07.02.2001
"It was almost funny," I said to my friend on the phone. He'd been in Florida for three weeks and had called me up to see what was going on back at home. Our adopted home that is. We'd both moved a few years back and were the only people from Texas that we still talked too. That's what childhood friends are all about I supposed.
"Funny how," he asked.
"Funny, funny. I mean, the last time we saw her she was a lesbian. The advantage there is that they tend not to get pregnant." It was a slight jibe at him since he was not exactly an advocate of what most people would call 'safe sex' and had given not just one but three girls the gift that usually comes with marriage. He was also a poor man when it came to the handling of money, so I was usually the one who ended up footing the bill. We worked at the same bars, earned about the same tips, he just had no idea where it all went. Such was life.
"Well," he sighed into the phone. "They have methods around it now. You may have seen it in the news?" His family, in an ironic twist, was much better with their money and, for some reason, decided that Florida was a good vacation spot for some people from Texas when shopping for a summerhouse. He even had his own room there, in which he sat on his bed picking at the calluses on his heel while talking on the phone with me. His parents took advantage of the time they would see him to try and convince him to cut it out with the whole city thing and go back to school. Perhaps the only flaw being that he had spent too much time skipping classes with me in high school to go to anything better than a junior college now. Still, they tried.
"I know they have methods. I know this," I said. "But she introduced me to her fiancée too."
"Ah. I see," he said with what clearly must have been a smile. "The plot thickens." I heard the click the toenail clippers he had been playing with made as they hit the ground after having been tossed off of the bed. "How far along was she?"
"Jesus," I said. "I'd have to say six or seven months, though I'm no expert... like some people."
"For Christ's sake," he moaned. He started to think up strange and painful ways to torture me into submission so I would relent on the topic. "If you bring that up one more time, I'm gon'na come back up and kick some ass," he threatened.
"Hey man, three times," I laughed at his frustration. "Three times. That's not an isolated event."
"Look, I called you," he said with a hint of lament in his voice. "And this is long distance. Are you going to finish about Jane?"
"So anyway, it'd been a while since we'd seen her," I said.
"Yeah, like what? Six or seven months?" He knew what track I was on. The two of us had known each other for over ten years by then and could sit in the same room and just nod, knowing what the other was thinking. It was uncanny and unnerved my girlfriend not a little bit.
"Exactly. So I asked her what happened to what's-her-name?"
"Alison, remember? Spelled like the Pixies song," he reminded me. He still had my copy of Bossanova in his CD player and I'd basically given up hope on ever getting back.
"Yeah, well, I didn't remember at the time. So she just kind of mumbles something and goes and finds a table as far away from the bar as possible."
"That reminds me of what's-his-name, Brian who ever, when he brought that girl in – much better looking than his girlfriend, remember – and we kept asking about how his woman was doing at work and whatever," he laughed. I laughed also. Brian was a good guy but his girlfriend was the one who had found the place and as such worth more business to us. The poor bastard still got harangued about it when he came in – though his appearances started to become fewer following the event.
"Yeah," I said. "I remember."
"So did you ever find out?"
"So after a while, her 'fiancée' goes to the bathroom and she comes to the bar looking really pissed. Remember she used to work out, right?"
"Yeah, with those big Linda Hamilton arms. They were nice," and we both nodded on our sides of the phone, a seaboard between us.
"Well, pregnancy works for some people and just doesn't for others. She's something like five-three so with that big, and I mean big, stomach out there, she looked like some roly-poly little munchkin or something, but with a pointed finger waving in my face. So she says, 'he doesn't know and he's not going to know' or that I am going to 'be in the pain.'"
"How does he not know?" When we knew her, prior to her newfound motherhood, she had been about as gay as we were from Texas. More so maybe, since I moved to Texas from California as a kid, but the girl was gay. And we really enjoyed it too. The three of us would sit around on slow nights, out on the sidewalk, watching the girls, commenting, laughing, and drinking. It was a hell of a lot of fun. She was flamboyant and brash and all the things she didn't seem to be when she walked into the bar the other day as though somewhere along the line she lost what had made her live and that somehow had made her straight.
"I don't know how he could not know," I replied. It was obvious to us, but then that was a relatively long time ago.