Gender Jumper

Today's story is sparked by my niece, who sheepishly confessed to me that she's still Facebook friends with my best friend from high school, who was affectionately once known as SuperChristianJockBoy but could now just as easily called PaternalisticEvangelicalCop now. Every once in a while, he'll DM someone in my my fam-o and wax philosophic about where our friendship went wrong, even though it's been nearly 9 years since I first cut off contact. He's been trying to solve it like a puzzle all this time, because he wasn't paying attention to the real story in the first place. Allow me to share that one with you now:

In high school, however shocked everyone was, SCJB and I were genuinely great friends. We liked to ask deep questions and read interesting works and listen to lively music. We showed up when our friends needed us, lent $20 back and forth for a while, and supported one another's strange lives without judgment because we connected to each other's humanity, even if not our values. We knew each other's families and could vent about their eccentricities, again without judgment. In college, we even worked and traveled together a couple of times and found ways to celebrate what we had in common. He balked at my going out of state, as much or more because he identified so heavily as a Texan and didn't understand how limited I felt here. We had thoughtful debates as our politics diverged further, often agreeing on the main points if not the actions that should be taken to correct them.

Once in a while, though, when I started to present evidence on something that mattered to me, he would shut it out and say, "Well, I don't know anything about that." At the time it felt harmless, but I've since learned a lot about tactics for dismantling debate (not least because my brother weaponizes liberally) and I don't exactly see it as a good-faith comment. It's not a statement that says, "I'm unfamiliar and I want to learn more." It's a statement that says, "I'm unfamiliar and that's your problem, not mine." The conversation was over and somehow my knowledge was disruptive.

I worked in D.C. He futzed around college for a couple of extra years, then ended up in a finance job he hated. He decided he wanted a job outdoors when one of his frat buddies got him psyched about becoming a fireman. Then when none of the local fire departments were hiring, they agreed to become cops instead. But the frat buddy never made the cut. I never took issue with it because I was still cop-neutral at the time: I knew they were capable of a lot of harm individually but believed they contributed societal good, too, and that a compassionate individual could accomplish good things from behind a badge. (I was young and naïve! It was the mid-00s!) He also took a lot of overtime work as a security guard. He also got married, and I was the best man.

One time he and one of his cop buddies joined me for karaoke and made a joke about how somebody spent her "Obama-bucks". Forget that my mom had been on welfare at some point when I was young, or that his mom probably was too. This slang was coded.

"There hasn't been major welfare reform since Clinton," I told him.

"Well I wouldn't know anything about that."

Well into caregiving, I would have still considered him my best friend, even though we didn't hang out or even check in as much; yet I had also applied the BF moniker to my writing and dating partner and to a friend from adolescence who showed me around the local BDSM scene before fucking off to California. It was caregiving, in fact, where the cracks began to show. I was having the hardest time of my life and I was hearing from him less than ever. When I did, it was usually a brief text exchange, of which up to a third of the exchange would invariably be, "Well, I know I need to come by and see yall some time. I'll bring [wife's name, because my grandfather liked her]." And then he just never did. I never asked him for help because I didn't know what or how to ask, especially of this guy, who still called me a "long-haired hippie" beyond the equivalent eight years that he'd known me with short hair. The old working class ribbing never let up, but I found I increasingly couldn't rib him in return. I found it tedious and unaffectionate.

The breaking point didn't come at my grandfather's funeral, as he has somehow convinced himself (he was the officiant at my request, though more as a favor to my grandfather than to SCJB), it came in two parts, one about half a year before the funeral and the other about half a year after. When his wife gave birth to their first child, I came out to draw the baby (as was my tradition at the time). It was my first time in their new home. He probably said something about visiting my grandfather in memory care, but I just ignored it. I told him I had some big news that I was excited about: Nesting Partner and Kiddo were going to move in soon, and I would have a family in the household again. Instead of reading the joy on my face or finding common ground (as we had done when we were young) he immediately balked at the idea: "A single mom? I dunno, man, that's pretty serious."

"Well, I've known her for over a decade and we've been together for over six years already. I know them well and this is what I want." Why did I feel like I had to defend myself?

