This is how you lose friends.

There’s cliché ways to open journal entries, and sometimes there is no way to avoid them, so I’m just not going to try.

I’ve got this friend; let’s call her, uh, Eris. She’s 20.

Eris has a boyfriend. Let’s call him, uh, Cerberus. He’s, hm, 23?

Eris is a good friend of mine, possibly my best friend. Eris is a good, smart girl. She can sing and play guitar; she’s better read than I am. In a lot of ways we’re similar; she’s held jobs and lived on her own before. She’s younger than me, but in a few ways she is more responsible, or at least I thought so. She met Cerberus while working at Olive Garden. Initially their relationship consisted of him pining for her and her treating him like shit because she knew that he was a worthless drunk piece of shit and it entertained her to watch him lust after her like a kicked puppy.

Then I fucked things up by telling her we couldn’t hang out anymore for a brief period of time. Why isn’t important, but I do regret this now, because in her boredom she decided it was a good idea to start seriously dating Cerberus and somehow she managed to fall in love with him. At this point, I am not sure if Eris knows what love is, and wonder if love to her is the absence of boredom.

Cerberus is an alcoholic. He is an unapologetic alcoholic who has numerous DUIs under his belt and warrants for his arrest in several cities. His driver’s license has been suspended for I don’t know how long, yet he somehow managed to defraud his way into buying a car, then he proceeded to get an illegal amount of tint on all the windows, because, obviously, that’s the smart thing to do when you’re trying to avoid getting pulled over so you can avoid getting arrested and going to jail.

There’s a great story where Cerberus and Eris drove out to whatever jail Cerberus’ brother is in–yes, it runs in the family!–and on the way back they got pulled over. For what? The limo tint, naturally. This should have been game over for Cerberus, but he had a trick up his sleeve: he pulled out the driver’s license of his brother, the brother who they just visited in jail, and handed it to police officer. They look about the same, so he figured, why not? If I’m going to go to jail, I might as well try to make it worse by lying to a police officer about my identity, right? It especially makes sense to hand the officer the license of someone who is currently in jail.

The officer takes the license and returns to his squad car, and comes back a short while later and says, “Alright, it all checks out, I’m going to have to give you a ticket for the tint, but you’re free to go!”

No, I am not shitting you. Yes, this story is true. Apparently in Los Angeles County there is absolutely no correlation between police records and who is in jail. Cerberus and Eris walked that night, with a ticket under his brother’s name, who was in jail at the time the ticket was issued, so if he goes to court for it, it’s obvious there is no way he could have gotten such a ticket. If this story makes you feel very, very scared for the state of affairs that law enforcement is in, you’re probably a good, decent, responsible person. If it makes you feel happy, you’re probably someone who has somehow managed to escape from jail and appreciate the fact that if the police pull you over, they’ll have no idea you’re supposed to be in jail! How keen!

Cerberus doesn’t like me. He is one of those boyfriends who are jealous and possessive, and he’s positive Eris is fucking me, even though we never have and never will. If Cerberus already didn’t have a lot of things going against him in my eyes, this would be enough to make me hate him. He has made Eris miserable on many, many occasions over accusing her of doing things with me. He’s played a lot of games to cut short time Eris and I have spent together. It’s ridiculous and childish, and reflects back to me things I used to do to girlfriends and regret now in retrospect. On the upside, Sarah benefits from this, because I will never treat her this way.

Eris’ parents don’t even like him, and not just for the obvious reasons.

The first night her parents decided, OK, we’ll give him a shot, we’ll let him spend the night in our house, he decided it was a good idea to drive out to a bar and get royally shit-faced. When I say shit-faced, what I mean is that he came back to her house and proceeded to piss on the living room floor. Not only that, but in his drunken stupor he managed to wander into her brother’s room, who is sixteen and one of the coolest people I know, and piss on his favorite jacket. Talk about a great way to leave a first impression!

My point is this: Cerberus is a worthless zero. He’s one of those walking black holes that sucks in everything good in his life and swallows it and doesn’t even shit out anything. He just sucks, and sucks, and sucks, and sucks. There is no tower of feces and destruction left in his wake, because in some ways even chaos is creation. Cerberus creates nothing but a swath of emptiness everywhere he goes.

If you don’t get it by now: Cerberus has absolutely no desirable traits, unless you’re Eris, at which point he somehow makes you happy when you’re not talking about all his undesirable characteristics and the reasons you should breakup with him. “He makes me happy!” she says, and then turns around and cries over the fact that every time she’s tried to do something nice for him, he fucks it up. Twice now she’s wanted to buy him a present (his birthday & Christmas) and he goes out far in advance of whatever special occasion and buys what he wants, takes it, uses it, and then gives her the receipt and says, “Thanks, honey!” These aren’t cheap items, either, both times they were in excess of $400.

