I know happiness is the appropriate response when friends start dating, but to me it’s the equivalent of a horror movie franchise doing an installment in space -it’s the kiss of death that sometimes even a gritty reboot won’t save.
It starts off slow; they want to spend time with the significant other rather than join you down for Karaoke night at Peanut’s Mecca Lounge and you don’t blame them because sex is better than warm Budweiser and the strained delivery of Rhinestone Cowboy as performed by long haul truckers. Then one weekend turns into another, then a month, and before long, it seems like you only get together for Christmas and maybe two other times a year and when you do see them, it’s like they have morphed into a strange facsimile of who they used to be.
Luck is when you find someone who meshes well with your group of friends, but sometimes that isn’t the case. Sometimes it’s a mash up of Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets The Stepford Wives.
My best friend in art school was a girl we’ll call Re-run; Re-run and I were wild.
Have you ever gotten into car and wanted to just keep on driving until the car ran out of gas? We did that all the time, we went to New Orleans, Savannah, DC, we even hopped a Greyhound bus to New York city. When we weren’t on the road, we were breaking in to old buildings, putting graffiti on any available flat surface, smashing bottles on the train tracks. We were always drunk, loud, and obnoxious.
Re-run dated a lot. Boys, girls, it was a catch of the day sort of thing. I always hated them, a collection of vapid morons ranging from Hipster Jesus to that girl who wasn’t a lesbian at all and just liked the idea of being discriminated against and making a scene in public. They were never around long enough for me to bother remembering their names. Things remained status quo for quite some time until she met a nice and all around decent guy. She was happy. I was happy for her and everything was hunky-dory a-ok, for awhile.
See, the guy that she liked was from DC and was graduating the fall semester of our Junior year and he was planning to move back home. When she found out this information the metamorphosis began. First, she became completely insufferable to be around. Everyone has been there, you have a friend obsessing over the person they’re dating or formerly dated and all they want to do is run a bitch triathlon. You have to sit through all of it muttering reassurances while wondering if you can actually force your thumbs through your eye sockets and peel your face off. They continued dating long distance and I was treated to a constant bombardment of, “Do you think long distances really work out?” and “Do you think he will propose to me? If he doesn’t propose to me by New Year’s, I’m going to break up with him.”
During this time period, I was either very drunk or very stoned in her presence. This is how I discovered the only way to watch Eraserhead is to be so inebriated you can’t move off the couch.
Re-run got her proposal and soon it was wedding magazines and dress shopping. She married early that spring, but in order to do so she dropped out of art school. Up until that Re-run had been a jewelry and metalsmithing major . She was incredibly passionate about her work. She was always coming up with fun, freaky ideas like making rings out of dead bugs cast in resin. There were some other extenuating things going on at the time, but her decision was to switch majors, get married, and move to DC. Somewhere in the process she managed to abandon everything about her former life, including me.
She changed her full legal name, then her appearance like someone running from a Mafia debt. She traded her art school uniform, cotton-candy colored hair, salvation army tops, and drawn on jeans for a drab chocolate truffle, Kohl’s clothing, and 500 hundred dollar Coach boots; typical white middle-class suburbia. Her behavior changed. I called her one evening and she told me she couldn’t talk, she was baking a pie for the boys.
This was a person I had seen so stoned, she refused to go to the store, but she had munchies so she just poured brownie mix into a bowl and ate it with water. Now she was baking homemade apple pies like June Cleaver and had apparently lost capability to use speaker phone. Her life revolved around her husband, his family, and community college. She would talk endlessly about how much she hated her brother-in-law, (and the only clear reason I ever got as to why was he didn’t like her cooking), and her sign language class, but if I wanted to talk about my art show, graduation, struggling to get a job, applying for grad school, or the deciphering the language of a cute guy I had met it was greeted with much eye rolling and redirection back to all of her problems. The only thing we could talk about was the past and talking about would make her chuckle and say “Wow I can’t believe we were so wild back then”.
The thing is, there is no back then for me. I still am that person. I keep on wanting to yell, “Who are you and what have you done with the real Re-run?!”
I have another friend, or I guess I should say had in the past tense, who was five times more crazy than Re-run and I combined. Most of her stories usually ended with, “And the last thing I remembered was my head hitting the sidewalk as I fell out the cab.” She ended-up in rehab and while she managed to clean up her life and is doing quite well for herself now, she’s pretty much severed all ties with me. I know she didn’t do it to be cruel, I know that part of her process of getting clean was leaving her old life in the past and I am a representation of that past.
I can’t help but wonder if that is how Re-run sees me now, some sad single person that will die alone surrounded by empty bottles of Stoli. I wonder if some of the resentment spawns from my own disappointment in her for giving up her dreams so hastily. Maybe it’s mutual jealousy. Me wishing that I didn't have to worry about making rent or having to come home to an empty bed every night. Her wishing that she was still out there living on the edge trying to be an artiste. I sit with old photos some nights trying to pin down the exact moment that things went wrong.
I find my solace in knowing that I’m not alone with this problem. The other day I was sitting in a restaurant with a friend of mine who was describing the horrible transformation of his friend into gun collecting redneck who mooches off his girlfriend. I told him that I could give him some good advice or some bad advice. He wanted the bad first.
“Get him to break up with his girlfriend and get him back in to drugs.” I said.
“My practical advice is sometimes people change and sometimes people outgrow each other. There isn’t anything you can do about it.”
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