"Well, good luck I guess." He didn't say, I wouldn't know anything about that, but he may as well have. The conversation was over and somehow my joy was disruptive. He walked off and I decided not to linger.

I should write another time about everything swirling in my brain during the time my grandfather lived in memory care. All I wanted to do was honor my grandfather, rest, save my relationships, distance myself from my family, and get on with my life. That already included SCJB after his comment, though it had already been clear our political differences hit differently. He spent some time under investigation for brutality one time and blamed his Black sergeant. He started grad school before I did because he wanted to become a detective (and eventually did). He got his ministry license but still never found a permanent church where he fit in. His ritual when he got home was to fix a Jack Daniels and put his wife on the ground in some sort of bodyslam while she laughed and screamed idle threats at his/their surname. They collected beagles. He finally stopped eying the door like a mob boss and reminding me that he could never have his back to it (he maintained these practices, he just became more subtle about it). We all went to a concert one time -- he and his wife, me and K the Ghost -- and he was in gym shorts, but since he wasn't allowed in city limits without his gun and badge within reach, he had to stash them in his wife's purse; I should have joked about him taking the purse to the bathroom, but it wouldn't have landed right. Things always sound different coming from me.

Anyway, I didn't hear from him much until my grandfather's funeral, when I invited him to officiate. It was a nice symmetry since he'd read a prayer at my grandmother's funeral and he had, long ago, been fairly close to them. It was my intention to cut off all contact there, but then he surprised me by showing up to my birthday gathering that weekend. I had the displeasure of seeing him meet the metamour from the BDSM scene who used to outsource his 101 to me so he could swoop in and date the people I prepared once they got the gist. But fine, whatever. I could start distancing myself soon enough.

When his child's 1st birthday came around, he invited me to a huge party and asked if I could unveil the drawing. I attended alone, and when we had a moment (which was hard -- there were a lot of kids and people I didn't know around) I was eager to tell him how well my household's first year had gone.

"So I know you had some concerns, but this year has been great."

"What do you mean?"

"About my partner moving in?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

That's when I was done. It was bad enough he never showed up when I needed him, even worse when he'd talked down to me about my relationship. But then to not even remember how important this was to me and how out of line he'd been? That was the last straw.

After I left the party, I just stopped answering. After two or three went without responses, he said he was just going to go ask my brother what was going on (my brother who I also wasn't speaking to at the time) and I relented.

"No need to get anybody else involved. Ask me anything."

I think his first question was something like, "What gives? How do you abandon a friendship after everything we've meant to each other." Whatever it was, I resented its premise and rambled as much in my reply.

I don't even think his second question was a question, but I tried to meet it in good faith and tell him that my priorities had shifted. "You're asking the wrong questions," I remember saying.

He didn't even ask, "What questions should I be asking?" He just pouted a bit more and gave up. Told me to have a nice life.

He pinged me once or twice after that, but nothing substantive and I didn't respond.

It was a time of great loss for me, but I had no grief over him by that time. I grieved him as I had many others through the lonely nights of caregiving, through the forgotten promises of showing up and doing better, of all the people who would say, "Let me know if there's anything you need," but then when I wrote on Facebook that what I needed was support and a reminder that I still existed, they never responded. I grieved the loves of my life who limped right up to the finish line with me, only to be gone when I turned back to thank them. I grieved people who had meant the world to me at various times of my life but who hadn't bothered to check on me during my first, truest tribulation. Whom I begged and pleaded to call, visit, distract me with their problems. Who had the gall to advance their lives while I was stuck in limbo and then tell me when I reemerged, "We just didn't know what to say!"

