night and found out he was living in Indiana, I was in Mike’s apartment and he was introducing me to his wife. It was weird but only because I remembered how we used to go out looking to pick up girls and now…he was married. I quickly saw that he hadn't just married the first person who said yes to him because his wife was really fun. I should have expected as much. Mike was a sharp guy so being with a girl that wasn’t cool certainly wouldn’t have happened. He would quickly drop the girls who tried to call him twenty times a day or ones who had discolored vaginas. We headed out and bounced around like we did when we lived in Chicago and it reminded me of why we hung out in the first place. I always loved hanging out with him because I didn’t know anybody else like him. Much like myself, he had looked around at the people we worked with at the bar and did not want to become one of them but he knew how strong the temptation was. When I left
wasn’t quite sure how he felt about it. On the one hand I think he was sad to see me go since we were such good friends. On the other hand I think he was jealous because I was getting out and he was still there. But then again he made a comment about how he’d see me back working at the bar when I failed in LA. So I guess he was a bit conflicted. Really I should have known how things were going to turn out when I let him read one of my screenplays and he ended up puking all over it. Now, the excuse he used was that he was reading it when he was on the toilet and the puke was completely unrelated to the screenplay. Looking back, I find the whole thing very fitting. Nonetheless, he met the woman he would eventually marry and they moved down here so she could finish school. They didn’t know what their future held but they knew it would be together and that was all that mattered to them. Being out and spending time with the both of them really allowed me to see how great they
were together because his wife only added to the what we would have been doing if it was just the two of us. There was camaraderie, telling old stories, telling new stories, and drinking. Lots of drinking. This was the kind of stuff I missed most because it was fun to spend time with people that you can get along with on multiple levels. We could hang out like we never missed a beat and ended up talking to strangers about everything from philosophy to their favorite sexual positions. Mike even found his masturbation soul-mate since the two of them determined they liked the same kind of pornography. The fact that it was a woman wasn’t exactly something he was prepared for but it didn’t surprise me. At this point nothing did. But then of course he was a married man now so there was grown up time too. We went out to his step-parents place and hung out with the family who had some beautiful land. They also had problems with cows wandering onto their property which was not a problem