Turds in the Punch Bowl (A Story of No Ordinary Friendship) (12 page)

Joe and Christine eventually exchanged numbers and that’s when the real trouble started. I never really saw Joe after that. Prior to their exchange, I would at least see him in the office. Our desks were next to one another in my third bedroom and as long as he and his new love were emailing, I had the privilege of conversing with Joe between messages. But now, Joe was completely M.I.A. He kept every conversation behind closed doors. Literally. He stayed locked up in his room twenty out of twenty-four hours a day. Occasionally, he wandered out for snacks and bathroom breaks, sometimes even for a large glass of Tang, but never to hang with his Monkey.

I often heard Joe’s low voice mumbling through the drywall that separated our rooms. I could hear intermittent laughter and softer, more intimate growls while they flirted on the phone all day. It was so annoying. One day when I was passing his bedroom door, I lingered a little longer than usual and eavesdropped on his conversation.

“I love you, too, Snookem’s,” Joe giggled. I almost pissed my pants. “I can’t wait until we can hold each other. You’re my snuggly-wuggly bear.”

What the hell was going on in there? I banged on the door as loud as I could, like a handy-man coming to fix his broken pipes. I could not believe the words that were escaping his mouth, let alone the tone of his vocal chords when he spoke them. He sounded like someone removed his balls and tightened his sphincter. I was ashamed to call him my broseph.

“Hold on, Baby Cakes,” Joe whispered softly and set down the phone to answer my knock. “Can I help you?” he asked me.

“The question is do
you
need help?” I told him. “Open the door, we need to talk.”

Joe spewed more disgustingly cute sentiments to his true love before he concluded his sap fest and then we had a serious sit-down.

“Joe,” I started, “we really need to address this Christine situation.”

“Why? You should be happy that I found someone.”

“True, I am happy for you, but I think the two of you should actually meet so you can get laid. This schmoopy-poo stuff is getting old. Where does Christine live? Maybe we should just fly her here to stay with us.”

“She lives here,” Joe said with a straight face.

Perhaps it was my own assumption that the reason they spent so much time on the phone was because of the vast geographical distance between these two star-crossed lovers; that land, and possibly sea, kept them apart for so long until destiny aligned the perfect time and place for their first fateful meeting. Clearly, I was the idiot here.

“Are you fucking serious?” I gasped. “She lives in Vegas?” I was standing beside myself. “And you haven’t met yet?”

“It’s complicated.”

“How complicated does it have to be to live in the same town and talk on the phone twenty hours a day, but not have time for coffee or lunch?”

“It’s just complicated. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me,” I reassured him.

Joe started from the beginning. He told a tale of a selfless woman who spent her days watching her sister’s kids because her sister was depressed. Her nieces and nephews even called her “mom” because she had practically raised them. Christine spent most of her days in her sister’s home caring for the five children, who Joe often heard in the background. The sister, who was battling severe depression from a stillbirth recently, rarely left her bed and was unable to function normally to help support her family.

The children’s father could often be heard entering the house in the late afternoons, at which time Christine would abruptly conclude her conversation with Joe to attend to the transition inside the home. Her sister’s husband worked two full-time jobs to keep the family afloat and was often stressed when he came home, so she had admitted it was quite chaotic upon his arrival. The loss of his wife’s income due to her depression and the devastation of losing the baby had really taken a toll on the couple, and Christine was doing what she could to help them. She would then call Joe back after she had gone home for the evening. In Joe’s eyes, she was a saint.

He said that it was difficult for her to get away because the children were her first priority and she didn’t feel safe leaving them in the care of their inept mother. By the time she made it home each day, she was exhausted. She never seemed to have the energy to shower and meet for drinks. Joe’s softer side shone as he told me of her compassion and empathy, and I could tell she brought out the same in him. He had been patient with her, compassionate and considerate of her responsibilities. Perhaps this woman was making a man out of my socially-retarded best friend. Had Joe really put love
above
getting laid?

“What about the hanky-panky?” I asked him. “Aren’t you dying? I mean, to know that she lives in the same town and you can’t be with her?”

