A Tale of Two Sit-Downs
About twice per year, something occurs that necessitates an email to one person, and one person only. When I learned that Shane MacGowan died on November 30th, I sensed what the morning demanded of me.
I composed an email to Mackie, my roommate for a college semester in London in fall 2004 and reminded him how we listened to the Pogues’ “Dirty Old Town” daily in our filthy flat. In my perpetual mission to earn hysterical laughter whenever contacting him, an anecdote unrelated to Irish punk rock was inserted.
“Was having lunch with my realtor recently and she asked about you because she started reading my book. Then she asked via a follow up email if I had a middle name. ‘It's Ulysses. My father knew a guy in college named Colin who was sort of an asexual. Nobody knew it at the time, but during a gathering at UConn one night, a group of friends, including my dad and Colin, played a question-based drinking game. When each man answered what would be the item or person he'd bring to a desert island to give him the most pleasure, Colin said it would be a copy of Joyce's Ulysses. They figured out his proclivities upon asking why when he 'read' in the bathroom for twenty minutes it never smelled like shit afterward. So, a man who 'got there' while reading the most critically acclaimed novel of the twentieth century is the source of my middle name. Also: That story is fake, and I do not have a middle name. However, Mackie used to tell travel agents that I had two lesbian mothers to explain my surname, which yielded a great reaction from Europeans every time. I am Adam _ Harrison-Friday.'"
His reply, much like the hair of that werewolf drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic's, was perfect: “Two things happen every time I see an email come through from you (in this order): 1. I get fully torqued knowing I’m about to read something both hilarious and nostalgic, simultaneously. 2. I get stressed the fuck out at the thought of having to draft up a witty comeback email.”
After detailing Sue’s demise for Mackie—the first paragraph of his rejoinder confirmed his fastball was intact as he facetiously called me a wet blanket for ruining the mood—we exchanged a few more emails prior to committing to a long overdue reunion owing to us not seeing one another since 2006. I have retroactively pondered on numerous occasions how bold I was when electing to venture overseas for a semester, especially since I holed up with my grandparents during my first six UConn semesters and knew infinitesimal peers on campus aside from Moore and a kid named Ken who I befriended when we were partnered for a project in one English class.
Within a day in London, Mackie and I became conjoined twins, or “butt buddies” as many referred to us. He was gregarious, loyal, and instantly freed me from any anxiety about adapting. We had a comedy rapport so strong that, as convenient as it sounds, it was worth the one-year suspension that felled me upon my return from the United Kingdom. (“Objection!” you’re interrupting.) How could I trade earning my college degree on time for receiving a note in the middle of a tedious three-hour British History course where Mackie implemented the power to see through her muumuu and observe about our sclerotic eighty something-year-old professor, “Damn, Ann Saunders has such a nice ass!”
As someone whose goal when arising each day is to make people laugh (and wants others to make him laugh in turn), I cannot overstate how much the give-and-take with Mackie sharpened my sensibilities and has since forced me to treat being funny like a full-time job. I’ve never wanted to make anyone else laugh more; if a joke like “As the saying goes, ‘If you believe in the bible, you’ll believe in anything’” floored him, I didn’t care if the other nineteen people on our trip were stone-faced. Unaware of it then, I coveted an outsider to help me discover (and support) who I was at an evolutionary time. When window shopping through the red-light district in Amsterdam, I was disappointed that not one hooker resembled Anne Frank if she survived the Holocaust with post-traumatic stress disorder in part because Mackie wasn’t on the trip to detour into hysterics when I cracked unwise. It emboldened the process of no longer worrying what others thought about my most vile impulses, realizing anonymous likeminded people were in the shadows sharing similarly dark, sarcastic worldviews equally in need of receptive outlets for their own black comedy derring-do.
Within two days of swapping emails, Mackie said he’d visit me in a week, intimating that another duo would be on hand: shits as well as giggles. I recommended a German restaurant—not the first choice of any Anne Frank doppelgangers—and remembered its proximity to a nearby casino, an easy sell. During our stay in London, the apartment building where we lived was adjacent to a casino, spurring on a photo of my membership card I’d saved, the pre-laughter surfacing as quickly as when he would notify me on a whim, “I gotta have five minutes alone in our bedroom…with your laptop.”
