Misguidance Counselors: Adult Friends, Childhood Friends, & Seasonal Acquaintances
by Sam Beasley
Ho ho ho, Campers!
We hope you hooked up with your crush from IT at the holiday party while you had the chance! Cuz it’s time to board those planes home and revert back to your adolescence. That’s right! It all happens this week.
Y’know that Christmas melancholy you get when you hear “Somewhere in My Memory” from Home Alone? Sad, but like festive. And kinda comforting? This week, Sam writes about that. But in a fun, sexy way!
Pour some red, like this post, and settle in for some holiday cheer. Oh! And thanks for getting lost with us.
LYLAS,
Misguidance Counselors
“You were handsome // You were pretty // Queen of New York City // When the band finished playing // They howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging // All the drunks they were singing // We kissed on a corner // Then danced through the night
The boys of the NYPD choir were singing Galway Bay // And the bells were ringing out for Christmas day”
The Pogues, “Fairytale of New York”
Adult Friends
Have you ever sat in a bar in Bushwick?
Staring at the blurred multicolored Christmas lights through the fogged window.
Annoyed that a nonexistent waitress didn’t greet you.
Twenty-somethings, looking like middle schoolers during passing period, swarming an inch away. Their early 2000s “vintage” jean-clad butts at eye level.
Begrudgingly, you go order a Stella at the packed bar. The cash-only bar. You and the 8th grader squeezed against you both hate cash-only.
“Who carries cash anymore?” you lament together.
Maybe you are still young.
Have you ever had a 23 year old gasp at your age?
You assure them they’ll also look young at 30. Just as you were told at 23, that night you went home with the 30 year old from LoveGun.
You loved that bar. It’s closed now.
RIP LoveGun.
You think, I guess my skin is better now.
That you can afford real skin care. That it smooths everything out.
You slide into the booth next to work friends. Adult friends.
Do you make friends as an adult?
From across the booth, adult friends chuckle at your recounted night from years ago like a rerun of The Office.
They admire your wildness. Glinting flecks of color. Memories from when you were uneroded,
full-grown.
Your friends at 23 saw you raw, messy, making offenses every outing.
Making out with that “really old” stranger at LoveGun.
You’re beginning to wear down.
Smooth for the world, smoothing for more world.
Adult friends enjoy smoothness next to theirs.
Can your body trust your adult friends?
Trust them if you laugh too loud?
If you can’t not cry?
Can’t not drink?
Can’t let yourself know the time. Endless nights, like endless summers, ageless for just this Saturday in Brooklyn.
My childhood friendships preserved so many rough, sharp, stunning edges.
Capturing youth for when we were 30 and couldn’t use it.
“Think where man's glory most begins and ends,
and say my glory was I had such friends.”
William Butler Yeats, “The Municipal Gallery Revisited”
Childhood Friends
In the town where I went to college,
20 minutes from the town where I grew up,
merely half a country and a decade from where I live now,
I walked past the old haunts of my friends and mine.
Bars where our nights sounded of fresh laughter and evergreen dreams.
Bars where our choices, not ending in certain devastation, are remembered as resounding triumphs.
I was leaving lunch with my parents. A busker played guitar on the sidewalk.
“What I Did for Love” from A Chorus Line.
I teared up at her husky voice.
Not sure if I wanted the same things anymore or who I was without my dreams,
I hoped, fixated on her Birkenstocks, that everyone felt out-to-lunch in their twenties
“She should audition for the shows!” my mom interrupted.
I rolled my eyes with gratitude.
Going home for the Holidays is like putting your back against a door jamb to see how much you’ve grown. I tweeted something like that once.
I get jealous of movies or episodes where characters, home for the holidays, run into estranged high school friends at their hometown bar.
Like that Girls episode or that scene in The Family Stone,
or that early 2000s Ryan Reynolds movie,
back when we simply accepted fat suits as comedy.
I still see all my childhood friends almost every Christmas
and am aware that I’m only jealous that I never see a former classmate,
someone who was cooler than me in high school.
(And everyone in high school was cooler than me.
Honestly, was there something in the water?
And I was drinking a different water?)
They are now wildly successful, wildly attractive.
We, after a decade-plus since last seeing each other, make out in whichever of my parents’ Jeeps I borrowed that night.
My gothic revival high school, named one of the “8 Wonders of Kansas Architecture” by The Kansas Sampler Foundation, is the first million-dollar school built west of the Mississippi.
Notable alumni include a Vice President, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a Tony Award winner.
All who walked the halls were struck by the palpable legacy, the call to grandeur, the nasty, historic plumbing.
I did a news report for broadcast journalism class on its water filtration system.
My investigatory calls were ignored. My Pontiac Grand Prix turned away from the barbed wire gate of the Topeka Water Division. Conspiracy?
In my last week of Senior year, I advised that my high school’s water was unsafe for consumption because I had to report something to graduate. I hated that class.
Curiously, the report never aired.
What was in the water?
I have the best friends back home.
