Not to be rude, but he’s giving Adam Sandler impersonator taking a walk on the streets of New York City.
In a run-down pair of Birkenstocks, he struts toward us with a smile plastered across his face and a football spinning in the palm of his hand.
“Hey, man,” he says as he reaches his arm out to Wilder. “Nice to meet you.” Sanders then turns to me and shakes my hand as well. “And you must be Scottie.” He chuckles lightly. “Never met a female Scottie before.”
“Neither did I,” Wilder says, surprising me. “Fell for her name though, because of—” and to my despair, they both say, “Scottie Pippen” at the same time.
“Yes,” Sanders says as he lets go of my hand and then takes a seat. “Back in the nineties, I was obsessed with the Bulls, despite being a Knicks fan. It was hard not to follow the phenomenon.”
“My dad was obsessed with the Bulls as well,” Wilder says, jumping right into conversation. “He had memorabilia and newspaper clippings hung all around his office. After school, I’d go into his office, and he’d put in a VCR tape of a game he recorded, and I’d watch while doing my homework. Scottie was my man.”
“Did you watch the documentary,The Last Dance?” Sanders asks with a wince.
“I did.” Wilder sighs heavily as I sit back, watching a bromance unfold. What…what is happening right now? “I try to block out the fact that he ended up being a prick.”
Sanders tosses his football in the air and catches it. “Made your taint shrivel up, didn’t it?”
Uh, did my marriage counselor just say “taint” and allude to it shriveling up? What the hell kind of professional setting is this?
“To fucking dust,” Wilder says and then leans back on the couch and drapes his arm over it.
Sanders chuckles. “A man after my own heart. What’s your name by the way?”
“Wilder. And you met my wife, Scottie, or Pips as I call her.”
Pips? Where the hell did that come from?
“For Scottie Pippen, obviously,” Sanders says.
Wilder raises his hand in a charming yet annoying way. “Guilty.”
“Well, it’s nice to meet you two. Ellison was telling me that you work for her, but she didn’t say much other than that.” Sanders directs his attention to me.
“Um, yes. I work as her copy editor.”
He nods. “You play golf?”
“Not exactly,” I drag out.
“She’s good though.” Wilder whistles, stepping in. “Girl has game when she wants to. Beats me every time we hit up the turf, although I don’t excel at handling a club, so maybe I’m not that great of a judge.”
Okay, what is he doing?
What kind of angle is he pulling?
He’s not supposed to come in here and be all buddy-buddy with the therapist. Because now, when we talk about our problems, who do we think Sanders is going to empathize with more?
The copy editor with moist palms? Yeah, they’re moist. I’m nervous.
Or the gray-eyed comrade with loose lips and an impressionable smile?
I’ll give you one guess.
“Ellison and I like to play mini golf. We have an ongoing score, and right now, she’s leading me by a few points, but with the new Butter Putter line coming out, I think I have a solid chance at gaining on her.”
Is this how all marriage counselor sessions go? Because if so, how are more people not divorced? This feels like a chat over a coffee, not a “help me, my marriage is falling apart” situation.
“Do you two ever play games together?”
