Cat Jacobi

They called him The Enthusiast.

Not to his face, obviously.

It started as a joke, the kind you whisper in the break room, over stale croissants and a shared hatred of customer service. Debra came up with it. I didn’t come up with it, but I wish I had. It was the kind of nickname that tells you everything you need to know before you’ve even met the person.

His real name was Derek.

We worked at a tourism company in Manhattan. Not the glamorous kind with sleek buses and foreign investors. Even though I highly doubt those buses are cleaned more than once a year. I worked in the kind of agency that made people believe they were getting the New York experience by following a girl in a red polo through Times Square while she shouted facts over the sound of car horns and regret. And “Empire State Of Mind” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys.

I’d been there for six months when Derek arrived. He was technically my trainee, though he was a year older than me, but looked at least ten years older. Like something, somewhere, in this grueling path of life, this man had either been dragged through hell and back, or he genuinely just lost the genetic lottery in every conceivable way. Twenty-two with a thinning hairline, and a mustache that had the tragic confidence that you only see in genuine pornos from the 1970’s. 

So, as you can imagine, it didn’t surprise me when he said he used to play music, “semi-professionally.”

Which, in Derek’s case, meant open mics in dive bars where the audience consisted of two drunks, a bartender, and someone’s disappointed fiancee.

Still, he carried himself like a man with history.

He wore sunglasses indoors. He called coffee “java.” He talked about wanting a cabin in the woods and twelve kids and a dog and three cats.

He used the word chick. Like a lot. Nobody talks like that anymore.

On his first day, he called me “kiddo.”

Which was weird. My coworkers all agreed that was fucking weird. 

Regardless, he could not read a room to save his literal life.

“You’re my boss, huh?” He said, smiling in that way men smile when they’re about to say something absolutely insane but think if they grin wide enough, you’ll take it as a compliment.

“Guess I’ll have to behave.”

I told him he didn’t have to call me that. That I’m not his boss, I’m literally just paid a little more money to do a lot more work and wear a different name tag. 

He laughed like I’d told him a joke.

He always laughed like that. Loud and airy. Like he wanted people to know he was funny, that he was laughing with or at something funny. He was never actually laughing, in a way, it was more so the performance of it that I think irked me off so much. 

The thing about working at a tour company is you have to learn how to perform enthusiasm.

You wave at strangers, you laugh too loud, you pretend to find Times Square “iconic” instead of the migraine factory it truly is. So maybe that’s why Derek fit in at first.

He was enthusiastic. Painfully so.

He complimented everyone. Told bad jokes. “Accidentally” brushed against people’s arms when making a point. Told me I had “good energy.”

Tried picking me up. Physically. As in off the floor. Without consent or permission. To prove how “strong” he was. To whom? I don’t know.

The kind of guy who’ll send you full playlists of songs that “remind him of you”, even though you’d only known him for three days. I have a theory that these men genuinely just have these on the ready, with a list of songs they’ve dedicated to every woman they’ve ever met because they see women as so painfully one-dimensional, entirely indifferent creatures.

I wanted to believe he was just awkward.

Maybe even sweet, in a weird, offbeat, “he’s just misunderstood” kind of way. Like Scott Pilgrim, if he drank a pack of beer every day. I genuinely, for a brief moment in my otherwise bitter, hag life, thought that maybe this guy could be a little fixer-upper. So what if he has weird self-esteem issues? We can work it out.

I thought, Maybe I’ll go for the funny, weird, creepy guy for once.

A little charity romance. A mercy date for morale. What harm could it do?

The harm was small at first. He started lingering.

After tours, he’d hover by my desk under the pretense of “asking questions.” Because a week of training hadn’t explained enough. He’d come in as I was grabbing my bag, ready to end my shift, light a cigarette, and start… asking questions. 

Except the questions weren’t about work.

“You ever been in love?”

“What kind of guys do you go for?”

