I’ve been fairly relentless about the importance of maintaining friendships with folks who hold very different views. We all have our limits, however. Here’s a story of a friendship I did lose, and have — just this month of all months — very tentatively begun to restore.
One name in this story has been changed.
July 17, 2016.
I’m on my laptop, scrolling through Facebook when I should be in bed, nursing my summer cold.
A message window pops up.
It’s Gretchen.
Fall 1985, UC Berkeley. As freshmen, Gretchen and I meet in Professor Stroud’s Epistemology class, and bond over a shared enthusiasm for David Hume and Djarums. Later, we appear a few times in a small pick-up cast of Rocky Horror. I am cast as Brad but long to be Frank-n-Furter; Gretchen is Janet — and also wants to be Frank-n-Furter. The first and only time I ever do MDMA, it is with her, after one of our shows.
“What’s up?” Gretchen asks.
“Not much. Winding down. How you?”
“Getting excited for the convention.”
I brace myself. Here we go.
Gretchen grew up in Huntington Beach, but lives in a Dallas suburb now. She’s a die-hard conservative who backed Rick Santorum in the primaries at first, then Ted Cruz, and has now turned into a devoted Trump fan. She saw my post over the weekend about the party platforms, and tells me how happy she is with the principles the GOP has chosen to embrace.
“I guess we’re both happy, then,” I reply. “The Democrats have a strong progressive platform, better than I thought it would be.”
“I knew you’d say that!” She adds a winking emoji. In the years we’ve argued politics, which has been since we rekindled a friendship online a decade ago, we’ve also tempered our disagreements with constant small acknowledgements that our affection for each other transcends everything.
In the fall of 1986, we are walking on Durant Avenue, both a little drunk. Somehow, we start kissing. There is little chemistry, but Gretchen and I do love each other, even if it’s not that way. We’ve joked about sleeping together for over a year, and today we decide to try. It is not awkward. It is not unpleasant. It is tepid, but it is also hysterically funny, and we don’t stop giggling. After a few minutes, Gretchen asks to stop. “This just isn’t us,” she says, and I agree. Naked, Gretchen falls asleep on my chest. In the middle of the night, I feel suffocated, and I extricate myself. She briefly wakes up, laughs and gently kicks me. “You’re mean,” she mutters.
In the morning, we get dressed and declare this will never happen again. It never does.
There is one thing Gretchen and I have in common when it comes to politics: we are both heavily invested in the social issues (abortion, LGBT rights, sex worker rights). Though guns and immigration, foreign policy and economics are not irrelevant to us, what has turned us both into political activists time and again are the issues revolving around sex and the autonomy of the body.
“Do you think Trump even cares about abortion or gay marriage?” I ask.
“He might not,” Gretchen concedes. “But the party does, and the judges he’ll appoint will. That’s good enough for me. The Supreme Court is the most important thing.”
“I hear ya,” I say. That’s what I always say when I’m at a loss for words, or tired, or trying to avoid a fight. I’m reduced to giving her vacuous affirmations.
And then, she types something else. In several years of good-natured political disagreement, she’s never gone here. Maybe it’s the intensity of this bizarre, bloody, bewildering summer of 2016. Maybe she’s sincerely ready to end the friendship.
“Hugo, I love you, but I’m worried about how you’re raising Heloise. She’s going to be a teenager soon. I think you’re setting her up for disaster.”
Even my old friends don’t get to go there. I inhale, and my fingers fly. I was taught by the best typing teacher ever when I was in 7th grade and I’ve been a writer ever since, and I can get out 80 words a minute if I’m angry enough. And I am.
Gretchen takes an extra year to graduate from Cal, doing a double major in music and psychology. She moves to Los Angeles in 1990, going to grad school in music. We hang out regularly, go to classical concerts together, and make a heroic effort to befriend the other’s partner. I hit it off fairly well with her boyfriend, but Gretchen and my first wife have nothing to say to each other, and the silences are awkward. And then, Gretchen finds the church.
