by Charles Bivona

“Were you ever involved in a dysfunctional threesome with two other guys?”  My friend David spit his Heineken on the bar. He was choking and laughing.

“Um, no!” he replied. “What kind of fucking question is that?” David has never gotten used to me. We’ve known each other since college. He became an architect. I became a professor, writer, activist, song-and-dance man. David calls me his “Crazy Gandhi friend.” Seriously, he introduces me that way. He says he loves me because I can still make him shake his head, smile, and wonder:

“What the fuck is wrong with you, Charlie?”

He was laughing harder now.

“Oh, I don’t mean a sexual threesome,” I corrected. “I mean a dysfunctional friendship with two other men–like The Three Amigos with problems, ya know?”

David was laughing and sipping his beer. He knew. Most of us have been involved in this dynamic at least once. The dysfunction usually lies in a third wheel insecurity: one of the friends feels that the other two like each other more and blah blah blah. So, the bruised ego of this “third leg” begins to act out—to sabotage the “better” friendship. This is when the talking behind backs begins.

David had an example: “Yeah, I was friends with these two dudes: one who is still my best friend today, Joe, and one who was my best friend from high-school, Billy.  Billy was insecure and shy when Joe started hanging out. And when Joe wasn’t around, Billy would talk major shit about him. It was fucking crazy. And then…”

This was so close to my experience that I rudely interrupted. “And then you found out that Billy was talking just as much shit about you to Joe! Right!”

“Yeah!” David slammed his beer down. “Yeah! Billy was telling Joe that I was a pathological liar! He was telling Joe that my girlfriend from high school was imaginary!”

This time I laughed, shook my head, and wondered.

“How did it end?”

David sighed, “I straight-up asked Joe if Billy had ever talked shit about me, and Joe just unburdened himself. Apparently, he’d been feeling conflicted about all the whispering—he called it Iago shit—but felt insecure in the face of my long-standing “friendship” with Billy. But when I asked him point-blank, he just opened up, honestly and completely.”

“And you were shocked by what he told you.” I knew this feeling intimately—the feeling of finding out a friend is working against you, the shock of realizing someone you’ve held close for years, for decades, doesn’t consider your best interests at all. Never.

“Well, I asked Joe.” David’s face turned dark, sullen. I could see the scar for a moment. “I mean, I suspected Billy. But when I found out what he really thought…what he was saying…about me…about my life…I was….” He trailed off, then blurted out, “Hurt. I was hurt that someone I once believed in, even admired, turned out to be a complete fraud.”

I knew exactly what he meant, but I thought there was more to it.

“I think there’s more to it.” I said.

“Of course you do,” David smiled. “Do tell.” He loved when I went off on what he called flights of analysis! The exclamation point is his, and he usually waves his open palms in front of him “for magical emphasis” when he announces  one of my Flights of Analysis!

He cracks me up. But I digress.

“I think there’s an existential wound to it, ya know?” David didn’t know, and he let me know it.

“No, Charlie,” he cackled, “I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about! Haha! Oh, please explain it to me, Professor!”

David finds my professor status comical, mostly because I used to get drunk and sleep on his lawn. He took his mock student bit one line further.

“Can I come to your office hours for a private session, Professor?” Wink. Smile.

“Well, with your friend Billy, for example,” I laughingly explained further, “you suspected he was an asshole, but the confirmation is what got you. Actually finding out that your suspicions were true! And worse than you thought! Not to mention being confronted with the fact that all their gestures of friendship were a lie. Like, in my case…”

I stopped abruptly. My own scars were showing. David got very serious.

“Damn, man.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Are you ok? Your face just fell. What the fuck happened?”

“In my case,” I sighed, “I suspected both my best friends in high school were spreading rumors about me, and I found out for sure when I overheard them in the hallway.”

“Damn.” David turned to his beer and took a long slug.  “That must have sucked for you.”

“It did.” My sigh was slightly shaken. “But the point is, the undeniable confirmation hurt the most—the irrefutable proof that my “friends” weren’t friends at all. And that’s a violation, really. I mean, people who openly encouraged me to trust them were secretly working against me—harming me.”

David leaned back in his bar stool. “Yeah, man. Yeah.” He shook his head and sighed slowly.

“I think you realize something dark about human nature in moments like that, ya know? It’s existentially painful because there’s so much loss in that new awareness. And one thing that sucks about awareness, you can’t just turn it off.”

We both fell silent. The snow outside was piling up. The climate crisis had shifted arctic wind currents deeper into their negative phase. Much of the United States was frozen under multiple blizzards. North Pole weather was dipping into Northern New Jersey—not at all delightful.

David decided to head home early, “so I can drive slow.” He paid the bill and braved the new tundra. I stayed to nurse my beer and watch the Evening News–in surround sound and HD color! I’ve been unemployed with no benefits for a few months now. The cable news channels had to go.

THE MSNBC NEWS SHOW! with blah blah blah….Tonight’s Top Story: Wikileaks.

You can’t turn off awareness. It’s horrible.

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