Thank You For Being a Friend

“So, I think Parker and Eddie are having problems,” I tell my buddy George on the phone.
“Who the hell are Parker and Eddie?”
“You remember, when we used to hang out at Mary’s, before I met Preppy? Parker was tall, had those really complicated highlights, never talked much? And Eddie was always drunk, I think he’s a florist or a doctor or something?”
“No idea who these people are,” says George. “But go on.”
“Well, they broke up yesterday, then they worked things out, but this morning there’s trouble again.”
“Why do you know this? Are they calling you?”
“No, it’s all right there on Facebook. Eddie went from ‘in a relationship’, to ‘single,’ then back to ‘in a relationship,’ and today it says ‘it’s complicated,’ which sounds like an understatement.”
“Just so I’m clear,” says George. “You don’t actually know these people?”
“I do too! From the bar, a few years ago.”
“Darling, this is absurd. Someone you knew from the bar back in your skinny days is not a friend, no matter what Facebook tells you.”
I think I’m developing a problem. After abandoning Friendster for MySpace a few years ago, last week I took the time to create a Facebook profile, since that’s apparently all the rage these days. I really just did it to keep up with the people in my life who now refuse to call, text, or e-mail. If you wanna know what’s up with them, you gotta read their “Wall”. I posted some photos, accepted a few friend requests, and had fully intended to leave it at that.
Within three days, I had two hundred friends.
I was not aware I knew two hundred people. But I hadn’t thought of my classmates from elementary school, or the next-door neighbor of a friend in New York, or the people I used to hang out alongside at bars before I moved out to the suburbs. Collectively, that adds up. And then, you start looking at those people’s friend lists, which reminds you of all sorts of other people you haven’t talked to in fifteen years, and within minutes, you’re caught up on every aspect of their existence since you last met, and you’re getting daily updates.
My friend Molly from junior high is hosting a poker tournament in Louisiana. There is not a single reason for me to possess this information. Until last week, I don’t think she and I would’ve even known each other if we were in the same elevator. I’m certainly not going to attend the poker tournament. But I know it’s coming along very well.
When I get friend requests from people whose identities I can’t quite place, I’ll click over to the photos to see if it jogs my memory. If it’s a cute boy, I’ll go through his whole album to see if he’s got any shirtless photos. It just gives my ego a healthy boost when attractive strangers want to be friends with me. Also, I like shirtless photos. Go ahead and judge, you know you like them too. It takes a minute to upload a picture, so it’s not like they put the picture up accidentally. I figure if a hot guy goes to the trouble of putting up half-naked pictures, the least I can do is observe, and decide what I think about it.
Then I have to check their relationship status, because I have several quality single friends who I’m always looking to set up with someone.
People keep sending me virtual plants, which is somehow supposed to save the rain forest, but I’m not sure how that works. Apparently there are also people “tending my patch”. Slutty Mandy recently told me she’d chased away a chipmunk that was eating my petunias, and the least I could do was send her a sunflower. I think that was the moment I realized I was completely immersed in a bizarre, foreign culture.
My cousin Nelson’s bedroom is across the hall from the den where I do most of my work. There are moments where both of us are on Facebook, messaging each other from ten feet away. We used to have actual conversations. No we send each other YouTube clips.
I don’t really worry about this scenario, because I know once the newness of it all wears off, I’ll move on. When I first discovered Xtube, my friend Greg and I competed to see who could find the most out-there, fetishy clips. But we reached a point where we saw a few things that I questioned the legality or physics of, and most of which I really wish I could un-see, so we abandoned the exercise. After that experience, plus exhausting the searches to find out if there were any clips of people I knew (and yep, there were), I haven’t really been back.
In the meantime, however, I’m enjoying getting caught up with the bartender who snuck me drinks in Florida when I was nineteen, and the guy who played a talking vending machine in the children’s show where I played a giant blue soccer-playing kitten.

And there are, of course, the unexpected benefits.
“I just got a request from some grad student who likes reading Austen and looks great in a swimsuit,” I tell George.
“Is he single?” George asks.
“Sure is,” I say. “I should introduce you. I mean, after all, now he’s a friend of mine.”