My anger toward SCJB has reduced and simmered down to a generic glaze: another patriarch who depended on someone for emotional labor and got -- what's that the GenXers say? -- all butthurt when it was taken away from him. That was the real indignity, I realized after some time apart. Since some time in college, maybe we were 20 or maybe we were 21, he hadn't shown up for me once. I showed up for him. I was there when he confessed to losing his virginity. I was there when half his wedding party bailed because he and his fiancée were going to move into their shared home two whole months before exchanging vows. I was there when his mom remarried and his mother-in-law died of cancer and his father offended his Black frat brother and he spent a summer with the Salvation Army and talked about how weird and creepy their whole military vibe was... But any time I shared something, he doubted, he debated, or he dismissed. When I looked over that long, long adult pattern, I realized that I wasn't even sure he noticed the emotional labor; he had been keeping me as a pet. I was his pet atheist (oh yeah, there was that time I send him a pages-long email about how my spirituality had evolved and I wasn't technically an atheist any more and he never responded -- I digress). I was his pet "liberal" "atheist", and I think the only reason he bothered to keep me around beyond a certain period of nostalgia or convenience was because he thought one day I would see the light -- religiously, politically, or both -- and he wanted to be there to gloat. Do I think he consciously believed this and wished for it? No, but I think it was the most affirming hope he had for our friendship. I was a smart guy, everyone knew, and if some day I took his side in some or another contention, then he'd get to feel smart, too!

It's all so crass. Like my fam-o, the journey I've taken isn't even on their map, can't even be plotted from their legend, and sounds somehow like a fantasy and the most boring thing ever to them. But I've been following my path and discovering things I never knew I needed -- we needed -- while they settled into scripts and ruts and scripts where they complain about the ruts and I've kept away from the Jack Daniels and I've kept from body-slamming my partners and I don't go harassing people who've made it clear they have nothing to say to me, no matter how badly I want to.

When we met, it was in a room full of peers, all flirty and attractively weird teens trying out for a recurring drama project. Then there was summer training and monthly meetings, intimate spaces where people laid in each other's laps and understood stillness. Then there were actual performances, though I barely remember us going together, and then our open house with family, which I missed for some devastating reason. I had a crush on her, but I had a crush on almost every girl in the room. I just loved the proximity of it all.

We stayed connected in the interim year, but nothing frequent or deep. She didn't come back while I was lost and afraid and just kept showing up without ever really asking the director. She, now a junior, was busy with her own school's theater program; I, a recent graduate who had failed to get into my dream school or have a backup plan, was languishing in limbo, from the minimum wage job to the clinically depressed girlfriend-roommate. 

It wasn't until I was finally away at NYU that she told me. We were chatting on AIM about my new girlfriend (not the depressed one, but a respectable one who never really asked me, just sort of started calling me her boyfriend and I didn't argue). She was flirting, like we did, but when I laughed it off she clapped back:

"I'm serious. I was in love with you, ___ ___." Full name and everything.

I couldn't tell if she was hurt, only that she was serious. I was so stunned I didn't ask any of the questions in my mind. I just took a dramatic breath (this was before the days when you could see someone was typing a response) and answered,

"Then I'm the fool." Lacking any finesse whatsoever, I told her that I didn't think my new relationship would last very long and maybe some day we could find out what was possible.

We didn't really discuss it after that, but we didn't communicate any less, either. My first year at NYU was the first time I ever had high speed internet, and I chatted at least as many words as I expositioned. She wasn't even the only person to dance along the boundary between "proper" and "improper" monogamy (the month would turn into six years, but I would make it five before full-on cheating on her). But I started to get a sense of her as a person and I wanted to know more.

But we did share secrets, we discussed sex and desire, and we continued to tapdance around the boundary of flirtation that was neither harmful nor harmless.

My first winter break, we ended up spending New Year's Eve together -- not just New Year's Eve, but Y2K. My best friend from high school came along and we just wandered the park, watching people and fireworks and cutting up. We took wild photos in a statuesque nook. Her playfulness was endless. I 

(It has only been in recent years that I realized I might have or could have loved that friend -- not the cop, but the fluffy learner -- romantically, as we met years before I allowed myself sexual thoughts about a guy.)

When the night came to an end, I think I used the magnitude of the occasion and the world not ending (...it was a thing... you kind of had to be there...) to surprise myself and her by kissing her goodbye. It wasn't even midnight. I don't know what I told the cop (he knew I had a girlfriend out East and he would forever be a stickler about monogamy). I just had to let her know that I saw it, too, some kind of spark.

