Frenemies

A couple of months ago Ted Kennedy passed away, and though it was expected, and though he lived a relatively long, healthy life until he was diagnosed with brain cancer early in 2008, I spent the next week crying. Chris Matthews didn't help with his Kennedy Brothers documentary, which didn't say anything revealing or new, but showed clip after clip of the boys in their youths, a time when all they knew to lament was their brother Joe falling from a plane in a WWII sky. Always in the background was Teddy, always buggy, the boy who at fourteen stopped one or another of the Hyannis Port celebration to raise a toast for "the brother who can't be here." Even then he had duende, the intimation of mortality, the knowledge that death is close by and life is wondrous, that the only thing to do is make people love you. Which is what they did when he toasted his dead brother. Which is what the world did, so many times over, because he loved it right back.

The death tore me up. His fight for civil rights, women's rights, health care, the underpriviledged were over. I drank my coffee every day and dreamed of another hero.

He wasn't to be found on Facebook, but that's a source I turn to when I feel so overwhelmed and good-for-nothing all I'm capable of is spying on others and imagining their better, richer lives (this is probably a reason I post so many gloomy status updates). So flipping through friends on this site one day shortly after the death of the last Kennedy brother, I came across the friend I've known the longest, Danielle, weighing in at fifteen years.

First I should give you a background on Danielle. We became friends, basically, because we started having sex at about the same time in high school and trusted each other enough to pass notes back and forth in class ensuring each other that we weren't pregnant. Sex and boys were our mutual understanding and as this was our preoccupation for the next seven or so years, we never stopped to recognize our similarities ended there.

In short, she's a fucking Republican.

There was no way for either of us to know that she was conservative fifteen years ago, or that I was liberal. Clues always abound, but when one is young and a friend says something that just doesn't feel right, one ignores it. The only loser is a friendless loser. (I'm reminded of an anecdote I may have already included in Buggy Face, but which so compels me I have to tell it again: it's the story of my mom walking home from school with her friend in third grade, and they've been let out early because their president has just been assassinated. They walk in silence, as I can imagine an eight-year-old would have a difficult time expressing anything in the face of such a tragedy, but finally my mom's friend spoke up--"Serves that nigger-lover right." And I think of how my mom knew that was wrong, sort of, as she had never heard that word before and could only intuit it was something mean and awful, but how she also walked the rest of the way with her friend. What else was she to do?)

Danielle and I have broken up several time throughout the years, and my argument against her is always she doesn't know how to articulate who she is. (As proof of this, she's often characterized our relationship as one that is nearly perfect--in fifteen years she swears we've only gotten into one fight. And I have to tell her, we're always in a fight! Remember that year and a half we didn't talk? That was a fucking fight!) My downfall as a friend is that I'm constantly try to prod the Real Danielle out of her. About five or six years ago when I was campaigning against Bush more than I was for Kerry, I got drunk one night and sent Danielle an incendiary Myspace message. The subject read:

Why are you a Republican?

It is never a good idea to ask a friend why she is who she is, but there I was, supposedly open-minded, liberal (and certainly drunk) Brooke asking her who she thought she was. I went on to provide a litany of reasons why her conservatism didn't make sense. Her favorite musical artists were U2, Dave Matthews, Coldplay, John Mayer, and several other pansies I'm forgetting at the moment. Do you actually listen to their music? I asked. Do you know the lyrics you recite? I probed. They don't believe in war, they don't care about the free market, they work against everything you support, and you sing along to it. You don't know who you are! I insisted. And I don't think I like it!

Danielle's shorter and much more adult response was, "I don't know what your problem is, but I'm not answering your ridiculous questions."

I deleted her from my MySpace account.

If anything this is proof that we've definitely fought more than once.

Now, years later, after one of Danielle's terrible breakups brought us back together, and now that we've graduated to grownup Facebook accounts, I sat at my desk, post-Kennedy death, and wanted someone on the site to make me feel better, or maybe just make me feel jealous at their publication or something. Suddenly I remembered an old friend I hadn't talked to in awhile, someone who it had been weird with for some time after Obama won but who was still, after all, a friend.

Then I saw her Facebook status: "Oh, God. Am I going to have to hear about Ted Kennedy's death for the next whole month?! I'm going to keep it on conservative radio and Fox. Why don't I always do that?" A guy friend of hers Liked! the status, and said Kennedy's hero's burial at Arlington made him wanna puke, and Danielle agreed it made her wanna puke too.

Not one for leaving well enough alone, I scrolled down her page for evidence of other inhuman/racist/disgusting status updates and came up short, though she did post this insightful ditty:

"Saw the best bumper sticker today. It said: Obama: Jimmy Carter's Second Term."

