Dinner and a Show

Tonight we’re all going out to dinner—yet again. It’s been too long, his insistence, a double date would be just the thing, he says. His girlfriend will make reservations at the new small plates joint and get back to my girlfriend with the time and the address. The thing that stands out to me after this brief exchange of electronic messages is what an effort it is to force small talk and make plans neither one of us gives a shit about. When did we become people who used insipid phrases like “double dating” and “small plates”? We’re adults. How did our language become the language of that which is new, trendy, precious, and unnecessary?

I can tell you the script of the evening as I replay past experience in my mind’s eye. He’ll order the most expensive things on the menu, I’ll order the closest thing they have to chicken. His girlfriend will drink too much wine and fall down in the parking lot, or, as it happened on one memorable occasion, in the restaurant lobby, flashing her underwear at a crowd of waiting patrons as she struggled to stand up. It would be funny if it weren’t a skipping record I can’t seem to stop.

This guy was my brother. My best friend, a friend of ten years, and yet we’ve come to a place in our adult lives where there seems to be no room for words, no time for discussion, and at the heart of it, both of us wish things hadn’t come to this. We pretend not to care any more. There’s a polite indifference in what we say, where we go, what we do, the plans our girlfriends make. The arguments we’d have in high school that raised in decibels and were punctuated in spittle are now contests as to who can object the least. The brotherhood that made us the friends we were is as irrelevant now as what restaurant we eat in, and what bars we buy our drinks in.

My girl wants us to stay friends– she likes his girlfriend, and I do too. But I’m not friends with his girlfriend, with either of those people. The longer I drift away from where we were in high school, where our intentions and mutual respect were, the less I feel any thing at all. Our friendship is the grave of a distant relative that I visit because I’m in town, because I feel obligated. If it were any other set of circumstances we probably wouldn’t bother. He’s flown in on business and we’ve made half-hearted remarks about doing something, then don’t. I’ve flown into town to bury old classmates, and he’s stayed away, and I’ve resented him for it and kept silent.

That would never have been the case in high school. When his dog died we went out to the creek behind his house and dumped the ashes. When my father had surgery he came to the emergency room and held up both sides of the conversation while I tried not to cry or be sick on the waiting room floor. There were girlfriends, break-ups, miserable school dances we always skipped out on to go lean against a wall and smoke. We always said we’d be honest, that we could rely on each other for the truth no matter how complicated our lives became, or how unfaithful our new and different friends might be. That’s become the least important thing. The less we know about each other’s lives, the better. He doesn’t give a shit, and frankly, neither do I. It seemed so important back then. It’s hard to accept such a singular and important truth was nothing more than some mutual self-delusion. Now, it seems as if we need that miasma of white lies, brush-offs and and ingratitude to make both of us the sort of people who can breathe in any social environment, no matter how toxic.

I hated clubs in high school, and so did he. We’d laugh at the kids with the fake ID’s procured for admittance into a place that played music equivalent to a drum machine and a strangled cat. When there wasn’t a local garage band playing we went to the biker bar hidden in a local strip mall and pumped twenty dollars worth of coins into the juke box. Now he’s found small games of pettiness and superiority to make the club scene livable. A new mont blanc ever y six months, vintage cuff links and silk ties, an assortment of alligator and ostrich shoes. You can’t out-dress him, he knows every bar manager and hostess’ name, and it makes him the stand out where-ever we go. He sees my passive bitterness and reads it as discomfort, as an inability to participate. Fuck that guy. When did this all become such a sensitive game of feelings and unspoken words. There was a time I could have told him in the plainest language that it was a matter of unwillingness, I’m not playing the game, I don’t want to be here, let’s go shoot some goddamned whisky and you can impress your co-workers with these parlour tricks—come on man, who are you talking to? It can’t be me. So who is he talking to? His girlfriend? Mine?

There’s no need to even be jealous. It’s clear he doesn’t want her, doesn’t think of her the way a shithead client or a lesser friend might dare to. Why is that loyalty important when it’s applied to my girlfriend, and unimportant when a friendship we swore in high school was thicker than blood, stronger than steel, is on life support. It’s not a question. I don’t have to ask. I know. He knows. We’re not those kids any more. We’re not that honest, that solid, or that strong. We’re two pathetic adults drinking pansy drinks in a pretty restaurant, and we will never, ever, have that brotherhood again. And I just don’t care.

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