What they did on Fridays was
never a waste of time. Most adults would disagree with them on that,
but they didn't care about the opinions of adults. They were young,
they were flippant, and they all had parents willing to waste
hundreds of dollars on movie tickets and popcorn. Stupid parents.
Sometimes the kids actually used their parents’ money as intended.
But not always. JT and Krista were always buying condoms and learning
how their bodies worked between the dumpsters behind the theater they
all felt was their home away from home. One Friday Krista bent over
to tie her shoe and banana flavored lubrication fell out of her shirt
pocket and onto the oddly styled carpet of Century 25. The carpet
that looked like Boy George had farted gay powder on the modern idea
of what the 80s was. For a moment the friends all looked at each
other, waiting for a cue. Dick gave them what they wanted by letting
out a vociferous chortle, and within moments the friends were in
various contorted positions reminiscent of Cirque du Soleil
performers, attempting not to laugh out moist, acidic chunks of their
In-N-Out burgers. They always had In-N-Out burgers before movies. The
restaurant was always way too crowded with baggy jeans and hoop
earrings on Friday nights to eat there after. When the regular kids
poured in after somehow having enjoyed their weekly mindless action
flick the restaurant looked like a magnified image of boiling water
molecules. It seemed a little uncool to be eating hamburgers and
french fries before sunset, but Dick and his friends didn't care too
much. They were the kind of kids who drank milkshakes before eating
as opposed to after. I mean, what if the apocalypse came before their
burgers did, right? Anyway, for a full year Krista's banana lube
became the group's favorite inside joke. At least I think it was a
year, but time and the things that fill it never really are that cut
and dry. It's a smeary, oozy concept, and the joke never really
died, it just kind of became less commonly brought up. One day, or
maybe on several days, it just kind of stopped being their main
thing. That didn't mean that years later after Dick was stabbed to
death in a San Francisco Mission district Burger King and Molly was
hit with stage 4 lung cancer the joke lost its power. It never really
did. Any one of them could bring it up whenever they wanted to and
unleash the hilarity anew. It was good every time, but never quite as
good as it was in the moment it happened. As the first, and best
ever, round of laughter died down, everybody pretended not to know
why Krista would need banana flavored lube, hounding her with their
playful ignorance. Jonathan, as expected joked, “JT’s banana
ain’t banana enough for ya, eh?” It wasn’t a particularly
clever joke, but the way Jonathan spoke it warranted another round of
gut-busting. He had a way about him, as if every second of his life
was a stand-up comedy routine. A routine he was performing for a
room of very important people. There was an extreme sense of
self-consciousness that appeared to ebb and flow beneath his levity,
but if the rest of the group perceived it, they never made it known.
He was mirth. He was their mirth. He always seemed to be illuminated
by imaginary footlights, egged on by the laughter of his imaginary
important people. When his friends laughed, it was as if they were
laughing too. All of the laughter came together to something more
than the sum of its parts, and it gave Jonathan a vitality unlike
anything he'd ever known. His timing was always impeccable, his
comments always fearless. It was a wonder he didn’t have a
girlfriend. He probably wouldn’t have had time for one anyway,
because he was always too busy getting high.
They all were, because Molly’s
mother grew a shit ton of weed. Her mother was a flower child in
every sense of the word. She had actually owned a smokeshop on
Hashbury before leaving the concrete congestion of the city for the
redwood congestion of Humboldt. There was a beauty in the way she
cared for her bud unlike anything the friends had ever seen before,
and Molly was quite the hashish connoisseur. Purple Dragon, Creeping
Lotus, Firefly Fiesta, Tony Danza Bonanza, you name it she smoked it.
Every weekend she’d stay with her mother and load up on leafy
greens, every Monday she’d head back to Union City, and every
Friday the friends play-acted like it was 4/20 and they were all
James Franco. The theater security guard, Terrell, constantly smelled
it on them and saw it in the cracks of their eyes, but he was far too
old and far too drowsy on Nyquil to care. He was a retired
construction worker, and he only worked theater security to help fund
the co-payments on his high cholesterol medication. He wasn't
completely indifferent to the actions carried out within his domain,
but the kids were fairly well behaved and that was fine. Molly
actually ran a super successful blog on pot, educating readers about
the cutting-edge lecherous leaf hitting the market, reviewing every
strain for her rasta far-out readers. Only Tony Danza Bonanza had
gotten five out of five leafs in the past year, as it gave users an
incredibly acute, pervasive euphoria with virtually no sluggishness.
