Turds in the Punch Bowl (A Story of No Ordinary Friendship)

by Jen Ashton

  Diamond had only taken one step on stage before she recognized her ex-husband waiting for her. I think it threw her focus off. Despite stripping for two years already, she was still a novice on the pole and apparently had to concentrate real hard to work it. To add, it seemed it took ample focus to also walk in her platform heels, because upon her third step on stage, she ate it. There went Diamond, tumbling down in what sounded like a bone-shattering fall. Her small ankles didn’t hold up well after all. The crowd cheered and she stumbled to her knees before gaining her balance again. Poor Jules, she was so embarrassed.

  “Good one!” Joe called out above the claps.

  “Joe,” I kicked him under the stage, “be nice.” I only half meant it. I knew she was a bitch, but the sight of her ex-husband and ex best friend sitting together at the front of her stage while she was required to disrobe and try to be sexy probably wasn’t the easiest task, even without his heckling.

  “Nice? Are you fucking kidding me?” Joe said loudly. “Nice is having your wife leave you for the bouncer at her strip club so you can finally have your freedom! Now that’s nice!” He sounded like he’d been drinking, but I knew from our earlier experience that lemonade was the only liquid in his system. I realized I would never win this conversation so I let him continue.

  “Diamond, hey Diamond!” Joe called. “I’ve got your dollars!”

  Jules ignored him for a moment, but then crawled over. She must have needed the money to pay her house fees.

  “Hi, Joe,” she greeted him, dreadfully.

  “Shut up and dance!” he hollered, stuffing a few bills in her bikini bottom.

  She left in a hurry and made her way to the pole. It didn’t take long for her concentration to elude her again. She climbed all the way to the top of the pole, swung upside down and began her decent, which I assume was supposed to end with some sort of sexy splits. Instead, she lost her grip about half way down and landed on her head and shoulders with a louder thud than her first fall. This time I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Oh my God!” I covered my smile with one hand and pointed with the other.

  “Oh shit!” Joe laughed, followed by similar comments from the crowd.

  It took me awhile to compose myself and wipe the tears from my eyes. Part of me felt sorry for her, but the other half just wondered how the hell Joe ever fucked her. Hell, he even married her! I hoped she had some redeeming qualities that I still, even after six years of knowing her, had somehow missed. Joe couldn’t stop laughing either.

  By the time I could sit up straight again after being doubled over for ten minutes, Diamond was gone and Joe’s lap was full. He was telling all the other strippers how Diamond was once his wife and they were all pitying him in the most delightful way. It was then that I knew somewhere deep inside Joe had some swagger. It didn’t take a night out roller skating with Cheshire cats to rebuild his confidence and get him back in the game. All it took was watching his ex-wife make a mess of herself in public to realize he wasn’t such a mess after all. For the second time that night Joe was glowing, and this time it got him laid.

  GOOGLE GOGGLES

  Back when Myspace was cool, which seems like eons ago in the ever-advancing social media market, Joe and I were a pretty hot commodity (at least we’d like to think so). Joe surfed the net daily for potential mates and I scribbled a lot of blogs about Joe to help reel in the ladies for him. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. Like the time he hooked up with one of my fans named Courtney. She was a portly girl whose IQ teetered on zero. We once evicted her from a house party for being stupid. She was cute in a roly-poly sort of way, but boy did she have a mouth on her. She was the loudest individual I have ever encountered. She was like a potato bug with a bullhorn. Her mouth was so big she won our annual Easter morning Peeps-eating contest by four. A feat never matched or beaten by any other human being.

  Joe and Courtney dated for a few months. I am pretty sure her mouth came in handy as a dispenser for things other than marshmallow rabbits and chickens, and that’s what helped extend her stay. He also kept her around because she let him shove her face in the pillow with the back of his foot during sex. I was always morbidly amused by his description of this particular maneuver, but never asked too many questions for fear of wanting to try it one day. Just not with him. In the end, it was Courtney’s innate ability to never shut up that eventually landed her a kick in the pants and a parting gift. (I believe he gave her a piece of duct tape, right on her kisser.)

