Eddie was never my friend. He knew cute dykes and straight girls and hugged and played with them to attract dudes, whereas he used me as a joke when he needed a scapegoat to make himself feel better.
Eddie and I, who knew each other during our adolescent years, met again in New Brunswick, NJ, when I lived in Manhattan. When you reside in Manhattan, though you were once in New Brunswick, you see that time has stopped in other city-suburbs—like traffic through the Lincoln Tunnel.
Eddie, who was in retrograde, had a muscular boyfriend, though Eddie was more butch than his stocky husband.
I visited Eddie with my friend Albert, who went regularly to the NIH to have his blood pumped in and out, because Albert, who slept with many men, had HIV. The NIH thought this treatment, though experimental, might slow the virus.
Albert was more intellectual than Eddie and his pony-tailed boyfriend, who were in a time warp and spoke slower than octogenarians on Fifth Avenue.
Eddie always tolerated me, and more so on Facebook because he realized I was an author and published a book and he loved the poem about me having sex with myself in the shower and my mother opening the curtain and catching me in the act, on Yom Kippur, which was followed with back problems, until God forgave me, gave me a good chiropractor, a Jewish guy with a beard in the West Village, who fixed me.
Eddie loved this poem and that I had become an acclaimed “Sapphic” writer, and yet, he never respected me. Not that he was ever callous, no, but he was always remote, like throwing me in the woods or outshining me in a video for health class that was being viewed by the entire football team.
Eddie was still the same, slithering snake he was in high school and made malignant remarks. When he was in eleventh grade, he made himself look better than me in front of the popular guys, who subsequently died in car accidents. Beautiful and enticing hetero guys who were no longer enticing when they got older, became alcoholics and died in their Volvos or Toyotas along the Jersey Turnpike.
Eddie, who spoke in cursive, lots of daggers on the high wire of Facebook, was the preeminent reason my self-esteem fell to low levels on June 6, 2016, a summer day that would have been as mild as any other but got sliced by Eddie’s verbal guillotine. This was not the French Revolution, and I was not a child of the Revolution, but my existence was that of a peasant intellectual who crossed too many words with Voltaire. “You don’t fuck with Voltaire,” Eddie said as the thick blade went through my membranes. This was, of course, metaphorical, but metaphors can give you more angst than an actual occurrence in real time, which, in a sense, is why metaphors were the precursor to cyberspace, where reality is never quite reality but you think it is.
I thought to myself: I need to delete Eddie from my list of friends on Facebook. It’s either him or my dignity.
I blocked Eddie, though he had purchased a hard copy of my poetry book, displayed it on his red oak table in the living room, and told guests that his friend “Hester was published. Let me read her ‘Orgasm on Yom Kippur Day’ poem.” They cracked up. The barbs continued. He’d barb me like a Barbie Doll, which is caught with her polyester dress undone by a neurotic and untamed Ken Doll.
The first time I unfriended Eddie, he thought, oh my, this must be a clerical error. Hester clearly loves me, she’s a great homosexual poet, and I must be her “friend” again.
Eddie asked me to renew our bond, and with some reluctance, I connected with him again on Facebook.
But he again lacerated me.
“Has your mother read your poem about masturbation?” he wrote on my wall. It was up there for three hours before I deleted it like you might hang a fascist dictator, if you were a partisan.
“What an asshole he is!” I told a mutual acquaintance.
Everyone merely said, “Oh Eddie, he’s just like that, he doesn’t mean anything by it; you know Eddie, he’s always been that way.”
This time he noticed my blocking was not a clerical error.
I cut ties with him a second time, around the 12th of November, when the weather, near his Jersey home, was foul.
And this time Eddie did not ask me to friend him, though he still spoke with me, via Messenger, which is what alienated people do to maintain relations.
Last night, in my dream, Eddie worked for Merrill Lynch. He did graphics, though he is really a Rite Aid manager in Princeton.