I stood outside the restaurant, my exposed hands freezing as I held a manila envelope when a black SUV with New York license plates approached. The moment was as chaotic as I could’ve anticipated: two right-handers awkwardly clasping their left hands together after I practically fell on my face when forgetting there was a lone stair on my walk to Mackie’s vehicle. We were informed of a firm ninety-minute dining time by the hostess, a woman who refused to laugh at three different knee-slappers I told in advance of setting my purple notepad on the table.
“She was a bit cunty, huh?” Mackie asked as he eyed the matching purple pen beside it, eschewing a facile Prince comparison. “What is this? I feel like you’re about to interview me.”
He’d long been hip to my note-taking regimen, ruing his lost memories and wishing he’d meticulously jotted things down during our semester, a task he frequently mocked me for in Europe when I would pause to write a quote or phrase in the composition book stored in my front left pocket. I inquired about his life, his multitudinous friends and family I’d met over the duration of our two years of post-London camaraderie, and mentioned how Sue and I had day tripped to the area where he now dwells a few times, falling in love with Kykuit, the Rockefeller estate, a Dutch word I’m certain he asked me to repeat in hopes it might tickle an eavesdropping antisemite. When he divulged for the second time how I hadn’t aged a day since we met, my then-forty-year-old face affixed to a twenty-year-old body, it concluded my lifetime streak of nobody granting such a flattering compliment, a borderline overture to resume my retired run of alcohol abuse and chain smoking.
“So…you quit booze, soda, and cigarettes? How do you have so much discipline?”
“I like challenging myself and not failing. You still drink a lot?”
“I don’t drink much anymore. Once in a while I go hard, and it terrifies Lauren. We live in a pretty liberal area and she’s always on edge that I’m gonna say something that gets me in trouble.”
I was growing more erect than when I blew a kiss at a sex worker who looked like Golda Meir.
“It’s usually me trying to bring ‘gay’ back. After two drinks, it just pours out. And I’m loud. But I don’t get caught except by Lauren.”
“The issue isn’t the word, it’s if it’s said with hate.”
I opened the manila envelope, first revealing a prop journal tucked inside it, Living With An Unusually Small Penis embossed on the cover, and presented the notes from a speaker phone-heavy hearing that hastily occurred five days after my deportation from London. Upon consulting with one optimistic attorney about the possibility of suing UConn for how poorly they’d governed my suspension, the brass permitted me on campus to enter an empty conference room where I played a tape recording of the hearing and typed out the transcript verbatim in eight hours, breaking at the top of each hour to smoke a cigarette.
“Who’s CC?” Mackie said while rifling through the paperwork.
“Catherine Cocks. Spelled like penises, not with an x. She ran the hearing.”
He skimmed through the first half of the forty-two pages, the first time he’d seen them, finally arriving at when I interrogated him during the hearing.
“‘Let’s go to Barcelona and get fucking wasted,’” Mackie read his bygone salvo from the ream while laughing. “Man, that guy from Notre Dame was such a pussy” was his commentary about the school’s resident advisor who complained that we threatened him.
He read about the EasyJet jacket he stole for me, a gargantuan, blinding orange parka akin to a human-sized traffic cone that I proudly wore around the city for a month. Mackie claimed “it was given to [him] on the plane by one of the people who worked for the airline,” a bold-faced lie if there ever were one. In the midst of this sequence, I disclosed how my therapist had recently semi-defended my actions by implying that it’s reckless behavior many people of a certain age are almost spiritually compelled to indulge, and how I’d begun treating my downfall with a dollop of optimism years ago as Sue’s foolproof mantra flashed in my head: that it was supposed to happen, delaying my undergraduate career, but also directing me back to Music Outlet and meeting the love of my life. Not like Miss Cocks knew that I solicited a black prostitute for twenty Euros in a Barcelona alleyway during a 3 a.m. downpour, but Sue did, deeming it a rock star-worthy revelation (and valuing that the prudent pro handed me a condom). Mackie insisted it happened in Prague until my journal entries from December 2004 dispelled his faulty recollections, my own carnal callback insufficient testimony.