If there is one good thing about Cerberus, it’s that he’s finally stopped skipping out on going to jail. He’s in jail now, finally. He has a year sentence, but you know how that goes, he’ll probably be out sooner rather than later. I hope not, I am hoping he fucks up somehow and ends up in for the full year. Perhaps I am soulless and evil, but I am hoping and praying that Eris’ time away from Cerberus isn’t spent pining entirely, as it is right now, and is instead spent realizing how better off she is without him. Unfortunately, it’s not going that way.

The plan was that Eris and I would spend all our time together once I took Sarah back to San Jose. I assumed I would be all lonely and broken without Sarah, like how Eris is without Cerberus, but I am not. I am actually happy and content with the fact that I’ve found someone who I have no misgivings about, and I have no complaints about us other than the fact that Sarah lives far away, which isn’t really a complaint about her at all. Eris, on the other hand, is fucking miserable and pathetic. There is no nice way to put it, she’s a downer.

It wouldn’t be such a big deal if it wasn’t that she’s being a downer over Cerberus. She’s all upset and depressed over the biggest piece of shit I have ever met in my whole life. I’ve known women who smoke pot with their two year-old sons and Cerberus is still the uncontested champion of worthlessness. I just don’t want to hang out with her, and I think it’s somewhat obvious since Eris and I have spent little time together in the last week when the plan was to be consistently together.

Last night things hit a breaking point. I figured, even though I didn’t really want to, I’d hang out with Eris when she gets off work and maybe we wouldn’t talk about how shitty life is without Cerberus and we could be happy and have a good time. I was wrong.

I drove her and a co-worker through the parking lot to Rite-Aid and on that short drive Eris starts complaining about the fact that she put $200 on Cerberus’ books, he went to the jail store and bought a bunch of food for his cell, but then switched cells, and the food never made it to his new cell, and he got a receipt that says he only has $60, which is not possible because how did he buy $140 worth of food and then lose it all, and, “it’s just not right! I’m going to have to go down there and try to figure out what happened, and oh my god! His brother has to draw things on the envelopes people send out to their wives and girlfriends so that he can have food because his brother’s food keeps disappearing!”

Maybe I’m an unsympathetic asshole. Maybe something is terribly wrong with my ability to experience empathy, but I got angry. I didn’t say anything, but my perspective on this is something like this:

The son of a bitch drove drunk, repeatedly. He knowingly and willingly endangered people’s lives. He broke the law, over and over again. He made a choice, repeatedly, knowing the consequences, and landed himself in jail. In jail, you have no rights. He willingly sacrificed his rights so he could have a good time. He’s lucky they even allow you to have money and buy things in jail. In jail, bad things happen. He’s in jail and I have no fucking sympathy for his plight. He deserves what he gets, which should be nothing.

Am I evil? Am I wrong?

No, I don’t think so, but I am her friend, shouldn’t I be supportive? I can’t. I know that to be supportive of her is to enable her to continue a dead-end and worthless relationship. She is wasting her time, her life, and her love. “But he makes me happy!” she pleads. I haven’t said this, but I wish I would: “Don’t you realize you could be happy, consistently, with someone else? You could find someone else, someone who isn’t an alcoholic, who doesn’t drive drunk, who doesn’t make you miserable? Don’t you get it? You could be happy with anyone; there are several million people in Los Angeles County alone, Eris. What is your fucking problem?”

I kept my mouth shut as long as I could, but something slipped. She was telling me this story about her father. She drove his car to work, she has her permit and she is learning, so he was with her in the car. For some reason I still can’t understand, she slowed down and stopped at a yellow light before it turned red. Her father lost it entirely and started yelling at her unintelligibly until they got to her work, at which point he got out of the car and started shouting at her. “Eris, I am so tired of your shit! You just let life lead you around by the collar! You need to get your fucking bullshit together and Blah, Blah, Blah!”

It caught her off guard and she told me she had no idea how stopping at a yellow light could make someone blow up in such a dramatic and unrelated way. I told her, “Well, for some people all it takes is a small thing to reach that breaking point,” without realizing that I was on the way to reaching mine. I continued, “You have been kind of frustrating lately.”

“What does that mean?”

“I mean, well, I mean that your whole situation is kind of frustrating.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Like the whole Cerberus thing. It’s like, you’re on this path, and everyone knows it, and everyone can see where it’s going, and it’s not like you don’t know, and it’s frustrating, because we’re just watching you walk this line and, how can you do it?”

“What are you even saying?”

“Your life is like a made for TV movie, Eris. You’re doing these things that have these very specific ends to them and it’s sad to watch but we’re watching anyway but the problem is you’re a real person we care about and we don’t want to see what’s going to happen, happen to you. I mean, don’t you want to be happy?”

“I don’t want to go to school, I don’t want to get a career, and I don’t want anything in my life. Those things won’t make me happy!”

“I’m not even talking about that. It’s just no one could ever understand why you would want to put yourself in these fucking shitty places and then try to thrive within them while it’s so fucking obvious you’re fucking miserable!”

