Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2018 15:11:05 +0200 From: Charley Reed Subject: Reed 'em and weep - next chapter: 21 April 2008. Monday 21 April 2008 Fact of the day: Okay, it's more of a Fact of Yesterday; Hitler would have turned 119 yesterday, having been born on 20 April 1889. Okay, heading off to watch the first matches of this round of the football during lunch today and giving ourselves a chance to check out the competition. Some of the teams have gone with comedic names such as Unatletico Retardo; others have gone pseudo-clever like us with AC P(h)arma, and some jokers have called themselves FC Barseholona. And then some have gone uber-dull and called themselves Real Madrid and Chelsea; undoubtedly, these are the twats who'll all pitch up in the club replica kits. Still, Meads United and D&C have a lunch-date tomorrow, and when all is said and done it's them who'll be paying for the meal. Okay, so as far as punchy slogans go that one needs work. J3sus, my old mates are the biggest perverts ever in the history of ever. It was the Party of the Century – Mandy's Big 17th Bash – this past weekend and she allowed me to invite the guys along and I actually had to elbow Gareth in the ribs on three separate occasions and tell him to close his mouth and quit drooling on the guests. I swear, if I hadn't I reckon he'd have pulled his cock out and started wanking on them. Okay, so I'm not uber-gay, I don't think. I don't follow fashion; I hate the house music and the idea of The Scene. I don't worship divas and I hate showtunes. I'm really not at all trendy. So I'm just plain ol' gay, but I am gay, and even I could tell that some of Mandy's little friends are going to grow into supermodels. Damn, those girls know how to get tarted up and work it for a party. Annoyingly, given the apparent level of visual talent at the PotC, it seems that little Ms Mandy has surpassed my carefully attained level of High School Cool. Credit where it's due – she has turned my level onto its stomach and raped it, in the way that the almighty fuck-off new double-decker Airbus would probably molest a Sopwith Camel. Hint: I'm fairly sure I was really not that cool at high school. I'll admit I did spend some time quietly postulating which of the guys there might be the father of my niece or nephew, but then stopped because a.) it was depressing to think that some hormonal, acne-riddled adolescent is getting to use his cock with an actual live human and I'm not. Also, b.) it was weird to trying to picture them in the act, because of course my sister was the other protagonist in my mind's eye and I'm sure you'll agree that that is like twenty six different kinds of wrong, and that's before you start considering their ages relative to mine. We didn't stay long; being all Out of School and At Varsity and thus cool by inference if not actuality, what would we want to hang with Grade 11s for, right? So we fucked off after an hour or two and ended up... doing nothing, mooching around and driving in circles arguing about where to go for the night. In the end – I shit you not – we ended up buying ice-creams from the Quick Shop at the local Engen petrol garage; the one at the entrance to our neighbourhood, no less, since we didn't even get out of that, for fuck's sake. We ate them in parking lot of the shopping center, outside the back door/return slot to the DVD store where Ben still does his time to earn a bit of spending money. Don't knock it – we get free rentals from him; it's not all bad. Al and I have both waited tables and Gareth delivers pizzas – exactly how middle class and profoundly suburban are we, on a scale from 1 to 10? Don't answer that. Still, in addition to being not rich, we're apparently also not cool enough to do anything other than mooch around our own neighbourhood and eat ice-creams on a Saturday night after blowing off a high school party. This is unusual, since we have a variety of places we usually go, but we just couldn't get moving on Saturday. A touch of nostalgia for a simpler time, perhaps? It wasn't a complete write-off, surprisingly – we got to have one of those profound and critical existential guy conversations, like people do in the movies. Quite surreal, the car radio tuned to UCT's fm station, us munching away on frozen confectionary and shooting the shit about where we'd come from and where we thought we were going to, where we'd be in five, ten and twenty years' time, which of us would get married first (the others all reckon it's me; a horrifying prospect), who'd have an affair with a secretary or hot waitress (consensus is Al on this one, even from him), which one would become the hen-pecked, over-domesticated, completely emasculated shell of his former self (me again; worrying), who'd cave in to the mid-life crisis and buy a sports car (also me, although I like sports cars, so...), who'd end up with like seven kids but be the poster-boy dad (Ben), who'd be the eternal bachelor (consensus here is none of us, in fact) and who might end up with a psycho off an internet dating site (Gareth, simply because he is too nice). As is typical of things like these, we solemnly promised we'd always be there for each other, we'd always be each other's alibi if necessary, it would always be us four against the world, all that over-done, over-simplified Hollywoodised bullshit which you need to say to yourself to feel like you still matter and to believe that you might one day have more purpose than this. Of course, much of it was a lot of hollow words on my part, and I feel really shit about that. None of these guys even suspect me, I don't think, and I know for sure I'm not straight now – after years of believing, no, desperately hoping, it might be just a phase, I've quietly accepted it in the last year or so – and every day where I don't tell them is one day further away from being able to keep quiet about this in good conscience. These are my oldest friends. We have so much history. I've known them since I was five; I know they'll understand and it won't be an issue. I don't know, then, why I can't just fucking sack up and tell them. It's really not so easy, though, is it? I came close, I really did; there was a perfect opportunity, a pregnant lull in the conversation right after the soppy bit about us being best friends forever, where I could have just whipped it out and stuck it in there. I should have; I fucking should have. It burns us, Precious! I don't want to be all OTT about it; I don't want a massive Coming Out party. I don't want anything special, or any different treatment. I just want to tell my friends the truth and I don't know why I can't do it. -C