Prior to departing, the hostess’s (nonexistent) hourglass nearly drained, I regaled him with a ten-minute Sue-centric story, one so ridiculous it seemed fictitious, cautioning that I needed to “Tarantino the timeline” for it to work, and after fine tuning the mechanics by orating it to anyone who would listen during the previous five weeks, the flawlessly executed kicker had him howling. Seeing Mackie’s open-mouthed cackle, his glistening and impeccably white teeth on full display, was a more defining London image for me than the National Gallery or Marble Arch. My day was already complete.
Except we weren’t leaving town without a trip to the casino. Mackie confessed that he’d developed into an expert blackjack player while nursing Lauren during her grueling breast cancer treatment, his method to amass (incomprehensible amounts of) money and find sanctuary from one of his life’s most arduous stretches. He played craps in London; not a gambler, I used to drink a complimentary glass of red wine and drunkenly cheer him on, my lips and tongue the color of eggplant skin.
“You have any casinos near you?” I asked.
“Nah. They’re all about two hours away. Probably won’t last twenty minutes till they throw me outta here. Last time, I was in the VIP room, and they accused me of counting cards.”
“Were you?”
“Oh yeah.”
Six different dealers took their turns in half hour intervals dwindling down Mackie’s stacks of green and black chips, him aggressively pursing his lips and slow playing until the deck was “juiced,” or offering better odds to beat the house. We swapped opinions about stand-up comedy, a mutual love we spent infinite hours exploring in Europe, along with our joint devotion to The Masters, me urging him to stop by my house to see the green-hued collection I’d assembled. One tried and true topic also materialized.
“Lauren’s mother is a crazy religious nut. Everyone gets so bent outta shape about her, but I love her. I encourage her to be herself. Like, she doesn’t give me shit about not believing, so I just go with it. It’s great how uncomfortable she makes everyone, and they all hate me for egging her on.”
“I have a similar relationship with Sue’s Born-Again aunt. Sue worried that I would be mean to her, but we hit it off and have been on good terms since. She’s a riot. Then again, I get where Sue was coming from. I did used to talk a lot of shit about religion.”
“Yeah, so what? You’ve always liked people who are genuine though.”
“My sixty-nine-year-old friend Bruce, a diehard Catholic, was by the house not long ago. He knows I’m a raging atheist and we love one another.”
“Of course, you have a sixty-nine-year-old Catholic friend!”
“He’s the one who coined Sue’s nickname, The Ambassador of Happiness. I stole it, used it on her, she loved it, and it stuck. Religion’s good for some things, man.”
A diminutive dealer named Vikram showed Mackie more mercy than any of the others, his stack inching upward to tease an imminent fall from grace. He called home from his car, and I cherished how he introduced me to his son as AHF before Lauren somberly extended her condolences about Sue. We shared some stilted laughs, an unreliable connection to blame, then he tailed me to the house.
“Play the Stones album with ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,’” he said as I showed him my vinyl collection in the basement. “Sticky Fingers, right?”
The inevitability of the night arose: I unearthed my 2004 journal and drafted a list of who lived in each of the four flats, including which duos and trios were in what bedrooms.
“How do you remember all this? Do you re-read these journals to help your memory?”
“I mean, I have here and there, but they’re full of shitty memories too, so it’s not often anymore unless I’m writing about something.”
As our brains accessed hazy, suppressed digital camera images from a generation ago, we deliberated on signature moments for the first time in seventeen years—our resident advisor’s addiction to Beowulf (we were stunned to detect the now beardless guy looking more youthful today than he did in the thick of that distant semester, London a fantastical playground for Tuck Everlasting clones), who we’d welcome reconnecting with today given neither of us kept in touch with anyone else from the trip, and how one girl had spontaneously said point blank to Mackie that she was horny and wanted to fuck him (red in the face, he politely declined due to his fidelity to his future wife back in Connecticut before a frenzied rendezvous with my laptop)—it dawned on me as we revisited one yarn that he’d yet to read the essay from my book about an infamous trip during our third weekend in England.
“I have never been more dehydrated in my life than the morning after these events took place,” I said.
“Did we miss the bus after we bought those jugs of water?”
“No, but we came close.”
