Been There. Done That.

Do you know a know-it-all?  You know the type.  An insufferable boor- and bore- who leaches all the oxygen out of the room with his inane pronouncements.  A “Cliff” from Cheers.  You can’t even argue with this kind of guy.  He never really listens to your conversation.  He just waits for the moment when he can jump in.

And he is always too obtuse to know when he is hogging the spotlight.

I’ve known one or two in my time.  Avoidance at all cost was usually the game plan.  But back in Colorado, Mike and I had one friend who was a variation on this theme.  And he was a neighbor and a nice fellow and we couldn’t avoid him- even when we wanted to.

Let’s call him Gus.  Older than us by about twenty years, Gus was a Sydney Blackmer/Jay. C. Flippen combo. Silver-haired, handsome, with the military bearing of the Air Force flying ace he once had been.

Gus had a big house not far from ours.  He was a fine cook and an enthusiastic art collector.  (Religious art, though.  Stuff like “Susannah and the Elders” or “Judith with the head of Holofernes.”  His whole collection kind of creeped me out.)  He was also a wine connoisseur, a car fancier, an avid mountain biker and a longtime skier.

Between marriages at the time, he was a doting father and proud grandfather to a clan of handsome, successful children who didn’t live in Colorado.  Well-off, charitable and gregarious, he had tons of free time on his hands.

And he liked to fill that free time with friends of all ages.  Somehow Mike and I got tapped.

Soon Gus included us in everything.  Dinners at his home, galas in Aspen, (he was on all the A lists) tamale parties mountainside, private soirées at the Hotel Jerome.  Both he and his then-girlfriend- let’s call her Ginger- partied with la crème de la crème and before we knew it, we were drafting in their tony social wake.

Ginger was a hoot.  A former Miss Miami, probably now in her late sixties.  If you looked hard enough you could see the blonde, blue-eyed bombshell of a beauty queen she once had been.  But pills, booze, facelifts, and a few husbands too many had all done their damage.

(She was sweet, though.  And she inadvertently gave me a good look at a certain kind of old school Aspen socialite when she said to me, “Here Ellen, please hold my Cosmo.  It’s time for my medication.”)

And because we weren’t schnorrers, we always reciprocated.  Intime dinners chez nous, or evenings out at good restaurants, Mike and I paid Gus and Ginger back hospitable gesture for hospitable gesture.

But this socializing had a snowball effect.  Soon other people in Gus and Ginger’s crowd took us up as the couple of the month, and we got invited around to many events where we partied with our original host and hostess.

Thus we saw Gus all the time.

This all sounds swell.  And it would have been- if not for one tiny little quirk of Gus’s.  He was wasn’t a know-it-all exactly.  But you couldn’t mention anything, any subject, about which he hadn’t an anecdote.

He always had some personal connection to any subject matter you could possibly dream up.  Name a place- he’d been there.  Name a person- he knew them.  Just name an activity- he had done it.  Name an event- he had founded it.

Name anything.  ANYTHING.  And Gus would have a long story about his connection to it.

If Mike mentioned something about Chuck Yeager, faster than you could achieve Mach One, Gus would be launched into orbit.  Some story about he and Glamorous Glennis’ s husband.  Old flying buddies or something.

Or if we had barbecued that night’s dinner.  All it took was one tiny compliment to Mike, the BBQ chef, and Gus would have to run home and get his diploma.  That’s right- a diploma in bbquing from some well-known cooking school.

Certain words had an intoxicating effect on him.  Like “flying,” or “vintage.”  We learned the hard way never to mention those buzz words because they unleashed in Gus a torrent of reminiscences.

In his frenzy to be liked or, perhaps because of his hyper-competitive nature, any word could set him off to out-top any story you were trying to tell.

And he didn’t take turns.  It was The Gus Show all the time.

Still he was kind of a sweet old coot, and Mike and I suffered in silence.  But finally, I had to take matters into my own hands.  I found this boasting and egomania unbearable and couldn’t face one more evening of it.

So one night, before yet another dinner party at our house, I went into our library and pulled out the Oxford English Dictionary.

“Watch this,” I said to Mike.  And I opened the tome at random.

“Here.  I am putting my finger on a word.  And I’m going to work that word into the conversation tonight.  You see if old Gus doesn’t have a story that doesn’t involve this word.”

And the secret word of the evening?  Armadillo.

That’s not an easy word to casually introduce into conversation but I was determined.  Mike was too nice to encourage me but he was human, and a human who had had his ears talked off by this braggart for years.  Right around the salad course, I said it.

And BAM!  Sure enough, Gus was off on a tale about armadillos he had tamed in Texas.

From then on, whenever we had to spend time in his company, I would go back to the O.E.D. and arm myself with a secret word.

Mean, I know.  But it was hilarious.  And as the words got more and more preposterous, Gus would always rise magnificently to the occasion.

When I left Colorado that was the end of Gus and his stories.  I’ve heard through the grapevine that he finally married Ginger.  I bet they are happy.

And some day, somewhere, I hope he is saying, “Ellen Ross?  Sure I know her.  Great gal.  Back in the seventies, we scaled Mt. Everest together.”

The old faker.