Repeat Friday

Brian was the one who started it. We were on the roof catching up on gossip when Charlotte's name came up. "It's weird you haven't noticed," he said. "Charlotte is a total homophobe."

I laughed, assuming it had to be a joke. Brian and I were both gay and she adored both of us. Her being homophobic seemed so ridiculous I'd never thought anything of the sort.

"Here's an example," Brian continued. "Name some of Charlotte's gay friends."

I thought for a minute. Charlotte knew a lot of people -- most rich and gorgeous New Yorkers did. To avoid confusion, then, she chose unique descriptive identifiers and permanently stuck them in front of names. If she knew two Alberts, she might refer to one as Crest White Strip Albert and the other as Republican Albert. If she knew two Matts, she might call one Cat Tattoo Matt and the other Staten Island Matt.

I didn't know why she did this, because it got her into trouble. Gay John wasn't too thrilled when Charlotte's mother referred to somebody named Handsome John and he realized it wasn't him.

"Well," I said to Brian, "there's Gay John, Gay Scott, Gay Stuart, Gay Toshi, ...."

"You don't think that's a little weird?" he interrupted. "To specifically single out everyone who's gay? Does she do it with anybody else -- Jews, blacks, Hispanics? If she really, truly accepted gay people, would she make such a big deal out of it?"

I blew it off as inexplicable but it planted the seed in my head. I had actually noticed how often she used the word "gay." As a gay man I hardly used it at all, whereas the straight woman used it constantly. In fact, that morning she'd asked me if I wanted to go with her and her "gay husband" to a gay club for some gay drinking and gay fooling around.

Charlotte had also raised a red flag with me when I was talking with Joe and David, a middle-aged couple who lived on the fourth floor. We were whispering about her upcoming birthday when she showed up out of nowhere. "Ohmigod," she gasped, eyeing us suspiciously. "If you guys are planning a three-way, I don't want to hear about it!"

We all laughed, but after she walked away we exchanged baffled glances. We agreed that her comment wasn't just clueless -- it was patently offensive. If she'd seen a guy talking to a hetero couple she wouldn't have assumed he was going to bang both of them.

I tried to forget about the whole thing during our usual Project Runway-watching night. While I was telling Emma about my trip to Berlin, though, she started acting weird again. "A lot of guys in Berlin have rings tattooed around their forearms," I said. "And I don't know if it's true or not, but somebody told me it's coded information about fistfucking."

"Ew!" Charlotte snapped, dropping a tortilla chip.

I scowled at her. "He said, 'Those rings mark how far they've gotten their arms into another guy's ass."

"That's disgusting," Charlotte sang.

I shot her an irritated look begore turning back to Emma. "I told him I'm from the country. If I got a ring like that it'd be halfway up my pinkie finger."

Charlotte jumped up off the couch. "THAT'S IT!" she yelled, cranking up the TV. "STOP! I'm not going to hear about this!"

"About what?" I asked. "About gay guys having sex?"

"ABOUT ANY GUYS HAVING SEX! CAN YOU PLEASE STOP TALKING ABOUT IT?"

"FINE!" I shouted as I stomped toward the door. "I WILL! And you can talk about whatever the fuck you want, but you won't be talking to me!"

I slammed the door behind me, and after that Charlotte and I didn't speak for eight days. Before the fight she'd invited me to her birthday party, and when the day came I decided I'd still go. There would be enough people that it wouldn't be awkward, and I could leave a gift as a peace offering. I didn't think I'd done anything wrong but I felt kind of guilty, so when I shopped for her gift I went overboard. I went to a shop down the street that specialized in all the Brooklyn clichés: everything was handmade, sustainable, and organic, from the Peruvian bags woven from hand-twisted yarn to the incense made by Patagonian tribes from fossilized yak poop.

I finally settled on a bracelet made of hand-carved beads from Namibia. It was really beautiful -- as it should have been for $320 -- with chunky tourmaline and lapis beads carved with intricate tribal designs. It was totally Charlotte: it had style, it supported indigenous people, and she wouldn't have to worry about running into somebody wearing the exact same thing.

I toted the gift to the birthday party and Charlotte spotted me the second I walked through her door. Our eyes locked. Without a word our eyes exchanged everything we needed to say: that we both felt terrible, that we'd made a horrible mistake, and that we couldn't survive another minute without making amends.

