Lunch Buddies Public Service Announcement

First, you get a phone call.

"Hey Buddy! Guess what? I'm temping near your office! Let's meet in Bryant Park for lunch!"

You couldn't be more thrilled. After all, it's your handsome, witty, strapping gay wingman and frankly, you love his company.

Pretty soon it's "Bryant Park Lunch?"
"Totes," You reply.

Next week it's "Bry Par Lu?"
"Mmmmm hmm."

Pretty soon it's just a ring of the telephone-- you pick up-- "Braple?
"Mya."

Your afternoons are cozy-- you laugh and laugh, he eats elaborate compose-your-own salads and talks about his BMs, you do stupid pet tricks with water bottles and cottage cheese and inhale deep, deep draughts of his second hand smoke.

But then-- maybe it's a Wednesday, a Thursday-- a day when suddenly the shit hits the fan and you have work to do. Meetings to meet, letters to draft, a blog to keep up with, 3-4 hours' worth of news to read.

"I'm sorry, Mike," you say. I don't think I can make it today."
He spazzes.
"Relax!" You say.

His response, via email:

"relax!" she purred. "i was in a meeting all morning!" mike squirmed in his ass groove. he felt...cuckolded. what self-respecting government agency would schedule a meeting, let alone a long one? dewy drops of tears burst forth from his reddened eyes. his long, naturally thick lashes glommed together and shone with the salty weight of their owner's fear and sadness. but, just as suddenly as his emotions oberwhelmed him, he was buoyed. he had remembered his adventures of the previous sunday eve, which at the time seemed foolish--the result of finding a dusty xanax under his bed and a bottle of malibu in his toilet tank--but now seemed appropriate. indeed, mike couldn't help but dash to the bathroom and lift up his shirt in front of the mirror. pausing briefly to admire his well-honed iliac crest, mike scanned upward, to the true subject of this bathroom sojourn: body art, the fashionistas called it. his mother would call it a disgrace. to mike, it was nothing short of blacked-out inspiration: ringing his nipples, in letters of fiery gold, bore the anthem:

when women and fags make you want to kick the bucket
just remember: you're vital! throw up your hands and say "fuck it!"
and he did.


This is obviously how one responds to such a preposterous epistle:

"what self-respecting government agency would schedule a meeting, let alone a long one..."

Mike's words echoed in the capacious chamber of Julia's mind, guilt suddenly bumping fiscal anxiety and hunger for leafy greens out of their usual places. It was true, her frail lie had shattered in the glare of Mike's keen perception, his Alexandria, VA upringing having soaked him in an incidental knowledge of the permadormant ways of government. But was his vision keen enough to know what she had really been up to? She consciously straightened her posture, pumping her tough, round breasts further out into the stale office air... "How could he know know know know know" she whispered, at first silently and then out loud, to mask the sound of a turnip green's carbon gasses wheezing from her ass. Could he have intuited that she had been lovemaking with a robot in the basement of the MoMA, roiling in piles of tempera paint willy-nilly? Could he know that she had run out to times square pretending to be a statue for the tossed pennies of foreign children who had no idea they were looking at a bush about T minus 45 minutes before it was to get a terrible, terrible toxic shock infection. The robot, meanwhile, was dead from exhaustion and needed to be cranked-- but alas, she had banged the crank straight off his body like Keisha Castle-Hughes with a badger for a muff, riding a honey-baked ham.

Did I get my reading done? Did I draft those letters? Did even get to the salt cod and spaghetti squash I had brought in for lunch? No, friends. I wrote 350 more emails to Mike, all more or less in tone and subject like the above.

Lunch Buddies: it's for real.