She didn't use her real name on the blog, so she was never recognized
in real life for her efforts, but the virtual renown she had accrued
was already something more than awesome. Molly made a surprisingly
immodest living from sponsorships, so she was constantly treating
Dick to nice things. They weren’t anything more than friends, but
Dick was kind of their unspoken leader, so she wanted to please him.
He always accepted the gifts, but he never gave Molly anything in
return—not even his namesake, that thing she so desperately
desired. What I'm trying to say is that she wanted his dick.
Evan was always jealous of Dick,
because he had Molly wrapped around his finger, and that was all. The
fact that he didn’t want Molly made no difference to Evan, because
Evan was Molly-obsessed. He would create characters that looked like
Molly in the various role-playing video games that consumed his time,
strip them to their underwear, and touch himself until the muscles in
his left arm collapsed uselessly by his side. His favorite game to
do that in was Skyrim, because he could make sexy dark elf Molly or
sexy Orc Molly, and that got him going like nothing else on earth
could—except perhaps real Molly in a dark elf or orc costume, but
he was five years and $10,264 away from seeing that fantasy
actualize. It wasn't cheap dating a girl who always had to be covered
in Hollister clothing and China Glaze nail polish. There were
certainly more expensive girls around, but the best things in Evan's
life didn't come free. Before Molly and he became a thing, every
night but Friday night was a “video game” night for Evan. Video
games were everything to him, because he never felt quite like he was
part of the group. He was kind of just a guy who had started hanging
out with them, not talking much to anyone. He didn't purposefully
exclude himself, he just never knew what to say to them. He joined
them on Fridays simply because Molly was there, and he got to smoke
enough complimentary weed to try to free himself from the
ever-present fear that Molly would never love him. It only ever
heightened it. That's irony right?
The thing about those Fridays is
that it gave them all a purpose. They didn’t realize it themselves,
but they were purposeless every other day of the week. Not a single
one of them had anything to stand for other than each other—other
than those Friday nights. JT’s parents often hit him, sometimes
with cause and other times without it. He never knew what to do. He
wasn't aware of the resources available to kids like him, so he
didn't know where to find professional help. On Friday night, he got
the only help he knew about, and it resided somewhere deep inside of
Krista. Some Fridays he would find more help than others, but he was
always better off having tried. JT dreaded the day Krista would
become fat, because she loved to eat, and her metabolism wouldn’t
be roaring forever. And she wanted to go into porn. What a silly
girl. JT was going to make sure to get a real job. Maybe he'd become
an engineer or an attorney. Perhaps a doctor. Those were the only
three things worth becoming. At least, that's all anybody ever talked
about becoming . He felt confident that his 3.0 GPA would get him
into a great school like Stanford or something, even though several
of his classmates had derided him for thinking so. “Unrealistic”
they called him. Whatever. He would figure it all out later and
things would just work out. They had to. He wasn't going to worry
about it yet. For now he had a skinny girlfriend and the sex was
good. It was the only sex he’d ever known. JT helped Krista much in
the same way. It was a mutual symbiosis, and they were always
sucking.
Krista was a fiery,
church-going, gun-owning, LGBT supporting, burgeoning young woman.
