Goodbye Old Girl

once upon a time, i was an AOL whore. Staten Island had (and probably still has) an M4M chatroom. i'd sit online, for hours at a time, talking with all the (other) SI closet cases. one night i got an IM from someone new; this person didn't have a profile but commented that they liked mine. we got to talking and it turned out that this person wasn't, in fact an M looking 4 an M, but was a married mother of three; a fag hag. we really hit it off, as most fags and hags do, and chatted for a while. this went on for a very long time; at this point in my life, i wasn't out to my parents and really valued the "adult perspective" on my life. she was fun, funny and very easily shocked by my tales of ribaldry and promiscuity.

at some point we started meeting up for coffee and eventually she introduced me to her friends and i introduced her to a couple of mine. more often than not, we would hang out at her house with her kids (who were around our age), in a sort of Poker Night Without the Cards type setting; drinking coffee, eating Entemans and trading war stories. it really was alot of fun and we became like a new sort of family; we each posessed somehting that none of the others did (wisdom, sensitivity, insights, etc), and we shared it amongst each other. we talked about our relationships and one-night-stands (she was still easily shocked and posessed an almost unreal naivete about such things) and held each other through break-ups and the usual dramas of the Life. then one day, something changed...

seeming over night, Mamala (for that is what i had come to call her since she was incredibly maternal), disappeared. she had begun to hang out with a completely clique of fags, that she had met online during one of her "membership drives" in the SI M4M room. our visits were few and far in between; calls went un-returned and e-mails un-answered. when we did get to see her, she gushed about her new good friend, with whom she was spending alot of time: a butch lesbian cokehead/partygirl. the more she described their friendship, the more it became obvious that it was going to wind up as more than a friendship. we warned her against becoming involved, but it fell on deaf ears. a couple of months later, she admitted that they had been having a sort of mini-affair. we didnt' judge (we'd all been "the other woman" at some point), but tried to support her in this new development. she shut us out and refused to talk about her...changes.

fast forward almost a year later: the mini-affair is over (Party Lez is unstable, controling and scary), enter a different butch lesbian (far butcher) and let the actual affair begin. again, we told her to watch her back. we didn't judge we were as supportive as she would let us be. the problem was she wasn't giving us any info. we knew they were involved, but we didn't know how she felt. she refused to tell us how she was feeling and denied all emotional support. eventually, she completely slipped away. all news about her marriage and her relationship and her children were gotten second and third hand. it was clear though that Butch Lez was...is... far more unstable and controling than Party Lez was. through the grapevine, it became very apparent that Mamala was incredibly unhappy. again, we tried to reach out to her, to no avail. we were finally on the outside. the nail in the coffin was finally driven when she failed to acknowledge one of our group's cross-country move (no phone call, no e-mail). i broke months of non-communication and called her to tell her how upset i was at her behavior. days later she called back to say that she didn't want to talk about it. after a couple of minutes of meaningless chit chat i hung up. after some thought, i wrote her an e-mail wishing her well but telling her that i would no longer attempt to contact her; our friendship had lapsed beyond repair.

throughout her change, i talked about it with Stephen. being an "outsider" he had the unique and wholly un-biased view that in all the years of our friendship with her, Mamala never actually gave of herself; in short we (her "kids") did all the talking and she just reacted. we never learned anything more about her than she wanted us to. as usual, he was right.

Stephen and i saw her the other night at the diner (with Butch Lez). she congratulated me on becoming an uncle again and feigned excitement about the wedding plans (she had once confided in several people that she didn't like Stephen). after a slightly awkward silence, i asked how she was doing. her response was "Don't ask". i just rolled my eyes, said goodnight and we walked away.

i finally got it: the next time i see her, i'm not going to ask.

i stopped caring.

"And then I found out/That there was nothing I could know or guess about you/You'd go as far as you could go/And it took me years to figure out/That there was nothing I could give to you/And years to figure out/That there was nothing you would take from me/And how can I describe/The way you slowly took my hope away/And all of the timeI thought I knew you"~ I Thought I Knew You (Mathew Sweet)