M4M

by Rick R. Reed

  He smiled.

  What to do next? he wondered. There was a press release he needed to put together for a show at a little storefront theater in Rogers Park that he loved because they were so innovative with a budget that was small enough to be viewed only through a microscope. But hell, most of the copy would be boilerplate, and the actual work would probably take him only a few minutes. It could wait.

  There was a spreadsheet to update: shows seen, contacts listed, stuff like that. Again, mindless work that he could do with his eyes closed.

  He just wasn’t in the mood to work. Luckily for him, he had a job where if he met his deadlines—and he always did, religiously—management left him alone. He also had the most seniority in the firm. He still marveled that he was LA Nicholes’s oldest employee, in every sense of the word. Even Jan was younger by two years, although Ethan thought privately—and unkindly—she looked older.

  What to do with himself?

  Ah, Facebook. The world’s great time waster.

  Ethan clicked on the bookmark at the top of his browser and signed on. He scrolled through the news feed, making sympathetic noises to those who had lost friends, family, or pets. He wished everyone on his list who was having a birthday a happy one, searching for grumpy cat memes to accompany his wishes. He rolled his eyes at all the political memes on both sides. It seemed that this arena would never quiet down, and really, why should it?

  Last, he looked at his own page. As always, he thought it was more than high time to change his profile picture. It was of him and Brian at Millennium Park, in the reflection of the “Bean.” And as he did every time, he shook his head and thought the change could wait one more day. It was the same way he felt about the framed photos on his desk—his head told him it was time to move on, to put those painful reminders out of sight, but his heart always came back with I’m just not ready.

  It was then he noticed the red indicator at the top of his page telling him he had a friend request. “Hmm,” he said, clicking on the icon. It wasn’t often, anymore, that Ethan got friend requests, at least not legitimate ones—there was the occasional “babe” in a bikini barking up the wrong tree. These days most anyone who knew Ethan in real life, either professionally or personally, had already friended him. Plus, after a while, the excitement of making new friends on Facebook wore off. No matter how much you commented, liked, loved, made sad or angry faces at each other’s posts, Facebook friendship could never be a substitute for one in real life.

  And there it was—his latest friend request. A guy named Ben Allread “wanted to be his friend.” How nice. Really, how terribly sweet. A stranger wanted to reach out and wrap his loving arms around Ethan in friendship. Whoa! Watch the sarcasm there, buddy! Where did that come from?

  Ethan allowed himself to drink in the guy. He was cute; Ethan couldn’t deny that, even in his tragic widower state. He had sort of a sexy nerd thing going on, with dishwater-blond hair, spiky, a stubbly beard, and a pair of round tortoiseshell glasses that looked straight off the shelves of Warby Parker.

  The name sounded familiar, but Ethan couldn’t immediately place it. He opened the guy’s page. He chastised himself internally for hoping for a shirtless pic. Such thoughts were simply not appropriate for a man of his years, and certainly not for his situation.

  And there was Ben Allread, all laid out for him. His timeline was crowded with posts from friends—there were comfort food recipes, silly memes, and the occasional invitation from an RL—that’s real life for those of you living under a rock—friend, asking him if he was going to services this Wednesday or if he wanted to meet up for coffee. There were also several inspirational memes revolving around gratitude, living in the present moment, interconnectedness, and stuff like that, posted both by Mr. Allread and his friends.

  Ben Allread must have a touch of the metaphysical or spiritual about him, which was not necessarily a bad thing.

  Ben’s cover shot was of the breakwater at Kathy Osterman Beach, aka the gay beach, up at Hollywood and Sheridan. Someone had painted the tower at the end of the breakwater in rainbow colors. It was kind of a pretty photo, with a turbulent blue-gray lake behind contrasting the hyperreal colors of the rainbow in the foreground. Ethan suspected someone was very familiar with using color-boosting filters on his smartphone. Still, the image had a certain serenity to it, even with the whitecaps and threatening clouds.

