From 1992 to 1994, I ran a radio show on the Stony Brook College radio station, WUSB, 90.1 FM. I had the moniker of... wait for it... Dredstar. I named myself after a comic book called Dreadstar. It sounded different and slightly malevolent. Chris' name was Thrashman. You know, he liked thrash metal... so it was like trashman, only... well, whatever. I had a lot of friends down at the show over it's two years on the air, and they all had to have a funny/morbid codename, like "Jim, the Rotten Limb," "The Gorefiend," and "Morbid Millie" was my girlfriend at the time. Anyway, I digress.
In 1993, I secured a position at Chris' employer. It wasn't anything great, but hey... money, y'know? I would stay after work to hang out with him, since he worked second shift. I would run down the road and grab some Taco Bell for us, and we would eat, play Uno (he usually beat me, grrrr!), and just shoot the breeze. By 1998, we had both left the job for various reasons, but of course we stayed in touch, hung out, and saw the occasional movie. We both love movies, but I would say Chris is more of an avid movie fanatic.
Life went on, and Chris and I both got married. My wife and I separated in 2002, and he was divorced a few years later. I had a daughter, and he had three kids.
In 2005 or so, I told him that I'm a transsexual. I showed him a photo from the Long Island Pride Winter Ball. Well, here it is.
He said, "Oh yeah, I have no problem with it! No problem at all! I wouldn't even think that was you, but maybe a picture of your sister. Yeah, you gotta do what makes you happy." Well, it's not word for word, but that's the gist of it. It was forced, and I knew it.
We fell out of touch for awhile, then he emailed me and told me that he was a bit overwhelmed by my transsexuality and the fact that his friend had changed so much. He said he still wanted to be friends and he told me about his divorce. He said he would tell me more in his next letter, and he gave me his MySpace address. I wrote him back right away, of course... but I heard nothing else from him, on MySpace or elsewhere. Maybe he saw my pics on MySpace, some of which were kinda revealing (click here for an example from an old post).
A few months ago, I got on Facebook and found him there, along with two mutual friends of ours, including Steve, who I mentioned above. My two other friends accepted my friend requests, and we've chatted back and forth to some extent.
Chris hasn't accepted my request, and it's likely that he never will. I know he's been on Facebook lately, because well...
I don't blame Chris for avoiding me. It's a general rule-of-thumb that the closer your friend or family member is to you, the harder it will be for them to accept. Also, it's pretty well known that men have a harder time dealing with it than women. Many men can't fathom why their friend would want to "cut it off," much less realize the fact that their friend was a woman the whole time, and that part just doesn't belong on a woman.
I had another friend, by the name of Jim, who had a lot of problems with me "choosing this life," as he said. He's a deeply religious fellow, and he actually thinks I'm committing a sin by leading my life this way. I looked, but for the life of me, I can't find any mention of transsexuality in the bible. Well, I digress again.
I miss this guy. We had a really wacky friendship, since we are both really wacky people. We had our own language almost, some of it culled from Johnny Dangerously ("you fargin icehole!"), a love of Star Trek and horror movies and books, role-playing games, crazy metal music, the list goes on and on. I'll never forget the time we went to see Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey while drunk, or when he ran around with his Robocop helmet on and "shot" cars (hmmm, we were drunk then too). I've only been to a strip club twice in my life, and that was with Chris. We went to too many metal shows to mention.
I'm out of things to say, but not out of memories. I wonder if he misses being my friend. Maybe he thinks he would rather have nothing, than have a friendship so changed as to be unrecognizable from the one we had? Well, I certainly miss him.
Are you reading this, Chris? I miss you,
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