The Meanest Sumbitch

Today I have been thinking about a friend I used to have but no longer have. I don't know why she is on my mind today, as I haven't seen or heard from her for easily ten years. When I think about her today, I remember how much it was I used to love her, and I also wonder why it was I loved her so much.

We didn't have a falling out or a Big Fight or anything like that. We just drifted apart naturally. She was one of the first school friends I had, and we remained so until some time after graduating high school, but maybe not long after that. What I remember about her is mostly that her dad was the meanest sumbitch I had ever met. Even by today's standards, that guy was a giant asshole. And that is what she got. He drove a delivery truck full of potato chips and then came home and drank about 16 cans of Milwaukee's Best. During the time it took him to drink that many beers, he would set about destroying his family while languishing in the blue glow of the television. He would snipe at his son and call him a gimp and a wimp and a fag. He would make sure that my friend knew just how stupid and worthless and lazy she was, like clockwork, every single day. No one apologized for him or scuttled me away, so I was an observer of this countless times. It made me uncomfortable, of course, but I think I was so uncomfortable anyways that this behavior struck me as merely hateful and that was about it.
Since I was a friend to my friend, we hated him right back together. And so on.

When we got to be in highschool, she just stopped attending school. First it was on Mondays that she did this, but then it could be any day. No one in her family seemed to care that she had stopped going to school; at least there were no apparent consequences at home for her. One time we found some real honest-to-goodness punk rockers in our small town. They were on the lam, ostensibly from some bad punk rock shit (we later learned they were not in fact real punk rockers but punk kids from the suburbs manufacturing drama for themselves). My friend ended up on a Greyhound bus to Colorado with a sawed off shotgun lifted from the arsenal of the Sumbitch and these punk rockers. They were apprehended by the law in Colorado Springs and there was media coverage and I was so sick with worry I didn't sleep for many days. Sometime after that she tried to kill herself with some pills, but she went about that half-ass like she did most things.

The last time I saw her I think we had lunch together in the town we both came from; I was visiting, and she was staying. She told me that she had tried again to kill herself, and that she planned to marry a gay guy for tax purposes or some such thing. I don't remember much about anything she said to me that day, but I remember that she seemed so stuck, and so sad, and so alone. I felt uncomfortable about it all, but I didn't know enough to realize that I was dirty with the love of my parents, who made sure that I had some kind of a chance at a life.

I am sitting on an overstuffed couch in a city far away from there. Outside my house there are plants I could not have imagined back then: passionflowers, butterfly bushes, gingko trees. And on a clear day you can see Mount St. Helen's from my kitchen table. I hope she got somewhere else. I hope she found a place where she isn't stupid and lazy and worthless, and where she can see something outside her window, something she never could have imagined.