No, I’m not talking about Karl. As I’ve said before, he’s my husband, not my best friend. And as many others have said, I married him for life, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, but not for lunch.
These days, a BFF is defined by Miss Merriam Webster as “a very close friend.” Well, the English major in me finds that harder to swallow than a case of subject-verb disagreement. A very close friend is a very good thing, even better than, let’s say, a good friend. That’s comparative. But the “B” in BFF stands for best, and that’s superlative.
Ricky became my best friend in high school, but not at first. We were sophomores together at Robert E. Lee, but it could not be said that we were friends that year. He was the gayest thing in Tyler, perhaps in all of East Texas, and that is saying something considering I was coming in a close second. He simply could not have cared less what anyone thought of him, and so Ricky terrified me.
There was some minor adjustment to the lines determining the split between Tyler’s two public high schools, so Ricky spent his junior and senior years at John Tyler, on the north side of town. So we both had our own school in which we could reign, so to speak.
The summer between our junior and senior years of high school, Ricky and I quite coincidentally ended up working at O’Neal’s, an old-fashioned parlor that served the best homemade ice cream in Tyler, made by Mr. O’Neal himself. How poor Mr. O’Neal ended up hiring both of us for that summer is a mystery, but by doing so, the word went out in the sub-rosa world of closeted gay men in Tyler that we were there, and they came to check us out. In those days and at our ages, Ricky turned 17 that summer and I was still 16, we were what was called “chicken.”
For some reason, Ricky was better able to see through these men and their increasingly more obvious motivations, while I was naïve about, fearful of, and a tad excited by this new kind of attention. It was never necessary for Ricky and I to “come out” to each other. We were both gay, and we both knew it, so we skipped that part and began to investigate this clandestine world of men, but without the benefit of knowing anything about how to act in it. We got ourselves into a bit of trouble, individually and together, on several occasions. I’m telling none of these tales.
We did learn from the guys that we befriended that there was a whole world of gay bars and dance clubs in Dallas, so Ricky and I decided to check that out. Armed with his fake driver’s license and my college ID card (I was attending classes at Tyler Junior College in my senior year), we hit Dallas, thinking we were ready for that step. We were so sadly mistaken.
We bombed on our visit to the Bayou Landing, located in an old warehouse at Cedar Springs and Pearl, near downtown Dallas. We had arrived well before the crowd, not knowing any better, but once people started showing up, Ricky and I thought we were well-positioned. We were so comically naïve that we actually believed men would come up to the table and ask us to dance, as if we were in some old movie from the 1940’s.
Finally, we danced with each either a couple of times, but neither one of us had come all this way to do that. Sooner than we expected, we headed back to Tyler, bemoaning what a bust this whole gay bar in Dallas thing had turned out to be. Ricky lamented that we could have had more fun in Tyler dragging Broadway or meeting up with Jimmy, the older brother of one of Ricky’s girlfriends at John Tyler, with whom I suspected Ricky was going further than I was with my downlow classmate.
Nonetheless, by the next Saturday night, we were back in Dallas, trying out a different gay bar, the Old Plantation in its original location on Rawlins Street. But this time, we arrived with the beginning of the crowd, we did not sit at a table unless it was with someone else, and if necessary, we would ask men to dance with us. We were a hit.
Ricky was always two or three steps ahead of me. He taught me not to dance more than two songs with one guy unless I really wanted to do more than dance, and the same rule was in place for guys buying drinks.
We were what would be called “obvious,” and together we could torch a shopping mall. “If they’re going to stare, let’s give them something to stare at.” Ricky had that confidence, and I mimicked it until I owned it myself.
At one point, he was doing hair before becoming a school teacher, and he had given me a Caesar cut, which on me looked more like a Pixie. He had dyed it with a formula of two caps of ginger snap and one cap of chocolate kiss, when a little more kiss and a little less snap would have produced a more subtle effect. But it worked. It was my cut and color when I met Karl. Need I say more?
We grew up gay together and both of us lived in Dallas for many years. Ricky knew most of my other friends, and he judged them carefully. He had moved to Dallas right after high school, so he had more experience than I in dealing with what we thought of as Dallas queens, and he was quick to point out anything he deemed rooted in jealousy or envy. Time would tell that he was invariably right.
For over twenty years, he was the one. Ricky could make me laugh, make me talk about what I didn’t want to talk about, make me have fun when I was having a mood, and make me get off my high horse after I had worked so hard to get up on it.
And then he died. Some kind of heart defect that ran in his family, his mother told me. I was so angry for so long. Ricky died in the midst of all the AIDS deaths, and it seemed so unfair that we could have threaded that needle and not gotten a pass for everything else. For years, I had dreams in which he would come back with some crazy excuse about having to drop out, to get away from something or other. I’m kind of sorry I don’t have those dreams anymore.
In a few days, it will be thirty years since I got that call. Thirty years since I had to arrange for my aunt and his mother’s best friend to go tell Ricky’s mother what had happened. Thirty years since she asked me to pick out the clothes in which he would be buried. “I know you’ll know what Rick would want.” She always called him Rick.
I’m lucky as hell to have had more than my fair share of really close friends. But best? The superlative? That was Ricky.