People tried to define her constantly, usually as a slut. She
dismissed those short-sighted assessments without so much as a hair
flip. She was young, but she knew what she wanted out of life. In
those days, all she really wanted was sex. She despised the idea that
girls lost something by sleeping with boys, while boys were
constantly lauded for their promiscuity. She felt a person should
either find all promiscuity repulsive or reward it all, regardless of
what private parts were on what end of the transactions. If you're
going to be a prude at least be consistent about it. She could tell
that JT was a bit taken aback by her future ambitions, but it was
all she wanted to do. She didn't see any reason to pretend to want
things she didn't want because there was nobody she aimed to please
more than herself. She knew she and JT wouldn't last, because she
knew JT couldn't stand to be married to a woman who made her living
being filmed sleeping with men. He was too gentle for that; he was
her little turtle dove. He was more attached to her than she was to
him, and she knew he would hurt when the time to part ways finally
came, but she didn't care. She liked the times they had behind the
theater too much to give him up any sooner than she had to. JT had
gotten much better since the first time. He'd learned her hills and
valleys, and a primal instinct would take over every time and
navigate the terrain that was her with extraordinary skill. She
figured she technically could sleep around. She could let JT go and
spare him from the greater pain that would build as their
relationship continued. She could break it off and sleep around to
fulfill her needs, but she didn't want to waste any time training the
unpracticed virgins that greased up Rock Hills High with their oily
faces. There were some talented, handsome seniors who she probably
could have snagged for a few nights but, truth be told, she kind of
did like JT. At least a little bit. He was a sweet guy. Sweet enough
for her to play around a bit in the novelty of monogamy in what would
be the only serious relationship she'd ever have.
Jonathan prided himself in his
ability to make people laugh. He’d lost his father to an obedient
Korean soldier when he was eight, so, at sixteen, he’d had enough
seriousness for a lifetime. He was always trying to shy away from
that history with jokes. Sometimes they were contrived and landed
flat on their asses, but more often than not people laughed until
they farted. That's something most people did against their will.
Jonathan was always dressed so vibrantly—reds, greens, yellows,
purples. He was trying, on a very subtle level, to emulate the
appearance of clowns and the medieval jesters that preceded them. He
wasn't aware of this attempted emulation, but he wasn't oblivious to
it either. It resided in the area of his consciousness that's saved
for things we don't want to know we know. That was the best place for
it. It left room for the earnest frivolity to dance around, striving
for lightness in a place where intense gravity used to keep
everything grounded and immobile. He was close to everybody in the
group, but they all knew he and Dick were the Alpha and the Omega.
They'd been acquaintances ever since Jonathan had spilled his apple
sauce on Dick in the second grade and the resulting bout of
fisticuffs led to them spending a lunch next to each other in the red
zone. The purple from around around Jonathan's left eye faded as
their friendship took flight. Jonathan was really the only person who
could make Dick laugh, and Dick really needed it today.
Dick was a wrestler, and he'd
just been annihilated at nationals. He figured himself a young man of
exceptional talent after breezing through the local boys and then
definitively taking out everyone at regionals, albeit with a bit more
effort. He was not at all prepared for what hit him in Connecticut.
All he got was one match, a match during which his body couldn't get
a word in edge wise. He was being suplexed, power-bombed, and pinned
in a maelstrom of spandex and sweat. A lifeless doll would've fared
no worse than Dick in those moments. In seven minutes that felt like
a decade of domination, Dick's dreams of national glory were dashed
harder than a double last name. He was in a light depression that
might've gained weight if not for Krista's banana lube. If not for
Molly's Tony Danza Bonanza. Most of all, if not for Jonathan's stupid
jokes that shouldn't have been funny but for some reason were. For
some reason they were insanely funny. And for that Dick was grateful.
After the friends had ingested a
ridiculous amount of confectionery crap and popcorn covered in
chemical substitutions for butter, after they had watched a movie
that was far less important than the dynamics they shared, after the
sun had set and the In-N-Out was full of baggy t-shirts and hoop
earrings, the friends began to part. JT and Krista went “off to
the bus stop,” which really did mean off to the bus stop, but not
before they left one more ultra thin on the floor behind the theater.
Molly began the twenty minute walk to her father's nearby apartment,
followed like a puppy by Evan, who was pitifully attempting to strike
up a conversation. It was an attempt that would one day, much to his
surprise, actually get him somewhere with Molly. But that day was not
today. Eventually only Jonathan and Dick remained sitting in front of
the theater, playfully bantering about girls and actors and food.
Jonathan's mother pulled up in her 1987 Chrysler Plymouth in the
mundane color of eggplant with bird turd sprinkles.
“Til next time , Jonathan, my
man!”
“We'll switch it up, D! Keep
it fresh.”
As Dick watched the dull turd
stains disappear around the corner of Satomi Sushi, he thought to
himself, “No we won't.” He knew they would be doing the same
thing every Friday for as long as they could. And he was alright with
that. Actually, he didn't think he could handle anything else. At the
very least, he wouldn't have liked it very much.
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