So, I’ve been chatting a lot with my old friend Coop lately. We’ve been out of touch for a little while, but about two months ago—right when I got back from my visit to South Central—he messaged me, saying that he missed my “antics” and wanted to make me a mix tape, since I’m the only one cultured enough to appreciate his advanced musical tastes. I was delighted at this message because it combined three of my favorite things: 1.) some one I love, 2.) personalized mix tapes, and 3.) shameless flattery.
Now, Coop is a regular guy. And by that, I mean he’s not a SuperHero or a SuperVillain, a SideKick or a Mystic or an Oracle. He’s certainly a unique and intriguing person, but he’s a regular person, too. That being said, he does possess this knack for popping back into my life at the exact moment I need an old friend around. I mean, it’s uncanny. Something really scary or overwhelming or heartbreaking will happen that sends me reeling, and just like magic, Coop appears out of nowhere, mailing me a story he wrote about me, or his band’s new CD, or making fun of my upper lip.
So I get back from South Central at the end of May feeling all sad and shaky, and I can’t fall asleep to save my life, and suddenly there’s Coop messaging me at 4am. And it’s been pretty consistent the last two months, which has been really comforting considering what’s been happening this summer. I mean, when someone, you know, leaves you, no one can ever take that person’s place. You’re always going to have a hole in your heart the exact shape of that person. It’s like a puzzle piece—no other piece is going to fit that spot exactly. But it’s amazing when someone shows up at just the right moment to remind you that yeah, your heart may have a piece missing, but ya still got some other pieces left.
Coop has a way of doing that. But I would never tell him that in a million years because he would bust my chops about it mercilessly until the day I die.
Now, Coop and I go way back. We have a pretty big history, which is maybe how he just psychically knows when to get a hold of me. We met during my very first class in college—Speech 101. Paranoid I was going to get lost and arrive late, I showed up at the classroom about 20 minutes early, so I was sitting in the room all alone, a little 17 year-old punk rock girl in her nose ring and army surplus combat boots, when Coop kind of wandered into the room in a referee shirt and a tweed jacket. Since we were the only ones in the room—oh, and since I have good manners—I looked up and said hi when he came in, at which point Coop just kind of looked at me and sat down without saying a word. I was mortified.
So of course we were going to end up being friends. (And P.S. Now whenever we get together, he ends up telling the How We Met Story as if I were the one who refused to say hello to him. Nice.) Actually, we got really pretty tight. We took classes together and made all kinds of art together, and we got in lots of trouble together. He’s one of maybe four people who can call me by my family’s nickname for me without me refusing to talk to them ever again. And perhaps strangely—you know, for as tight as we were—neither of us was ever attracted to the other in the slightest way. And I think this is a pretty big feat; I mean, if I really think you’re awesome, I probably wouldn’t pass up the chance to kiss you once. But for Coop…there’s nothing going on below the neck. Or below the heart, perhaps. And as for him, throughout his college career, he had a crush on every single one of my girlfriends—every single one—except me. After we graduated, I tried to get offended by this on principle and out of vanity, saying, “Really, Coop? Every single one but me? You couldn’t even crush out on me for like a week out of courtesy?”
And he’s a bit reserved when it comes to talking about anything that might even approach emotions, so he just looked at me and said in his almost-Texas accent, “Come on, Lulee, would you really want me to have a crush on you?” To which I had to reply, “No, not at all. That would be so amazingly awkward. Please promise you’ll never have a crush on me.” And I don’t know if this is connected or not, but I’m the only girl from college he still speaks to. Hmmmm.
Coop and I have been in two fights since we’ve known each other. And I don’t really know if “fight” is the correct word, but I think it’s the closest one. The first fight happened after Coop called me a certain word…it starts with a “c” and rhymes with “hunt” and is a word I absolutely hate—except, in very limited, very special circumstances, when used to refer specifically to a part of the female anatomy. What happened is that for several weeks—which later turned into months, and in some cases, years—my girlfriends and I were going through a phase during my senior year where we thought it was hilarious to call each other the most vulgar names we could think of, as well as make the most vulgar “your mom” jokes possible. It was that phenomenon where you love someone so much, the positive words aren’t enough to express it, so you have to go to the negative ones. (I’ll note though, that none of us ever called each other the c-word.) And Coop spent weeks witnessing this, and one night he and I were busting each other’s chops a bit, and BOOM!
He dropped the c-bomb.
Of course, he was really young—we all were—and he really thought he was just playing the same game he had been watching us girls play for weeks. But oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I took that boy to school. Hard. It was not pretty.
The only other fight we got in was right after we graduated. Of course graduation meant that our crowd was splitting up and moving to different parts of the country, which can be a difficult thing to face during such an uncertain time. Coop was moving up to The Snowy Cities with his band, and I was going to grad school, and some of our other friends were still at college la, la, la. And of course, as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t The End or anything you know, because there’s such a thing as The Telephone, as well as The Mails, never mind The E-Mails, and all of us had these handy machines called The Automobiles. But it was tough for all of us to be separated. But one day soon after graduation, Coop lost it a little bit on the phone, saying why are we pretending when we know that we’re just going to stop talking to each other in a few weeks and then we’re never going to see each other again because people just don’t stay in touch. Everyone says they will, but they won’t, so why waste time pretending?