Hearing Mackie laugh multiple times as I orated the essay I’d written to document a trademark bout of debauchery proved how we would be one another’s biggest fans as long as our reunion persisted. We went one by one through the list of undergraduates with whom we studied abroad, pros and cons about each of them mustered with ease.
“Remember when Joe sat open-mouthed in the living room staring in the distance at nothing and you laughed so hard you had to leave the room?” he asked me.
“Of course! Then I came back, and you immediately did the same fucking thing!”
“I loved that dude. He wasn’t bothered by anything.”
“Just wanted to get high and watch cartoons and baseball. Admirable. Can you find that girl Jackie on Facebook?”
“There wasn’t a girl named Jackie on the trip.”
“Yes, there was! She lived with Niti. The floor below us.”
“There absolutely was not a girl named Jackie.”
“Dude, there were twenty-one undergrads on the trip. She basically did everything by herself and would come to our flat at odd hours, but she was a real person!”
“This is really fucking me up. I do not remember her at all.”
He dared me to get in touch with one girl whose company we relished, and I promised I would upon him reporting that she’d become a published author. When he couldn’t quite recall if she smoked, I wondered if he’d forsaken all his London memories to morph into the card counting genius who failed to emerge earlier in the evening.
The night wound down after he inspected a photo of Sue on the basement bar, her drumming in front of an Anal Cunt poster, the band whose former lead singer once dated Mackie’s cousin, a surreal bit of synchronicity that prompted him to text her the photo and produce an underwhelmed reply, not the stuff of grindcore lore. He was disgusted by a sip of limoncello seltzer—me predictably teleporting to when he would literally spit out soda he “borrowed” from me on the floor of our London kitchen when he disliked the flavor—and I handed him a plastic fork to use when devouring his leftover schnitzel on the two-hour car ride home. We talked at length, the baton passing full of love, not laughs, about how much we both idolize The Masters.
“It’s on here already,” Mackie said while showing me the couples calendar bifurcated with Lauren, April 8th-14th blocked off for Masters week. “I wanna get down there this year so we can meet up in Augusta.”
“Ya know, the downside to joking about suicide forever is that Moore was frightened about what I’d do when Sue died. Had to tell him that the one thing I love in this world that is mine and mine alone is The Masters. This year Masters week begins on Sue’s birthday and it’s also a solar eclipse. I will not miss that.”
“Listen to you, a fuckin’ atheist talking about zodiac signs and mystical bullshit.”
“Hey, man, anything for The Masters.”
“I hate all traditional shit except that place.”
And reconvening with a beloved old pal. After seventeen years apart, it took all of seventeen minutes following his sendoff to email him the forty thousand words I’ve written about that golf tournament. Now I knew we’d be in touch yearly due to a newfound, ironclad bond, and if he wanted to dub anything Augusta National-related gay, I’d be overjoyed to contact Lauren and illuminate how he was employing the archaic definition not to soften the blow for their pearl-clutching neighbors, but solely for my amusement. Butt buddies forever.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
A week after she died, her best friend Nichole and I began perusing Sue’s thousands of photographs. Sue was an immensely organized hoarder, a woman who never wanted heirs yet believed preserving her existence in notebooks and scrapbooks was essential to documenting a life well lived, an art in which she undeniably succeeded. Being gifted the ability to home in on a distinct era in her life with ease, whether it delineated her stint as a high school heavy metal chick, bubbly local news reporter, or doe-eyed dreamer in Los Angeles, made it easy for us to analyze her ever-expanding hairdos along with her transformative fashion style.
“What the hell?” I said. “She wore khakis in California? Did she leave her hometown to dress business casual in her personal life?”
“Here’s Naomi!” Nichole excitedly told me, flashing an image from the 1990s of Sue’s childhood best friend.
“I really want to meet her,” I said.
“Let me message her.”
Within minutes, Nichole and Naomi were texting as I pressed Nichole to invite her over to reminisce. Sue and Naomi had a falling out a few years before I met Sue, and while it wasn’t bitter or malicious, she skipped recapping it for me. Even if it had been unpleasant, I was more intrigued to encounter a vital force in Sue’s life that I didn’t know than allow unimportant ancient details to convince me otherwise.
