Sometimes I go for weeks without talking to my friend Jim. It got to the point in High School (when I was dating the horrendous devil woman I called a girlfriend and who monopolized all my time) that Jim and I would only see each other in the 1 class we had together.
But whenever we got together, we would always have a great time. It would be like we had only been apart for a few minutes. I know I’m making it sound like Jim and I are in a relationship, but it’s hard to describe in other terms. We follow the same cultural happenings, and we have the same interests. So it’s no trouble finding something to talk about. The conversations always eventually turn hysterical, and it’s hard to understand why unless you can actually witness.
For example (and I warn you, this isn’t going to be very funny) when we were in High School, our near demonic girlfriends, who were friends, decided to throw a party with the rest of their friends. They were always so busy playing grow up, and Jim and I just wanted to be kids. So while they were sitting around having polite conversation about the most mind-numbing crap I had ever heard, nibbling on pretzels and 7 layer dip, drinking diet cola and iced tea, I turned to Jim and said,
“Hey. When you were a kid, do you remember there ever being Bible action figures?”
He said he remembered, and it just went off on a tangent from there. We talked about how Moses had Kung-Fu grip, and his stone tablets could be used like a “Death Frisbee” on the other Bible action figures.
We talked about how the probably would have had dinosaurs as their “Sidekick Pets,” completely ignoring the fact that fundamentalist dogma can’t cope with the idea of dinosaurs at all.
We had only begun to get into the topics of playsets (the Judas Iscariot back alley/hanging tree, one playset for each Egyptian plague, etc.) when we noticed that our girlfriends and their friends had stopped talking and were sitting around us in a semi-circle like it was story time and they were on the reading rug. (See, I told you it wasn’t funny.)
Well don’t you know it, but that pretty much fucking ruined it for us. Every time Jim and I hung out after that we had people coming up to us and saying, “Talk about Bible action figures again!” We couldn’t talk about anything without someone expecting it to be hilarious. Never in their egomaniacal dreams could they conceive of a world where we weren’t there to entertain them. We talked about such goofy stuff because our brains worked the same way, and because we needed a coping mechanism and an escape from a group of 16 year olds who were eager to be 45.
I’d love to blog about some of the conversations Jim and I have had over the phone. (He’s in Arizona now, working on his masters in short story writing.) But they just wouldn’t make any sense.
For example, he just turned in a paper about characters who grew up in a poor part of Baltimore. This caused 2 ignorant comments to be made by one of his peers, and the chair of the department. First, his peer knew that most of Jim’s stories were based on things that had happened to Jim when he was growing up in some of the poorer parts of Baltimore. So when Jim portrayed an extremely white trash family living in subhuman conditions, his peer thought she should take it upon herself to ask if that was how Jim’s family lived. Jim was about to take it upon himself to explain that, no, that’s not how he lived, when he decided instead to pretend like it was. (See, we both like to lie to people if we can get away with it.) It culminated at the point when they were at a bar later that night and he “confided” in her that he was the first in his family to finish high school, college, and even go into a masters program. As he said, “The odds are against me. I’m not even supposed to have made it this far. I look up to people like you, because you know how to behave. Your whole family has degrees. I don’t even know what I’m doing.”
But I digress, the really funny conversation came with the dean of the department when she wrote, “Why don’t you just say it’s a black neighborhood?” when Jim was describing in his story a run down part of Baltimore. That gave us fodder for a good half hour. We imagined the dean wanting to make more comments like, “Can’t you have a few more young black men standing around listening to rap music or playing basketball? Maybe they could be drinking orange soda and eating fried chicken and watermelon. They should probably be selling drugs and not paying their child support either. Perhaps you could describe a scene where they all start robbing each other.” Jesus titty fucking Christ! Could it be more ignorant to assume that a “poor” neighborhood is a “black” neighborhood?
Oh well. Probably not all that funny to you. See that’s what I’m talking about. If you could see us in action, follow the train of thought, it’s pretty funny. We’re two guys with one brain. But when I relay it to you like this, it just turns out crap.
