On Friendship, Part II: Joy

Leoser Complex, fall of 1986, was an odd brew of girls and guys; Job Corps still occupied two wings of South Complex, so we had 3 floors of guys, 9 floors of girls, and the handful of male residents that took up a half floor in Wyly, still the College of Optometry in those days.  That meant we had mixed staff, too.  It could not have been more unlikely:  non-traditionals who were just a few years older, like John Ryder and me, little spitfires like Trish McAlpine and Wendy Barlow, younger sort-of-innocents like Anthony Zulch and Julia Harrison.  Hettie Orange, with the biggest laugh ever, and zany Dana Adair.  Later, Jackie Bullard and Tom Cannon, distinctive individuals who seemed destined to be a part of the group.  You could not put together a more mismatched crew of college kids.  But we bonded over two weeks of staff training, a gigantic off-campus party for my birthday in the middle of that, and then the long weekends when we mostly all stayed on campus, doing laundry, studying, watching movies, going to Granny's Attic for our weekend drinking festivity, and sitting up all night having philosophical discussions or playing a game that we literally (embarrassingly) called "Dormbusters."  We were having the best time of our lives, though we had no money and no clue about life.  I still count many of the friends I made those Leoser years---Jackie, Julia, Anthony, John, Lorraine, Steve, Dean, Wally, Tom---among the truest friends, the ones who loved me most completely, out of all the people I've ever known.  But Laura was the glue that bound us all together.

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When Laura had to let the staff member go who wasn't passing, she lost her closest friend on campus.  They remained friends, but Tena had moved back to Tulsa, and Laura wouldn't go that far in her giant cruiseliner car she called Bart to see her.  It was noticeable that she missed her, though she had an entire galaxy of people that orbited around her, a cloud of student and professional staff who admired her and liked to be around her.  I was there, and like most of the students who worked for her, I found myself spending a lot of my spare time in her apartment in the evenings, where she gently reigned from the "Commando" chair, a brown velour number she'd inherited from her sister, and we would pile in the floor on pillows or blankets (the air in there was set on freeze-your-ass almost all year long), or on the also-inherited contemporary "taco couch," which had a tendency to suck your backside into the crevice and never, ever let you go.  I can't count the hours, Pepsi's, cigarettes, or reams of topics consumed, but I know that's where our friendship was sealed.

 

My family was living in South Dakota that year, so I was mostly on my own.  I spent almost all my time on campus.  Soon, Laura and I were going out doing stuff with another friend or two, not always staff.  Previous staff and old friends like Dawn Killian, Sue Casto, and Lorraine McDonnell were older than the people we worked with and more to our mindset.  Then after a while, it didn't matter whether anyone else was coming with us.  We found we ran on the same speed, temperature, temperament, and timetable---symbiosis.  If we went shopping, we got bored with it at the same time:  pretty quickly.  We liked the same kind of movies:  suspense, mystery, chick flicks, breakup stories.  Anyplace over 65 degrees was too hot.  We smoked the same amount---even the same brand.  By the time I finished my Master's, we were so close that I thought of her as a sister.  In fact, she moved up to a professional off-campus position that year, and I took her Hall Manager job and continued to teach part-time for Arts & Letters. 

 

To see it from the outside, we should not have been friends.  I liked to be at the center of things, and she did not.  I was an outside farm girl, always up for a trip to the river or the lake, day or night.  Laura hated outside and bugs.  I drank rivers of alcohol when I was still a student, and she hardly ever took a drink, due to a blackout incident she had at Dakota Days back when she went to USD.  She loved jazz and hated blues, while I absolutely wanted to break out in hives at the sound of jazz.  Blues spoke to my soul.  She hated most meat, and I was a rancher's daughter raised on beef.  I adored poetry (still wrote it back then); poetry mostly induced eye-rolling in Laura.  Conversely, she was notorious for crying at Hallmark commercials, movies, weddings, you name it.  I was, at least publicly, as tearless as the Sahara.  I was messy, and the older Laura became, the more of a neat-freak she became.  My habit of kicking off shoes everywhere drove her crazy, and her father's secret nickname for me was Pigpen, because I always had a pile of stuff scattered around me, wherever I was.  I was in awe when I found her considerable record album collection was alphabetized.  Art Deco, flamingos, and anything from the 40's and 50's spoke to her.  I remember when she bought an old TV remote control simply because it was identical to the one that her family had when she was little.  While I admired her commitment to a style, I didn't get that style---at all.  I came to understand that, like many other things in her life, to be an attempt to reclaim a sense of her lost home. 

 

So different, but so clearly best friends by that summer we changed roles.  After that, we still ate lunch together most every day, had girls' nights when we would go do ceramics or some other crafty things, went to every Mexican restaurant and Luby's we ran across, hit up craft fairs anywhere we could find them, and spent many a cool weekend afternoon doing what we called "junking," going to antique malls in Locust, Springdale, or Muskogee.  We went to several housing conferences, most notably one at OSU, where we went out to Eskimo Joe's with a bunch of other delegates.  Standing on the stairs in the old beer garden there, nursing her White Russian that must have been pretty strong, she looked up, spied the moon, and proclaimed in childlike wonder, "The moon."  Immediately afterward, she seized up, half-shouting, "Oh my God, the roof is gone!!!"  That story, the memory of her expression and voice, still make me laugh, 25 years later.  It made her laugh, too.  And there was no, is no, probably never will be a laugh that was better than hers.  It was real, head thrown back at first---then if she really got tickled, she'd start to laugh so hard she couldn't catch her breath, she'd start to turn purple, and I'd start screaming at her, "Breathe!" which never helped.  I don't know why, but we could make one another laugh for the most ridiculous reasons---even in annoyance.   Somehow, once, we got on a discussion of how underwear should fit.  I felt it should be close-fitting; her philosophy seemed to run toward underwear that only touched at the waist and was loose from there.  This just made no sense to me, and I harped on it off and on over a long period of time.  Finally, one day when we were on our way to shop in Muskogee, I was warming up to get rolling on this again, when without warning, she exclaimed, "Shut up!  You're giving me a tic!"  First I laughed, then she laughed, and I don't even remember how I finished driving into town after that, because we could...not...quit. 

 

No, there didn't seem to be a lot of reasons for us to be friends, but many people could say that about their closest friendships.  What I don't know is whether most people are stupid enough---truly, so much of a jackass---as to try to lose their best friends.  I was.  I did. 

 

 

***Next time:  Up from Down***