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After three days, Joe T. has reached page four of the book, still untitled, that he is writing. He has trouble filling the page. While he mixed the Sardine a drink at the bar (and stopped his whining about how hard it is to write), he asked whether I could ghostwrite the book for him!
Finally, after having swallowed my bile in the previous column over the gratuitous production of books, I said flatly NO.
"I thought we were friends."
That is something, friends, that we precisely ARE NOT.
Joe pouted a moment — perhaps more for the sentiments conveyed by capitalizing all the letters of my dual denials — before he recovered from my rebuff.
"Don't you have the time or something? I thought you liked to write."
I like to write my own material.
Typically, the social rejection meant less to Joe than a figment of an ephemeral writing project less certain to happen than his reading Finnegan's Wake. A few days later, though, back at his booth in the Attic grinding out the sentences, he saw me at the bar.
"Sard, you didn't really mean we weren't friends."
I may have overstated the situation. You might consider me a friend. I, however, do not reciprocate.
"Does that mean, if I was your friend, you would ghostwrite the book for me?"
I wouldn't.
"But what are friends for?"
Apparently, to get them to do things you can't do yourself.
"You consider McNulty a friend."
I only see him here.
"At the bar?"
No, in the Sardine articles. Besides, I have come to think of him more as a father figure.
"And Frank Weathers? Wal-terr?"
Why would I be friends with them?
"You see them — and McNulty and me — all the time."
That's the problem. We see each another too much. We are constantly reminding ourselves why we are in each other's company.
"Why's that?"
To reinforce our familiarity with one another. To feel comfortable. And, in my case, I need you guys for the column.
"That's why we consider you a friend."
Friends don't need each other. In fact, the very opposite is true. Friends at the highest level know that being in the other's company is a let down, cannot attain the quality that was established early in the acquaintanceship. Besides, friends knows how one another thinks. You don't need to reinforce the mutual familiarity.
"Do you have any friends?"
In this column, you could count two. My Pun Pal, whom I have never seen. And Vespucci. I see him every five or six years. But we write a lot.
"What about your girlfriend, Melinda?"
We're becoming friends, but we still have sex. Once we can be with each other without wanting or having sex, our friendship will reach a pinnacle.
"Or she will have left you."
Bob Castle is the author of A Sardine on Vacation. He has had two other books published this year: The End of Travel, a comic memoir and send up of traveling abroad (Triple Press) and Odd Pursuits, a collection of stories (Wild Child Publishing). He is regular writer for Bright Lights Film Journal and has over one hundred fifty stories, essays, and articles published. The first fifteen installments of his saga can be viewed at the old Unlikely Stories. Episodes One through Forty-Seven of A Sardine on Vacation (with five semi-canonical additional episodes) are also available in book form.