Answers on the Joe front arrive soon enough. Curiosity insatiable, Dylan makes a point of tracking our old friend down at his parents’ house, to get the full scoop. It seems that my instincts were spot on, regarding the weird timing on that mid-month move, and something did indeed go down between Joe and his roommate Justin.
This intrigue is by no means a slow developing one, however, as every significant piece deploys in the tiny window of a single night. Arriving home from work late on the evening in question, Joe observes a pair of used wine glasses on the living room coffee table, but doesn’t think any more of it at first. Even as he’s marching up the stairs to his own room, and can hear Justin having sex with someone up there, he’s giving the guy a mental thumbs up, possibly even slightly relieved in that he hadn’t seen Justin with anybody up to this point, and was beginning to wonder if the roommate was all talk but no game. At least until the shrieks and moaning stop at roughly the same time Joe reaches the landing, and Justin exits his own bedroom with…some other guy. Sweaty and euphoric, the two of them nod hellos at Joe, passing him as they head on down the stairs for another glass of celebratory wine.
Until this moment, Joe had considered Justin one of those squeaky clean, immaculately groomed and feminine acting gents who merely gives off a slightly gay vibe in order to attract women. This is after all a well-known effective strategy — if not something most quite have the stomach for — and when pressed, Justin would even claim that this was the angle he always pursued. Though the rest of us only met him on a single occasion ourselves, my own impression matched Joe’s, in that he reminded us of an old classmate we knew who also drove in the exuding-gay-vibes-to-attract-pussy lane.
Except, now that I think about it, that classmate had eventually come out as a homosexual, too. So maybe this shouldn’t hit us as any great surprise. Joe is so creeped out by the encounter, though, that he moves all his stuff out the next day, informing Justin via telephone that he does not intend to extend his residence there.
Upon learning this, we are all pretty much in sympathetic agreement with him. Though not the least bit homophobic, and believing that people should feel free to love or screw whomever they choose, it would be a bit much to live under the same roof as a gay male. It’s already borderline gross having to listen to your friends bang some chick, even a really hot one. Finding oneself subjected to passionate cries from some dude getting pounded really amplifies the revulsion factor by untold degrees. Justin can continue enjoying his merry little homo scene under his own roof, then, and good for him, but Joe understandably wants no part of it.
Perhaps somewhat relieved that this shrieking cat is finally out of the knapsack, Joe finally rings me and Phil up a few nights later, sounding already about half blasted and wondering what we are getting into. As it turns out, we too are just sitting around the kitchen table, dusting off a few Milwaukee’s Best cans apiece, and debating this very topic. Burned out on the old school metal classics Phil has thrown on damn near every evening, I’ve launched a preemptive strike by firing up the local alternative FM station as soon as I arrived home today. This gambit strums a perfect chord, too, in that it’s more interesting for me, while just barely heavy enough to appeal to him. Even as Phil only knows maybe half the songs, mostly the older ones, thus far he’s not complaining about even the artsier fare. In triumphant moods now that our comrade is driving over here to liven up the proceedings, when Jim Carroll’s People Who Died bursts from the speakers, I begin riffing on the repetitive chorus, singing instead that Philly’s friends are in jail, jail…Philly’s friends are in jail, jail! Which does after all match much of the subject matter we were just bandying about. And though I get the feeling Phil has never heard this song before, he does begin ad-libbing with impressive effectiveness, improvising bits about those friends to fill in the verses.
Joe shows up and systematically pencils in more details of that Justin incident, before moving on to commiserate about his sputtering efforts on the female front. Lamenting that he needs to bust that wedding ring out again, which he too stopped wearing after a couple nights out with us. These woe fueled tales then prompt Phil to bemoan his stalled attempts at wooing Jen, at great length.
“You see this?” he explains to Joe, pointing at the refrigerator dent, “I named that one Jen.”
Though I’m the only one not currently decrying the state of his dating life, this doesn’t stop these other two from offering me constant unasked for “pointers,” a trend I have observed at great length over the years. This will continue during our scattered, inconsequential bar tour, one which finds us progressively hitting sorrier and sorrier dives — though thankfully avoiding Bootleggers Inn. Nobody is coming right out and saying so, but I consider it no great coincidence that we have set our sights ever lower as this evening progresses, with Phil at one point even declaring, with a shrug, as the three of us appraise an especially beefy specimen from afar, “fuck it, man, pussy’s pussy.”
But none of us make a move on her, either. A general malaise has wafted over our enthusiasm for random pickups, and I’m wondering what it will take to erase this. Actually, it’s just about certain that wearing my cowboy outfit would have if nothing else made for a much more interesting evening, and provided a greater conversational spark, but I wasn’t about to light that fuse, not with these two. Meanwhile, Joe hints at “driving around a little” before stopping by to see us, which I take to mean he had swung by Angel’s apartment in desperation, only to discover she wasn’t home. And still these guys continue with their pointers aimed at me, even after we return home and, despite the late hour, Phil decides he’s going to fry some steaks for all three of us.
“This one here needs to get back with that Helena,” Phil says, his non spatula holding hand on its accompanying hip, in the manner of a car mechanic telling someone he is horrible at keeping up with his vehicle maintenance.
