Making Friends
I made a friend at a street festival once. He was in his fifties. His waist and his hair were thin. His belt was modified for thinner. There was something written on his hand in ink. It wasn’t a phone number or a street address. Maybe part of a shopping list, or a word he needed to look up when he got to a dictionary. He wasn’t the type to look up a word up on his phone. To be honest, I don’t know if he had a phone. If he did, I never saw it.
We were friends. Walking side by side. Him asking questions, me answering questions. I knew about his wife. Or…ex-wife, she left with another man because he was better a cooking and cleaning. My friend was too old for his age. That’s what he told me. Trapped in a younger body. Youthful mindset, the whole bit. I was okay with it. I asked him how old he was if he wasn’t really fifty-three. He said around thirty. Seems like as good of age as any.
Then my friend started getting creepy. His pupils were too dilated to be normal. He started a little shimmy that went about half way up his body and back down to the floor. I didn’t mention it the first few times, but then I asked about it. First he said it was nothing. Then it happened again, and again after that. It was a lot of movement for it to be written off as nothing. I asked again. He told me it was the holy spirt. Said he catches it from time to time out of the blue. Walking down the street, enjoying the festival, and the holy ghost comes up and kicks one of his legs into the other.
I didn’t want to walk with him any more with all the knee quivering he was doing. In fact, I didn’t want to be his friend at all. I don’t know too much about the holy ghosts. Regular ghost make me uneasy. A holy ghost might be worse. I don’t know how those sorts of things work, but I didn’t want the holy ghost catching me. That was about the end of our friendship. His name was Ron, I think.
There were more friends. A whole group of them. Three girls and two guys. Jeff and Donny. Those were the guys. They wore their hats backwards and had similar walks. There were a lot of things similar about them. At the end of every step they sprung up onto the ball of their foot. They were about the same height. Sometimes when Jeff laughed, Donny laughed, even if he didn’t know what Jeff was laughing about.
The girls in the group were not similar. There was a husky one with her breast pressed together. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought they might pop. That’s how tight they were squeezed together. She worked for some company where she had to talk all day. You’d think that would make her not want to talk while she wasn’t at work, but it didn’t. She talked more than the rest of us combined. She talked about the way the sun was turning her skin darker. She talked about food, mostly food she didn’t enjoy. It was obvious that she did enjoy certain foods, but he didn’t talk about those. She talked about her nails and about getting a new car because the car she had was making animal noises. I couldn’t listed to all of her talking. I stopped being friends with her almost immediately.
The other two girls were nicer. They talked too, but it wasn’t their main objective. They could listen. I told one of them a story about a time my friend got thrown in jail for being overly drunk in a place where people wear fancy clothes and valet park their cars. It was a good story but she wasn’t in the mood to hear a story like that. She started sending text messages about half way through.
We all stood together in line, waiting to get into a music show. It close to an hour, all of us friends talking the whole time. Almost as soon as we got our hands stamped and walked into the venue, the friendship dissolved. They weren’t too concerned about it. One of the girls and Donny said goodbye, but the others disappeared. I didn’t stay friends with any of them after that. They might have stayed friends with one another, but I couldn’t be friends with those types of people.
An old lady was my friend in an elevator once. She wore blue high-heeled shoes and her ankles didn’t seem prepared to balance in them. She wore perfume that smelled a little like a pine scented floor cleaner. Most people couldn’t pull that off, but she wore it well with her blue high-heeled shoes. I was getting off on floor seven. She was going to the eleventh floor. The doors pulled apart at floor seven and our friendship was done.
It happens often for me. New friends come and then they go. It’s not always their fault. Sometimes I’ve got other things to take care of. Once, I stopped being friends with someone because a stop light turned red. I caught it while it was green, they got stopped. Friendship is a strange thing in that way. Some people are really good at it. I’ve never been great at making new friends.