False Friendship

It had been years since I’d had a circle of friends. Friends slip away in my experience. My friends throughout high school had moved away to wherever life had taken them. A string of dedicated bachelors replaced them, men who had slipped into the trap of self-inflicted loneliness, their lives devoted to work and their siblings’ families. I had no desire to become one of them, so I replaced them with others more suitable to my age and interests. Long story short, I found myself peripheral. Not really fully completely apart of their circle of friends. They got together. I was met at wherever.

Maybe that was my fault, or partly my fault. I’m an odd sort. I straddle the line between introvert and extrovert. I crave company. But on my terms. I require substantial downtime, usually during the workweek, and in that time, I rarely saw anyone outside my family. That’s just how it worked out. I worked shiftwork. They did not. And I worked underground. They did not. Then they too slipped away. They married and had kids and moved away. Some craved younger company. I suppose I grew stale after ten years of acquaintance.

Then I too married. And those friendships I had drifted away further. Some of them divorced and expected me to play until all hours with them now that they were “free,” but I begged off, citing my new circumstances. I was married now, after all. And they weren’t. They wanted to meet women. New unmarried women were just a temptation for me. So, those divorced friends slipped away, too.
I was on the lookout for new friends for years and never found them. I became a solitary soul outside my marriage. But I still went out. Habit, and all that. But without friends, it was just drinking. The glow and lustre of the night had paled without companionship.

Then I met someone at work, close in age and, as it seemed at the time, of similar interests. Not a perfect fit, but no one is. But I believed we had some sort of report, so I asked if he’d like to join me for a beer one Friday evening. His wife was out of town on business. He was home alone. I thought he might like to get out of the house for a change.

He agreed and met me at the bar, Mickey Jay’s (Big House). There was a “quiet” band on stage. A two piece acoustic electric. Quiet by all performing standards. He arrived just before the band went on stage for their second set, he stayed for just one beer, and he left minutes before the band finished their second set, when he could have had a half hour of all the quiet he could stand. But before he left, he went into a fit about how he couldn’t hear and that pubs ought to be quiet so people could talk. He went on about how pubs ought to be silent whispery affairs, much as he was accustomed to in England, where he’d grown up (contrary to Ben Thompson who loved loud, rowdy bars and live music, and he grew up in England, too, so go figure). Personally, I don’t think he liked music that much. He was never attracted to live music, never listened to music at his desk, and didn’t have a varied collection, preferring to only listen to the music that was popular when he was a teen. When he did come out to see live music with me and Bev and his wife, he never tapped his toes, never whooped it up, never applauded or raised his hands in elation. He was a statue, throughout. Getting back, he had his fit and left. I was taken aback by that, a bit.

My “friend” didn’t like to go out, it turned out. He didn’t like going out to restaurants, either. He did like eating a greasy spoons that cost $5 a plate. Value, he called it. He preferred going to someone’s house, or better yet, having people in for dinner. He was generous with the wine, I’ll say that about him. There was much talk, but sooner or later, he’d had more than enough and the TV was turned on and channel surfing began. Conversation lagged.

What he did like was conspiracies. He loved them. He never stopped taking about them, about how the government was pulling the wool over our eyes, how they were watching us, analysing our emails and browser histories, tapping our phone lines. How GMOs were poisoning us. He also believed in ghosts, telling me on more than one occasion how his entire family had been haunted in their dreams by the same ghost one night; how it had run through each of their dreams in succession, terrifying them.
I listened to each of these stories in turn, and said that I didn’t believe in any of those sort of things. I’d never seen or felt a ghost, I said. And I thought governments had a hard time paving the roads, so I doubted they could control weather or keep tabs on us all, or keep it a secret, if they were, for that matter. Governments are just people, after all. You’d think he’d have taken the hint; but no, the conspiracies grew wilder by the year, if not the month.

I caught his wife rolling her eyes as these subjects came up, but she never shut the discussions down. Neither could I. Each denial of whatever he was pontificating about turned into a challenge to his beliefs.

He didn’t just rattle on about those odd beliefs. He bitched about his family to me. In private. He complained about his wife’s spending habits. He complained about their debts. He complained about his daughter and his son and their choice of education. He complained about how they ganged up on him. I didn’t want to talk about his personal problems, but he began asking me for advice. I didn’t want to get involved. Bev and I were likely to have dinner with them in a couple days and I didn’t want to have all that baggage about them in my thoughts when I saw them. It colours a person’s perspective, whether you want it to or not. And I’d have to keep his secrets, then.

Before I knew it, he was treating me to tales about how the U.S. government had been behind 9/11. I asked him to stop. He began sending me links to websites that when researched turned out to be conspiracy minded rags that never tabled any proof other than references to other conspiracy websites.
When I tried to suggest what I thought were reasonable explanations to the conspiracies he spoke on, or how governments and political parties might not be trying to enslave us, he began telling me that I was brainwashed by mainstream media.

He turned on me, in time. He began to “back check” anything I said on Wikipedia, unwilling to believe anything I said. That was tantamount to calling me a liar every time I spoke. He said that I spoke in “broad, sweeping statements.” That I lumped people and things together. It was like being picked at every day. It wore on me. It wore me down. It sapped my self-esteem. Then he began to ridicule those things he knew I liked. He marginalized what I had done, the travel, the music lessons, he went as far as to suggest that he and I should both write a short story or short screen play and have HIS family judge our efforts to see which was better. Like they weren't biased against me by then, because even his children had begun to talk down to me. It was like he was jealous. It was like he needed to break me to best me, no matter the cost.

Why didn’t I walk away? Because I thought he was my friend. There were statements of admiration at first. What seemed earnest complements. Then there were a few widely spaced backhand compliments. They became less widely spaced. Before long, I felt a knot in my stomach. Then there were shunnings. Somehow, I felt rejected. I tried to make things right, but after four years of courting a “friend’s” friendship, and failing, I’d had enough. I walked away. He kept at me to join him for lunch at work and I caved. I joined him. We made our peace, of a sort. Then he would lash out again and there were more shunnings.

We endured a car pool for a short time, but it was very short lived. He argued incessantly. When I finally lashed out after another barrage of insane conspiracy statements about GMO poisonings, the Queen’s assassination plots, the US surveillance of every person on the planet, the US shooting down passenger flights, I told him to “Shut the fuck up. I didn’t want to hear about it anymore.”
He got a speeding ticket on the way home. Somehow it was my fault.

As he pulled into my driveway, he beat me to the punch. He told me that, “It wasn’t fun, anymore,” and that he thought we shouldn’t travel together anymore. He wouldn’t look me in the eye or speak to me anymore at work, either. He would change direction when he saw me in the hall.

Soon after, he couldn’t get away from me. We bumped into one another at a corner. He turned and stared at a spot on the wall as I passed.

I looked straight at him. My gaze was withering. “Coward,” I said.

He scuttled away.
This is the most important thing I can ever tell you: Take a hard look at the people in your life. If they’re toxic. Get rid of them. As fast as you can. They want to destroy you.