Barbara the Slut and Other People. Lauren Holmes

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       WEEKEND WITH BETH, KELLY, MUSCLE, AND PAMMY

      They say men and women can’t be friends. Because men will always want to have sex with women, even if we say we don’t. We might even think we don’t, but if we see the wrong body part in the wrong way, it will be over. Our penises will end us. But I think there’s a loophole. If the man in question already had sex with the woman in question and was so drunk that he doesn’t remember it. Or he only remembers it enough to know that it was not good. And then the man becomes friends with the woman, and because he has no memory of her vagina, he doesn’t think of her as having one. That’s what’s up with me and my friend Beth. I don’t want to sleep with her even though everyone, meaning my sister, Kelly, thinks I do.

      I’m also not gay. Which everyone, still meaning my sister, also thinks. That’s not why I don’t want to sleep with Beth. I’m attracted to women. I’m not attracted to men. But for a straight guy in New York City, I’m not doing such a good job. For a tall guy with almost all of my hair, I am not doing such a good job. I did great in high school. I did fine in the beginning of college. I did horrible later in college and after that I took a break. I’ve been trying to make a comeback since I got to New York. But New York is weird. And I live with my sister. And back to my sister, the point is she says I have issues. I’m sure I do, just not the lying to myself kind, or the gay kind.

      • • •

      I met Beth the first night of college. We got wasted and had sex. I did two things wrong. Apparently I laughed when she told me to lick her pussy. In my defense, I probably just laughed because I had never heard something like that come out of a girl’s mouth. And I had never done that before. I don’t know why, but I hadn’t. It’s probably better that I didn’t take my maiden voyage into that salty sea when I was blackout drunk. It turns out that I like it very much, but I found that out too late for Beth. I found that out with Tiffany, which was the other thing I did wrong. When we woke up in the morning, I saw Beth’s roommate sleeping in her bed, looking like half Playboy Bunny, half cross-country runner. Which is exactly my type. So I said, “Who’s that?” And that was Tiffany.

      Beth, on the other hand, wasn’t my type. I could see that she was attractive. But I was not attracted to her. At least not when I was sober and had a better sense of how tall she was. I’m six one in shoes but Beth is six two, barefoot. And that morning when I stood up and asked who the blond angel in the other bed was, Beth stood up and told me to get the fuck out. I looked up at her and tried to rearrange my brain. Then I followed her instructions and got the fuck out.

      You know the rest of that story. I dated Tiffany. The ratio of times I went down on her to times she went down on me was ten to one. Beth forgave me. We got to be friends. We thought it was funny that we fucked. I was glad I didn’t remember it. Tiffany cheated on me with four different guys. A new guy each semester, sophomore and junior years. I never would have found out except I met the guy from spring semester junior year. It was an Italian guy she was fucking in study abroad. I visited her there, in Florence, and we ran into him. Something was lost in translation and he thought I was her brother. He asked if I was as flexible as she was and he laughed. At first I thought it was some kind of compliment. Then I realized something was wrong. When it dawned on me what it was, I punched him in the face and broke his jaw and I told Tiffany I hoped she choked on his dick and died. Either that, or I cried in front of Tiffany and Luca the Italian stallion, and Tiffany broke up with me and put me in a cab to the airport with some napkins. I forget exactly what happened. I honestly thought we were going to get married. That’s how fucking stupid I was.

      By that time Tiffany and Beth weren’t friends anymore. According to Beth, Tiffany was a motherfucking cunt. According to Tiffany, Beth was volatile and had no filter. Tiffany may have been a cheating whore but she was very polite. It drove her nuts that Beth said “pussy” and “retard” and told the chair of the biology department that her biology professor was the worst teacher she had ever had and demanded to know if he even had a PhD. I liked that Beth was rude. It was funny. And her referring to her own vagina as her pussy was disgusting and part of what made our friendship possible.

      When we graduated Beth and I got an apartment together in town. I had been offered a job at the college’s development office. None of my other friends were staying around. My two best friends fled the country, one to China to teach English and the other to Haiti to be some kind of hero. Beth wanted to stay in town to keep her suspiciously lucrative job at a pizza place. She worked three days a week and she was rich. I asked her more than once if she was sure they were only selling pizza. She said of course they were only selling pizza, expensive pizza. She took home two to three hundred dollars on a regular night, and she always wanted more shifts. One of the girls who worked six days a week drove a brand-new Mercedes and apparently slept with a Yankees player.

      Beth got fat that year. She stopped exercising and she didn’t know how to cook. Whenever I cooked, she had already called for takeout. She didn’t eat at her restaurant because pizza was fattening, so she ordered from the Chinese food place, the Indian place, the Thai place, and the Korean deli down the street from our apartment where everything tasted СКАЧАТЬ