CHAPTER NINE

Stress Of Friends

One time or another, we have all experienced stress as a result of being double-crossed by someone we've entrusted as a friend. The pain and agony one goes through is sometimes unmatched after finding out a person you called a friend, the person you've confided your deepest secrets to with reckless abandon, openly violated your trust. I'll never forget the pain and anguish I witnessed my homegirl go through as she sat bewildered with her insides twisted after seeing her best friend locked arm in arm with her ex-husband. "Russell, how could that bitch do this to me?" she barked, "I thought she was my friend!" "I'm not sure whether you know it or not, but you just answered your own question," I replied.

She turned from the window and gave me one of those Gary Coleman "What you talk'n bout?" looks. As modestly as I could, I continued, "as a matter of fact, you are almost as much the blame as she is. She was never a true friend, and she shouldn't have ever been called one, let alone considered one." I recall, as if it were yesterday, when the two of them met some ten months earlier. They were introduced at a reception by a mutual friend. Since they both were visitors at the reception, they were unfamiliar with everyone there except those who escorted them. They sat next to one another and were forced to engage in light, meaningless conversation. But as the evening continued, they discovered that not only did they share some of the same interests, but the two of them knew some of the same people and they got their hair fixed by the same beautician. Shopping was one of the interests they both shared, so they made arrangements to go shopping in the near future. My homegirl seemed to like this young lady an awful lot, so much so that after a couple of weeks she'd began introducing her as her girl or as one of her best friends.

I didn't think anything unusual about that because she, like most people, misused the word "friend." One day after a conversation she and I had over the phone, I quietly questioned myself. How could she reveal so much personal information from her childhood to her unhappy marriage to a person relatively new in her life? In the next six months they'd become almost inseparable. I'd often see them together at Happy Hours and other functions until she surprisingly stumbled upon her best friend locked arm in arm with her ex-husband entering a grocery store. "Russell!" she spoke in a light tone. "If I'd had my gun on me at that time, I swear to you, they'd both be dead right now!" The room was silent for a moment, when she clinched her fist and stuttered, "I thought she was my main girl. I thought we were really friends." I interrupted and said, "Homegirl, it's not really that inconceivable that a friend could do something like that. But, not a true friend! There is a distinct difference between the two." She looked at me for a moment and said, "Yeah, I guess you're right.

She was never a true friend, and she lost more than she gained."