16
After I got up off the floor, I asked Kat to go get us some beer and I went back to work with guys, taking the back seat so that I didn’t have to hear anyone else bitch about it. We were more or less done when Carl came back with Lisette in tow.
As much as I didn’t want to, I felt the need to apologize. I had every right not to though. After all, I seem to have been doing all the hard fucking work with this job, while Carl got to stand around and bitch and try boss us around.
And we still didn’t know about Lisette. All of my fucking intel about her could be written with a thick magic marker on the back of a fucking playing card (I’ll leave it up to you which card I was thinking of).
But no, I couldn’t leave it be. Carl was my friend, one of my closest, along with Gus and Evans, and maybe Wes, and as much as you hated your buddy’s girlfriend, you had to still be respectful to her face.
And I didn’t do that.
“Hey,” I started, “uh, look, I’m… I’m sorry about earlier. This whole episode has everyone stressed, me included, and I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”
She stood there and looked at me. I think she was trying to decide if I was sincere or not, but, again, I had problems reading her. Her face seemed impassive, but there was something behind her eyes that made me think of mischief.
Finally Gus broke the silence.
“You know, Lisette, this is like the third time I’ve ever seen CT apologize for anything in the entire time that I’ve known him. I think you should accept it.”
She stood there for a second longer before she finally said, “I accept your apology.”
“See,” said Gus, “that didn’t hurt, though CT could probably use a beer.”
“Someone say beer?” said Kat coming in the door, Lone Star in hand.
I lit a smoke, my third in a row I think. I was just trying to keep my head down at this point. I wasn’t sure what to do, but this whole thing wasn’t going well.
And I couldn’t look at Carl. I didn’t want to to see what was in his eyes. After all the shit that we had been through together growing up (good and bad, smart and stupid, watergun fights and near death from guns, knives, cars, and just being fucking stupid. After all of it) we were so close that I didn’t want to see the pain that I had caused.
And I’m an asshole. I know it, everyone knows it. After you get done looking up Gus in Webster’s, you could turn to the page with ‘asshole’ on it and see a full half page pic of yours truly flipping you the bird.
Habits like chronic assholiness should make those around you expect certain things. Your clothes, your looks, your mom, everything is a fucking target for ridicule. It’s all fair game, except your girl. That’s like leaning on another guys car, or eating his fries without asking, and Carl had every right to want to kick my ass at this moment.
But I couldn’t face it. I had let him down. Hell, that was why I was in that position in the first place: I couldn’t let Carl get into this kind of trouble alone.
Someone put a beer in my hand. I looked up to see gray eyes.
“You okay,” she whispered.
I just nodded and popped the top on the beer. I put the can to my lips and drank deeply for several swallows. When I looked down, I noticed that everyone else had found places to sit and were drinking and bullshitting. Except Evans of course; he was bitching about people calling him bro.
That was something I didn’t understand about Evans at the time. He wasn’t affectionate, except for the traditional surrogate cock-measurement insults that happen between guys. I mean, he always wiggled and squirmed and fought to get away whenever anyone gave him a hug, even if it was his mom.
On top of that, he only had an emotional spectrum with two colors, which were mildly amused and fucking annoyed. That was it. No anger, no love, no hate, just this bemused drifting through life.
At least that’s what it was at the time. He eventually grew out of it and actually married a really nice woman who fits him like a glove and, out of all of us, ended up the happiest. Go figure.
But at the time he was busy trading insults with the guys, alternately annoyed and amused.
“Want another beer?” Kat asked from beside me.
“Yeah.” That was the first thing I had said since the apology.
The next beer turned into two, the four, and continued to grow exponentially till I was sloppy fucking drunk. Everyone had left after two or three beers, but I kept going, doing enough damage to the inventory to make up for he loss of the other four people.
I wanted to drink myself into oblivion. I was afraid that I had done irreparable damage to our little tribe. Drinking myself blind sounded like a good idea at the time, even if Kat didn’t seem to think so.
But I couldn’t deal with it. I didn’t think that I would be able to function without them. They were as much my family as Remmy was. Maybe more. These guys, these brothers, were there when my life was really rough, when my dad had left and my mom went off the deep end after working two jobs to support us.
To tell you the truth, with the exception of the guys and maybe Wes, I really didn’t have any friends. Sure I new folks and was friendly with people and got invited to parties, etc, but the all seemed more acquaintances than anything else.
You know the what I mean: The “passing by” friends. The ones that you know and hang out with for a couple of years, but shortly thereafter your orbits diverge and you drift apart. You may see them occasionally at the theater or bar, but you don’t count them in your circle any more.
Then there are the friends, the true Friends, the ones that you can count on no matter what. You’ve heard that old gag “Friends help you more, real Friends help you move bodies.” Well these guys were those kind of friends.
But there is another old adage, this one from Oscar Wilde, that goes “Real friends stab you in the front.” That’s what I did to Carl, I verbally drove a dagger made of anger and vitriol into his heart.
And I did it to his face.
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