A Facebook friend of hers agreed with that bumper sticker's wit, and said that day she saw an even better one:

One
Big
Ass
Mistake
America

Immediately I thought I'd delete her from my Facebook account, and then I recognized, no, Brooke, we don't go backwards in life. That won't solve anything. So instead I stomped down the stairs and as I told Brock what I'd read I burst into tears for the tenth time in a week, and I told him I didn't want to be Danielle's friend anymore.

For days I was inconsolable, and when my birthday came and went without a card or email from her, I posted a message on her wall about something funny my stepfather Kevin had done, and reminded her she missed my birthday, and suggested the reason for this was because I was too liberal for her. I was going for witty with a dash of acerbic. I wanted to be in words what a Lemonhead hard candy is in taste.

She sent me an email back apologizing profusely for being a bad friend and asked me how life was going, how Erica was doing with the pregnancy, whether or not Rosita was ready to tear her hair out, and basically all the questions about myself I would've loved to answer...if only I weren't answering to her.

A month later I still haven't responded back.

Now the question is, why? Danielle clearly felt bad for these last months of muddy friendship, but I just wasn't having it. If I did respond at all, I would have to be honest about how her Ted Kennedy comment made me want to tear her eyes out, and she'd get all defensive about her politics, and then I'd say it's not just politics, but about have a fucking heart, which of course would suggest that, indeed, she didn't have a heart. Basically I'm willing to let her be the bad guy for as long as I can.

Then, and I'm not sure how or when this happened, as I didn't label it on my yellow legal pad for taking blog notes, a revelation: I'm the asshole here, and likely always have been.

You see, I've always felt slightly superior to Danielle. I went away to college and she stayed at home, and then I went on to graduate school and met the really Smart People she'd never meet. Though I didn't know this at the time, this was my secret retribution for her having been friends with all the popular kids in high school who drove Mustangs and spoke terrible Westbank English (sadly, I never could make myself do this). She was friends in high school with the girls I can still see on Facebook through the twenty pounds they've gained since then, the ones who thought my abusive boyfriend was cute, but an asshole, and that I was slightly weird, or slightly sluttish (I cheated on said abusive boyfriend and the whole school found out), or most likely they didn't think about me at all. Resentment stemmed from her having been thought cooler all our lives; I couldn't help but concieve what an injustice that was, because of course I was cooler. My thoughts could be articulated and only because no one wanted to hear what I had to say, I rarely spoke.

So when we became grownups I quickly became a child in order to get back at her: I'm smarter than you are (sing-songy voice).

But now that I am speaking I'm remembering what a good friend, Courtney, said about Danielle recently, that she has real liberal tendencies. And she does: the music and caring and kindness and shit, just the fact that we've hung out a lot in life and actually gotten along.

Maybe that's what did it. In thinking about how Danielle can have aspects of her person that she certainly wouldn't check off on a box or questionnaire (I suspect the word liberal makes her gag), I began to consider how that might be reversed. How I revel in my liberalism (short litany in defense of my inherent qualities which I deem liberal: love of the underdog, obsession & crying & caring for everyone but especially those who are really sick and really far away and that I can't do anything about, the fact I was a rising star in the Greek community in college--Greek Woman of the Year, Phi Mu President, etc.--it was because no one else was a hippee and I was the closest thing, my hatred of any injustice, my hopes for the little guy whomever he may be, my aversion to looking good unless absolutely necessary which can be proven by the fact I did not shave my legs or wash my hair for almost two months one year in college). And how when it comes to being truly liberal and open-minded, I often fall short of it.

Some examples of my awful, fascist tendencies: I'm often jealous, and I don't like to share, and I want everything to be mine sometimes, and I want to be loved the most, and I don't listen in fights but play the victim like a champ, which means I don't argue well though I ironically usually ask for it, and am unyielding on a point even if it's for the greater good (utilitarianism: look it up, Danielle) if it's not good for me.

Also, there are a lot of Is in my writing (see previous, or any, paragraph). Which shows you where my interests lie.

Another example is this blog. I'm railing against the indecency of a person who has tried to reach out to me, and I can't be bothered to reach back. You see, I'm busy, Danielle. I'm a professor at a very important football university. Even though I'm not a professor I can say that because you don't know the difference. Thus, I am still smarter than you are.

Do you see how I just can't help but be a real fascist asshole sometimes?

Another problem with this argument is it's a fallacy to conflate liberalism with open-mindedness, because they aren't necessarily the same things. But don't tell Danielle that.

Because I'm still not calling her.