I tear Gretchen a new one. How dare she question my parenting decisions? I spell it out, writing that if Heloise were to get pregnant as a teen, I’d want her to make the best decision for herself, whatever that looked like. I give thanks for California, one of the few states in the union without a parental notification law for minors seeking abortion. And I add that I sure as hell don’t care about trans folks using the restroom with her.
“You’re putting your liberal ideology ahead of your daughter’s health. That’s disgusting,” she replies.
Gretchen has three daughters, much older than mine; her girls are now 20, 17 and 12. “And you’d want to force your girls to carry a rapist’s baby to term,” I shoot back.
Forget 31 years of friendship. We are typing bumper sticker slogans at each other. My face is hot.
Sometime in 1991 or 1992, Gretchen’s roommate introduces her to the Los Angeles Church of Christ, an aggressively fundamentalist, right-wing Christian movement. Gretchen is swept up in it. Her boyfriend breaks up with her over it, but Gretchen is determined. She invites me to go with her, and I beg off, pleading my own gentle Jewish/Anglican agnosticism.
Gretchen pushes and pushes, and I give in and go with her, sitting through an interminable, creepy service. There are full-immersion baptisms, praise bands with poorly tuned instruments, and hectoring preachers. Gretchen’s eyes glow, and I wonder what happened to the sardonic, pale girl who played Janet to my Brad, the one who laughed until milk came out her nose when I told her I thought I might want to become a priest.
I’ve had many conversions in my life. They never last. Gretchen has one, and it takes.
Boy, how it takes.
You know how arguments like this go. I’ve been studiously avoiding political fights for months, citing my own exhaustion and fragile mental health. Gretchen, who attends a lily-white megachurch, is surrounded by the like-minded and wants someone to quarrel with. We’re both spoiling for a full-blown, nasty-ass, hit-below-the-belt scrap with someone whose views we each regard as ill-informed and irresponsible.
For a quarter of an hour, we rage at each other. Gretchen patronizes: “I think you’re only saying these things because you’re seriously mentally ill.” I lash back: “Seriously, you’re getting less and less kind and tolerant the older you get. What the fuck happened to you?”
She brings up porn, reminding me to make sure my children never see it. “I hope you’re not masturbating,” she says. “Men who masturbate grow spiritually weak and demons possess them.”
Early 1987: Gretchen and I make a Saturday trip to San Francisco for dim sum and a visit to the legendary Good Vibrations. It is my first visit to a sex store, her second. We look at antique vibrators together, giggle, and swap details about how we make ourselves cum. “I bet I jerk off more than you do,” she says, and when I ask how often, am stunned to find out she’s right.
Several times in the past 25 years, Gretchen has remarked that she worries about my soul. “If you don’t accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, you can’t be saved.” She was ecstatic when I flirted with evangelicalism for a hot minute; when I wandered back to my “secular lifestyle” we didn’t talk for nearly a decade.
I ask: “Do you think my kids are going to hell?”
We’ve left abortion and porn and bathrooms behind. We’re now at the zenith of the fight.
“You know the answer, Hugo. It’s not about what I think. I want the best for you and Heloise and David and Ayra (sic). But Jesus is the only way to salvation, and if you and your babies don’t accept Christ, then you’ll be cut off from God forever.”
I pause. And I tell her the truth: I can’t do this. I can’t fight like this. “We had a beautiful thing a long time ago,” I write, “and I will always love you with all my heart, but I can’t be friends with you. Not like this.”
“I feel the same way,” she replies.
“I’m going to unfriend you now,” I type.
“Okay,” she replies, “I’ll let you do it first.” The wink emoji appears.
“Thank you,” I tell her, “For everything.”
I hope she doesn’t ask for what because I don’t have an answer. Gretchen comes through for me, and doesn’t ask.
“I love you too,” she types. “I’m praying for you.”