Naomi and I embraced, her tripping on her way inside, an ironically overt tribute to Sue’s steadfast clumsiness, and the three of us conversed in all the expected ways about storied Sue lore for two-plus hours. In a brief digression, Naomi unveiled how she and Sue were markedly different people (and became friends in large part due to proximity), almost dismissing how crucial a role she’d played in Sue’s life, the countless cards she’d mailed her safeguarded in a box as well as the umpteen scrapbook appearances on exhibit in Sue’s archives evidence that her own legend would be wildly incomplete without her grammar school girlfriend.
Some banter occurred, my journalistic imperative to form a modicum of order regarding a new person preordained, and Naomi mentioned how she’d worked at an insurance company since graduating from high school, her daughter having begun a job there in the last year.
“I told her, ‘Ya gotta take it up the ass for a while until you find a job you love!’”
“See!” Nichole said to me as I laughed. “I told you she had a sense of humor like yours.”
“And like Sue’s.”
When Naomi exited, I vowed to keep in touch and rapidly brought her into the fold. Each night after Sue’s death, I exhumed four photos of her housed in the several dozen boxes and bins in my basement and texted them the subsequent morning to Sue’s friends (Nichole and Amy), co-workers (Kelly and Shelly), and her cousin Lynn. I appended Naomi to the list to fill her in on select chestnuts from the preceding two decades. Six doting women in their fifties became my constants as I faced each new day living a second life with Sue, a life overflowing with the ephemera that now illustrated her absence.
One morning in mid-December, Naomi texted me. “I wanted to make sure I extended an offer to come to Christmas Eve dinner at my house. Feel free (and I encourage you) to bring Sue. My brother-in-law would welcome the company. We often have ‘stray cats’ at holidays so it wouldn’t be weird (for us anyway).”
The ashes of Naomi’s brother-in-law, Steve, her husband’s close friend, were in their possession during the holidays each year, so greeting a houseful of strangers with my dead girlfriend in tow proved irresistible.
“Warning: my family is mostly nurturing Italian women, so they’ll be all over you asking if you’re okay and if you’re eating.”
“I’m gonna tell all of your family that the only thing I’m eating is pussy.”
Unphased by my blue streak, Naomi required assistance with her annual wacky Christmas photo, persuading me to stop at her fifteen-acre farm a day in advance of the family meal. The year’s theme was “celebrate like it’s your birthday,” her eight-month-old grandson cast as the baby Jesus, and I entered a hypothermic barn to spot a table with the shoot’s props: a white beard and wig, syringes (full of animal medicine, Naomi swore), a lampshade, even a couple bras, the convivial nature leaning toward depravity, not piety. She had half-jokingly inquired if I owned a blow-up doll, me retorting that my Shirley Temple RealDoll was our lone option.
Peso, her twenty-five-year-old donkey, was accompanied by her three goats Daffodil, Lucy, and Bubbles, the four uniformly disinterested in contributing to the makeshift manger scene, especially after one bra toss landed on an errant horn. Naomi’s neighbors, doubling as scenery, relayed how a red sedan had been immobile on the street for endless hours throughout the week, debating if they should alert the police until I suggested it might be a poor guy whose hand was in heat and couldn’t manage a peaceful way to masturbate on the highway. The railroad tracks abutting the property left me selfishly regretting that Sue and Naomi severed ties, Sue as obsessed with trains and benevolence toward animals as any of her other myriad eclectic passions.
I returned to her monstrous home the next afternoon and met Naomi’s mother, Marie, along with her three half-sisters Donna, Doreen, and Aileen (who would be referred to as Eileen, a bewildering misnomer the lady herself, Steve’s wife, had requested she be called in her youth), as well as Naomi’s daughter, husband, his mother, Doreen’s husband, and another stray like myself who some initially guessed was Sue’s boyfriend, shocked by our age gap increasing from thirteen to thirty years, confusion Sue would’ve found scandalously endearing. While the host couple prepared food in the kitchen, I took a seat beside Marie, a chatty octogenarian sharing Sue’s middle name unafraid of dishing out disarming candor about absurd family history.
“I used to make them clean the porta potties when we had lunch at the prison,” Marie said out of nowhere.
