That's the Way it Oughtta Be
This question was posed to me on Sunday afternoon from my long time friend,Skinny.He was trying to hold back my hair and made the mistake of doing so from the scalp.
"They are extensions..." I mumbled, as I proceeded to hurl again over his deck.
"I don't like them," was all he muttered back and he patiently held the fake hair out of vomits way.
I know how to really make an impression with my friends. Somehow six years had gone by and Skinny's McMansion was ignored by his friends. It's not that we didn't like his wife. She always seemed friendly to us...at least to our face. It just seemed as their ten year marriage went on, his wife became a less frequent visitor to our events and Skinny was usually stag. Their lives became so seperate that he took to asking me to go to events with him such as friends weddings or Christmas parties. The sad part? I was also in the same kind of relationship.
Now that he has been divorced for a year, Skinny was finally refurnishing his huge empty house. It is one of those cookie-cutter, mini mansions that seem to be the rage in this part of PA. Cathedral ceilings and rooms galore. I pictured myself in my midnight wanderings in my two bedroom townhouse with no basement. I could wander here for days.
This was actually one of the places I hid out when Prick was still running around free. Skinny and I would sit in his basement. He would watch old Flyers videos and I sat staring in to space, numb from what was happening in my real world. We would reminisce about our youth. We have known each other since we were 15 years old. Somehow the question of; how the hell did we get here? never came up. At least, until Sunday.
"Ness-O-matic, you are a mess-O-matic." Spoken like a true Philly dude. We all have nicknames for each other. Skinny was skinny once. Now it is like calling a bald guy Curly. Skinny takes the true Rocky Balboa Philly-speak to it's highest art form. It is incredibly rare to have any kind of "serious" talk about anything with Skinny. When I stayed in his McMansion, hiding from Prick, I stood at the landing of his stairwell. It looked in to his family room that had cathedral ceilings. I sang the opening line of Evita, "don't cry for me Argentina..." and he snarfed his beer through his nose. For 28 years we have made each other laugh.
It's not the first time I hurled in front of Skinny. Hell, it's not the first time I hurled on the poor guy or vice versa. He went to the same college as my best friend. We went through clubbing and beach houses together for years. Drinking was a huge part of our friendship. I rarely drink anymore. Skinny is not skinny mainly due to a good beer gut on him. I should of known better when Mich, her husband and I went to visit him in his big empty house on that Sunday. He wanted to show off the new dining room set he bought.
It started like any other visit. I don't know why the beer tasted better than usual. Skinny has a bar with a tap. Maybe it was the frosted mug. Maybe I really deep down wanted to get plastered on three beers. Maybe the laughter was too much. Who knows? All I remember was one minute being fine and then the next moment I was outside with Skinny standing over me, holding back my fake hair puking off his beautifully stained deck on his perfectly manicured lawn.
"How the hell did we get here?" I asked him. We grew up outside of Philly. We went to school, we worked, we got married, we moved all over the place and here we were. He was alone in his big house and I was puking off his deck. For once there was no jokes coming from either one of us. After he asked me how my extensions came out he carefully helped me pluck each weft from my head and threw them on his picnic table.
"Ness-O. We keep being too nice to the wrong people." I leaned over and threw up a third time and started to cry.It was a lot easier for him to hold my real hair back.
"I just thought it would be different by now," was what I said as he crushed me in a hug.
"It is different," he replied. "We both know that it is better to be alone than to be alone with someone who makes us feel lonely even when they are sitting right there."
No matter how sick or drunk I was, I knew Skinny just made a profound statement that nailed it right on the head.
I spent most of the day yesterday, green at the gills. I did ride Veritas in the morning. He was kind enough to not bounce me around too bad.
At 5:00pm Skinny sent me a text:
"Nessi,U need to wrk on building more beer muscle. Training begins @ Camp SkinMan. K/p lttng UR real hair dwn."
I had a good giggle and ran my fingers through my real hair. My head still hurt too much for fake hair.
Song of the day:
That's the Way~Led Zeppelin
I don't know how I'm gonna tell you, I can't play with you no more,
I don't know how I'm gonna do what mama told me, My friend, the boy next door.
I can't believe what people saying, You're gonna let your hair hang down,
I'm satisfied to sit here working all day long, You're in the darker side of town.
And when I'm out I see you walking, Why don't your eyes see me,
Could it be you've found another game to play, What did mama say to me.
*That's The Way, Oh, That's The Way it ought to be,
Yeah, yeah, mama say That's The Way it ought to stay.
And yesterday I saw you standing by the river,
And weren't those tears that filled your eyes,
And all the fish that lay in dirty water dying,
Had they got you hypnotized?
And yesterday I saw you kissing tiny flowers,
But all that lives is born to die.
And so I say to you that nothing really matters,
And all you do is stand and cry.
I don't know what to say about it,
When all you ears have turned away,
But now's the time to look and look again at what you see,
Is that the way it ought to stay?
That's the way... That's the way it oughtta be
Oh don't you know now, Mama said.. that's the way it's gonna stay, yeah.
Comments
Blessings my sweet!