Floating
Some weeks ago I wrote something about my best bestest friend in the universe, and I sent it to my blog update list as a secret entry. I didn't want to post it in public, it felt too personal, it was unresolved, I didn't want my friend to read it, I didn't know why he wasn't speaking to me. I heard from him a week ago, and we reconnected, shared our summertime stories, and then had a grand adventure this weekend which I'm writing this morning. But in order to understand my grand adventure, you have to know the background. So I'm posting my secret entry from those weeks ago below. I gave it to my friend to read and he was touched.
Breakfast at Tiffs
I wanted to tell you a story about a man who orders Avon every two weeks. He buys rose lipsticks and matching blush and concealer and mascara and the Skin So Soft hair removal cream. He works at a drag club in the city and a girl's gotta look her best. But thinking about him got me thinking about the only other man who ordered Avon from me.
I met Patrick years ago. I met him in California, even though I lived across the country in the middle of a kudzu wilderness, even though I didn't know I'd end up moving to the Other South. I met him and his wife at a hotel and we became friends. The details aren't important now.
We had business plans together, but the business never gelled, it limped along for years, and the kibble we tossed at it didn't feed its hunger. Really, I was the reason the business things didn't work. I can think up any big idea in the entire universe. I can tell you why things work, I can solve your problems, I can train your dog, but I could never figure out my own bramble rose path and my problems seemed like those math theorems about prime numbers. It would take a supercomputer a million gazillion years to solve them. Not to mention all those kids. Patrick and his wife had one child who was married and happy and somewhere far away, but he remembered the days when his child was young and into every corner of his life.
But over those patchwork years, while I frittered away at work like and home life and moved across the country and tried to become a detail person, Patrick and I became dear friends and ended up in towns next to each other and we ate breakfast every Tuesday morning in a tired diner by the sea and chatting with instant messages all day long, about news events, about kooky people, about his crazed life and my sorry love lives and the business things that never ever worked.
What I want to do now is slice my body in half so that you can peer inside, look at my guts and heart and mind and frontal lobes and see what this friendship meant to me. It was everything, because it lasted through all my bad choices and man problems and kid emergencies and work traumas. I told Patrick almost everything, more than I've ever told any friend, and I think after a long long while his wife became tired of me and the hold I had on her husband, and the hold he had on me.
Patrick and I were never lovers, never held hands, never kissed. We were like best swashbuckle adventure mates. We swore like sailors on the phone, every other work was Fuck with a capital F and we told dirty jokes and he heard all my heartache stories about my children, about my rape, about the daughter I gave away, about the men who let me down, about my dreams of being a performing artist, a fucking fine performing artist who lived by the sea in a pirate ship of a home with many animals and who could surf and belly dance and bake the best fucking brownies in the world. Yeah. It was the best friendship on the face of this planet, even with my lack of details and Patrick's lack of tact.
None of my other friends liked Patrick. They called him gruff and mean and a jerk behind his back. I always defended him. "Yeah? He's a jerk? He sure is!" This is what I'd say. "But you don't 'get' him, because if you did, then you'd know he wears his heart on his sleeve and he is the most generous and funny person you will ever meet."
And over the years, as some friends came and went and as my kids grew and I collected more animals and became more eccentric, Patrick never left. He probably defied his wife to meet with me at times, though I never asked. He listened to any complaint I cared to share. He told me I was somebody. He told me I could do anything I wanted to do. He told me I could be that fucking fine performing artist by the sea because I had real talent and an unusual sense of the absurd. And I believed him because Patrick was not only mean and gruff and a jerk at times, he was brilliant and an even bigger big picture person than me and won many awards in his industry and could create anything - anything - on the spur on the moment just by opening his mouth and I was nobody but a twice-divorced mom of multitudes with a potty mouth.
I could tell you a million gazillion stories of our times together and the laughs we had and the way we called that tired diner "Tiffs" and all the horrible heartache we both had the last two years that snowballed into a moment two months ago when I was in the middle of waiting for first contact from my daughter and he was waiting for serious medical test results from a chronic condition and something happened. I don't know what. I don't understand it. I'm confused. I wish I knew. All I know is Patrick sent me a short email saying he needed time away. And I haven't heard from him since except for a few cryptic emails in return when I tried to pull him back into my circle. I'm afraid the friendship is over, and I don't know why.
One of my last memories of Patrick is how, even with that gruffness and manly manness, ordered a big bag of Avon from me. NASCAR slippers, cologne, bubble bath, some body creams for his wife. He sat on a brown stuffed chair in his house, wearing an oversized long-sleeve t-shirt and baggy shorts, his mouth turned down under a greying mustache. He thumbed through the Avon brochure and rattled off product numbers of things he wanted to order. I could tell he was doing this to help me, to humor me, to be a good friend. He didn't really want Avon stuff. He would have ordered more but I closed my order book and changed the subject.
If a genie jumped out of my computer this night, and asked me if I would give up Avon to get Patrick's friendship back, I would say YES! I wouldn't think twice about it. I'd give it all up for one more breakfast at Tiff's.
8:42:03 AM 
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