“Why were you eating lunch at the prison?” I asked.
“I didn’t have any money, and it was a nice spot to eat outdoors. But the bathrooms were disgusting.”
“All us girls got used to pissing outside,” Donna chimed in. “I still do it. I’ll be out foraging on my property and have to go. Who cares? It’s my yard!”
“Jesus,” Aileen said. “Go inside like the rest of us do.”
“Ah, who cares?” Marie said, echoing her eldest daughter.
“Watch out for bears,” Doreen’s husband said.
“Ma!” Doreen said. “Tell him why you wouldn’t bring us to stores instead.”
“Well, you were always getting in trouble. Stealing shit, me getting calls about you doing something fucked up.
“I was the troublemaker back then,” Doreen said. “Donna is now.”
“She turned thirteen, so I asked her to babysit,” Marie said. “Until I got a call at midnight that she was sitting in the middle of the road drinking a bottle of beer!”
“It was a private road!” Doreen rebutted. “Plus, weren’t you off looking for another husband?”
“I have been married four times,” Marie said to me. “My fourth husband lasted longest: seventeen years. He loved to dance. He’d pretend to fall all the time, scared the shit outta me. Now I’ve got my gay neighbor for company. He constantly sends me photos of gay men playing basketball.”
“Gay men are widely known for their athletic skills,” I said. “And all those gay basketball players, like when LeBron James practices in Provincetown.”
Roy, Naomi’s husband, entered the dining room with a clear pitcher in hand.
“This is homemade eggnog,” he announced.
“That’s actually elf cum,” I countered, channeling Dave Attell and earning a few groans. Now I was family.
“There’s a tiny dish with fresh nutmeg,” Naomi told us, a fingernail-sized spoon resting on a pile of pure brown powder.
“Hand me a credit card and a mirror,” I said. “Anyone doing a line?”
“Chris is writing another book,” Marie said to change the subject, repulsed by the creamy concoction.
“It’ll be awful like the other ones,” Aileen said.
“The first Amazon review of the last one says, ‘Very first sentence is a lie’!” Doreen added.
“You should see all the cringey typos and grammatical mistakes,” Aileen said with contempt after I tried to play devil’s advocate for my fellow scribe.
“Second review is ‘Worst book ever!!’” Doreen submitted as further verification that Marie’s sister may not be elected family historian.
“Wanna go see those cat beds now?” Donna asked me.
My landlord, who had a strict no pets policy when Sue and I moved into the house we rented in August, changed his mind after she died and gave me permission to get a cat on the condition it was an adult female, my preferred type. When Nichole told me Sue once had a treasured stuffed animal named Henrietta, a furry little dame I’d never heard of, I decided that when the time was right, I’d name my new sidekick in her apocryphal bud’s honor.
Grateful for the gratis cat bed and collar, Donna and I reappeared at the table where I made room for her to avert holding her plate while eating beside a Stanley Cup-sized glass bowl of alcohol-free fruit punch nobody was drinking. I provided minor color about Sue’s illness, Aileen briefly discussing Steve as Marie, who lost her favorite beau in 2011, listened. Here I was surrounded by pseudo-strangers who had endured the brutality grieving begets, securing ways to smile and laugh as a means of perseverance, their admirable actions as life-affirming as any advice they could have given me.
The bountiful spread—ham (an unfortunate if delicious casualty from Naomi’s farm), eggplant parmigiana, homemade cheese pierogies with sour cream, roasted and mashed potatoes with gravy, peppery macaroni and cheese (the de facto vessel for complaints), salad, and fresh rolls with butter—was another conversation starter.
“I fucked up the potatoes,” Marie said mid-meal. “They’re so damn lumpy.”
“Ma, why the fuck don’t you buy ‘em premade like you do with the eggplant?” Aileen asked.
“I dunno,” Marie said. “I should. Pain in the ass to mash ‘em. I can’t finish this salad. I’ll feed it to the raccoons even though they don’t like it.”
“What raccoons?” I asked. “And don’t they love eating anything?”
“The ones by my shed,” Marie said. “They’re picky. I got some fuckin’ asshole living under the shed digging shit up now.”
“Could be a groundhog,” I said.
