Letter to a Platonic Friend

Dear Angie,

You’ll be happy to hear I finally named a character after you. She’s in that password-protected novel that has been collecting dust in my My Documents folder, the one I only pretend to hate talking about because it’s been halfway done for years with no end in sight. Out of a highfalutin indulgence, her name ended up turning into Angelica. She’s implicitly “angelic”, although you wouldn’t say that that’s the first thing that comes to mind when describing a genially obese, black, Louisianan gypsy who roams atop highway medians either panhandling or hitchhiking or scaring children. Decked out in ornate head scarves, shawls and bangles, she punctuates various critical moments with a “Lord have mercy!” A blatant mammy caricature, she is.

In a movie adaptation, Queen Latifah would play her.

But Angelica’s function, of course, is to serve as the novel’s deus ex machina, although great efforts are being taken to reign in my twenty-something male writer’s urge to execute a contrived Replace All on the protagonist’s name to something like Jeff Crawford or Julio Cortez or Jerome Carter, along with concluding his character arc with a self sacrifice, etc.

I’ve grown fond of this Angelica character, not so much because she’s a breath of fresh air in the otherwise surprisingly vapid premise that has been fueling the project thus far, but because every night spent fleshing out her range of strengths and foibles doubled as an evening spent thinking about you, baby. I’d laugh to myself, imagining the bewilderment on your face as you’d one day peruse the manuscript wondering what went wrong with my childhood, just as I’m laughing to myself right now, picturing the sneer your mouth is currently forming into after beginning to be so totally creeped out in a way that you can’t even begin to vocalize!

(Spelled out for you, it’s either because I seem to get off on spending my evenings writing a book featuring a character based off of your essence, or because of the really weird way this letter is being written, like I’m trying to sound smarter than I usually sound, or both, or because I admitted that I laugh to myself, and who does that.)

Trust me, I can do better. You attended one of my college house parties, where desperately improvised punch lines followed every anecdote in order to meet the ensuing crickets and snobs complained about the lack of alcoholic variety in the cooler. The air inside was stale and hot, the outside mosquito-heavy night sky glowed a dull orange from low-pressure sodium streetlights. The introductions were uninspired. Phil caused a ruckus with his unsolicited camerawork and his circus-show pituitary gigantism, and you barely maintained any rapport with Krissy who seemed to only communicate with others that evening by lifting her contemptuous right eyebrow, so it was easy to deduce, in my mind at the time, that the only reason you were there was because you were hot for me (even though you yawned during my Josh Hartnett joke and briefly dozed off on the living room couch while the party raged on for everyone else, prompting me to take an up-close picture of you napping—startling you with the flash of my camera—because it was my best stab at being “flirtatious” during that awkward juncture of our developing friendship).

And as the party evolved and the surrounding background chatter continued to escalate, I reached a point where listening to what people were actually saying to me was a physical impossibility. Instead, I only paid attention to how they looked as they were saying it, nodding at the appropriate cues and giving them stock replies based off of their limited facial expressions. It never ceases to amuse me how people have no idea that I have no idea what they’re talking about. And while everyone spoke to me at the same time, I kept a watchful eye on the inebriated, bald roid-rage dude who was harassing you right as you were leaving. He draped his thick arm around you and appeared to ask you what your name was and you grasped your purse protectively and appeared to answer, “My name is Angie.” And he did his very best to say something truly debonair, something that only a funny charming genius with a large vocabulary could pull off, but it came out sounding stupid so you turned away and continued walking towards the door and to save face he made a V-shape with his index and middle fingers and flicked his tongue through it in your direction as his Neanderthal lackeys behind him howled in rowdy approval.

Later on that evening I donned a Michael Myers Halloween mask and a pair of latex gloves, then opened the upstairs bathroom door and spun the roid-rage dude around while he was in the middle of urinating. He said, What the fuck. And then: What the fuck? Just like he had done earlier, I stuck my tongue out between my two fingers spread into a V. For most of the night he had been smoking marijuana with Rick and a couple other guys out on the back porch, so it must have horrified him in his drunk and stoned mental state the way my tongue snaked out of the narrow slit of my emotionless mask, my eyes vacant but menacing. “LEAVE ANGIE ALONE!” I shrieked, although my mask’s lips didn’t move, and he nodded despite having forgotten your name and not even knowing what this was all about.

“IF YOU MESS WITH HER AGAIN, I’M GONNA MUTILATE YOUR TESTICLES WITH A NAILCLIPPER.”

In a movie adaptation, I would be all CGI.

The next morning I asked Justin if he thought you had the hots for me. He told me probably not, that if you left my party at 10:30 pm on a Friday night then that meant you found me boring. I cursed myself: cursed myself for not thinking of any better jokes than ones about Josh Hartnett, cursed myself for doing a duet with Missy instead of you on karaoke night at Starbusters, thus causing possible confusion. Justin told me I could still be that penis in the glass jar waiting to be smashed at any given moment, so I shrugged and began my implementation of a five-year seduction plan where I would feed you a steady diet of witty instant messages and start up a hilarious blog geared towards developing your curiosity towards me, curiosity which would later grow into obsession. At the end of five years, I would then abruptly retire from blogging, throwing you into a state of horny desperation and thus putting me in a position of power. Words made you fall in love with me, baby, and it’s all culminating with the highest honor of you being the namesake of one of my characters, isn’t it.

Sincerely,
Pete