“Dude! I’ve been telling him that for years!” Joe concurs, nodding from a kitchen chair, Milwaukee’s Best can on the table before him.
I cackle and reply, “things are moving along just fine. She spent the night here just last week. And then came back for her purse.”
“Did you bang her?” Phil shoots back, though purely rhetorical.
“For about three solid years, yes,” I retort, as if not understanding what he meant.
“No I mean now.”
“Well, no,” I admit.
“There you go, then,” Phil scoffs.
“Yep. There you go,” Joe concurs, lifting and tilting back his beer.
Upon learning of this development, Dylan also asked me a day or two ago what was going on with Helena, and I told him, “I think I have to play that one cautiously. If I show too much interest, she’ll be gone.” That this is true seems irrefutably clear to me. Although I am always open for tips from the fellows on improving my game, and consider myself no expert, I feel I have rebounded quite well in the wake of the Jenna breakup — and this was all accomplished by, thus far, not even calling anyone. Ever.
Yet a certain class of character cannot resist dispensing wisdom. Part of this is their nature, although I’m beginning to suspect that if you are not dispensing advice yourself, then no matter your accomplishments, you come off looking incompetent. That alone is maybe reason enough to go around telling everyone else what they should do. And regarding tonight, there is one other factor in play here, too, which is an underlying current, never quite explicitly verbalized, where Joe has always considered me a joke.
This is a complex dynamic to unpack, and it doesn’t all just relate to picking up ladies. Physical manifestations of this concept were visible for example in that scrunched up face he made at Triads last month, to my bullshit comment about dating women whose names start with J. Granted, he isn’t entirely caught up to speed with every development thus far this year, particularly after going rogue for a couple weeks. But even in spotting him everything that’s happened this year, by wiping that off the slate, I’m absolving myself just fine by comparison.
Angel was mighty fine to observe, sure, and nobody can take that away from him. Yet there are some major reasons he began to realize she’s no prize, of which the boob flash was merely the spark in a can of gunpowder. She’s also a dumbass and has no personality, unless you count the occasions she was highly unpleasant. I have no comparable exploits during that period, although this is mostly due to a serious relationship with Jenna; however, if you combine the time he spent with Angel and his own previous girlfriend, Lee Ann, then there’s a close match in longevity covered. Lee Ann is essentially the same truncated height as Jenna, was always considered by our peer group as an attractive chick…and yet to my eyes Jenna mostly looks better. Though some, like the stick-figure obsessed Pete, might argue with this assessment, Jenna’s at least in the ballpark, and in my opinion has a prettier face, a more voluptuous frame. The sum of these epochs, placed side by side, I would therefore consider basically a wash.
Going back even farther, to our previous serious partners, the Helena vs. Janis battle royale is a blowout in my favor. Regarding our conquests in between those two eras, I suppose he does come out slightly ahead in that regard — at least from a numbers standpoint. Here again however this tally is peppered by some questionable calls, frequently while drunk, where he nailed some real dogs. Many of these were occasions where I could have just as readily leaned that way myself, was on equal footing to possibly bang the dog in question, but couldn’t bring myself to do so. And then there is the Lily situation.
He would never admit it, but I think the Lily quandary aggravates him most of all. She is unique in our annals by opening up a theological debate, within myself at least, concerning how to handle a very specific, unlikely to repeat scenario. Though Joe continues to dispute this point, I told him about my exploits with Lily…before he went ahead and also screwed her anyway. Which actually doesn’t bother me in the slightest, because she has consistently meant nothing to me all along — it’s only Joe’s feathers which appear oh so slightly ruffled, as the years have gone by and these facts have emerged. And while his most obvious, readily available defense would be to either admit he doesn’t remember me telling him, or that he knew but didn’t care, he has instead consistently maintained that I never mentioned this beforehand.
Yet we have had multiple, very detailed discussions about the contours of her huge, naked tits, her not that great looking pussy, lacking blow job skills, and the way she thoroughly douses the bed by squirting, to name but a few topics. My response to his denial has always been: how else would I know all these things? If one were a forensic examiner, one might also read quite a bit into tinier, more benign points, like how when sending us Christmas cards or leaving notes on our door, these commonly began Sid and Joe: even during periods where he was the only one sleeping with her. A couple years ago, Lily did us a huge favor, perhaps, by moving to Chicago, yet she returns to visit often, and it could get extremely interesting to see where this leads now that Joe and I are both single again.
More immediate concerns wiggle their way to the forefront, however, like for example our growling stomachs. And yet meanwhile at the stove, Phil is telling us some long-winded tale about being at a cookout with former Cleveland Brown greats Frank Minnifield and Al Bubba Baker. Which, though quite amusing, I suspect is also distracting him.
“Hey, what’s the ETA on these steaks?” I demand, incredulous that they have taken this long.
Joe, who is after all attending pilot school, appreciates this humor, and explodes with laughter to the extent he spews a little beer across the table. Phil is not nearly as entertained, however, as he spins around with a stern expression. “I got your ETA right here,” he tells me, repeatedly slapping the spatula into his open left palm.
Following this lone, brief reemergence, Joe will just as abruptly disappear again. This time around, however, word eventually reaches us that it’s for a different reason, in that he has already emergency landed into another serious relationship. Our amateur pilot is no longer flying solo.
