Friended

We were best friends, each the other’s trusted wingman and sometime sponsor and crude litigator who called each other “brother” and “amigo” and “hermano” and “bud” and “homeslice” and took our shoes off politely at the entrances to one another’s new apartments and asked who we were seeing now and exchanged woes and lent each other a few bob and discussed books and listened to eclectic music and watched old noir flicks or so-bad-they’re-good karate or horror movies and told long uncurbed jokes and smoked and drank and pilled into the pallid dawn and chilled each other out when someone went too far or had taken too much or had gotten too hectic and revived one another with tea or coffee or biscuits or something stronger after a particularly spectacular nose-diving whitey and said “I know, man” and “Forget about her, dude” and “There’s plenty more fish in the sea” after a bad break-up.

Best friends, except for that time he got off with the girl I told him I loved in Greek and Roman Civilization before I had a chance to ask her out and I flirted with his Russian girlfriend after he had asked her out and he tore my favourite shirt doing a headstand during a pub crawl and I roundhouse kicked him after he’d been in a street fight to show him the correct way to execute the maneuver and he crashed his motorbike into a snowdrift with me on the back on purpose to give me a near-death experience and I told him to fuck off and get someone else’s notes or maybe read the fucking Iliad himself or — hey — maybe even try going into a lecture every once in a while and he split owing two months’ rent and I chopped his upright piano into firewood when he was in Madrid for the Christmas break and he smoked all my weed when I was in my parents’ over Easter and I borrowed his Bukowski books permanently and he told Sharon Sullivan I was gay so he could hook up with her and years later I told her he’d joined the priesthood after they broke up and it took years before she found out the truth and he almost choked me to death, drunk on the Gaza Strip one night and, if we hadn’t been laughing so hysterically, I might be a good-looking corpse right now and I nicknamed him “Dracula” when he grew his sideburns out and he broke my kitchen window with a snowball and I told him the ending of The Usual Suspects before he’d seen it and he ruined The Exorcist by laughing through the whole thing and I ridiculed him publicly when he went head-over-heels after barely four seconds on a bucking bull machine in a dusty Texas bar and he loaned my favourite leather jacket with the perfectly faded folds to his brother, Bill, who lost it and I got him fired from his job because he didn’t show up for work after he twisted his ankle when I persuaded him to try walking home from Malone’s blind and he got me thrown out of Fibber’s for doing coke with his sister in the gents’ and I got him kicked out of hot yoga for shitting his pants a little doing the Pavanamuktasana pose, of all things, and he had me escorted from a writing retreat for plagiarizing Bukowski and I got drunk and fell off his roof through his favourite rose bush and bled bright red droplets all over his new cream carpet and he slept with my sisters, Kate and Elizabeth, and I slept with his aunt Geraldine and he threw out a painting I did of Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart that I was quite proud of and I threw up all over him while cooking him a meal and he moved house a day after I’d helped him paint his new flat, in fact did the majority of the painting, and he rubbed it in viciously when his football team beat mine in the final of the Champions League and I poured salt into his wounds when my rugby team beat his in the final of the Champions Cup and he didn’t come to my mother’s funeral and I was a no-show at his father’s and I successfully wooed Carrie Fitz  to “Hold Back the Dawn” from Storyville by Robbie Robertson before he did, even though it was his album and he’d met her first, and he didn’t change the water in my goldfish Bob’s bowl the whole time I was in Rome, even though that was the reason I’d given him my keys in the first place, leaving such a Gordian tangle of fish shit that I had no choice but to bring Bob’s bowl with Bob in it down to the river, a walk in congested traffic that felt like the Calvary scene in On the Waterfront with the morning iridescence scintillating the bowl into a disgusting lava lamp so that everyone knew so absolutely where I was headed and what I was going to do that I may as well have taken out an ad and each step resonated with my failings as the slow grey river waited with vigilant eyes and eager jaws lurking in the cinereous muck like devil inmates in hell waiting to jump a fresh, still sparkling, soul and afterwards I realised he’d also cleaned out my copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls and the first time I saw a picture of his beloved grandmother I said “Hey, it’s Elvis!” and he pissed into my sink one night when he was drunk on cheap boxed wine and I broke into his house and took apart his bed and left a spanner and a note on the pieces saying “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it” and he brought a prostitute to a dinner party at my boss’s house and I settled down and had a family and got boring and betrayed our friendship and he never showed his face again, never came to any of my weddings and never met my children and never saw me again and disappeared into the internet and became a fucking crank.

But sometimes we Like each other’s posts.