Well, funnily enough, in this nightmare, I got a job in Eddie’s Merrill Lynch office. Eddie was welcoming, didn’t see my anxieties float over cubicles, and was able, with defiance, to be corporate yet maintain an artistic decorum among his peers.
I was new, didn’t have a desk, and though I was given a temporary one, Eddie asked me to sit next to him.
He didn’t suffer from the same social phobias that I do. I always get fired because I don’t get along with people. I think they are spying or laughing or telling the boss what a horrible editor I am, though if they told the truth, that I was better than them, they’d be fired; but that would interfere with their $600 car payment, so instead they tell stories about me and I get terminated.
Eddie, the third time I unfriended him, stopped talking with me via Messenger.
He was afraid or curious or hurt. It was hard to tell why because he didn’t tell me why he halted our conversations.
It might have been that elephantine female in the room: I dated his former date to the Golden Retriever Poetry Society Dance, who, at age 59, forty years later, was still closeted, but no one from high school, in 2019, stopped their cars in the middle of Route 9, asking, “Do you think Angela Turnip is a lesbian?” Angela Turnip, who never left our hometown, except to attend a not-quite ivy league university, was utterly concerned that people discussed her sexuality while standing in line at ShopRite.
I knew that Angela and Eddie went to the Golden Retriever Poetry Society Dance together in 1979 because I saw their picture on Facebook, with that 70s blow dried hair that made them look like birds. Black birds. At 59 they resembled gray ostriches in a Jackson, NJ, safari park, but they never put their heads below the earth, for they were always looking around, stalking the weather and other people’s insecurities.
Eddie eyed me eerily at Merrill Lynch.
It was the first time we had spoken since I blocked him.
People don’t like cyber alienation, especially if they are dissing you.
Eddie asked me to sit next to him.
“No, Eddie, my love,” I replied, because we had studied Grease in high school. He understood the allusion.
He got quiet, coughed and breathed at the revelation: he was unfriended thrice, blocked once, by Hester Mittgang, the acclaimed lezzy scribe who had written about orgasm on Yom Kippur.
“Found out you went to bed with Angela Turnip,” Eddie announced.
“I think I need to leave.”
He followed but then pressed a key on his computer and sat down.
“You are deleted,” he remarked.
“From where?”
“My life, this nightmare, the hemisphere. And that in-the-closet dyke Angela Turnip you went to bed with, wherein you were butch in the streets, fem in the sheets, and Angela Turnip, who enjoyed her make-believe penis like a Forest Ranger would his gun, well, she will not talk with you again.”
I ended the dream so that Eddie could not fire me. I covered myself with sheets. My dog dribbled on my blanket.
I continued to stalk Eddie on Facebook, but since he had now blocked me, in addition to my blocking him, I couldn’t see more than a small image of him with a brown afro. It was clearly his hair before he went bald—his hair in the 1970s—when he tried making out with me in front of the football players to prolong his closeted status though they all knew his eyes in the gym locker room did not drift to their sneakers.
One day, however, I couldn’t control my cell phone fingers. I drank a few beers and called a mutual friend to get his phone number.
“Eddie?” I asked. I was a little slippery from the Molsons.
He was muffled, which is unusual for Eddie, whose mouth is like an untrained bird that shits all over the house.
“Who is this?” he said. He sort of knew, or I thought he knew, that it was me.
“It’s Hester…”
“Who?”
“Hester…Hester Mittgang,” I hesitated, “from high school.”
Silence.
I also said nothing.
“How did you get my phone number?”
“Ummmmm…”
“It’s unlisted,” he pronounced the word as a grammarian might when making a change in book cover copy.
“I just wanted to…”
“Look, Hester…you are fucking crazy. If you ever call my house again, I’m going to file a police report.”
The Molsons did not provide a good reply.
He hung up.
I’ve since regretted breaking up with him, if such a thing is possible. I realize Eddie was an asshole and treated me like shit, but I still wanted to keep an eye on him—the way good hunters observe their prey.
