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| Again |
Ric called me again last weekend and I just stared at my phone as I let it ring out. He didn't leave voicemail but he did text letting me know he was trying to be friendly asking me how I was and giving me an excuse that he hadn't gotten around to adding me to his Steam friends list for some reason. I just couldn't bear to speak with him. He texted a few minutes later confirming that he was at Gators. I knew it of course. Heart attack or not, Ric can't go weekend without drinking.
He called again tonight around 8:00. It being a Thursday night I raised my eyebrows surprised that he'd be calling me sober. I picked up and soon found out that he was in fact halfway to Coors Light nirvana sitting at Gators on a weekday night. "Oh great," I thought "another meaningless conversation with him having to listen to his drunken blather how about is boring job and his boring social life." But you see it's only me that thinks it's boring. He apparently likes his job and finds it rewarding. He thinks he has a great social life with all of his bar friends and young twinks that use him for his money. This he thinks, is a great life.
Before long, probably unconsciously, over the course of the next couple hours of a decidedly one-way conversation of him telling me every little nuance of his boring life, he reminds me that I'm fat as he acknowledges he's getting up towards where I am, he reminds me that I'm lazy and corrupt as he talks about my financial standing and how I got where I am, and he even brings up the fact that I slept with his boyfriend as a reminder of how loyal I am I guess, though that incident took place 20 years ago. Heck, even the old green hair yellow teeth shit came up again. This goes back to my criticizing a photograph of him I commented on back in 1998.
Long-term passive aggression and grudges that just will not die no matter the number of decades that pass that make me extremely apprehensive about getting into a true heart-to-heart with him because I don't know what would trigger him and provoke him to try and really fuck with me out of spite.
And this is a person I wanted to hang with again? Invite into my home? Break bread and lift a glass with?
As our conversation was coming to a close after a few hours of me being extremely patient listening to his non-stop posturing I had had enough. He wanted to know if I would drive up to visit with him over Christmas. Again for all the memories of his that he harbors year after year of the bad shit I supposedly have done he surprisingly doesn't remember some of the more mundane aspects of my personality like the fact that I don't enjoy the Christmas season. In his eyes, no doubt, he thinks I will be sitting around Christmas Day wondering why I'm alone and shedding a tear. I started to point out all the ways he had insulted me during the conversation tonight and that the only thing we had in common is our drinking and I just don't want that lifestyle anymore. I could tell by his response he literally had no idea what I was saying. For him, abstinence has always been a temporary state. Something that would eventually fade back into his version of reality which is perpetual drinking.
I told him that I just didn't see any purpose to us getting together anymore. He started to get irritated and, I think unconsciously, mentioned things like what I did to the banks as a moral lacking in his eyes along with the disloyalty of sleeping with his boyfriend Gary in 2003. That did it. So because I basically was saying I wanted only a friendship which included sober phone conversations and no bar hopping adventures anymore, he was going to take jabs at me to put me in my place. I think he, perhaps subconsciously, thought I was making a judgment call about his life when I told him that I didn't want to have the same relationship with alcohol that he does. It doesn't matter what his motivations. I just kicked myself for even thinking that there could be some kind of restitution of a vestige of our friendship. I can somewhat deal with the narcissism but if you're going to layer passive aggressive microaggression behavior in with it, deal me out this hand and the next, I'm done playing.