Sleepless in the Suburbs

It’s four in the morning. I wake up agitated. It’s too quiet. I realize the air-conditioning isn’t running. The bedspread is on the floor and the sheets are soaked with sweat. The room even smells hot. Confounded by this, I check the thermostat. It’s eighty-six degrees, which would be perfect if I was at a barbecue but not really ideal for a night’s sleep. There’s air coming out of the vents, but it’s warm air, mocking me. I throw on boxers and look at Preppy snoring contentedly.

I have no idea how he sleeps through stuff like this.
I’ve always been the person who wakes up at the slightest provocation, bolting up to seek the source of the sound. My father used to go to work at five every morning, and I’d jump out of bed when I heard him in the kitchen. I don’t really know why I did it every day. But I couldn’t keep myself in the bed, knowing there was something going on in the house that I needed to investigate. I’d find him at the kitchen table, eating Raisin Bran in his postal uniform.
“You should be asleep,” he’d say. “Everything’s okay.”
Then he’d give me a hug, and I would go back to sleep until I heard my mother moving around a little while later.
Standing outside my house in my underwear and flip-flops, I shine a flashlight on the air conditioning unit, which is currently not doing anything. This is a little panic-inducing, because calling a technician will require money we don’t have. Suddenly I miss having a landlord. Plus, there’s no way I’ll be able to sleep knowing there’s a problem to solve. This is exactly WHY I wake up to every sound. Because there might be something I need to take care of, like a broken air conditioner.

Now, if only I had the slightest idea what to do.

Other than knowing the sound it’s supposed to make I’m at a complete loss.
Back when I lived in Mississippi, I dated a guy named John whose next door neighbor loved reggae music. John’s neighbor seemed to particularly love reggae music at three in the morning, played at a volume which managed to provoke a rage in me I wasn’t aware I possessed. I would toss and turn in John’s bed, pillow over my head, trying my best to avoid the inevitable confrontation. But it was no use. I’d inevitably launch out of bed, pounding on the wall with my shoe. The music would get louder. John was oblivious to all of this. Without his hearing aids John was profoundly deaf, an aspect of his existence which presented countless hurdles, but did usually guarantee a good night’s sleep.
So I’d have to throw on my boxers and a t-shirt, marching across the hall to his neighbor’s door. He’d greet me in a cloud of pot smoke, wearing a sarong, black lights glowing in the background.

Our conversations were never cordial.
“Jesus, do we have to go through this every night?”
“Dude, what’s your problem? Your buddy never complains when you’re not here.”
“Because my buddy is DEAF, you jackass. But I’m not, so could you turn it down?”
“I wish he’d fuck another deaf guy, then.”
I’d try to explain my frustration to John the next day, but he’d just tell me not to worry about it. How does one explain annoying sounds to a deaf person?
“It’s like if roaches were crawling all over you,” I told him. “You couldn’t sleep through it.”
Later, when John started having nightmares about bugs attacking him in his bed, he blamed me.
Still standing outside, I think of kicking the air conditioner, because that tends to work with vending machines when they won’t relinquish my Snickers, but decide against it. Then I follow a cable to a fuse box on the side of the house, covered in ivy. I start ripping the ivy off, delighted by a possible solution. That’s when I see the big spider. It’s one of those fat bastards, so big they look hairy. This launches me five feet back, having a small panic attack. Because I saw Arachnophobia at a particularly impressionable age, I have always seen spiders as malicious, calculating creatures, hell-bent on world domination. Even Charlotte’s Web gave me the heebie-jeebies, especially because she had Debbie Reynolds’ voice, and frankly I find that woman alarming. She’s like a garden gnome in drag.
Now the spider is the only thing standing between me and cool air, and by extension, sleep. I take off one of my flip-flops and run toward the fuse box kamikaze-style. I smack the hairy monster off the box, flip a switch, and the air conditioner returns to life with the sound I was hoping for. I feel quite pleased with myself as I go back into the house, having slain the monster and completed my mission. Back in the bedroom, Preppy is spread-eagle on the bed. I want to wake him and share my harrowing hero’s journey, but decide to wait ‘til morning. I give a little push to roll him over, but he won’t budge.
“Baby, move over,” I say, pushing harder.
He flings an arm out in protest, managing to punch me in the face.
“Jesus Christ!” I yell, a hand to my throbbing eye.
“Shh,” he says. “You’re being loud.”
He resumes snoring. I grab my pillow and the bedspread and head for the sofa, deciding I’ve fought enough battles for one night. I should be asleep. Everything’s okay.

