confront him, and that it
  was a toss-up whether he’d go into narcissistic rage or take the
  ingratiation route.

  I spent the intervening day thinking about my approach.  I’ve had
  plenty of practice in communicating with a narcissist, but I have a
  personal distaste for being manipulative.  I was trying to come up
  with something that would be both honest and non-threatening, but in
  retrospect I don’t think such a thing would have been possible. 
  What I ended up with was a plan to tell George that I was confused by
  the conflict between his two statements about his truck’s capacity, and
  to take my tape measure out and measure the truck.  This morning,
  I asked Doug to go out with me when George came, and back me up. 
  What I had in mind was more in the nature of agreeing with me that the
  wood wasn’t all dry and seasoned.  I just wanted a second presence
  there.  I felt that it was a situation calling for backup.

  Doug asked if he should go armed.  Not knowing what sort of
  armament George might have in his truck, and envisioning the rage I
  knew was a possible response to my confrontation, I said I didn’t think
  Doug needed to strap on Greyfox’s quick-draw rig.  I thought, but
  didn’t speak, the idea that maybe the pump shotgun would be a better
  choice.  Greyfox was out here for an hour or two this afternoon,
  delivering groceries and picking up cold-weather gear.  As we were
  discussing George, Doug said he suggested going armed to the
  confrontation.  Greyfox said that might switch his rage to
  ingratiation.  When the time came, I prevailed, and we confronted
  George armed only with a tape measure.

  The time didn’t come at ten this morning as he had promised.  I
  was not surprised.  He was three hours late when I left here with
  Greyfox to go vote in the local borough school board election, to make
  my opinion known on the sales tax proposal.  He was five hours
  late when he phoned to say he was on his way, and six hours late when
  he arrived.  He was talking his usual line of bullshit even before
  he was out of the cab.  He stopped abruptly when he saw me start
  to stretch the measuring tape along the bed of his truck.  He
  asked what that was all about, and I told him of my confusion over his
  conflicting statments of his truck’s capacity.

  Enraged, he said if that was the way I was going to be, he just
  wouldn’t do business with me.  He got back in his truck as if to
  drive away.  I walked to the open window and said to him, “If what
  you’ve told me is true, and you leave here with this load of wood, you
  will be shorting me on the wood I’ve already paid you for.”  You
  should have seen his eyes when I leaned a little forward and looked at
  him with deep sincerity as I said, “You really don’t want to short
  me.”  I’m consistently amazed how a few calm words uttered
  sincerely can inspire fear in those with guilty consciences.

  That switched him to ingratiation, pronto.  Of course, the form
  his ingratiating behavior took was just endless repetitions of his
  bullshit tape loops.  He said that his truck bed was, “six by
  seven,” six feet wide and seven feet long, and that the load was
  stacked two-and-a-half feet deep.  I eyeballed the load, heaped up
  in the middle and sloping off to a single course of wood at the sides,
  and asked him if that two-and-a-half was in the middle or at the
  side.  Then I said, “I’ll just measure it.”  And I did.

  The bed of the truck is 4 feet 8 inches wide and that includes the
  humps for wheel wells which cut a foot or more out into it for about
  half of its length of five feet, ten inches.  The first time I
  measured the truck, I hooked my tape over the outside in front and
  measured clear out to the outside at the tail light, but when George
  climbed out to dispute my measurements, I did it again and that time
  made sure I was getting the inside dimensions.  The depth of the
  load at its greatest point was 27 inches, tapering down to ten inches
  at the side.

  A cord of wood is 128 cubic feet.  George’s truck indeed holds
  about three-tenths of a cord.  He climbed back into the truck
  after saying that Doug could unload whatever I thought he owed
  me.  I stood there as Doug worked, talking to George.  
  In response to his claims about the quality of his wood, I acknowledged
  that some of his wood was dry, but that a lot of it was green.  He
  spluttered, and started disputing the accuracy of my
  measurements.  I held up my Stanley Powerlock tape for his
  inspection and invited him to measure it for himself.  When he
  went off on another tack, I interrupted to tell him that green wood was
  standard fare around here, and was acceptable.  I assured him that
  I wasn’t calling him a liar, and that the only reason I’d wanted to
  measure the truck was because of the discrepancies in what he had told
  me.

  When he finally shut up long enough to get what I was saying, that he
  himself had told me Saturday night while he was drunk that his truck
  held three-tenths of a cord, his eyes did that thing again.  There
  was the light of comprehension followed by the wall of denial.  He
  said emphatically that he never said his truck held three-tenths of a
  cord.  Under and behind his words, I heard the hopeful tone of the
  habitual drunk who knows he can’t with any assurance say that he did or
  did not do anything while under the influence.  Unable to accept
  the clear facts, he retreated into his false narcissistic persona and
  ran the tape about all his satisfied customers.  He’d worked
  himself back into full rage mode by then, and as he started to climb
  back out of the truck I told Doug to stop unloading.

  By rights, I should have gotten that entire load and another 12.8 cubic
  feet or so, but George was still too much of an unknown to me to risk
  his rage.  He looked at his now-half-full truck and said, “This
  isn’t fair,” in that aggrieved tone so familiar to me from Greyfox when
  his false persona has been punctured by a keen bit of reality.  I
  looked him straight in the eye, took a slow deep breath, and said, “If
  it were really fair, George, I’d have this whole load and a little bit
  more.”

  That was too much for him.  He drove away yelling something about
  my being, “on the list.”  Oh, my, I wonder what that means. 
  

  

  • 9:08 pm
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