Obviously that wounded me—so much that I couldn’t respond at all. But a couple days later, I sure managed to mail him a 14-page letter that was both ridiculously naïve and entirely practical, all about how we get to choose. We choose whether to keep in touch. We choose whether to stay in each other’s lives. We are the ones in control of that. The world doesn’t tear people apart without those people agreeing to it. If you want to call, you pick up the phone and you fucking call. If you want to see someone, you pick a time, then you get in your car and you drive there. It’s not rocket science.
And of course I threw in there that if he thought that us being friends was just wasting time until our inevitable demise, then let me know and I’d spend that time on someone else who actually valued their relationships.
And of course, it’s been all these years, and we’re still friends. We ended up getting tighter after that letter. We saw each other a lot in The Snowy Cities, along with some other friends who moved there. I stayed in his first apartment, the one where you had to stand on a milk crate in the bathtub in order to take a shower because the drain was so slow, and I’d harass him endlessly for hanging an “ironic” Spice Girls poster in his living room when he was such a music snob. He wrote a little novelette about me in that apartment, based on Virginia Wolfe’s Mrs. Dalloway. We watched my first porn movie together—The Pussy Cartel: They’re Fighting Crime with Their Legs Wide Open! And a side note: I was completely horrified for the first 20 minutes, and then I was just disappointed that there was no actual crime fighting. Or indeed, any discernable cartel at all.
And Coop has seen me at my absolute worst—I mean, completely helpless, rock-bottom worst. He came to see me after I first developed PTSD, when the anorexia was in full swing. Once I finally told one of our friends what was going on, there had been a bit of a phone tree among the rest, and they were taking turns checking in on me, but when Coop found out, he took off work, got in his car, and drove hundreds of miles to see me in A Town Near You. At that point, I had lost maybe 40 pounds in eight weeks, and my hair was falling out, and I was so weak I could hardly stand up for more than a minute at a time. He said he barely recognized me. During that visit, Coop had to pick me up off the bathroom floor, unconscious, because I passed out while brushing my teeth and smacked my head on the sink on the way down.
He was also the one to figure out the only trick to get me to sleep. He had me get into my pajamas and get under the covers, even though I insisted that I don’t sleep, I can’t sleep, that nothing works. Then he climbed into the bed with me, sitting up against the headboard and on top of the covers. “Okay Lulee, you get to go to sleep now because I’m going to keep watch. I’m going to stay awake and watch and make sure everything is okay. You can sleep now because I’m here to make sure everything will be okay…”
The next morning when I woke up to find Coop stretched out on the couch, he said it took about two minutes before I was out like a light.
And a few months after that, I got a late-night call from Coop, and it was the only time I had ever actually heard genuine distress in his voice, what with him being such a cool customer and all. He found out that he was about to become a father—very unexpectedly and still very young—and he didn’t know what to do. And I could tell when he wanted me to listen, and when he wanted me to propose some options, and when he just wanted me to tell him everything would be alright. And I did. You know, like you do when you love someone.
And I suppose after stuff like that, it would make sense that some kind of psychic bond was created, some kind of link that can cut through hundreds or thousands of miles to alert the other of distress. It’s funny that out of all the people I know, it’s Coop who has this kind of psychic MedicAlert bracelet or however you’d want to describe it. Coop who, if he had his choice, would probably never talk about a single emotion as long as he lived. Coop who, if I wanted to, would let me shamelessly cry and wail and unleash my Big Bag o’ Crazy in front of him and then just say, “I don’t know, Lulee…that’s big. That’s deep. I just don’t know…” It’s funny that over all these years, he’s the one with the finely-tuned emotional barometer, when it comes to me anyway, because in terms of emotions and the way we deal with them, we’re complete opposites.
So after months of radio silence, and usually at some hour in the morning when all “decent people” should be asleep, he’ll message me or text or call, and of course I’m awake. And he’ll bust out some memory of one of our little scrapes or narrow escapes, and then he’ll demand a full update. And sometimes knowing that someone would listen while you broke down into the weepiest, snottiest, most pathetic mess they’ve ever seen is enough. So instead I can just say, “I’m so sad, Coop. My heart hurts.”
And he’ll just sigh and say, “Yeah, I figured it was about time for one of your adventures. What happened this time?”, somehow sounding like a grandpa sinking into his La-Z-Boy recliner to listen to your tale.
Because for Coop, everything I do is an “adventure”, even all the awful stuff—the bad jobs and bad judgments and the accidents and the poverty and the heartbreaks so intense it feels like my chest will explode. They’re all adventures in Coop’s eyes. I have a lot of trouble seeing them that way, but it’s good to see your life through someone else’s eyes. It gives a little perspective, you know? And when I get all tangled up in the workings of my own heart, perspective is the one big thing I’m missing.
This time Coop’s been around for far longer than I would have expected, and I can tell it’s just about time for him to turn back into a pumpkin. I mean, he has two jobs, three kids, and one wife, so it’s not like he has time to just chat with me and make mix tapes and make jokes and talk about music all the time.
It’s nice, though, to have these little brief visits from someone who knew you long, long before your heart started to hurt, and it’s even nicer knowing that they’ll still be visiting you long after your heart stops hurting.
Because in order for that to happen, that means that yes, yes, sweet little baby girl, your heart will stop hurting eventually. It doesn’t feel like it now, but eventually your heart will stop hurting.
Right?
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