Money Dearest

My neighbor Mrs. Richardson explained over our back fence that the neighborhood only uses one yard man: Walter, a man in his late thirties who lives at the end of the block. The system is simple: Whenever Walter feels like it, usually around the end of the month, he’ll drag his mower out and take care of your lawn. You can’t call Walter to schedule an appointment, because he uses prepaid cell phones and is always changing numbers. It’s also difficult to decline lawn service, because you never know when he’ll come by. So everybody just keeps fifty dollars on hand for when he comes to your door to collect.
I told Mrs. Richardson that didn’t sound like the best setup, and I might check around for something a little more reliable.
“Oh, please don’t,” she said. “We all use him. Walter lives with his poor mother, and he won’t get a real job. Only way she can get him to make money is by doin’ the yards. We do it to help her out.”
So I hired Walter. Gotta help his poor Mama.
I’m in the kitchen making dinner, which I do now because I’m home all day, and it’s important to have a few noticeable housekeeping things done when my fiancée gets home. Otherwise he begins to wonder what it is I’m doing. And I can’t say “I was writing,” because if I was actually writing all that time I’d have a novel longer than Gone With the Wind to show for it. In truth, I don’t do a lot of actual writing. But I spend a great deal of time staring at a blank document in Microsoft Word, begging my brain to actually come up with something. So then I’ll stop staring and have a cigarette or twelve, call my sister, maybe watch some clips of baby animals on YouTube. I love baby animal clips, particularly panda cubs climbing on things or sneezing. You wouldn’t think you can fill a whole afternoon watching those, but trust me, you totally can.
I can usually snap myself out of gazing at the screen slack-jawed about an hour before Preppy gets home, at which point I’ll start dinner and dust something in the living room. That’s key, because when he walks in the house and smells Lemon Pledge, his brain tells him I’ve been cleaning.

It also helps if I put a little Windex behind my ears, to complete the effect.
“I’ve been thinking,” says Preppy as I drain the pasta. “My domestic partner benefits provide the exact same coverage for both of us. Same health, dental, prescriptions, all of it. And I pay for that.”
“Oh-kaaay,” I say, not really sure where this is going, but really hoping it won’t interfere with my long-term plans to use these benefits to have all of my teeth capped. My ultimate goal is for it to look like someone’s turned on a fluorescent light when I open my mouth.
“So, if I pay for us to have identical benefits, how come you only let me have two movies on the Netflix queue, and you get four? Shouldn’t we each get three?”
Giving Preppy his own personal Netflix queue was a little gift from me last year. It didn’t cost that much more to upgrade my membership, and then he could pick out his own movies. I hadn’t thought of it as being in the same category as him providing my health insurance, but since the Netflix is considerably cheaper, I’m glad that’s how he sees it.
“I’ll fix it tomorrow,” I say, adding it to my to-do list. I’ve got a book coming out soon, at which point hopefully I’ll be financially stable again and Preppy won’t have to cover the bills. Until then, however, things are a little lean. I take pride in not having asked him for actual cash yet, but I had to take my change jar to the CoinStar at Kroger today, so that may be ending soon.
The next morning, the doorbell rings. It’s Walter the yard man, holding the check I’d given him the day before.
“I’m really sorry about this, Mr. Payne,” he said. “But the bank said they couldn’t cash this check.”
Well, shit. So much for having my own money.

I go to my wallet and pull all the money I’d gotten from cashing in my change, and hand it over.
“I’m sorry about this, Walter. There must’ve been some mix-up and the bank.”
“Mm-hmm,” he says, giving me a look that lets me know he’s completely aware I’m full of shit, but willing to spare my dignity and play along.
And just like that, I’m broke. I am officially completely dependent on my partner. The leap of faith I took in leaving my day job now feels more like a stumble. I call around, and manage to get a gig babysitting the next afternoon. Despite Preppy’s assurances that I shouldn’t worry, everything will be fine, I know that I need to contribute more than just the smell of furniture polish to the house. I can just picture Mrs. Richardson leaning over the fence, talking to the neighbors.
“You don’t even have to read the book,” she’ll say. “But everybody’s buying a copy. He won’t get a real job, and the only way Preppy can get him to make money is by writing those books. So we do it to help his husband out.”