“Well,” he hesitated, “we have our ways.”

“What the hell does that mean? You have your ways. You’ve never met her, how the hell do you have ways to have sex?” It was then that I had a startling image of Joe masturbating in his bedroom only meters away from where my son and I slept each night. My jaw dropped and I had to pick it up off the floor. Joe saw the transition of my expression from confusion to disgust and smirked. I shivered and cringed. “Gross, Joey!”

“What do you expect, Monkey?”

I suddenly imagined Joe’s penis tucked away like an old forgotten toy. Sometimes you don’t know its value until you get it out, dust it off and try to play with it again. When Transformers hit the shelves, Go-Bots were a thing of the past and experienced their own dry spell. To his defense, if years later some hot guy on the phone started reminiscing about robots, I would totally be inspired to dig Leader-1 out of the box in my closet and tinker with him. I could see the nostalgia of getting out the Go-Bot now.

Thankfully Joe didn’t ask me to play robots with him and I never alluded to his penis being compared to a lesser brand. I assumed our conversation was over and started to leave.

“Sometimes I jerk off outside her window.”

I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly so I turned around to ask, but he was nodding his head yes and grinning already. This was definitely beyond just getting out the Go-Bot. “What the fuuuuuuck, Joe?”

I can honestly say that I don’t curse that often unless it involves some sort of formal inquiry into Joe’s behavior. For some reason, my questions are chock-full of shock and repulsion, and obscenities are the only way to convey my emotions. He never ceases to amaze me.

“So you know where she lives?” This was the only thing I could think to ask at the moment. Why he would do this
outside
her house rather than inside her house or even her was still a question I was trying to configure inside my head. There was no easy way to ask that, so I just didn’t.

“Kind of,” he replied, knowing his response would only lead to more questions. He didn’t necessarily look like he was ready to answer them either.

“Okay, so let me get this straight,” I paused. “You kind of know where she lives?
And
you’re kind of a peeping Tom?” I paused again, thinking my question through. “How the fuck do you kind of know where someone lives? Don’t you either know if she lives there, or not?”

“It’s not like that,” he argued.

“Then what’s it like, Joe? If you
kind of
know where she lives, then maybe you
kind of
jack off outside the wrong window, right?”

“It’s not as if I’m standing outside a window. I park my car on her street and we have phone sex.”

I didn’t think it could get any weirder. But I was pleasantly relieved that he wasn’t spanking his other monkey on someone’s front lawn. I had a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact that he would drive to a woman’s neighborhood and embark on a solo mission without inviting her to come out and play. So I inquired.

“And she doesn’t ever meet you outside?”

“She won’t,” he told me. “The first time I went over there, she gave me directions to her street, but wouldn’t tell me which house was hers. She said her nieces were spending the night, so I sat on the phone with her for hours. She said she could see me and wanted me to touch myself. I’ve been back every night this week, but she always has the kids so we just have phone sex.” He saw nothing wrong with this scenario.

“And you don’t think that’s weird, Joseph? Never mind that Christine has an excuse for every occasion. Don’t you think it’s weird that you’ve been spanking it to a row of houses every night this week? Talk about a weird fuckin’ fetish! Which one do you like best? The white one with the grey trim or maybe the terracotta stucco turns you on?”

Joe’s shoulder’s sunk lower than they did when his piercer told him there wasn’t enough room left on his shaft for a fourth barbell. Suddenly, every ounce of hope and confidence he had placed in his big wiener drained from his little body. He was following his hard on again and this time it led him to a dead end on a cul-de-sac in North Las Vegas. There was no doubt that his hope and confidence punched his ego a little bit upon their departure. He was bruising already.

“When you put it that way, I guess it does sound weird, doesn’t it?”

“A little,” I comforted him. “You’re just lucky the neighbors didn’t report you as suspicious. Please don’t go over there tonight. I don’t want to have to bail you out of jail for lewd behavior.”