  He scrolled through the guy’s photos, the feeling this person was familiar becoming more and more pronounced, until it became a terrible nagging, akin to watching a movie or something on TV when you just know you know one of the actors but can’t quite place him or her.

  “Who are you?” Ethan asked aloud.

  “What?” Jan Most called over the partition separating them.

  “Nothing,” Ethan called back and heard Jan muttering under her breath, something about working in a loony bin.

  It wasn’t until he came to one photo, posted with the hashtag #TBT—or throwback Thursday, for those of you living under a rock—that all the pieces came together in a most horrible way.

  At first Ethan laughed, or tittered, almost uncontrollably. This was a face he thought he’d never see again. Ah, thank you, Facebook, for making unwanted reunions with those in our past so common and so damned easy.

  He stared hard at the photo of not a bearded, kind of sexy nerd in glasses, but of a waifish young man with fine blond hair, grinning out at the camera with an insouciant smile. Ethan shook his head.

  “Bubbles!” he cried.

  “What?” Jan Most asked.

  “Nothing.” Ethan moved closer to the screen and the image of his tormentor back in his early days at LA Nicholes, the receptionist who always seemed to look at Ethan with disdain or, worse, amusement. He touched the button nose on the screen. “Bubbles. What in the hell do you want with me? Especially after all these years? We were never friends in real life, so why Facebook? Why now?”

  He could feel someone staring at him, as surely as if there was a laser pointed at the back of his head and burning a hole directly into his brain. He swirled around in his office chair.

  Jan was leaning against the top of the partition, a smirk on her face. “You really are losing it.”

  “Oh, tell me something I don’t know,” Ethan said sadly.

  With a rush of silk from her skirt, she hurried around the partition and stooped down beside him. “Who is that? He looks like, uh, what’s his name? The one in the Home Alone movies?”

  “Macaulay Culkin?” Ethan looked at her.

  “Yeah. That’s the one, except all grown up and kind of prettified, if that’s even possible.”

  Ethan stared at Bubbles’s pic, thinking it must have been taken around the time he worked alongside Ethan, just over the partition in front of him. He remembered Bubbles’s passion for computer solitaire and gossiping with just about anyone in the office except for Ethan. Ethan always thought the young man didn’t deem him worthy of the poison tidbits he liked to spread about those in Chicago’s theatrical community, and even here in the office.

  “He was a hateful little queen,” Ethan blurted out. He lifted a hand to his mouth, almost as though he could push back the words he had so thoughtlessly and unkindly uttered. Whether it was true or not, Ethan had always tried to live by Michelle Obama’s motto to “go high.”

  Jan snorted.

  “He used to work here.”

  “Oh, I know. I came on board when he left. Now that I’m seeing this, I remember passing him when I came in for my first interview. He was a snarky little thing.” She smiled and then pulled up Ethan’s guest chair.

  “But why are you looking at his Facebook page?”

  “He sent me a friend request.”

  Jan made a disgusted sound. “That’s why I have no time for that site. I was on it once upon a time, until all these people I never liked began tracking me down, wanting to be ‘friends’ when they never gave me the time of day in real life. The last straw was this asshole I dat
ed once or twice and who”—Jan leaned close to whisper—“gave me crabs, wanted to be my friend!” She snorted. Ethan failed to see the humor.

  “TMI, Jan, TMI.”

  “Sorry.” She glanced back at the page. Then she leaned over to minimize the #TBT pic and bring up some of the other, more recent, photographs. “Well, at least on the surface, he seems to have matured a bit. He actually turned out kind of cute.” She sighed. “He’s one of those people I hate.”

  “And which group would that be?” Jan was not known for her love of humanity. She would say she was “discriminating” or “choosy,” but the fact was, Ethan was one of the few people she actually spent any time with. She’d told him once she preferred the company of her two cats, Nick and Nora, to people. She wasn’t kidding. He never knew whether he should be flattered by her friendship or questioning what was wrong with him.

  She punched him in the arm. “I love people!” she said and laughed.

  “But which people would he be? You know, that you hate?”