Evidence Tampering

I’m in the drive-thru at Chik-fil-a, which I always feel a little guilty about because they donate money to Focus on Family, and I really shouldn’t support that. But damn, those fanatical fundamentalists sure do make a fine chicken sandwich. I’m mulling over this quandary and looking forward to my waffle fries when the woman in front of me pulls ahead to the trash can, discarding a bag from Wendy’s, and another from McDonald’s.
I’m left wondering if she’s conducting some sort of tour. If I followed her out of here, would she stop at Dairy Queen next? I saw a movie once where Meredith Baxter played a bulimic who’d go on drive-thru raids like that.
There are so many social problems I wouldn’t even know existed if Meredith Baxter and Judith Light hadn’t dramatized them for me.
Then, as I receive my own order at the window, I have to move an empty Burger King cup out of the holder. A quick look in the back seat reveals the evidence from my most recent late-night run to the Krystal on Moreland Avenue, where I’m willing to risk being assaulted just to have tiny hamburgers at two in the morning.
Shit. I’m just like the lady. Only I don’t even throw the bags away. So I’m actually worse than the lady, because I’m also a slob.
It isn’t as though I’m ordering every meal via drive-thru speaker, but it is disheartening to note the change in lifestyle that’s occurred since I got my driver’s license. When I was still a pedestrian, I ate at fast food joints only a few times a year, mainly because it was rare for me to even walk past one. They don’t market fast food to people who walk, because you never see anyone walking down the street stuffing their face with a triple bacon cheeseburger. That’s reserved for drivers, who sit in traffic and eat French fries by the fistful. Oh, and by the way, other people can totally see you when you do that. The image of a man in my rear-view mirror deep-throating a Moe’s burrito is forever burned in my memory.
One would think that my expanding waistline would’ve been enough to sound the alarms in my mind, but it’s actually the moment at Chick-fil-a that really scares the hell outta me. I get home and delay my lunch in favor of cleaning out the car. Every paper wrapper, every plastic cup, every little cardboard Krystal chick container, leave me feeling shamed.
I must destroy all evidence.
I tend to do that. Any physical reminders of an unpleasant incident must be completely eliminated. A photo makes me think of a bad moment? Gotta tear it up. The polo I was wearing the day I found out I had cancer ended up in the trash, because it would forever be my cancer shirt. I bought new sheets once on the day a boyfriend broke up with me, and eventually I had to give the sheets away because I felt rejected every time I opened the damn linen closet. I should let my fiancée know about this, so he’ll know to take me to an alternate location if he ever has bad news for me. Because if it happens at home, I’ll have to burn down the house to eradicate the memory.
My grandfather was an avid fan of Playboy magazine in the 1970s- he had the entire decade stacked on the top shelf of the guest bedroom closet. My cousin Nelson and I used to pull copies down and marvel at the centerfolds featuring women with frosted blue eye shadow and pendulous, pre-silicone boobs. Nelson was clearly delighted by what he saw, but I was always more interested in the staging of the photos. Who stands in their library reading Ivanhoe wearing nothing but garters and heels? Or, why was this woman standing naked in front of a blazing fireplace holding a poker? Wasn’t that dangerous?
Then one day, we discovered a promotional copy of Playgirl that had been sent to my grandmother in 1975. These men were sexy in the Burt Reynolds mode- big mustache, overly tan, a little thick in the middle, overgrown pubes the size and shape of a slice of Sbarro pizza. They lounged, on rocks and in hammocks, looking directly at me with a smirk that said, “Admit it, Topher, you like it.”
I stole it. I took it home and committed every page to memory, reveling in fantasies of these manly men and me doing… something. I wasn’t entirely clear on what, but I knew it was something very wrong and potentially fantastic.
The Playgirl had to be destroyed.
I cut every single page into tiny pieces, taking hours with the task. I put the resulting confetti in a paper bag, then walked six blocks to the Presbyterian Church and threw it in their dumpster.
And here we discover the flaw in my destruction-of-evidence plan: I still remember every detail of that macho man lying in repose on a rock with a boner. I vividly recall the cancer shirt and the rejection sheets. Getting rid of the actual objects didn’t make the memory go away. In fact, the ritual may have highlighted them in my mind.
Maybe the best way to learn from a shameful experience isn’t by trying to eliminate it- it’s facing it head on. With that possibility in mind, I try something new: I take one of those Krystal containers and tape it to my dashboard. We’ll see what happens.