“Well, stop feeding it!” Doreen logically countered.
“Nah, it makes me feel good to not waste food.”
“Unlike your husbands,” I didn’t say.
Once dessert got served—grape nut and mocha chip ice cream, three apple pies and a chocolate cream pie, a cake roll, Doreen’s intimidating walnut chocolate chip cookies, and rice pudding with raisins added for Marie—more shop had to be talked.
“Do you bleach your hair?” I asked Roy’s passive, serene mother Shirley, furnishing a bonus compliment after praising her shiny gold camel broche. “It’s so blonde. It looks great!”
“Thank you,” she said softly. “Yes. My mother did it for me when I was sixteen. I tried going back to my original color, dirty blonde, but I love it too much.”
“Was Sue a natural blonde?” Aileen asked.
“No, she bleached it forever and added pink and purple,” I said, displaying a snapshot taken at the Hollywood Bowl merchandise shop in August, for my money the definitive photo of Sue, one so exquisite I blew it up to poster size and framed it in the living room, her the model of a human shooting star bedecked in colorful bracelets and necklaces, a bright pink frilly off-the-shoulder blouse, psychedelic-patterned pink and purple bell bottoms, rainbow-colored sandals, and an eye-popping pink and neon green boa-esque jacket slung over her right shoulder as she braved throat cancer while posing in customary white sunglasses, tongue out with a peace sign on parade in her left hand, the ideal candidate to be named Janis Joplin’s spiritual successor. “I miss her hair so much. Playing with it, brushing it, smelling it. I started watching ASMR videos of women having their hair brushed.”
“That’s a fetish!” Aileen accusatorily said.
“I swear there’s nothing sexual about it,” I said in my own defense. “It’s soothing. I know it may come as a surprise from a man who’s been balding since he was fourteen, but I love women’s hair. You have really nice hair. I meant to say it earlier.”
“Oh, please,” Aileen said, rolling her eyes.
“I tell her that all the time,” Naomi argued on my behalf.
I had sprinkled in additional hosannas for Doreen’s and Naomi’s nail polish selections, proof my estrogen levels could hang with the postmenopausal sisters at the table. We moved to the living room as Roy opening gifts from his mother took the spotlight.
“Is that a fucking ROCK?!” Naomi asked a second before it loudly thunked on the hardwood floor.
“It’s the one my dad used to put on the crock pot you threw away,” he said while picking it up.
“She gave you the pickling rock?”
“All mine now! I think this is…” Roy left his sentence hanging, inspecting the instrument mingling with his fingers.
“Is that an anal thermometer?” Doreen asked.
“No,” he said as if she was serious. “Looks like it’s for…dairy?”
“These are some interesting gifts,” I said as I sat beside him eagerly awaiting the ensuing curiosity.
“It’s too bad she had to leave. She usually explains why she got me this stuff. Huh, what is this?” Roy asked of the contraption he held while squinting.
“Did she give you nineteenth century porn?” Marie asked.
“It’s a manual viewfinder, I think,” an attentive Aileen said.
“Oh yeah, there’s a box of slides,” Roy said.
“Read the back,” I told him. “This one’s from 1890s New York City.”
“Is it an orgy?”
He pulled the gadget to his eyes for a few minutes entranced by its oddities.
“I can’t believe she gave you the fucking rock,” Naomi said, understandably stuck on the outlandish heirloom summarizing her spouse’s peculiar haul.
“What’s this?” Roy said of his latest gift.
“That’s a candlemaker, I think,” Naomi said.
“Very practical,” Roy said in semi-mock admiration.
“You can use it when you turn off the lights and the orbs appear,” Donna said.
“Orbs?” I asked. “Like ghosts?”
“It’s some old-world energy. This house is two hundred-years-old. Weird things happen in here sometimes.”
“Maybe you can take a picture of one with your fuckin’ flip-phone!” Doreen said to mock Donna, the Luddite in the room.
“I live in East Bumfuck and don’t need your modern shit!”
“Adam, here’s something for you,” Naomi said. “She always brings gifts for stragglers.”
“What is this?” I said after opening it.
“Looks like a roach clip!” Donna said.