  Jan sighed dramatically. “The ones who actually get better looking as they age. This fella, for example, looks a lot more approachable, not to mention manly, these days. Is that a non-PC thing to say?”

  “Yes,” Ethan replied. “But it is true.” He regarded the photo she’d brought up of Ben Allread on Navy Pier with the famous Ferris wheel in the background. “He hardly even looks like the same person.”

  They stared at the pic for a while before noticing the caption—at Chicago Shakespeare Theater for the opening of Twelfth Night. “God! We were at that same opening,” he said to Jan. “We might have crossed each other’s paths.” He shrugged. “Guess he’s still into theater.”

  “What are you gonna do?” Jan asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you gonna accept his friend request?”

  “Of course not!” Ethan said, a tad bit too quickly and too emphatically. He clicked out of Facebook and back into Microsoft Word, where he could work on a press release. There was still an hour until they’d leave for lunch. In that time, Ethan sadly realized, he could easily cross off every item on his to-do list.

  As Jan went back to her own desk, he wondered, really, what he would do with the request. The obvious answer was to delete and maybe, for good measure, “mark as Spam.” And he wondered why he was wondering….

  He tried to take his mind off Bubbles—or Ben, as he supposed he should now be calling him—by immersing himself in his work. He polished off a press release and did several different posts for several different theater companies via social media, which brought him back to his own Facebook page.

  Even though he thought it wise to resist, he brought up Ben’s Facebook page once again. He stared at it, thinking that the young man he’d once known had vanished. At least that was the image he projected on his page. If there weren’t so many similarities, right down to listing LA Nicholes as a former employer, Ethan would have been convinced this wasn’t the same Benjamin Allread who had once graced this very workplace.

  If Ethan were asked to guess what Bubbles’s Facebook page looked like, he probably would have unkindly thought there’d be lots of campy humor, most of it mean-spirited, maybe some pictures of classic bitches like Joan Crawford and Barbra Stanwyck. Gay pride stuff everywhere—not that such posting was a bad thing, of course; it was just that some people, in Ethan’s opinion, went overboard with it. Pics of nearly naked men. Of himself, Bubbles would post very flattering selfies, run through a filter to “beautify” his face and to smooth out any lines.

  But Ethan would have been making assumptions and drawing conclusions he had no right to draw. After all, he hadn’t seen the kid—man—in eight years. A lot could happen in that time frame, Ethan thought, considering his own life as an example.

  He’d once been a happy man, joined with another happy man in a kind of bliss. Oh sure, he and Brian had had their ups and downs, just like any other couple, but at the core of their relationship were three words he could always put his faith in—love, home, and family.

  He’d thought they’d be together forever. And in a way, they had been—at least for Brian. Forever, unfortunately, had proved to be a very short time indeed to Ethan.

  Who was Ethan now? A shell? A man who simply went through the motions of living?

  He shook his head. He didn’t want to consider—once again—the darkness at his core, darkness he wondered if he would ever manage to get out from under. Or if he even wanted to….

  He looked more closely at Ben Allread’s page and learned he’d become something that very much surprised Ethan. Wait. Surprised was a mighty weak word for what Ethan felt as he perused Ben’s “About” section. Stunned might be better. Shocked? Gobsmacked? Ethan smiled. He liked that last one, with its Brit overtones.

  But under occupation, Ben said he was a minister on the Far North Side, at a church that called itself One Life.

  Benjamin Allread? A minister?

  Ethan actually guffawed and then stuffed a fist in his mouth to suppress it. Minister? The Reverend… Bubbles? It had to be a joke. If ever there was a person ill-suited for the clergy, it was Bubbles.

  But then, Bubbles wasn’t Bubbles anymore, was he? He was Ben. He looked very different, and perhaps he was very different. Ethan realized he had no idea what had transpired in the years since Bubbles left LA Nicholes. A thought also popped up in his head, almost unbidden. You never really knew him, Ethan. Not really. You judged and made up your mind about him based on Ben’s outward appearance. They were reasonable assumptions, for sure, but still, you never took any time at all to get behind the person with the giggly laugh and the cutting sarcasm. Maybe, just maybe, those things were defenses.

