Friendship

I remember what life was like before I met Charlene. I lived in LA. On my last night there, I asked a friend for money, who upon giving it to me told me never to contact him again. Later at a bar, I was desperately trying to get someone to come home with me. I was practically begging her. I didn’t even want to have sex; I just wanted someone to talk to. Alone in the city, I decided to spend the rest of my days drinking myself to death in Las Vegas. Where better to wither away than in the desert?

One night while driving drunk down the strip and listening to 'Lonely Teardrops' by Jackie Wilson, I came inches away from killing a woman walking across the street. By God's grace, I was able to slam on my brakes just in time. Realizing she was a prostitute, I got out of my car and asked her to come back to my hotel with me for the evening under the guise of having sex, but truthfully just to keep me company. Reluctant at first, Charlene agreed.

The beginning of a friendship often feels extraordinary in retrospect. Though the days themselves were ordinary in hindsight, we remember them as containing a sense of otherness. Whether it was fate or destiny that brought us together, we were kept together by a mutual longing to be loved and to love in return while we floated through time towards nowhere in particular. In a way, friendship involves constantly imbuing the ordinary with extraordinary qualities.

In the moment, though, the initial interaction usually isn’t special, perhaps because the friend doesn't always appear to us as we imagined them. Friendship often comes in a form that we don’t quite expect. I never thought my friend would be a hooker I picked up one night towards the end of my life. Floating through life hopelessly, the initial interaction seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary. You might think it’s strange that a friendship could begin with a blowjob, but the truth is, I just wanted someone to talk to. I asked Charlene if we could just hang out and talk until our time was up.

I think she saw something in me—the same thing I saw in her. Someone who saw me for who I was and someone who could see her for who she was. It wasn’t clear at the time, but as soon as she left and I was all alone, I realized that she and I were going to be friends. Friendship always contains a dual experience. What I experienced was also experienced by Charlene. Friendship involves us simultaneously playing both the roles of giver and receiver.

Days later, sitting alone on a bench, drinking a martini, Charlene walked up to me. I told her I had been looking for her the previous night and asked if she’d like to get dinner. At dinner, we talked, and she asked me why I was trying to kill myself. I thought it would be the last time we saw each other, but she assured me she wasn’t judging me; she was just curious. We sat there for over an hour talking, and later, we walked home instead of taking a cab just so we could talk some more. I realized the thing about friendship is that when you’re together, the world disappears; nothing matters except the two of you. The activities are just there to hide the fact that you want to spend time with this person. With a friend, it doesn’t matter what you do—walking down the street is better than going to a party with people who make you feel alone. Being the more intuitive one, Charlene told me she wanted me to move into her place and that I could sleep on her couch. That was the moment I realized I had made a friend.

After I moved in, we did everything together—grocery shopping, parties, dinners, watching TV, going on trips, gambling, and even getting kicked out of casinos. Friendship consists of these little things. It’s a constant act of production, creating plans, experiences, memories, laughter, and inside jokes. These small things that we create together become part of our sense of self. Like the time we got matching tattoos, or how we've started to sound like each other and use the same phrases.

These changes are often detected by the other people in our lives. They pick up on our new beliefs, slang, clothes, our élan vital. At first, the changes were minor and her friends would dismiss them, but it was when we spent our first holiday together that they knew things had changed. Holidays like New Year’s Eve and Halloween that friends spend together are celebrations of friendship as an entity—a mutual recognition that we are both loved and needed. This friendship becomes an intangible but palpable object, expressed by the union of two individuals who are invigorated by each other as if it were a self-perpetuating machine, defying the laws of physics.

Over time, I developed an attachment to Charlene, and one day it surfaced in the worst way. At lunch, I gave her earrings I had bought for her. As I was putting them on her, I said something crass and hurtful about how she would be able to feel them tonight when one of her clients is pounding her from behind. I saw her mask her feelings from me. Ashamed of what I said, I got up and left. I felt like I couldn’t be honest with Charlene about how I felt anymore. The ability to communicate openly, which was the foundation of our friendship, was compromised. The emergence of feelings I didn’t want to share resurrected a sense of isolation I thought I had overcome. Upset that she couldn’t see how her work was affecting me, I acted out by bringing someone home that night. While we were together, Charlene walked in and saw everything. Friendships can be shattered by an act of betrayal, which is an attack on the friendship itself—a declaration that it no longer holds value. Friendships break when the freedom to speak openly is lost.

As I reached for my drink, Charlene stood there with tears in her eyes. She told me she wanted me to leave. For one week we didn’t see each other. During that time, I remembered what life was like before our friendship—a lonely existence where no one could hear me or see me. An existence where mundane activities drove me to distraction because that was all I wanted. As I moved through the world, everything reminded me of Charlene. There were moments when I had thoughts that I knew only Charlene would understand. I was certain she felt the same way. As I lay on what felt like my deathbed, wasting away, I called Charlene and told her I needed to see her.

When Charlene arrived, she hugged me. We were no longer angry at each other; we were just happy to be back together. Like a broken bone, friendships can become stronger than before if they heal correctly, though sometimes they leave scars that don’t fade away. She and I spent that last night together before I died in my sleep. Thankfully, we had reconciled, which meant that while I passed away, our friendship lived on. Frozen in time, Charlene could carry it with her, looking back on it fondly as a source of life.