We ran toward each other in seemingly slow motion, shoving the other party guests aside. We met in the middle of the room and hugged each other like we were never going to let go. "I'm sorry," I cried. "That's the stupidest thing I've ever done. I know you're not homophobic. I was just being stupid or I had a stroke or something, and I promise I'll never bring it up again."

"Really?" Charlotte said, wiping away tears. "You promise?"

"I promise. I'll never mention it again."

We hugged once more, and when we separated I noticed that both of our eyes were filled with tears. That's the mark of a great friend, I thought. When one of you does something unbelievably stupid, it just brings you closer together.

Naturally the party was brilliant, since Charlotte's friends were all six-foot-tall Russian models or handsome Norwegian musicians. We drank and laughed until the sun went down, and then a tipsy Charlotte took center stage to unwrap all of her gifts. She gushed over a pair of shoes, a painting, and a crystal vase before she got to my offering. She shot me an excited look and I veritably glowed with pride. She tore the paper open, pulled the lid off the box, and extracted the bracelet from the box.

With fifty people watching breathlessly, she held the beaded string at arm's length, and her expression turned from glee to disgust. "Roman," she snapped, like a third-grade teacher, "I never stick anything up my ass."

A Sixteen-Minute Phone Call With My Friend, The Wonderful Thomas

And highlights of what he had to say, at five-minute intervals.

MINUTE 0: "So how are you? I've missed you. You're always out of town."

MINUTE 5: "So my friend Michael is having his apartment renovated and he needs a place to stay. I thought since you're always gone...."

MINUTE 10: "His husband Ralph would stay there as well. What? Yes, it'd be just the two of them."

MINUTE 15: "That is so nice of you! You know, I wouldn't let them stay at my place because of their enormous dogs, but --"

I said not a fucking chance and hung up at Minute 16. But now I'm thinking I should have pretended to go along with it, just to hear further developments.

MINUTE 20: "They're really great guys. And they've cut way back on the smoking to just eight packs a day!"

MINUTE 25: "That is so sweet of you! You won't regret it. They gave up drugs and haven't burned down a building since 2023."

Part Two

 I told the butter story to a friend the other night & realized there's a Part Two.

As the flight attendant walked away, I sat there wondering what I should do. I could chase after her & explain the whole thing: I'm not crazy. I thought it was candy, not butter. I'm not the kind of person who collects unused butter from airplanes & takes it all home to add to some kind of giant butter pile in our fridge.

And then I look over at my husband, a big, gruff German man who is packing all of his spare globs of butter into his travel bag. Presumably to take home and add to that giant pile of butter in our fridge. I stared in horror as he actually put cold globs of butter on top of a sweater and a scarf.

Had the whole world gone mad? I wondered. Had the plane flown into the Twilight Zone, into some alternative butter-centric world?  As far as questioning him, where would I even start? With the fact that neither of us particularly likes butter? That it's not outrageously expensive, so hoarding it isn't exactly required? Or maybe with the thought that five minutes outside the cool plane the butter would melt & he'd smell like popcorn for the next six months.

I've learned that a good way to avoid conflict with another person is by asking questions instead of stating opinions. "Sweetheart," I said, "why are you collecting all of the butter?"

He shot me a confused look, then sat back and sighed. "You just told the stewardess you wanted to eat it."

How had this spiraled so weirdly out of control? I was delirious but not so out of it that I didn't care. My first impulse was to clear up the confusion in one fell swoop. I wanted to stand up and shout, "I DON'T COLLECT BUTTER! I DON'T EVEN LIKE BUTTER! I THOUGHT IT WAS CANDY!!!" But then it hit me: he was doing this for me. He didn't know why I suddenly started craving butter, but that didn't matter. No questioning, no wondering, just always having my back.

 

So, it's a happy ending -- an unexpected happy ending. Sure, maybe now two people thought I was crazy, but I was okay with that. Because this was the opposite of a red flag. It was a bright green flag. It was another answer to the question, "How did you know he was the guy for you?" Because I knew the next time someone asked, my reply would start with, "Well, once on an airplane he thought I liked to eat butter...."