I’ve tweeted something like that several times.
My friend once said, “We’ve ruined all other friendships for each other.”
Beholding her was knowing bliss, as she continued complaining about being a work friend’s bridesmaid while eating bottomless chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant.
We were grabbing dinner while home for the holidays.
Applying a balm of reunion and carbohydrates after another brutal year out in our real and separate worlds.
Stuffed in a booth together, like a cast party at the Applebee’s after our high school musical.
I let myself wonder if we could have stayed together. All of us, in our hometown.
Would we have been happy?
And what of the hypothetical classmate,
successful and attractive, running after their grand dreams,
would my fantasies of them feel the same?
My superpower is making the best friends. That’s the tweet.
I found the best friends at each stage of my life.
Due to those first friends of my childhood.
The friends to whom I unintelligibly sobbed over the phone when I came out.
The friends with whom I got in trouble drinking my parents’ Mike’s Hard Lemonades.
The friends who created a safe space to let me know I’m bossy.
My friends were something else,
as patrons of the Applebee’s would complain.
We knew each other better than we knew ourselves, spending entire summer days together.
Marathon days.
Days I spent the school year chasing.
Our friendship is one of the best things we’ve ever done.
We steal these few holiday hours once a year. Willing them to last forever.
I worry that I may no longer be the friend they knew.
Anxious to finally discover that I had run too far away.
No longer knowing them well enough, and apt to say the wrong thing.
Then this year will be the last year with the friends who raised me.
Taught me to love myself. Tasked me with dreaming.
We’ll grow apart like others who aren’t us.
And I’ll no longer remember who I am,
only what I dreamed.
“...I do know your name. I just don’t know it at this moment. We’re at a big party. We’ve kissed hello. We’ve had a delightful conversation about how we are the two last people on the face of the earth who don’t kiss on both cheeks. Now we’re having a conversation about how phony all the people are who do kiss on both cheeks..”
Nora Ephron, “Who Are You?”
Seasonal Acquaintances
I love holiday party season. An NYC tradition.
I wassail through the boroughs with my wine-soaked smile.
The holiday party circuit, my New York Marathon, my Pride Parade.
New Yorkers take to the streets for these enjoyable citywide inconveniences, tossing emphatic pleasantries to every stranger.
“Congrats!” to the marathoner. “Cute harness!” at Pride.
“Happy Holidays, you!” to the friends of friends that I see once a year.
Feeling abandoned if they were absent from my former co-worker’s yearly tree trimming.
Leaving me regretfully traversed and alone in Queens.
I don’t remember their names or their jobs.
But feel justified when it turns out to be Byzantine and she works in fundraising for PBS documentaries.
I do remember that she always brings homemade eggnog.
If given a choice, she’d prefer seasonal friends to remember this detail.
It’s an inroad bypassing initial small talk. We can now, most likely, complain about politics. Which is the only safe small talk in New York City.
“Being an adult is saying hello to people,”
is something I once, unfortunately, said to a friend.
I don’t remember the saying it so much as I remember him saying I said it.
Now I follow a maxim from my 20-year-old self or accept being a hypocrite.
I’ve obligated myself to say “hi” to people who make me want to scream, “Why do I know you? Why!?”
As well as to the enjoyable people who’d prefer not to say “hi” either,
but do so because I have forced adulthood upon us all.
So I must say “hi” to the New Yorker over the age of 40 of indeterminate association and wonder,
Are you going to kiss me on the cheek? Oh, on both?
Aren’t you from Ohio?
Each generation compensates for showing up on this island in their own way.
I say this because no one from the Midwest is ever happy-to-see-someone enough to kiss them.
This kissing, for me, has surpassed the stress threshold of posturing bro greetings.
Improvised hand slaps, grips, now pull and shoulder bump into a half hug.
Yet, here I am again, expected to know how many kisses, in the opinion of this UES woman or West Village homo with whom I am inexplicably acquainted, is correct.
There once was a bandwagon on gay Twitter damning the act of saying, “We’ve met.”
I can hear the condescending homo lilt.
Both in the quote and the complaint about it.
Villainizing strangers who, beyond the possibility of the human condition, liked you enough to remember your name.
I get it, in so much as, I, like most people, don’t like most people.
And, unwittingly, love to complain.
If I remember a person, and we must chat, I do prefer to tell them.
A further perversion of politeness.
I usually say, “We’ve met! At so-and-so’s holiday party. I’m Sam.”
First, I still any anxieties from the vague familiarity of my jolly, burgundy smile.
What is my name? Let nothing you dismay.
Permission for you to not remember a single thing about me.
And now we can gossip about our mutual friend.
The only other safe small talk.
Second, I think it is nice to let someone know they’ve achieved that rare and ultimate feat:
Being memorable in NYC.
A city of surplus population, opinions, and cheeks kissed raw.
My gift to you during the season of festive complaining:
Having remembered your name.
Adult Friends, Childhood Friends, & Seasonal Acquaintances by Sam Beasley, @sbeas