Unsure what it was, Naomi described her mother-in-law’s obvious big heart, acknowledging that much of her home’s décor—like the antique metal carpet sweeper beside the dining room cabinet packed with miniature farm equipment models—was a product of Shirley’s anachronistic generosity.
“I gotta get going,” Marie said once the antediluvian hand-me-downs were done being opened. “It’s dark and getting late.”
“Yeah, we gotta feed the doggies,” Doreen said.
“You can keep Steve until New Year’s,” Aileen said to Naomi while putting on her coat.
“Do you want to bring some rice puddin’ home?” I asked Marie, hugging her. “Those homosexuals are gonna be pretty hungry after their pick-up game.”
Naomi and I relaxed at the dining room table chatting alone. Upon learning she is a purger, I hesitantly pointed out my gift that she forgot to open.
“Gift wrap is future trash, so I hope you dig that Target bag.”
“You saw how I wrap everything in brown Walmart bags,” she said while extracting the box.
“I thought you’d appreciate it.”
“Oh wow, thank you!” Naomi said with a glowing smile.
“There’s some major juju to owning one of Sue’s Holiday Barbies!”
We chatted about Sue for a half hour, maybe longer, me getting misty lamenting the twenty more years I’d grossly miscalculated when conservatively estimating how much time I assumed we were guaranteed, and certifying how it would be impossible for any woman to have a fair chance at replacing one of the most ineffable humans, admitting that I primarily wanted a companion with whom I could share my life. Naomi, imbued with wisdom from her mother and older sisters, listened and empathized, a pair of affectionate qualities she had stockpiled in abundance like Sue, positing clarifying questions to my rambling along the way. Naomi’s daughter eventually joined us, steering topics to their own fascinating family dynamics as I blissfully accrued data about the gaggle of new people I’d just met.
“Shit, Glenn texted me a little while ago looking for sugar,” I said about one of Sue’s closest confidants, and now one of mine, a guy who I’d told that I wanted him to be part of my life if he was interested in remaining my friend sans Sue.
“I have an extra ten-pound bag,” Naomi generously said.
“Wow, he’ll be happy. I don’t keep any in my house. How funny, gifting a stranger sugar on Christmas Eve.”
“Right? I’ll walk you out.”
“Thank you for the meal and hospitality,” I said while shaking Roy’s hand in the kitchen, the SpongeBob tin in my other arm.
“Thanks for coming by and bringing Steve some company,” he said in his concise cadence. “Ya know, I used to take Steve into the office. One time somebody said that it was confusing because we work with another Steve. ‘What can we call your Steve?’ she asked me. ‘Uh, how ‘bout Dead Steve?’ So, that’s what I call him at work. My cousin and I like taking him out to the bar too. ‘How many?’ ‘Three.’ They don’t even notice him.”
Naomi, sporting seasonally inappropriate shorts, bid farewell by my car, reminding me of our future date with cheeseburgers and coleslaw at a local diner we both love. I said how much I enjoyed everyone’s company, specifically her foul-mouthed mother. When I joked to Mackie that my next significant other would likely be found while volunteering at the senior center, I had no clue how wrong I was.
How could I not fleetingly envision myself and Marie on the day I became her fifth husband, tying the knot beside a rock stinking like vinegar as Shirley took some daguerreotypes of my prairie wife and I animatedly canoodling like silent film stars? Sue’s childhood best friend, now my stepdaughter, would be crying tears of joy as she lit perfectly phallic candles that would guide the connubial path traversed bareback on Peso to the barn ready for her mother and I to consummate our marriage as Sue and Dead Steve, an ashy item, ogled us from the table decorated with bottles of lube and an anal thermometer. There’d be no fear that any of Marie’s offspring would catch us in flagrante delicto, her commanding that they scrub nearby latrines in between rounds of competitive public urination. If anyone fretted that my first Christmas without Sue might be unrelentingly mournful, they had no clue how deeply her belief in gratitude and positivity would aid in generating zaniness worthy of our finest hours together. As long as I continued summoning her to fuel my imagination, Sue’s carefree essence would make achieving my daily laughter goals as effortless as reuniting with two incomparable friends who also subscribed to the liberating belief that the most fundamental thing in this world to not take seriously is yourself.