Remembered an incident from high school. It took place at the University of Tampa, on the edge of the Hillsborough River, which is quite wide at that point. I was with a friend from school, just the two of us on that side of the river when somehow we caught the attention of some rough-looking guttersnipes on the other side of the river. They shouted at us, using words I could not distinguish or which I at least choose not remember. Their words were not kind. They were taunting and crude.
My friend, for no reason he would ever explain, responded to these taunts by yelling “SEX?” as loud as he could. This brought all these people to their feet. They were across the river but still felt threatening to me, ready to rumble, ready for a ruckus. The only thing keeping an altercation from happening was that wide, wide river between us.
I heard them yell something like “What?” and “Huh?” I heard “What was that?” Friend and I tried to act non-plussed but I, for one, was nervous. The river was wide but it would not have taken much for these people to get over to Kennedy Boulevard and cross the short bridge leading straight to the University of Tampa campus. From there they might have trouble finding us, as we would have moved far from the shore of the river by the time they got there. By my guidance we would have been safely holed up in the tangle of curved hallways and circular staircases of the science wing at Plant Hall.
At my behest we walked away from this long-distance conversation, but the catcalls kept coming. “Skinny bitches!” was one name I heard over and over. They shouted it, to be heard across the span of the river, but the shouting felt like a kind of whisper. They were trying to get inside our heads. “Skinny bitches!” They got into my head but my friend seemed to think his blurting out the word “SEX!” was not just hilarious but righteous and appropriate.
Who were they? 6 or 7 people, maybe in their 20s, lolling about on the Hillsborough River on a weekend morning, probably during the summertime. Did they attempt to come after us? They looked like they wanted an altercation and my friend and I were not prepared for anything of the kind.
They were not wrong. We were a couple of skinny bitches, probably 17 years old at the time.
That friend is one I wish never got away. Deeply intellectual but grounded, yet prone to certain eccentricities that I guess could be called predictable. He got sick of my shit, my selfishness. I don’t know what took him so long to give up on me.
Some years back I looked him. He lives in Houston, still married to a woman he met while traveling in Italy soon after college. He has virtually zero presence online, save for a LinkedIn profile that reveals precious little. I think of his online absence, clearly deliberate and planned, as a kind of meanness. I know he’s there, out of the frame of the pictures of his wife. But no evidence of his personality or presence is visible.
I once considered moving to Houston, for no other reason except to get an apartment in the same complex he lives in. He’s in a ramshackle looking place, hundreds of apartments with swimming pools and amenities that all look pretty crappy to me. I wanted to move there, just to see what he’s doing, to see what he’s hiding from us.…