  Ethan shrugged. Armchair analysis of one of his fellow human beings was not his forte. Hell, he had a hard time analyzing his own self, let alone anyone else.

  He clicked on the hyperlink for One Life Church and gave a cursory glance at their website. He saw that it was a “New Thought” church, whatever that was, inspired by the teachings of one Ernest Holmes, whoever he was. “Celebration” services were held every Sunday at 10:00 a.m. at One Life’s center, the basement of an elementary school on the west side of the neighborhood. All were welcome. The center was open and affirming, which Ethan took to mean gay.

  “No,” Ethan whispered to himself. “There’s no way someone could change that much.”

  “You ready?” Jan, behind him, caused Ethan to jump. He quickly clicked out of the website, almost as though he were looking at bareback porn, and offered Jan what he knew was a sheepish grin.

  Her eyebrows came together a bit as she looked toward his monitor, which now showed his Microsoft Outlook home screen. “I know better than to ask,” she said, chuckling.

  “I’m ready.” Ethan stood. “I’m starving.”

  THAT NIGHT, home alone with a bellyful of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia and Cat on his lap, partially blocking his laptop screen, Ethan returned to the wilds of Facebook. Why couldn’t he get Ben Allread out of his head? He knew he should simply delete the friend request and be done with it, but something, and he couldn’t really put a name to that particular something, prevented him from doing so.

  How had Ben found him, anyway? Had he searched? Had Ben thought of Ethan all these years apart? Ethan snickered at the notion. Impossible!

  Ethan thought of how Facebook constantly offered to link him up with people “he might know” and decided that could have easily happened to Ben. After all, they shared a workplace, and that fact alone would be enough for social media algorithms to come up with a match, right? Just like schools, hometowns, and so on.

  In the end, what difference did it make? He had a small decision in front of him, one that certainly shouldn’t be causing as much angst as it was.

  He brought up the friend request. Without allowing himself to hesitate, he clicked on Confirm. He sat back, wondering what he’d just done. He felt like maybe he’d opened Pandora’s box or let a geni
e out of a bottle. An evil genie….

  He felt that single click on that innocent-appearing blue box could be life changing. And if things ran true to form for Ethan, not in a good way.

  Or not.

  Many of the friend requests Ethan accepted had the same end result—nothing happened. He’d never hear from the person, leaving Ethan to wonder why they’d bothered sending a request in the first place. It was the same on LinkedIn, where he had hundreds of “connections” and almost none of them led anywhere. Almost? Ha! All.

  This would most likely be no different. Real life and common sense told him what probably happened was Ethan’s face popped up in Ben’s feed, and amused, Ben clicked on the Add Friend button, probably smirking as he did it. Ben had always looked at Ethan with a grin flickering about his lips, as if Ethan’s very presence was somehow comical.

  He wished he could take back his friend confirmation. He knew he could just as quickly unfriend Ben, but a nagging—and quite absurd—sense of decorum prevented him. He wondered if Ben would somehow see the friend/unfriend maneuver and then hold it against him. Or Ben’s feelings might be hurt. Ethan couldn’t allow that, in spite of his history with Ben/Bubbles. It just wasn’t in his nature.

  What was in his nature was to send his new friend a message. He brought up the box to compose something and wrote:

  Imagine my surprise, seeing you again after all these years! What on earth possessed you to reach out to me, of all people? LOL. You never seemed to like me much when we knew each other in real life—

  Ethan paused. He then backspaced, deleting the last sentence. It was too harsh, even if the sentiment was real and, in all likelihood, justified.

  In the end, he backspaced over the whole message and clicked out of the page. When his browser asked him if he was sure he wanted to leave the page, he snapped at it, “Yes!” He clicked on the Leave Page box and slammed his laptop shut so hard it caused poor Cat to meow in alarm and leap from his lap.