Part One

Twenty-five hours traveling back to Berlin from Tokyo. Around hour 18 I started suspecting I wasn't going to make it. I kept bumping into things, blanking out, falling asleep on my feet for a second or two. Mental note: never do this again. I was delirious.

After my last meal, the flight attendant tried to take my tray. "Wait," I said, grabbing a little wrapped candy that'd been included. "I want this."

She looked at me & tentatively laughed. "I'll take it," she said, & she grabbed it out of my hand.

"No," I protested, taking it back. "I'll have it a little later."

Now she was flat-out confused. "Okay," she said, before heading back up the aisle. "Enjoy it!"

I will, I thought. I mean, it's not really that crazy. And then I looked closer at the "candy" & decided, okay, yes, it really is.

 

It is literally impossible for an American to get a German driver's license. Oh, they'll let you sign up with a driving school and download the app and buy the book and study for months and take the test, but there's no way in hell you'll pass. The test is thirty questions selected from a pool of one thousand, and while they will happily give you all one thousand questions in advance, even with months of deliberation and conceptualization and rationalization you'll never make sense out of them.

One problem is that the "English translation" of the book you've bought is into Great British. Trailers are "caravans," people have "behaviour," and your car has "tyres" and does "manoeuvres." Sentences actually start, "You must reckon with....", which sounds like something Marshall Dillon would say to Billy the Kid. I want to answer, "Do I, pardner?"

I like this passage because it's so totally true. Is "muzziness" a word? Nowhere in the world. But I like picturing a German motor vehicle official sitting back and imagining, "So, when I take an Ambien, how do I feel? Tired? Relaxed? No.... Muzzy! That's it! Medications can cause muzziness."

Even ignoring the odd comma here doesn't help, since "reeve" means "the chief magistrate of a town or district in Anglo-Saxon England."

Google doesn't even help with words it agrees are real. For weeks I read about the proper behaviour in regards to "walking paths" and "footpaths." Don't park on them. Don't drive across them. I kept picturing Mercedeses zipping through forests when it hit me: they meant those cement walking footpaths we have in America. You know, we call them "sidewalks."

"Sunken kerbstones" also baffled me. I wondered about a country whose driving rules so heavily featured flooding. Don't give priority to cars at sunken kerbstones. Ignore cars at sunken kerbstones. Weeks dragged by before it hit me:

Driveway. Don't stop for cars coming out of driveways.

Every day I'd study more, and fume more about it. In America I'd regarded Germany as Valhalla, where everybody was smart and logical. And then I came here and realized the reason Germany was so highly regarded was because it was being graded on an EU curve. Not a genius? Less than brilliant? No problem. Just go stand next to Slovakia and Greece.

My irritation magnified over months of study, as examples of their idiocy piled up. I spent a few weeks puzzled by something called "dipped headlights." References were everywhere. In a tunnel, you must dip your headlights. When you see a deer by the road, dip your headlights. I started to think, are German headlights controlled by a joystick or something? And I'm a smart guy! An idiot would have assumed there was onion soup mix and sour cream involved.

I still don't understand the reasoning but I can repeat the facts: their "dipped" headlights are what Americans call "headlights," and their "main beams" are our brights. Dipping your headlights bizarrely means just turning them on.

Here's a life-or-death instruction about markings on the road:

I can't even understand who this is talking to. Will British people read this and think, "Righty-O, Guv'nah!"? Because Americans look it and go, "Whaaa?"

Americans might also take exception to the word "recommends." We'd be tempted to stop in the middle of the intersection, and when a policeman pulls up we'll say, "Well, the book RECOMMENDS stopping back there, but I decided against it. You know, it's like ordering the fish after the waiter recommends the veal."

Of course, if getting a driver's license is torture here, I'm pretty sure going to jail is worse.

The stakes get higher when buses are involved, so it's important to memorize this:

Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? And then you come to this:

I was pretty sure I was missing something here. "Don't ever pass a bus flashing their hazards while approaching a bus stop. Wait until it's parked and children are exiting before you do." But then I noticed they use two distinct words: "overtaking" and "passing." According to people online, Americans think they're the same thing but Australians think they're different. I couldn't imagine defending that to a traffic policeman:

ME: "Officer, I'm from Cincinnati. I didn't dangerously overtake that bus, but actually carefully passed it."

