Posts tagged Friendship

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.

I’ve had a lot of different groups of friends throughout my life. Some lasted a long time and some a short time. This story has to do with a group of friends that I was only close with for a short time. I don’t even remember who all went with us, to be honest, but I know that my best friend Kristen was there, along with a guy she was dating at the time named Byron. It was likely to have been them, plus Amanda and Ernest.. or maybe Chris, Ryan, and Mike. I don’t know, but it was some combination of the group of friends I had at that time. It was a fun group to hang out with, but things became complicated when Kristen dated Byron, then didn’t like him anymore, and also when Amanda told me that Kristen talked about me behind my back all the time and said I was annoying and boring. She also told me that Kristen hit on “Gap Troll” when I wasn’t around, which was hard to believe. It was kind of a rough ending and I still don’t know what to think, but I also kind of don’t care. This story doesn’t have anything to do with that, it’s just about one of the most entertaining times Kristen and I hung out with Byron.

Let me tell you a bit about Byron. He was a pretty normal guy. He had spiky black hair and some kind of goatee or other terrible facial hair. He was Native American.. I guess? He had a tribal band tattoo and explained that it was cool because his grandfather was Native American. I kind of understood, but still thought.. um, no. He also had a penis piercing. I know this because he showed it to me. I think it was neon green. I hope I’m remembering this correctly because I really want to have seen a penis piercing in my life. I think my friend started dating him the night he told us about his piercing, which is hilarious. This was the same night that I was dared to kiss Kristen, and possibly Amanda too. I’m now remembering another amazing dare: We were sitting on a dock next to some water (wait, where were we?), and first we dared our friend Crazy Mike to pull out his balls. Then we dared Amanda to lick his balls. She totally did and it was awesome. We used to refer to that moment by saying “Baked potato by the sea.” And if you don’t get how cool it is that balls sometimes look like a baked potato, then I totally don’t get you or anything you’re into.

So one night we decide that we should drive to some abandoned and supposedly haunted house located out somewhere in Manteca. We are driving around and Byron starts to tell us that he’s gotten out of speeding tickets a bunch of times by just not stopping when a cop tried to pull him over. Uh, what? Yeah, he said he would just go so fast that the cop couldn’t catch him and wouldn’t want to go through the trouble of making a big deal out of it, so he’d just stop following him and let him go. And what would happen if they decided to make a big deal out of it? Oh, I’d be fucked.. I’d go to jail. Hmm, okay. Then he said something to make himself sound hard as hell like “There’s so fucking way I’m getting my insurance raised by some fucking cop.” I guess just not speeding wasn’t an option for him.

We get to the place we’re heading and the first thing we see is a giant pile of trash bags. Byron starts aggressively ramming the trash bags with his car. He’s acting really strangely and will not stop ramming the bags. I think he even made someone get out of the car and move the trash bags around, just to.. check.. something? Then he parks and we’re walking around this fucking creepy house. There’s graffiti on the walls and there are no doors on any of the rooms. The house is set up really strangely like you can see the bathroom as soon as you walk in the front door, but the living room weirdly connects to the same hallway the bathroom connects with so my friend walked from somewhere across the house right to where I was. It was just.. it was just fucking creepy. But what was worse than that was that Byron would not shut the fuck up. He was just saying, “Man, we gotta leave.. What if the cops come? There’s no way I’m going back to jail. Man, I just can’t get in trouble again. I’m not even scared, I’m not scared at all, I just can’t get in trouble again.” THE WHOLE TIME. It was annoying, but also really funny because he was obviously just afraid of seeing a ghost or a methhead or a spider. I think something really creepy happened to finally make us leave though.. like we saw a weird sign that said “Intruders Will Be Shot” or something and we all kind of freaked out. I mean, we weren’t scared or anything.. we just didn’t want to go back to jail.