An Old Friend

Late, wondering and awaiting, anxious, pensive and brooding, been drinking, but not wasted, though my old friend is. His head in a bucket I brought him, legs and waist on the couch, torso off, arms wrapped around the bucket I use to mop, strange man walked into my world. Recently divorced from a beautiful model, saw her book covers, the airbrushed dimples, the exaggerated hip movement, the close ups and makeup marks, he stated that she was in love with someone else, and now the marriage is annulled. He drunkenly cheated on her, and the aftermath consisted of two years of no sex, now he is snoring, half on the couch, half off. We have talked of being roommates, but something worries me, is he gay and looking to me for relief? He is looking in the wrong place. I talk of love, and how that’s what I want, but I put up these barriers don’t I? Only females can feel the extent of what my love is, whatever it is, is focused on the female. I can have a conceivably finite intimacy with a male. I can have a naively hopeful infinite intimacy with a female. He’s snoring loudly, half dead, half alive, and I’m thinking of the phone calls from the ex-girlfriend last night that I missed because I was unconscious and I toy with the idea of making a call and exhibiting how I still feel that I need her. I won’t. There will be no call. This body is ready to turn to the toils of the next day, for effeteness seeped in surreptitiously amidst a duo of loves that appallingly reacted to the abasement and bellicose statement of the noisy snorer on the couch next to the big, blue chair I sit in. In a bar frequented by older folks looking to sit in cushy leather half- circle booths, where men with large chains and slick hair not so subtly seduce anything young, fit, or pretty, we all drank whisky, but we sipped, the snorer gulped. The lovers are following their love to Chicago tomorrow, and I scrape the remains of my love off my heart for tomorrow.

And now it is today, an odd ache in my right calf, rigidity and tightness along the breadth of my back, and the general harangue of the hangover, a body bitching and a face in the mirror not so fetching, swollen, bloated eyes, saggy skin covering the skeleton ‘round my mind, a day of loosening, reconciling, and aimless, fruitless interpreting.

I walked out of my room, his jacket and pants on the floor before the front door, the coffee table pushed far from the couch, and my roommate’s heaters whirring and glowing near the slumbering old friend. What happened after I expired? I pray that the roommate won’t find something to chastised me for, but he’s done it before, indignant when I bring someone home drunk, troubling coping with any form of chaos, the slug’s trail can only disgust. The slug lives to digest.

The old friend enlisted my help to move a couch into room in his parent’s house. Though we knocked some pictures off the wall, the couch settled into its spot fairly easily, and his mother, alone with the epileptic though frisky dog Molly, gave me a big hug, two of them in fact. Father is in South Africa visiting his daughter, who has strayed from her missionary endeavors for more entrepreneurial pursuits, to the dismay of father, who prays for a living. The old friend told me he believes in the power of prayer, told me a story of father summoning the family to the kitchen table, in a circle, hands held, eyes closed, speaking softly, exulting, beseeching, asking for a van for furtherance of the cause, and a week later the miracle manifested, someone bought a van for the family. I remember getting high as hell in that van.

The old friend showed me his various leather bound notebooks, and told me of all his plans to write in them, one for emotions, one for intellectual queries, one solely for writing about the breakup. I told him he can’t think about writing. You just do it. Thinking too much leads to impotency, and if you’re not feeling it, if it’s a struggle, leave it, forget about it, and do something else.