OFFICER: "Oh, then that's cool. Have a great day!"

Similarly confusing is where you can park your car:

You can't stop "up to 10 meters" of a St. Andrew's Cross. Now turn the page.

Yes, you got it. In a "built-up area" -- you know, what humans call a "city" -- you can park five meters in front of a diagonal cross. But don't even think about stopping there.

The book also declares, "Parking is not allowed on a priority road outside built-up areas." In human-speak, this means "Don't park on the road in the country." I memorized this, and then I took a sample test which asked, "Are you allowed to park at the side of a priority road outside built-up areas?" My answer: absolutely not! The correct answer: of course!

It sent me running back to the text. Apparently when they say "Don't park on the road in the country" they mean "Don't park IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD in the country." What, did you assume they meant on the side?

I sat there staring at the book, struggling to process what I was reading. I'd spent six months deciphering their pronouncements only to discover they were facts any idiot knows. It's weird: everybody in Berlin speaks perfect English. I get two German words out of my mouth and they say, "Look, buddy, let's make this easy. Let's go for English, okay?" But then I decide I want to get a driver's license and suddenly they're all, "You want go putt-putt in motorcar?"

Whether they're incompetent and don't care or they're actively trying to keep Americans off their roads, the end result is that it's impossible for us to pass the driving test. It's a Catch-22: if you're stupid, you'll never figure out what they're talking about. But if you're smart, you could waste months trying to unravel things that are obvious to idiots.

One last example bolsters the incompetence explanation. Let's start with a paragraph from the official book.

And here's a question from the official quiz.

As you can see, I got it wrong. Apparently you need to "reckon" with taxis and beware of taxis and watch out for taxis and keep away from taxis but you don't need to show them "particular care." Like don't send them flowers or chocolate? Think twice about that shoulder massage?

Anyway, I hope you learned something. You can pass someone without overtaking them, you can park in some locations without stopping, and you can totally ignore people that you need to pay very serious attention to. It makes me think of relativity, and that Einstein himself would probably fail this test.

I'd like to say that frustration makes me more determined, but in truth I gave up. I stop trying to understand it and instead just memorized the one thousand mostly-useless questions and their corresponding nonsensical answers. And I passed the test. Now I just have to pass the driving test and I get to drive all over Europe.

I've got to say, I'm feeling seriously muzzy now.

I didn't have parents, and in my earliest years developed a combination of anger and cluelessness that would follow me throughout life.

When I was five, someone at my school suspected I was smart, so one day I was dragged out of class and told I had to take an intelligence test. I sat at a desk and some old guy showed me a drawing of a tree on a sunny day. I noticed the tree's shadow pointed toward the sun rather than away from it and thought, wow, what the hell is going on here?

"What's wrong with this picture?" the guy asked.

I shrugged. "Nothing," I said.

"Nothing?" the teacher asked.

I glanced at it again. "Nothing."

Obviously disappointed, the guy said we were done and started to write in my folder. I picked up my jacket and walked to the door before adding, "Buddy, if you don't know, then you're on the wrong side of that desk."

My neighbor has prostate cancer. I ran into him in the elevator the day he was discharged from the hospital after a four-night stay.

He doesn't speak English & my German stinks. I wanted to hug him. I wanted to say, "I hope you are feeling better. I hope the treatment you received was sufficient & the hospital staff caring. That sounds like an absolute nightmare but fingers crossed they can keep you in good health. We sincerely care about you."

Except I know the German for maybe three of those words, so I just said, "This is not good. Not good. Very very very not good."

He actually got mad at me. The words "Of course it's not good, you absolute moron!" might have been said. I wanted to explain that my German isn't good enough to discuss sensitive topics but that sentence alone would take me twelve elevator rides to translate & would probably end up as, "Best I no talk. Bye bye." I thought, wow, even when I mean well I'm screwed.

I fumed for a couple of days before I settled on a solution: a multipurpose preemptive German apology. "Hallo. Ich bin ein 68-jähriger New Yorker und mein Deutsch ist nicht gut. Für nette Worte telefonieren meinen Mann. Wenn du eine Pizza brauchst, bin ich dein Mann." ("Hello. I am a 68-year-old New Yorker and my German is not good. If you need kind words, call my husband. If you need a pizza, I'm your man.")