The next time I saw her was the following year (summer I think); she'd had breast reduction surgery to reduce her back pain and I came by to wish her well. It was the first time I'd been inside her large, expensive home, or met any of her family. I didn't stay long, and I didn't kiss her goodbye.

And from there, we just lived our separate lives. We stayed in touch on AIM, and I kept her cell number long enough to put her in my first several phones (I didn't get one until the summer I graduated NYU and moved to D.C.). Our paths never crossed and our conversations didn't spark potent memories.

Until...

One day near the start of summer, I was scrolling through my phone and talking about all the old numbers that remained there. I was talking to someone, but I couldn't tell you who. It was 2008, ten years since the drama troupe and eight since Y2K. I'd been to D.C. and back, finished my 6 years with my college sweetheart, and was two years deep into nonmonogamy. I was depressed that year, grieving a heartbreak the previous winter, and not dating as much as I had in previous years. I was looking for connection. I was curious about that sparkle.

On a whim, I texted her. She didn't recognize the number, but it was still her line. She said she was glad to hear from me, and almost immediately suggested meeting up. She sent me a picture and I barely recognized her. She explained that after the breast reduction, she'd made some different life choices, lost weight, and kept it off. I confess I was a little disappointed; not only was she just about the most attractive person of size I'd ever met, but I had way more experience connecting with fat people than thin people. I couldn't put it into words, especially since I was still pretty thin myself by most accounts, I just knew I had an easier time relating to people who had come to terms with their imperfect bodies than those who never had to.

The intimidation only got worse when we met at Barnes & Noble. I had recently started to develop a working knowledge of zodiac signs, and all I can say is that she was extremely Virgo (my opposite sign, which can evoke dangerous attraction among other things). Just when I thought she'd become coiffed and aristocratic (like the sexy, expensive dress that clung to her thighs), she'd inject the best kind of chaos (like telling me that she'd taken her panties off due to VPL). I had absolutely no idea who this person was, but I couldn't look away. 

I told her about New York, D.C., and polyamory. She told me about learning to reckon with the body she had, and her college days. She now worked in high end catering, and had recently started a relationship. We wandered the aisles and commented all the way. It was hard to look away, but sometimes it was hard to absorb this new version of her. I took strange solace in the thin smile lines on her face, a lingering artifact of the cheeks I remembered.

Over the PA came a powerful album intro that distracted me for a couple of tracks. When I confessed this to her, she grabbed my hand and marched me over the the music counter to ask the cashier. The cashier had picked it herself, and showed us the CD on display. I bought it immediately. This totem gave me strength, all the more as it continued playing overhead.

"I feel like I owe you an apology," I blurted at no point in particular.

"For what?"

"I feel like I didn't really make much sense back in the day. Like, New Year's Eve, when I kissed you. Like maybe I led you on and never showed up for you."

She turned her head but grinned potently. "Don't you remember what you told me? After?"

"After New Year's? No, I don't remember at all."

"When you got back to New York, you messaged me and you said, 'Thank you.' You said that kissing me helped you realize that she was the one for you and that you were going to focus on being present for her."

Years later, I still have no memory of these thoughts, only of her repeating them back to me. "Wow, that was kind of an asshole thing to say."

(More than kind of...)

"Yeah."

She was not locked away, nor conflicted, but I had no idea how she was feeling.

I couldn't have put it into words at the time, but my journey was opening me up into an over-communicator, a processor, and a space-holder, and she neither wanted nor needed any of that. I'd never felt so hyper-aware of the class difference between us as I did walking around the parking lot of the richest mini-mall in town; besides the nicest B&N in town, there was a Williams-Sonoma, a Crate & Barrel, and clothing stores I'd never set foot in. We were much closer to her territory than mine. And however mystifying the dynamic and beguiling her slightly tamer eyes, this was the closest we'd ever get.

We hugged goodbye, a little stiffly. We added each other on Facebook. I think I dropped by her work to say hi once, but she wasn't in. She got married a couple years later to that guy she'd started seeing. When she got pregnant, her face filled out again.

I still think of her whenever the Ting Tings get stuck in my head.