I left Joe with a lot to think about, but not without doing some thinking of my own. I decided to take to the computer and exercise my super sleuthing skills again. This wasn’t my first rodeo when it came to researching Joe’s debacles. There was a fungus among us and I was on the hunt for it. I had diverted Joe by making him feel as though he may be the suspicious one, lurking around a dark street with his hand in his pants, but the truth was, I was more suspicious of Christine. Something wasn’t right with this story and I was going to unravel the truth.

I dug deep on Myspace for any clues to Christine’s life. Unfortunately, there weren’t any. She had a lot of pictures taken from all kinds of angles, mostly in the bathroom in front of the mirror, but she had no personal information posted. I was going to have to quiz Joe, and I could only pry when he was vulnerable, so I took him to dinner at Sierra Gold.

“So tell me everything you know, Joe. The truth, and nothing but the truth.” I was feeling confident as a detective.

Joe told me the name that popped up on his caller ID every day, the name of the still born baby who was memorialized, the names of Christine’s nieces and nephews, and the street where he choked his chicken each night. He told me some other names she had mentioned in passing conversations and occupations she claimed to have had in the past. Surprisingly, he had way more information than I expected which led me to conclude that love is definitely blind. There were plenty of weapons in his arsenal to start a war. He had just simply chosen to ignore the approaching enemy and keep his guard down while they marched in and caught him with his pants down.

The next day while Joe was at work, I went on my wild goose chase. It didn’t take me long to find a memorial site online for a child whose name matched Christine’s story. The page verified the child’s death, the sisters and brothers of that baby, whose names matched those of the nieces and nephews, and the father, whose name matched the husband of her sister. I was beginning to think maybe she was telling the truth. As I scrolled down the page, I noticed the name of the mother. It matched the name on the caller ID. Another confirmation. I was ready to throw in my towel, admit my false accusations and call Christine a saint myself when one line stood above the rest. It was a link to their family tree.

I clicked the link to be welcomed by a photograph of a rather large woman, I would surmise in the four hundred pound range, her husband and five children. It was Christine’s sister and her family. I was looking right at them. The only problem was that her sister was an only child and her middle name happened to be Christine. Her family tree was all trunk and no branches. The pieces of Joe’s puzzle started to put themselves together without my assistance. Suddenly, the picture became clearer and clearer. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The sister was Christine. Joe had been duped by an impersonator. I had to tell him! I printed the memorial page, the photos and the family tree, ran downstairs as fast as I could, opened the door and ran right into Joe.

“Oh my God, Joe! You won’t believe this! Guess what I found?” I was so enthusiastic about my discovery that I was yelling at the top of my lungs while I flailed the paperwork in front of his face.

“I know,” he said, quietly.

His tone caught me off guard and I ceased my excitement to look at him. Somehow, I had missed the fact that he had a black eye and a bloody lip. “Oh fuck! What happened to you?”

“Well, I was at work and I got to thinking. Christine had mentioned her sister’s husband worked at the Luxor. So I left work early and headed over to see if I could find him. I did.” He wiped the gunk out of his swollen eye. “Well, he found me first. Apparently I’ve been talking to his wife for the last few months.”

“Aw, man, and I was just on my way to show you these.” I held the photocopies up for him to view but he swatted them aside.

“I already saw photos of her. She’s fucking huge.” Apparently love had Lasik surgery. “Leave it to me to fall in love with a voice on the phone that turns out to be Fatty Fatterson from 1-900-EATS-A-LOT!” He was clearly disappointed and broken-hearted, not to mention her size was making him feel smaller than he was so he was overcompensating with name-calling. Overcompensation has always been one of Joe’s strong points. “Her name’s not even Christine. And she doesn’t even have a sister!”

“I know, Joe. I’m sorry.”

“
And
she’s married!”

“I know.”

“And he’s fat, too!”

I chuckled a little, “How did you find all this out?”

“After her husband got done punching me, we sat down and had a drink. He was pretty cool about the whole thing after he got his anger out. He told me his wife was depressed and delusional. He had suspected she was having an affair so he hired a private investigator. He found out about me a few weeks ago, but didn’t have enough time off work to find me and confront me. When he saw me in the casino stalking him, he recognized me and tackled me. I guess I got lucky. He said if he would’ve seen me outside of his work, he would’ve killed me.”