I once had friendly acquaintance named Brody Christensen. He was a Mettler’s customer. Brody did not engage in assault or harassment at Mettler’s. However, he was too notable a Mankato character not to pass up in Mankato Memoirs.

Brody Christensen and I are about the same age, but he hadn't spent a lot of his life outside of Mankato. His mother had some type of health problem, which required him to stay in town to care for her and his younger siblings. Things that I did in high school, things that excite a person who hasn't spent much time outside of their home town, are things that adult Brody was interested in. For example, Brody spent his time reading existentialist literature, like Nietzsche. He was always spouting multi-syllabic words that he didn't know the definition of. He'd use them out of context, in ways that made no sense. He didn't like his Midwestern accent, so he spoke in a fake East Coast accent, like one might hear in Massachusetts.

Brody had a part time day job as a door-to-door window treatment salesman. He was also a drug dealer on probation. He enjoyed traveling around Mankato by foot, hanging out in the local pubs with foreign exchange students from the local university, learning about their countries, and engaging in drug deals with them. For example, I once met up with Brody at a gaming bar called Blue Bricks, where he was shooting pool with some refugees from Sierra Leone, discussing drug sales. When I arrived, his associates left, and as he put a quarter into a pool table to release the balls, he said to me,

“This night is all about you, while we ponder our existential dilemma together.” However, after he began the game, he became preoccupied by a barista from Coffee Hag, who he spotted hanging out at a table with other people in the open room next to us. He went out for a cigarette and to stare at her, while I was left to sit at a table by myself for a long period of time inside of Blue Bricks. When he returned, we shot a game that he easily won. He was astonishingly boring to be with, so I left. I also left because the parking lot space only gave me two hours. Two hours was all I really needed to know that Brody sucked, although I continued to text with him for a few days after. He invited himself over to my motel room, texting something along the lines of,

“You can play with my hair, watch a David Finch movie with me, and tell me that life is but a dream.”

Brody had a girlfriend named Mikayla. I let him know that I was not comfortable with the idea of him coming over, and that I was only interested in hanging out publicly. He stopped responding to my texts completely. From there, I became depressed and returned to Coffee Hag by myself, to practice LSAT puzzles and surf the net. One day at Coffee Hag a few weeks later, I saw him on a date with a woman who wasn't his girlfriend. I texted him, telling him that I didn't mean to be at Coffee Hag during his date. He checked his texts during the date, then shooed her out of the cafe fairly quickly. After she left, he sat at my table, apologized to me for not responding to my other texts, and told me that his mother recently had surgery. I didn't respond much to him. He, like so many small town assholes I have met in my life, said to me while shaking his head,

“You're so weird.”

I wasn't weird in larger West Coast cities though, and I certainly wasn't weird in comparison to all the oddballs on my twitter feed. I was just weird to a dweeb like Brody who hung around strip clubs and shot pool at Blue Bricks, chasing women behind his girlfriend's back and cheating on her, potentially exposing her to diseases and poisoning her with things she had no knowledge of. Brody tried desperately to escape the small town scum around him, but he was thirtyish and had never left. One time, he referred to Mettler's dancers as “The Island of Misfit Toys.” The irony was that Brody fit the profile of a misfit toy more than a lot of us dancers.

At Mettler's, Brody went through cycles, where he was there a lot, and then didn't come back for weeks or months at a time. I didn't tell anyone at Mettler's that Brody and I hung out or talked outside of work. Eventually he and I fell completely out of touch. One day in the dressing room, I overheard one of the dancers complaining about him. She was a Jewish gal, and Brody had been trying to court her, by lying to her, telling her that he is also Jewish. She was angry about this, and also angry after learning about his girlfriend. A couple of the other dancers began discussing their experiences with Brody as well. I didn't share any of my experiences with them that occurred in previous months. I just listened.

I overheard some of the dancers discussing how they wanted to make a doxxing web page about Brody in Mankato, but that never came to fruition.