  After the breakup, Joe encountered another long dry spell. I first thought this spell was brought on due to Courtney’s posts on a Don’t Date Him site, but I later realized Joe had just stepped in desperation again. This wasn’t your average dry spell either; it was also a lonely spell. And when Joe feels lonely, he does what any other red-blooded American male would do. He joins every dating site he can.

  Joe was registered on Match.com, PlentyofFish, eHarmony, and SexwithMidgets. You name it, he was on it. He met tons of girls online, but never in person. There was always an excuse that inevitably led to the cancellation of any planned date. I felt sorry for Joe. He couldn’t seem to catch a break. That was until one day when he struck up a conversation with a beautiful girl on Myspace named Christine.

  “Monkey!” he called to me from the office. “I got one!”

  “One what?” I yelled back, running up the stairs thinking there was an emergency. I hoped he had caught one of the little lizards that occasionally scurried into our house.

  “Woo-hoo-woo!” he whooped in falsetto as he ran into the hall, jumped up and clicked his heels together like the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz when he first set out to find himself a brain. “I got a message from Christine!”

  Joe acted this way whenever a girl emailed him. It was this over-reaction to the smallest of gestures that first led me to believe that he had very low standards. Well, post-Jules, at least. Joe was beaming. I hadn’t seen him smile like that in months. It must’ve been a good message. “So what did she say?” I inquired.

  “She said hi!” he was so ecstatic that he failed to realize this was not news; of any sort.

  “Hi?” I repeated. “She said hi.” I looked at him inquisitively. “Anything else?”

  “Not yet!” he boasted, turning around to lead me into the office so he could show me the evidence. “See. She messaged me!” There it was in black and white, plain as day. The screen said 'hi'. I asked Joe to show me her photos so that I could better gauge his enthusiasm.

  Christine was a super cute girl with long, dirty blonde hair and eyes like Cleopatra. Though she was Caucasian, she was extremely exotic. She had a rockin’ body and an intoxicating smile. I immediately wondered what the hell she wanted with Joe; apparently from her message, to strike up a conversation. And so they did. But not until after Joe wasted half the day asking me what he should write back.

  “What do I say, Monkey?” he asked. “I have no idea what I’m supposed to write back.”

  “How about ‘Hello, nice to meet you’ or ‘Hey’ or just say ‘Hi’ back to her with a smiley face? Girls love smiley faces.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to come off as too excited or desperate. Shit, I’m all flustered, Jen! I don’t know what to say!”

  I counseled Joe on his dramatic nervousness and helped him calm down after an hour or so. In the meantime, her message just sat on his screen awaiting a response. By the time he got up the nerve to approach his computer and reply, she was no longer logged in.

  “Oh good,” Joe exclaimed. “She’s not on.”

  “Why is that good?” I asked, completely confused.

  “Because that gives me time. Then I don’t feel pressured to respond right away.”

  I wondered if he even knew what a jackass he sounded like when that statement left his mouth. “Do you have any idea how stupid you sound right now?”

  “Stupid’s better than desperate!” he reminded me, and he was right. A quick response may have been to
o much coming from him. When forced to think on his feet in front of a cute girl (if he can make it past the light-headedness and fear of passing out because he forgets to breathe), his tactlessness never fails to rear its ugly head and leave him wondering why everyone has slowly dispersed from our company.

  I excused myself to go eat dinner and by the time I returned he had composed a brilliant email to Christine. It said, “Hi cutie.”

  * * * * *

  Two months and twelve hundred emails later, Joe was in love. It was official. He was having a full blown online relationship. He would talk to Christine through Myspace eight to ten hours a day. It was like a full-time job, and I was lucky if I could get him to break away for lunch. I was starting to call Sierra Gold our old stomping ground. I had to do something about this, and fast.

