That's What Friends Are For

So My Therapist Says To Me, "Do you choose your friends well? Do you have GOOD friends?"

"I think they'd say so," was my pithy response.

I do have good friends. Not a lot. As I told The Good Doctor, if you spread that around too thin, pretty soon it loses its meaning. At least, it does to me. I can count on one hand the number of people who I think are the real deal, spend the time, person you can call when you're lying naked on the bathroom floor with a headwound friend. And they're really something.

I've known a woman, Sarah Jo Harsen, for 10 years now - a record for me. You see, I moved a lot in my adult years. I was a reverse Army Brat. I only went to one school, but as soon as it was completed, I moved all over the country every couple of years as an adult. I would stay somewhere for a year, 2 years maybe, a record 4 years in Chicago (but 2 different apartments, so...) and took the opportunity at every move to escape that which was bad and reinvent something good. Usually, that meant leaving behind exes (a few of those), bad job experiences (there weren't very many of those), or unacceptable weather patterns. And friends - good or bad - usually fell by the wayside when the the U-Haul pulled up.

Just too much effort, I'd tell myself. Out of sight, out of mind. Absence makes the phone call longer. All those old cliches. Sarah Jo and I met the first time I reallllly moved away from home - 3 hours away. We met in a bar. She tells the story differently than I do, mostly because I apparently don't remember meeting her the first time, she says. I contend that the opposite is true. She doesn't remember meeting me for the first time. I think that's because it wasn't in her finest hour. I remember seeing this really beautiful woman, flanked by homosexuals of varying quality, sobbing on a barstool. I cannot tell you what it was about. For all I know, it wasn't sobbing but a contact lens incident. Nor do I remember why I knew one or more of the people attending her. But I remember, foggily, offering anything I could to help out. (I also remember thinking, "Ideally, this is a situation cured by alcohol and not by automobile repair knowledge.")

It's a 10 year-old flash of memory that has to fight its way through God-knows-how-many obstacles to make its way through to perception. So I grant you that I might not have the details right. But it's the memory I have and for as long I have memory (which may not be long, at this rate), I'm stickin' to it. Ten years I've known this woman. She's getting married this year. If that ain't a kick in the head... Single people seem to carry silent pacts past the age of 35 or so that as long as you don't, I won't. And then when somebody breaks the pact, you really kind of struggle for a split-second between joy for their gain and "Hey....we had a deal!" OK, more than a split-second. But good on her. She deserves it.

Sarah Jo and I only lived in the same town, she reminds me, for about 18 months of this 10 years. The various Bells have built their pools on our dime. When business or pleasure travel brought us into one another's neighborhoods, we'd make it a point to have dinner, take in a show, perhaps. She took me to see The Full Monty - the musical - when I lived in Chicago. Her new boyfriend was there. He's about to be her husband. She's one of the brightest, most literate people I know. She's prickly and witty and quick with a come-back. My kinda gal.

We'd sit in bars, point to a perfect stranger across the sea of standard deviants and tell their story. We'd invent their career, home life, love patterns, psychoanalytical profile, the works. And we'd laugh.... We'd write poetry - bad poetry - really bad poetry - together. It was a party game that nobody else really understood but entertained us immensely. She'd write a line and pass the cocktail napkin and pen to me. I'd write the next line. And back-and-forth we went. As the night got later, the poetry became far more Ginsberg than Dickinson, and we dubbed our collection of cocktail napkins (she saved them!) "The Bar Bards".

We sat shoulder-to-shoulder in an overcrowded pub once. The place's clientele was ambiguous at best, if we talk about sexual orientation. It was the place all the gay folks went when the gay bars closed. Only it was the place where all the straight people already were. So it got to be highly entertaining around 2:15 a.m. Sitting there, a man chatted us up and we three enjoyed ourselves immensely. When he excused himself for a moment, Sarah Jo and I were quite perplexed as to whether he was hitting on one of us. And if he was, which one of us? That's a real friend. Somebody who is more than happy to go home with the stranger, but will applaud as you walk out the door with him instead....that's a keeper. Ten years.

She's the first person I called when I was given the diagnosis. I would call and make her stay on the line the first few times I swallowed the pills that would make me better, only they made me sicker. I was too scared to take them by myself in my miniature apartment in Des Moines and she wasn't embarrassed to hear that. You know you trust someone when you want them there in case you vomit. And I guess you really love somebody if you're willing to sit there while they do it. We exchanged promises over the years. They're the kind of promises gay men and straight women make to each other: "Make sure they bury me in THIS nightie and make sure they leave the casket OPEN!" Those kinds. When I was sick already and didn't know it, she drove with me to San Francisco from the midwest so I could see it on my birthday. Most of those stories will never be printed. Not because I'm afraid to write them, but because she is now a woman of a certain age who has dignity and, soon, a husband. So youthful stories will become ancient secrets.

We've swapped resumes, told hard truths to ourselves and each other, disagreed on things that matter. We've taken different paths: hers more stable, mine more whirling dervish. We both ran bookstores. We both love theatre. Neither one of us knows the name of that character actor who is in everything without resorting to the Internet. She sees a lot of movies. I don't have to - I feel like I have the way she talks about them. We can flush on the phone. I made her promise to tend to the more embarrassing aspects of my personal hygiene should it ever become necessary. She did. And now it's in writing.

There are other friends I'll mention later. But she's the oldest friend I have today - not in age, lest I offend. The Good Doctor's Point was, "If you pick such good friends, why not good lovers?"

Good question. I guess that's why he gets $110 an hour.