Rich PART 1

I make the drive to Orange County to meet up with my new best friend, Rich. I met Rich about a year ago at a friend’s birthday party. We connected instantly because he thought I was hilarious and I thought he was God.

Rich had a dark tan and excessive arm hair and deep, big, brown eyes, like a baby Chihuahua but all human. He put the MAN in huMAN, actually. He grew up very Catholic in Michigan and went to Yale. He tests missiles in the desert during the week and designed and built a skylight in his condo in Irvine. This secretly makes me Lois Lane, holding onto his cape as we scale the Empire State Building during a full moon.

I was supposed to be at his place by eight so we could go to BJ’s Brewery to have dinner and "maybe meet some girls." I was holding onto the maybe in that statement, hoping that it meant we go to plan B, sharing a Peanut Butter Pizookie in a corner booth and talking about how hard it is to fall asleep when the TV is on unless the Golden Girls is showing on Lifetime. It's comforting. And so is this Pizookie. Now make it happen.

“Hey, man!” he seemed to smile into his phone as I called him en route from the Valley. My hands were shaking, even a year after meeting him, because he caused me to question whether or not these freakish same-gender feelings were ever going to go away. I'm 23 and still into people with excessive arm hair who also probably have penises. I had to put in my earpiece or I’d get into an accident.

Forgetting to say hello, I blurt through the phone to him, “I’m on my way and just got to Downtown. I’ll be there in about forty-five minutes. Is that ok?” My voice is higher now and it's too late for me to adjust it lower. Further, this is as low as it goes when I'm talking to a man who cooks his own steaks on a stick in his fireplace.

“No worries, Bro." He called me Bro.

"And hey there’s something I have to say to you.”

I buckle. I’m not gay, but I will be for him, right now, in this car thirty-eight miles away from his hairy, Catholic chest. “Oh, yeah?”

“Happy Birthday, Friend!” He says in a purposely-geeky voice. It’s kind of our thing. It's how we hide our awkward hot-guy-and-fat-guy totally platonic love.

“Hey, thanks!” I mimic back. After I hang up I regain my blood pressure and turn up Reba’s "I Know How He Feels" from the 1988 LP, Reba. Singing wildly in the car “But he’s too caught up to notice me, she must be his new love…Oh I’ve been there and I know how he feels.”

I don’t want to look like a pig at dinner, eating all of my BBQ chicken pizza, so I stop at a Chevron a few blocks from the Irvine Spectrum and get a bag of Trail mix with M & M’s and a chocolate milk, and eat it in the car. I inhale it in the car. I vacuum it into my intestines in the car. I don't remember consuming it at all in the car.

Part 2