Short Story: Friends For Specific Purposes

Short Story: Friends For Specific Purposes

Each friend has a specific purpose in our lives, they all serve a different function. Some friends serve multiple functions, but there are few friends which tick every box.

Panjita ticks the fun box. From making slippers out of period pads, to taking me to see a play about a man with a ten inch penis, she brings randomness and excitement into my life. What she does not tick is the reliability box.

When I realised that I would have no guest to accompany me on my plus-1 invite to my friend’s wedding, through my despair there shone a small ray of hope. I assumed that Panjita, also possessing a plus-1 invite, would be in the same situation. I was right. We were both dateless losers. So we organised to go to the wedding together. Not as lesbians, but as strong confident single women (leaning on one another for support).

Unfortunately, Panjita, being Panjita, did another spontaneous mind-changing magic trick. I had been stood up. Not only was I manless, my sympathy date was ignoring my texts, calls and facebook messages. This was Panjita’s way of telling me ‘I’m not coming’. And so I was left with a choice. I turned up to a wedding, smelly and greasy after spending the afternoon teaching English, alone, to a room of people who I had never met. Apart from the bride and groom of course, I happen to know that the groom is a recovering drug addict, and the bride, well, she doesn’t love the groom since he got off the drugs. ‘He just isn’t the same person anymore.’

The second option was Porna - the true friend.

A true friend ticks every box. The drinking friend box. The comforting friend box. The miscellaneous box.

Porna is the friend who came out to Germany to visit me when I hated it. She jumped on the next plane and arrived at my apartment with a bottle of Malibu and a bottle of vodka – the main ingredients for the Fatty Fucker.

Porna is the friend with whom I invented the Fatty Fucker. The world’s most lethal cocktail, named appropriately due to its effects on its drinkers. I can’t tell you the rest of the secret recipe as it should only be consumed by true, experienced alcoholics – otherwise the consequences could be deadly. Put it this way, the first night we discovered this concoction I slept with Fat Pat - hence the name. The most recent Fatty Fucker incident involved me dancing on the stage of the Ritz and getting booed off.

Porna is the friend who I text when I’m walking through the rape park at night. ‘If I don’t text back in fifteen minutes I’ve been mugged/murdered or abducted by aliens.’

Well, she usually doesn’t remember until two hours later, I’ll be in bed and receive a text saying, ‘are you alive?’. But at least the thought is there.

Anyway Porna, the friend for all purposes, offered to accompany me to the wedding. It may also have had something to do with the groom’s single best men. But in the end we didn’t go.

I thought to myself, why should I spend 20 or more pounds in a taxi, another 20 or more propping myself up at the none-free bar and another 2.50 on a ‘congratulations on your marriage’ card, for a friend I have seen once in the space of two years. The last time I saw her I spent the next day picking up whole slices of sicky pizza from my carpet (has this girl never heard of chewing?). Some nights I lay in bed and am reminded of the whole incident by wafts of cheesy bile hitting my nostril. And to add insult to injury, she never did pay me for that takeaway. If Panjita didn’t feel the need to attend the wedding, nor any of our other friends for that matter, I don’t see why I did.

Instead I spent a fabulous curry and wine filled evening chez Porna. The great thing about Porna’s place is that she has sofas and a TV. These are extremely rare delicacies in the life of a student. Apparently some guy has been going around shooting everyone? I had no idea. Without a television and no strong desire to ever buy a newspaper I have had a murder, financial-crisis and David Cameron free year. I don’t know which one is the worse of the three? Global bankruptcy, mass murder or a smarmy politician who clearly needs urgent treatment for a spray tan addiction? I’m going with the latter. During an evening of Blossom Hill red and Chicken Tikka masala, that guy just seems to get oranger and oranger.

Back to the friend politics, I’m not going to get mad at my friends. I’ve known Panjita long enough to know this isn’t the first time she has let me down and it won’t be the last. She most probably won’t come to Taiwan. And yet I still choose to be her friend. She serves the purpose of being by my side in some of the most exciting memories of my life. After all she did take me to see a play about a man with a ten inch penis - which is never a bad thing.

I’m not going to be mad at Porna either. It has been almost an hour since I text her to say I was walking through the rape park and she still hasn’t text me asking if the aliens have got me. I’m sure she will remember within the next thirty minutes and interrupt my sex dream about Gerard Butler with a text asking me, ‘are you dead yet?’

Life is about friends for specific purposes. You have reliable friends and you have unreliable friends. You have facebook friends (the creepy people who added you after meeting you once but you’re too scared to delete in case you meet them again). You have drinking friends (the people you wonder if you’d actually like if you ever met them sober). You have sex friends (I will tell you about die Schlange in a later blog). You have the Sicky friends (they turn up, be sick down the side of your bed and you don’t see them for years). You have the ‘other’ friends (for example there is just no describing the special people of this world like Jelly). Then you have the Fatty Fucker friends, the truest friends of them all.