  “Why don’t you call her?” I asked one day while he was sitting at his computer waiting twenty minutes for her to respond to his email.

  “Because I don’t have her number,” was his answer.

  “Maybe you should ask her for it.”

  Joe seemed puzzled by this request. I began to wonder if he had ever asked a girl for her number before, but then recalled a night that he got smacked when his approach went terribly awry (something to do with asking if her phone number started with the same amount of piercings in his penis). “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said with a smile. Of course he hadn’t, that’s why he didn’t have her number.

  Joe and Christine eventually exchanged numbers and that’s when the real trouble started. I never really saw Joe after that. Prior to their exchange, I would at least see him in the office. Our desks were next to one another in my third bedroom and as long as he and his new love were emailing, I had the privilege of conversing with Joe between messages. But now, Joe was completely M.I.A. He kept every conversation behind closed doors. Literally. He stayed locked up in his room twenty out of twenty-four hours a day. Occasionally, he wandered out for snacks and bathroom breaks, sometimes even for a large glass of Tang, but never to hang with his Monkey.

  I often heard Joe’s low voice mumbling through the drywall that separated our rooms. I could hear intermittent laughter and softer, more intimate growls while they flirted on the phone all day. It was so annoying. One day when I was passing his bedroom door, I lingered a little longer than usual and eavesdropped on his conversation.

  “I love you, too, Snookem’s,” Joe giggled. I almost pissed my pants. “I can’t wait until we can hold each other. You’re my snuggly-wuggly bear.”

  What the hell was going on in there? I banged on the door as loud as I could, like a handy-man coming to fix his broken pipes. I could not believe the words that were escaping his mouth, let alone the tone of his vocal chords when he spoke them. He sounded like someone removed his balls and tightened his sphincter. I was ashamed to call him my broseph.

  “Hold on, Baby Cakes,” Joe whispered softly and set down the phone to answer my knock. “Can I help you?” he asked me.

  “The question is do you need help?” I told him. “Open the door, we need to talk.”

  Joe spewed more disgustingly cute sentiments to his true love before he concluded his sap fest and then we had a serious sit-down.

  “Joe,” I started, “we really need to address this Christine situation.”

  “Why? You should be happy that I found someone.”

  “True, I am happy for you, but I think the two of you should actually meet so you can get laid. This schmoopy-poo stuff is getting old. Where does Christine live? Maybe we should just fly her here to stay with us.”

  “She lives here,” Joe said with a straight face.

  Perhaps it was my own assumption that the reason they spent so much time on the phone was because of the vast geographical distance between these two star-crossed lovers; that land, and possibly sea, kept them apart for so long until destiny aligned the perfect time and place for their first fateful meeting. Clearly, I was the idiot here.

  “Are you fucking serious?” I gasped. “She lives in Vegas?” I was standing beside myself. “And you haven’t met yet?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “How complicated does it have to be to live in the same town and talk on the phone twenty hours a day, but not have time for coffee or lunch?”

  “It’s just complicated. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me,” I reassured him.

  Joe started from the beginning. He told a tale of a selfless woman who spent her days watching her sister’s kids because her sister was depressed. Her nieces and nephews even called her “mom” because she had practically raised them. Christine spent most of her days in her sister’s home caring for the five children, who Joe often heard in the background. The sister, who was battling severe depression from a stillbirth recently, rarely left her bed and was unable to function normally to help support her family.

  The children’s father could often be heard entering the house in the late afternoons, at which time Christine would abruptly conclude her conversation with Joe to attend to the transition inside the home. Her sister’s husband worked two full-time jobs to keep the family afloat and was often stressed when he came home, so she had admitted it was quite chaotic upon his arrival. The loss of his wife’s income due to her depression and the devastation of losing the baby had really taken a toll on the couple, and Christine was doing what she could to help them. She would then call Joe back after she had gone home for the evening. In Joe’s eyes, she was a saint.

