Spider Legs

Our uproarious laughter would have been enough to get us a yelling from the neighbors from the next rooms ― except these neighbors are in the room with us, laughing. We, my best friends and I, knew we were gonna be making a lot of racket all night long so we decided to invite my apartment neighbors over for a comedy marathon night. So, here we were, my three best friends, my four neighbors, our three boyfriends, and myself. I was leaning against Carlo on the wide sofa. His arms were around me, sometimes playfully fiddling with my fingers. When he laughed at what we were watching, I could hear his deep voice through his chest.

We were watching DVD-after-DVD of Kathy Griffin’s standup performances. We loved her of course, me being gay and my best friends and neighbors being women. We hooted, hollered and cackled along with Kathy’s live audience. She was making a joke about Kuwait when my phone vibrated in my pocket. Startled, I wiped tears of laughter from my eyes and excused myself. I knew it was a phone call because the vibration pattern was different from a text’s. (Yeah. I’m weird like that.) I crossed the short distance from the living room to my kitchen/dining area before I answered the call.

“Hello?” I began. The number was unregistered, and half of me was worried it might be an emergency of some sort. The other half was getting ready to be pissed in case it was a crank call.

The speaker was slurring, and it took me a moment to realize who it was.

“Yeah. Sure. Sorry. I almost didn’t recognize your voice. You sound…drunk,” I said. My brow knotted. At that moment, my boyfriend stepped into the kitchen, a questioning look on his face. I mouthed ‘A friend!’ to him.

“So why are you calling me?”

There was a long pause, and I had to repeat my question several times before I got an answer. My friend slurred his words and I had to constantly ask him to repeat them. In the end, I understood what he wanted, and I hung up.

“Who was that?” Carlo asked.

“Warren,” I told him absently, my mind somewhere else. “I have to go.”

Carlo raised an eyebrow. “Go where?”

“Uhm, pick him up,” I said, already making my way to the front door. The ladies were too absorbed in the standup to look up when I crossed the room.

“Pick him up?” my boyfriend said incredulously. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

Without missing a beat, I replied, “A quarter past two.” I already had my jacket on and was fishing the bowl by the door for my car keys.

“And yet you’re still going out?” Carlo said. He was blocking the door now. “Who is this ‘Warren’ anyway?”

“I told you, he’s a friend,” I said. I felt strangely blank. All my replies to my boyfriend have been bland, monotonous. My heart was not in my words. All I could think about was Warren, and that I had to pick him up. It wasn’t because I was hypnotized, or anything. It was just that I knew what I had to do, and that my friend was counting on me to do it. No one was gonna stop me. “Now, excuse me. He might get into trouble, I need to pick him up ASAP.”

“Who is Liam talking about?” Stephanie asked no one in particular. Her eyes were still glued to the screen, her pink-nail polished fingernails digging into the bucket of popcorn in front of her.

“It’s Warren,” I replied, starting to lose patience. “Steph, please tell them who he is, while I go and help him. Step aside, Carlo Bien. Now.”

I’ve been with Carlo long enough for him to know that when I use that tone on anyone it meant I was ready to lose teeth and nail if I didn’t get my way. So he raised his hands in surrender and sidestepped away from the door.

As I slipped into my shoes at the porch, I could hear Carlo half-yell ‘So who the hell is Warren, anyway?’

So, who is Warren? As of now, I must admit that I really have no idea. Until five years ago, he was my best friend. He was probably the closest person to my heart at that time, besides my family, of course. We were never lovers, mind you. He was straight, after all. We were the best of friends, until the revelation of my gayness forcibly set us away from each other.

In fact, the first punch that hit me in the face after I came out was from him.

My nose went numb at the memory of it. I shook off the feeling and pulled the car out of the apartment’s parking space and onto the road.

The silence inside the car brought back memories of the time when we were quite literally inseparable. The tree house…the movies…the pranks…the near-death experiences (oh yeah, we had those)… A sudden thought came to me: So why, after five years without contact, did Warren call me to pick him up? All these thoughts and more churned inside my head, forming a maelstrom of confusion.

The car’s interior was so flooded with childhood nostalgia and utter puzzlement that I completely missed where I was supposed to pick him up. I backed up several yards towards the bar Warren was stuck in.