I close the chat window and unfriend her.
I go out for a walk. I put the Rocky Horror soundtrack on, and with my earbuds in, I walk a long, long time.
May 1994. Gretchen is getting married. She’s found a man at church, and they are very much in love. “We haven’t even kissed,” she tells me; “our first kiss will be at the altar.” I am bemused and in awe, but I want Gretchen to be happy. I’m also engaged to be married to wife #2, and this fiancée is the jealous type. She wants me to cut off all my friends of all sexes whom I’ve slept with. After a huge fight, my fiancée refuses to come to Gretchen and Mike’s wedding. (It should have been a sign; her jealousy and my dishonesty will work in tandem to sink our brief marriage.)
I go stag, and at the sit-down lunch reception, end up sitting with the groom’s cousins, who offer me a flask and invite me bow-hunting. I decline both, the former with regret.
Except for the concealed flasks, there is no alcohol at the reception. This is a dry church.
There is dancing to Motown, and eventually, I get a chance to twirl a moment with Gretchen. She is radiant and sweaty and happy, the perfume and cologne of a hundred different embraces mixed on her skin. She hugs me tight, and impulsively, I lift her off the floor.
“Careful now,” she says. She looks around, then whispers, her breath hot in my ear, “I wish we could go get a fucking drink.”
I haven’t heard her swear in years. I can feel my face light up.
As an uncle or an in-law taps her shoulder, Gretchen smiles at me, shrugs, and winks. “Love you,” I mouth at her. “Love you more,” she mouths back.
September 2020. After four years of no contact, I get an email from Gretchen. It’s not personal; it’s a birth announcement for her first grandson. I send a message of congratulations, and get a brief reply: “Are you ready to be friends again?”
I send a friend request on FB. For weeks, there’s no reply. Then, yesterday, she accepts it, and “likes” a dozen of the photos of the children. I do the same to the pics of her holding her grandson, and in honor of his name, quote a song I know we both know, as we used to sing it together.
“Goodnight, you moonlight ladies!” I type as a comment beneath a pic of the infant in Gretchen’s arms.
This morning, she likes the comment, and replies, “He is a very sweet baby James.”
It’s a start.
(An earlier and much shorter version of this story ran on Medium in 2016)
Thank you, Hugo.
What a fun read!
It’s written as though you’re sitting across from me at my kitchen table, the way friends usually do —— storytelling while enjoying a nice cuppa hot tea.
My husband who claims Native American ancestry, was raised with no boundaries, wary of government, & the 1st & 2nd amendments are practically tattooed on his forehead. He probably recites it as a lullaby before he sleeps. Ha ha.
When I host dinner parties at my house, my best friend, comparable to Alexandria O-C, her husband, a 6’4 fun-loving kind of bohemian, speaks over everyone with a loud northern British accent, then attempts to keep the peace by replenishing our champagne glasses to the rim with a bottle of bubbly rose during disagreements about touchy things. Meanwhile, “back at the ranch,” our other guests, play loud country music dancing under the influence of Cabernet and chases it with Mary &Juana.
It’s cliche but “all we need is love.”
Hope you’ll be able to continue to be friends. So difficult to see people we love make baffling changes. My sweet sister-in-law was a Catholic (albeit one who felt she had “lost her saints”) when she met my Jewish brother, and they were married by a rabbi under a chuppah. They remained agnostic for 10 years. When their kids were toddlers she joined a right-wind evangelical church , and now believes the earth is 4,000 years old, Harry Potter is evil, and nonbelievers who have not been “born again” will be “left behind” when all the believers are physically swooped up to “Heaven”. She has a high school education and has been homeschooling the kids since kindergarten (they’re now 14 & 15). The teachings are based on a fundamentalist Christian curriculum. They voted for Trump in 2016. Luckily they live in S. FL while we live in central FL so we rarely see them and maintain a friendly relationship. I love her but can’t respect her religious or political beliefs ( which we never discuss).