Dang,

I was day ahead. I was sure that today is Saturday.

So my little story I had prepared is for tomorrow.

Have to go to work and think of something to write today.

Yall, have a good day.

It is Friiidayyyy !

I’d just moved off the commune and was living in a house on Vallemar street in Montara, working at a wholesale nursery in Half Moon Bay (planting flats of seedlings all day long, surrounded by fat Latinas) with my skinny red-headed friend, Susan, with whom I did coke from morning until night until morning. At lunch we'd punch the time clock and hop in her orange VW beetle and jam over to the Cypress House to drink beer (and snuffle up more coke in the ladies). The coke was supplied either by her dealer boyfriend, James, or my dealer boyfriend, George (or on good days by both). I brought my provisions in a little carved ivory vial in the shape of a pineapple. “La pina,” I’d say to Susan when she picked me up in the morning and we'd grin, knowing we'd make it though another day of horribly tedious, back bending manual labor. Our blue jeans sported bands of indelible dirt across the thighs from leaning against the muddy wooden nursery tables all day long. The Latinas hated us, whispered about us, called us terrible names in Spanish. Susan spoke some Spanish because her man was from Colombia. She told me that one of the women liked to call us “cabrona,” sort of Spanish for “asshole.”

Susan had two pretty children by James, Victoria and Jonas. Jonas was killed in a playground accident in the second grade. I saw Susan only twice after that. She had switched from coke to valium. Lots of valium. She was so changed by grief I barely recognized her. James had vaporized and she was living with a full-blooded Cherokee named Ron. Ron was scary but she seemed devoted to him. I crept away from her house, her life, our friendship, just not knowing what to say. About a year and a half later I blew into the fishmonger's at Princeton Harbor and there was Susan, looking thin, red-headed, crooked of tooth and freckly as ever. Except that she looked about sixty-five. We spoke for a moment, more strangers than friends. The place smelled like seawater, and all around us were shiny-wide fish eyes, staring at nothing. I have not seen her since.

Here we go, Mrs. Bukowski, back in the saddle and galloping ahead of the pack.

As always, pal, this was simply pryholomshuye (told you I was going to start using the Ukrainian version of stunning, my worn-to-a-pulp daily praise of choice for you.)

From coke-fueled bonhomie to the walking dead in one day. I grieve not just for your friendship but for this zombie-mother, her dealer/lover/co-parent and their surviving child.

I'm still shuddering.

We meet every Thursday for the fried chicken special at the 101 Diner. Well, I have the fried, she has the barbecued, but we're both Southern so we meet for the chicken. Our ramblings cover a wide plain of territory and often run to mid-afternoon.

Through some lucky feat of digestive serendipity, we somehow managed to find each other among all the other half-gnawed, bile-corroded screenwriters dissolving around us in this lower intestinal tract known as Hollywood.

We don't call to confirm. It's every Thursday at 12, rain or shine. The only deviations allowed involve medical emergency, specifically, anesthesia and cutting. Even then we're only talking location change. Whoever's vertical delivers the chicken to whoever's not in the trama ward.

Yesterday she referred to me over a "pass the pepper" as her boyfriend. She has a fiance for all that other stuff, she said, but in the literal sense, she said, I'm the boyfriend. I liked that.

Outside our lunch on Thursdays, we don't e-mail or call. There's no need.

He’d been looking at me strangely for a few minutes, the short, dark guy standing next to me, waiting to pay at the register in the little gift shop near my house. Suddenly he turned and looked straight at me. “I know you,” he said. “I’m Steve’s brother.”

Ah yes, Steve. He started out as my boss, the crazy new creative director of the ad agency where I worked years ago. I was still married, he was living with his nutty girlfriend Vivian, She of the Mouth That Never Stopped Moving.

He’d been a drama major, then an actor, then “sold out” to go into advertising and make enough money to support a wife and kids. But he could still captivate any audience, with his beautiful booming voice and flair for the dramatic. “Mah-ra-LYN!” he’d shout as I came into his office, “The copy. Is. Due. Right. NOW!” Of course the copy wasn’t due until next week, but if I believed that, where was the drama, the tension, the . . . action?

There was always a spark between us; something more than friendship was buried underneath the Kate Hepburn/Spencer Tracy banter. Then I got divorced. His eyes gleamed at me: possibilities? “I need to learn how to be single before I can even think of becoming a couple again,” I told him from the confines of my office, safely behind my desk. Yes, faces really do “fall,” and his dropped about a million miles. But it was too soon.

I got a different job and left the agency, but the friendship kept growing, fueled by jokey emails, late night phone calls and once a sudden, urgent kiss in the darkened parking lot of the restaurant where we’d had dinner.

Then he left Vivian. My eyes gleamed at him: possibilities? “I’ve never felt this way before,” he said. “It makes me nervous.” “That’s okay,” I said, convinced that we were finally on our way. “Let’s just make sure we don’t lose the friendship.”

After a few tentative dates, he ran away. Stopped calling. Didn’t return phone calls. Dropped out of my life. Just like that.

Steve's brother and I stopped in the doorway of the gift shop to say good-bye, shivering in the damp December chill. “Of course I’m going to tell Steve I ran into you,” Alan said. “Any message you’d like me to give him?”

“No, Alan,” I said. “Nothing, thanks.”

@

why don't we have a "break your heart into a million pieces" kudo? who runs this show?

and Queenie, as always, brilliant...