The Last Day of Our Acquaintance

I don't know how to say this without sounding gay, but Doug and I broke up in September. He had called and left a couple of messages on my cellular; I never called back. Or, more accurately, I waited a week to call back. By then it was too late.

Doug had been my best friend for years. It's no wonder: in some ways, we were the same guy. We were the ones who stayed up after everyone else had gone to bed, arguing politics while we smoked a pack of cigarettes each. After we both pledged to quit smoking, we missed our nicotine-fueled conversations so much that we took up cigars. (Disastrously, I also took up scotch.) At its peak, our relationship superseded all other relationships in our lives, evidenced by the fact that we spent more time with each other than anyone else. That we worked for different companies didn't stop us. When I was at IFW, Doug was a fixture at our Thursday night pickup basketball games. I regularly met him and his coworkers for lunch. We seldom went more than two days without talking; consequently, even when we were apart, we weren't really apart. I called him from a strip club in Las Vegas. He called me from his hotel pool in Hawaii. More than any of these things, however, I knew Doug was my best bud because everyone accused us of being secretly in love with each other. Especially his girlfriend.

So when I called him one week after he'd left me those voice messages, I wasn't entirely surprised when I got his voice mail. Ever since I started school I hadn't been so great about calling back, so I knew he was thinking "Fuck that guy." I left a message instructing him to stop being gay and call me, but he never did, and after my third unanswered message it was me who was saying "Fuck that guy." I'd be lying if I said I wasn't taken aback, as Doug had ostensibly lost his mind. "Do I want to be best buds with a guy who's so prone to hysterical overreaction?" I asked myself. A guy who was willing to throw away years of friendship just because I took too long to return a phone call? A guy who could cavalierly walk away from all those epochal moments we shared that defined us individually as humans -- i.e., the time we dueted on the Tom Jones song "Delilah" at a karaoke bar in Japantown? I never called him again; he returned the favor.

I did some things after my breakup with Doug that I'm not so proud of. I smoked cigarettes with a faceless array of new guys, attempting to discuss the recall election at the same time I attempted to rekindle the magic. "Doug would never say anything good about Cruz Bustamante," I'd think to myself as I put out my cigarette and explained I had to get going. So it was with something approaching trepidation that I opened up an e-mail earlier this week from Doug. It had been two-and-a-half months since we last spoke. He admitted he had overreacted, but at the same time he accused me of taking our friendship too lightly. When he said we were both so stubborn we'd probably never talk again, I wondered if this was his way of reaching out.

I used to say that I only fucked women, and that I made sweet, sweet love to men. I'm not sure how that's relevant to anything I've talked about so far -- I just think it's funny. Then again, maybe I mean it to mean that if I write Doug back, I'll be demonstrating a capacity for reconciliation and stick-to-itiveness that I never revealed with any of my past girlfriends. Therefore, if I reply to Doug's e-mail, I'll be doing the mature thing, but I'll also be doing the gay thing.

I'll let you know what happens.