“Can you be specific for fuck’s sake?”

“The Cerberus thing! You say, blah blah, he says he’s going to get out of jail and change his ways and stop drinking and driving and go to college and get things back on track for you. But you know, everyone knows, once someone goes to jail, and it’s not like he hasn’t been before, they just keep going back to jail. He’s tried to quit drinking before and it hasn’t stuck. It’s just sad, because he says these things, but you’re fucking kidding yourself if he’s going to get out of jail and not say, ‘hey baby, c’mon, I just got out of jail, let’s go get a drink,’ and then he’s going to get all drunk and go drive somewhere!”

“When he gets out of jail I’m going to be sitting there with a tallboy of steelies waiting for him!”

I lose it, “For fuck’s sake, Eris, what the fuck is wrong with you? Are you fucking stupid!?”

At this point she opens the car door, we’re sitting in the drive through of Taco Bell waiting to get her food, and I say, “Eris, fuck, seriously?”

“Out of all the people I don’t need this from right now, it’s you, supposedly my best fucking friend,” she says.

I’m speechless as she gets out of the car and slams the door and walks off. I don’t really know what to do. I know what the good thing to do is, and that’s to chase after her and apologize and try to make things better, but how can I? My words are true, my sentiment is genuine, and I can’t just take back the truth. She knows it’s the truth, she’s said all the same things herself at some point, and it’s so frustrating to watch her ignore it all on purpose under the guise of pursuing some shallow form of happiness.

I back out of the drive through and pull through this liquor store parking lot and see her go around the corner and disappear down Leffingwell. I pull up into the driveway and look down the sidewalk, which stretches down a hill, and is lined by a solid wall for at least a mile. She’s gone. I don’t know where she went, I didn’t see her walk into the liquor store, but she’s gone. I don’t know how she did it, but she managed to completely vanish. I sigh to myself and pull out and flip a bird at the intersection and drive down Leffingwell the same direction she went in, but she truly disappeared. In all honesty, I didn’t really want to look for her. I didn’t know what I would say if I found her, because once you remove the possibility of apology, what are you supposed to say? “I’m sorry I told you the truth about your loser boyfriend, get back in the car”?

Admittedly my timing was bad. I can apologize for that. I’m sorry I lectured her on the same day her father became irate and yelled at her incoherently about the exact same thing. I’m sorry I became specific when he managed to stay ambiguous, but I am her friend. It doesn’t seem to me that a friend should just sit by idly while he watches a friend he genuinely loves and cares about destroy every iota of emotional well being she has.

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I should just sit on my words, I don’t know. I’ve never been in this position before. I’ve never had a girl as a friend; I know how I talk to my guy friends.

Guy friends are easy. If they’re complaining about their women being a bitch, you can easily say, “Well, man, sounds like she’s being a bitch.” They say, in response, “Yeah, I guess so, oh well,” and move on. In most cases you can just repeat what they say and then append something chauvinistic, like, “Yeah, she’s being a total bitch, but at least she sucks your dick, right?” Guy’s problems with women don’t even seem to progress to the level that Eris’ problems are at.

I’ve never heard a guy, outside of myself, dive into some lengthy problem with a woman. I’ve gone the whole, “My woman is cheating on me, this shit sucks,” route, and my friend’s responses to that consisted of, “Man, you gotta drop that bitch, man, she’s a fucking cunt.” My reply to that was, “Yeah, but I like her, but you’re right,” and then I went on my merry way fucking shit up for myself. It was a spectator sport for a lot of people, watching the train wreck that was my relationship at the time, but eventually it ended and I didn’t make my friends miserable with me, I think.

This shit with Eris is persistent and ridiculous. From day one she’s been admitting, while denying, that Cerberus is a dead end, and I just can’t deal with it anymore. With Eris, it’s not enough to say, “You realize Cerberus is a dead end, right?” because she says, “Yes, I know, but he makes me happy!” Then I have to sit there while she pines, and pines, and pines, after some piece of worthless white trash who isn’t worth her time of day.

I’m burned out. I’m assuming that last night I destroyed any future Eris and I had at being friends, at least until she wakes up from whatever silly trance Cerberus has her in. I was hoping I would be along for the ride, that I could subtly push her toward realizing that she shouldn’t be there for him when he gets out of jail, even if the only way to reach that end was to convince her that the only way he’ll change is to lose her. (This would be hardcore manipulation, because everyone knows that even if he loses her, he’s not going to change, and then hopefully she’d see that and move on.) Unfortunately, I didn’t have the patience or ability to see this through. It seems to me the problem is that I actually do care. If I didn’t, I could just sit on my hands and watch, but I can’t, it’s just not possible for me.

I suppose I’m relieved. I just wish I could have helped. It’s sad, I guess, that sometimes being a friend means not being a friend. Perhaps it’s inexperience with these situations, but I don’t see what else I could do. You can drag a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink, right?