“Bet you hate dating apps. You seem like a face-to-face kind of girl.”

I laughed the way women are trained to laugh, politely, softly, noncommittal. Because saying “that’s inappropriate” would make me the problem. And, with already a plan to put in my two-weeks notice, I couldn’t afford to be the problem.

He’d send me playlists. Jazz songs, always. New playlists all the time. I never asked for them, mind you, I never asked him for music recommendations. But he’d send them over anyway.

Chet Baker, Coltrane, Davis.

Once, he wrote, “Bet we’d look so hot as a couple”

I didn’t reply.

He followed up with: “U there?”

Then: “Just kidding lol unless you’re into it.”

I started wearing headphones at work, even when nothing was playing. The noise-cancelling kind. I just pretended to ignore him, but the enthusiast is always just so enthusiastic. 

We were paired on a group tour once, a last-minute schedule change.

He insisted I “let him take the lead.”

I said fine.

It was ninety degrees and humid enough to make God sweat. We walked from Rockefeller Center to the Flatiron Building with thirty middle-aged tourists, all moving at the pace of a fucking roomba vacuum. Derek made sure to stay beside me.

Every few blocks, he’d lean over to whisper something meant to be funny. 

A little too close. 

His breath was hot, and smelled like hot dog water, his words were sticky.

At the Empire State Building, he told a 14-year-old teenage girl from Michigan that she had “model energy.”

Her mother laughed nervously. She told him she really wants to live in New York, he gave her his Instagram so she could “keep in touch.” Which, I pray she hasn’t. He acted so charitable about it, too, like he was a good big-city guy, showing her the ropes of life. 

I pretended not to hear. Otherwise I would have barfed in my mouth.

When the tour ended, he said, “We make a good team, huh?”

I said, “Sure.”

He said, “You should come see me play sometime. My set’s pretty intimate.”

I said, “I’m busy.”

He said, “You didn’t even ask when.”

I said, “I don’t need to.”

He laughed.

He always laughed.

Loud. And airy.

After that, the atmosphere shifted. He’d stop talking when I walked into the room. He’d stare a little too long in the reflective glass of the office door. He’d hum the jazz songs from that stupid fucking playlist under his breath when I passed, like a private joke I wasn’t invited to understand. He’d already decided I was too stupid to understand the music he played, so I decided I didn’t need to listen to anything he sent me, even if I felt bad.

He left a coffee on my desk once. My name, spelled wrong.

When I threw it out, he said, “Guess some people don’t appreciate nice gestures.”

I said, “Guess some people should stop making them.” And that we’ve worked together for a month, he should know I don’t really drink coffee. Ever.

He stopped being friendly after that. But he didn’t stop being there.

There’s a particular kind of fear that comes with realizing someone likes you just enough to ruin your peace.

Not love.

Not an obsession.

Just that itchy, invasive admiration that feels like a spider on your skin.

Like you want to tear your skin off or would rather eat a bowl of live wasps than walk into work. Knowing that you’re going to walk in and see somebody that will hit on you and ask you twenty questions at a time while simultaneously knowing nothing about your personality. Knowing that no matter how many times you tell him to back off, he will be in your DMs asking you if you’re up this very night.

And then, like light at the end of a tunnel, my two-week notice was over. I was no longer forced to see this guy again. 

My delightful coworker told me he quit a few months later, and said he was “moving on to bigger things.” No one asked what that meant. Probably because what that meant was he booked a venue for the first time in three years.

Now, whenever I pass a jazz bar, I half-expect to hear him laugh.

That awful, airy laugh that tries too hard to sound confident.

Sometimes I think I do hear it, faintly, like feedback.

It blends with the honking taxis and the tour chatter, part of the city’s endless white noise.

New York is full of men like him. Overconfident, under-talented, perpetually convinced they’re someone’s lesson. And maybe he was mine.

About politeness. About fear.

About how sometimes, enthusiasm is just another word for entitlement.