The Dude

Most men have at least one friend who drives their girlfriends batty. This friend is usually a slovenly deadbeat - an obnoxious drunk and habitual stoner who parties way too much for her taste. She feels he is a bad influence on her boyfriend. He has a low grade telepathy for knowing just the wrong time to drop by (always uninvited), and he stays for hours situated on the couch mooching beer and weed and doing things like belching and talking with his mouth full that infuriate and outrage female sensibilities. For sentimental reasons, or out of a misguided sense of loyalty, or because they like to let their wild idiot side play out vicariously through him, men will not cut this guy loose. They seem to romanticize their one friend who is living free outside societal constraints, perhaps because they feel that they have been tamed and forced to settle down. For whatever reason, guys will obstinately defend their friend and chuckle indulgently even as they have to bail him out or loan him money for the infinite time. They refuse to find fault with him,

“Poor dude! He just has the worst luck! The cops completely overreacted. Talk about police brutality.”

“He just keeps dating these girls that turn out to be psycho bitches that screw him over completely! Oh, by the way, he needs a place to stay so he’ll be moving in for a while.”

Even though the girlfriend will try to undermine their friendship with all the effort and dirty tactics of the CIA destabilizing communist friendly governments in Latin America, the boyfriend, no matter how pliable and whipped in every other aspect, remains stupidly, stubbornly loyal to his friend. It enrages the girlfriend that she can’t win this one battle, which makes her hate the friend all the more.

I had an old boyfriend Birmingham who had a friend just like this named Tony. In usual fashion Tony got thrown out of his current living arrangement so my friend took him in and let him sleep in a room in the back of his apartment. The room was small and there was only space for a bed, but somehow Tony also managed to cram his extensive porn collection, which was about as large as the Library of Alexandria, into the room as well. He had inherited the collection from his long time bachelor brother when he got married and it was Tony’s single largest material asset. Girls of every nationality performing every fetish imaginable were represented on the porn's pages, many of which were expensively laminated. Because space was limited, porn was strewn about in a thick porn carpet around the room and in large, precarious piles, stacked up as shamelessly as New Yorkers and LL. Bean catalogs. There was even porn shoved between the mattresses, poking out like a dust ruffle or lettuce leaves from a sandwich. Tony didn’t bother using a mattress cover or fitted bottom sheet and had only a grimy sheet laid across the top, only partially covering the stained mattress. His room, which had no door, was quite a sight, and girls would stand before it in mesmerized horror like a bird before a snake.

The worst part about Tony was that he would inconsiderately monopolize the single apartment bathroom. He would either spend hours locked in there with his harem of porn or anchored on the toilet in peristaltic spasms from all the cheap cocaine cut with baby laxative he had done the night before. No one else could, or wanted, to use the bathroom.

Tony eventually moved on but one day my friend was telling me about how months after Tony left he opened up a Monopoly game and found the magazine Swingers of Birmingham. My old boyfriend suspects that Tony had been interrupted while perusing it and had hurriedly shoved it in the Monopoly box. I asked where it was and my old boyfriend said that he had thrown it out because it was absolutely disgusting, full of very unattractive hillbillies, about the level of glamour and taste that you would expect from Hustler's Beaver Hunt (link not safe for work). I would have given anything to see such a thing. I remain deeply disappointed to this day that I didn’t get to see it and I still haven't forgiven him for throwing it out.