My unhappy writer friend called yesterday. Things were not improving for him. He’d sent his ex stories with female characters very similar to her. These women experience pain emotionally and physically—get wronged in every paragraph. His ex didn’t respond, he told me, and he had started to fall into even deeper waters of desperation with major inarticulateness, because when he picked up his laundry and found a sock missing, he couldn’t think of the word for sock and had to point at the smelly beige thing covering his ankle. They were all laughing at me, he said, and I love Latino culture, but they belly laugh big time, and from their bellies into mine their laughs infected with a fearsome ghoulishness.
That’s a great description, I tell him. You should write that down.
My unhappy writer friend has been unhappy for as long as I’ve known him. Yet his father has to be one of the most vivacious seventy-five-year-olds in existence. Stunned to think he’d produced such a downer, I asked him in a private moment at a dinner party if he ever worried about his son, and he told me his son had made certain choices in his life. He then started to sing a song from 1946 and I understood our private moment was over. Soon my unhappy writer friend called us into the kitchen. He wanted his father’s singing to stop because he’d just received a not-so-nice email, and what were we talking about in hushed voices? I can’t believe people, he cried. Just once would I like— His father tried to massage his neck, but my unhappy writer friend knocked over a glass of wine and his contributor’s copy of a literary magazine turned pink, and he motherfuckin’ed his father, me, the glass, the wine, Trader Joe’s, the magazine, the editor, and his story—Not one of my best, they never take the goddamn good ones.
My therapist gets tired of me talking about my unhappy writer friend. She wants me to think about what it would be like to live in another city—a metaphorical city with skyscrapers and fire departments, one not counting my unhappy writer friend among its citizens. Make it metaphorical, she warns, not real, because if you moved then I couldn’t see you anymore and that wouldn’t be good for your head. I agree to work on visualization and after the session she tells me her husband is taking her to Ireland for three weeks. I joke about Dublin being a highly metaphorical city and she tells me to help myself to mints on my way out.
Back on streets, I open the six text messages my unhappy writer friend sent while I was in session. I’m dying here reads the first, third, and sixth message. The second: I wonder if I should get into schnapps. The fourth: You’ve been very nice to me over the course of our time together. The fifth: Good new story about my ex. Dump truck hits her. She’s in half-coma. Uses Ouija board to profess love to former meant something.
My unhappy writer friend’s birthday is usually an occasion for incredible sadness and regret, and this year is no different. It’s only him and me for a while—his father comes late. Then Todd and Chloe. Chloe was in a poetry workshop he once taught and she always remembers his birthday and calls him a fine man of letters. Todd’s face appears coated in white makeup. He carries a vat of peanuts and jumps whenever someone uses a sentence of more than one word. I wonder what method he would use to kill my unhappy writer friend.
After greetings, everyone is silent for three uncomfortable minutes. Then my unhappy writer friend gives a speech about his prior year on the earth and what he’s learned and how he can make improvements in the one ahead. Midway through, or at what I hope is midway, his father tries to gather everyone in a circle to dance, though we’re in a small studio apartment. My unhappy writer friend starts yelling how he doesn’t want anyone to dance while he’s talking and his father asks when he will be done talking. I don’t know Dad, he says, I haven’t planned this out. Then my unhappy writer friend details plans to revise his least autobiographical novel and his father laughs heartily, scooping icing off the day-old cake and into his mouth. I want you all to know, my unhappy writer friend says, how much you mean to me and how much your support supports me.
Me, I say.
What? he says.
Me, me, me, me, me.
We look at each other for a moment and I realize this is my chance and he sees it too. Warping, his skin droops and starts to smell. It’s like I’ve hit a skunk.
Oh God, Chloe says, and he says, What are you trying to say to me? And I search the floor for my bag, but I can’t find it. No smooth exit, no continuation of my sprint to freedom.
What I’m saying is—we love you too.