Posts tagged Best Friend
Posts tagged Best Friend
When I was 19, my best friend and I were hanging out every single day. I would drive to her house a few cities over and we would do a series of activities that usually remained the same for weeks or even months. I think our first routine was going to Target, then eating at Applebee’s - appetizer sampler, woo woo!, then going to Walmart, then going to Denny’s - coconut cream pie, holla! This went on for so long that we both decided at some point that we needed to lose weight. Let me just release a breath of sadness over the loss of that tasty artichoke dip and that most-likely-totally-healthy pie. So before we relapsed with binge drinking and midnight Del Taco runs, we decided to try out swimming.
We started going to In-Shape City every night and using the gym pool. We didn’t work out or anything, we didn’t swim laps, but we weren’t eating fried mozzarella dipped in ranch, so we were still doing better than we were before. We would mostly just wade in the water and joke around. We were fond of one joke in particular where we would walk through the water as though we were in a horror movie, looking around saying, “Becky? Becky?” And finally we’d shriek, “Beck-aahh!” and quickly submerge ourselves in the water as though we’d been pulled under by a masked Jason - I always imagined myself at Camp Crystal Lake.
It was fun to be in that pool because there were almost never other people there. I’m thinking we were there at 10pm or so, which explains their absence. When there were people there, however, they were a little odd. There was one couple, a boy and a girl, floating and twirling through the water in each others’ arms like they were gliding around a ballroom. It sounds cute before I tell you that every time the guy had his face in our direction he would kiss at us. This went on the entire time they were in the pool and this moment will be the first study I’ll cite in my thesis paper “Males of the Human Species Are Fetid Waste Matter”.
The other swimmer we encountered on more than one of our many trips was a lovely Mexican fellow who spoke little English and wore a speedo. He was muscular, so the speedo looked about as good as it could on a person, but it still wasn’t pleasant. He was a talkative, somewhat aggressive guy and he was pretty interested in me and my friend. Should I mention now that guys were never interested in us? At least that’s how I remember it, but here we were with enough repulsive men for us to have one a piece! Maybe I should explain why this guy was repulsive. Um.. he was a weirdo? We once asked him what a “culo” was - it was in a popular song at the time - and he responded by putting his hand to his lips and flicking his tongue back and forth. He said, “I’ll lick it if you take a shower first”. This might be a good time to tell you that a culo is a booty-butt.
He was kind of a lurky dude. My friend and I used to joke that he was probably “masturbating in the shadows” of the pool area. We even made a song about it, which my friend subsequently made her outgoing voicemail message, to which her father responded favorably, but not really. So I should admit at this point that we were the real creeps in this scenario because we totally told this dude that we would meet him in the girl’s hot tub and have sex with him. I don’t know if we explicitly said that, but it was definitely implied. The hot tub was in the lady’s locker room and we just sat in the jacuzzi and waited for him to come-a-knockin’. When he did we decided to just use fake old lady voices and yell at him to get the hell out of there. Which he did. Whew, that was a close one, we almost had to actually do that thing that we said we would do!
The last wonderful memory I have of swimming at this pool is of the time when my cousin came to visit us. She was totally down with swimmin’ it up, but was upset that there were no kick boards or fun noodles in the pool. She went to ask the guy at the front desk with the horrific, unnatural-looking bleached hair if she could have the key to get into the pool-floatie closet, as I am absolutely positive it was called. When she came back from talking to the desk clerk, we saw that one of her nipples was completely coming out of the top of her bathing suit. That was one of the greatest moments of my life and I hope bleached-hair-idiot-pool-floatie-nazi thought she did it on purpose to bribe him into handing over the goods.
Warning: Potential self-harm triggers behind the cut
I remember thinking as a kid that everyone was like me. I always thought that the popular people were the same as me, except better looking and more confident. I thought they would appreciate me and everything I’m about if they got to know me. I thought that for a long time. I remember being at a party when I was 19 or so where these too-cool hardcore punk kids – I don’t know why “kids” is the first thing I think of to call them – were talking about Sarah Silverman. In that moment I thought, oh god, I have the entire Jesus Is Magic special memorized.. I could quote something from it right now and they would realize that I’m awesome. But I know now that, not only would they not think I’m awesome, they probably wouldn’t even know what I was talking about. And I wouldn’t like them either. But I never thought of things that way. It was the same way with every guy I ever liked. I just liked them and worried that they wouldn’t like me back. I would think, ugh, he smokes a ton of pot, he used the word “illiterate” to describe my fumbling with the door handle, he eats meat and doesn’t care about animals, but.. what if he doesn’t like me? I would always feel devastated when a guy didn’t like me or when he stopped liking me and I think a lot of it had to do with my thinking that everyone is at least like me enough that they would find me interesting. And some of it was just a need for approval from men (16 year old boys).