  He said that it was difficult for her to get away because the children were her first priority and she didn’t feel safe leaving them in the care of their inept mother. By the time she made it home each day, she was exhausted. She never seemed to have the energy to shower and meet for drinks. Joe’s softer side shone as he told me of her compassion and empathy, and I could tell she brought out the same in him. He had been patient with her, compassionate and considerate of her responsibilities. Perhaps this woman was making a man out of my socially-retarded best friend. Had Joe really put love above getting laid?

  “What about the hanky-panky?” I asked him. “Aren’t you dying? I mean, to know that she lives in the same town and you can’t be with her?”

  “Well,” he hesitated, “we have our ways.”

  “What the hell does that mean? You have your ways. You’ve never met her, how the hell do you have ways to have sex?” It was then that I had a startling image of Joe masturbating in his bedroom only meters away from where my son and I slept each night. My jaw dropped and I had to pick it up off the floor. Joe saw the transition of my expression from confusion to disgust and smirked. I shivered and cringed. “Gross, Joey!”

  “What do you expect, Monkey?”

  I suddenly imagined Joe’s penis tucked away like an old forgotten toy. Sometimes you don’t know its value until you get it out, dust it off and try to play with it again. When Transformers hit the shelves, Go-Bots were a thing of the past and experienced their own dry spell. To his defense, if years later some hot guy on the phone started reminiscing about robots, I would totally be inspired to dig Leader-1 out of the box in my closet and tinker with him. I could see the nostalgia of getting out the Go-Bot now.

  Thankfully Joe didn’t ask me to play robots with him and I never alluded to his penis being compared to a lesser brand. I assumed our conversation was over and started to leave.

  “Sometimes I jerk off outside her window.”

  I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly so I turned around to ask, but he was nodding his head yes and grinning already. This was definitely beyond just getting out the Go-Bot. “What the fuuuuuuck, Joe?”

  I can honestly say that I don’t curse that often unless it involves some sort of formal inquiry into Joe’s behavior. For some reason, my questions are chock-full of shock and repulsion, and obscenities are the only way to convey my emotions. He never ceases to amaze me.

  “So you know where she lives?” This was the only thing I could think to ask at the moment
. Why he would do this outside her house rather than inside her house or even her was still a question I was trying to configure inside my head. There was no easy way to ask that, so I just didn’t.

  “Kind of,” he replied, knowing his response would only lead to more questions. He didn’t necessarily look like he was ready to answer them either.

  “Okay, so let me get this straight,” I paused. “You kind of know where she lives? And you’re kind of a peeping Tom?” I paused again, thinking my question through. “How the fuck do you kind of know where someone lives? Don’t you either know if she lives there, or not?”

  “It’s not like that,” he argued.

  “Then what’s it like, Joe? If you kind of know where she lives, then maybe you kind of jack off outside the wrong window, right?”

  “It’s not as if I’m standing outside a window. I park my car on her street and we have phone sex.”

  I didn’t think it could get any weirder. But I was pleasantly relieved that he wasn’t spanking his other monkey on someone’s front lawn. I had a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact that he would drive to a woman’s neighborhood and embark on a solo mission without inviting her to come out and play. So I inquired.

  “And she doesn’t ever meet you outside?”

  “She won’t,” he told me. “The first time I went over there, she gave me directions to her street, but wouldn’t tell me which house was hers. She said her nieces were spending the night, so I sat on the phone with her for hours. She said she could see me and wanted me to touch myself. I’ve been back every night this week, but she always has the kids so we just have phone sex.” He saw nothing wrong with this scenario.

  “And you don’t think that’s weird, Joseph? Never mind that Christine has an excuse for every occasion. Don’t you think it’s weird that you’ve been spanking it to a row of houses every night this week? Talk about a weird fuckin’ fetish! Which one do you like best? The white one with the grey trim or maybe the terracotta stucco turns you on?”