Friday night I got the call that you always know will come some day, but never suspect will be that day. (Especially since that day found me drinking a beer, eating chicken fingers and barely twenty-four years old. All around a completely inappropriate time to hear that your once best male friend had gotten engaged).
My once best male friend is a friend from high school (and college—we both went to the same university) with whom I actually made a “back-up” pact as seen on Friends. When we were fifteen we decided that if neither one of us was married by the time we were thirty, we would get married to each other. When we were twenty-one we revised that age to thirty-five, because only fifteen year-olds think all hope is lost at thirty.
We were each other’s Valentine’s Day dates every year in college since neither one of us could manage to maintain a relationship through that troublesome holiday. We’d have arguments over who said what that time in the ninth grade, because neither of us could let anything go. He, with great patience, taught me how to play video games but never let me win. Whenever a college roommate kicked me out (sexiled me) due to the presence of a boyfriend/fling/one-night stand, his room was the first place I went.
He was my oldest friend, my parents loved him, he loved my friends and if, when I called him, I happened to wake him up, he’d answer his cell phone with “Are you all right? Do you need me?” (Then, when I said “No,” or “Hi,” he’d say, with great finality, “Good night, CB.”)
After college, we both moved to New York where he found a girlfriend and promptly disappeared. There were the occasional phone calls wherein he would want to catch up and I would want to harass him about when in God’s name we were going to hang out, but there were never any face-to-face meetings.
In a fit of desperation I even offered up Re-Boyfriend—“I’ll bring him, you bring your girlfriend, it’ll be great!” (It would not have been great, it would have been horrid, but I thought his sense of propriety was keeping him from fraternizing with females who were not his girlfriend. I wanted to find a way around it.)
Then Friday night, when I was at happy hour, he called to tell me he was engaged.
I did not know he had called to tell me he was engaged and so I answered the phone as such: “Hey fucker! I’m out with S. and a whole bunch of people. Come! Everyone wants to see you.”
“Actually, I’m engaged.”
“What?”
“Engaged.”
I said nothing.
“To be wed,” he clarified.
I pulled it together and said congratulations with an appropriate amount of enthusiasm. Luckily, I was able to hand to phone off to S. who squealed much more convincingly, though still not perfectly.
When S. handed the phone back to me, I heard “Listen, CB, I’ve got to go make more phone calls."
“Okay. Congratulations!” It was all I could think of to say, though, in retrospect, questions about the ring and the date of the wedding would have been nice to ask.
There was a pause before my once best male friend yelled, at full-volume, “That's right. I’m taken baby!” before hanging up on me.
I stared at the phone for a second.
“S., I think he just said ‘I’m taken baby!’” S. laughed in this way she has that acknowledges something is horrible but at the same completely ridiculous and funny.
“Are you sure?” she asked, still giggling.
“Well… he could have said ‘What’s shakin’ baby’….?” S. just gave me a look.
“I’m never seeing him again, am I,” I asked rather sadly as I ate another chicken finger.
“Oh, you’ll totally be invited to his wedding,” S. said in a way that I somehow felt missed the point. “If I’m not invited, will you take me?”
“Sure.”
I guess this means S. is my new back-up.
