Adieu, My Butt Crack Buddy

Ours was an unlikely friendship. Me, a middle-aged, green tea-sipping NPR listener; Him, 30ish, pot-bellied, chain-smoking Dittohead.

I selected Frank from a bevy of contractor types who interviewed to help me remodel two 80-year-old bathrooms. His fingernails were black, but his white tee-shirt crisp and his blue eyes sparkled behind paint-flecked glasses.

As he worked up designs, plans and budgets, sketching with squarish contractor’s pencil, he talked nonstop about the unique challenges of old homes.  Every once in a while, he’d stop and sharpen the pencil with a penknife, brows furrowed in concentration. I was smitten. That afternoon, I handed him my house keys and a check for $30,000 vaguely wondering if I’d ever see him again. 

But sure enough, the next week and for seven months following, he arrived at 7:00 a.m. sharp in his eight-cylinder pick-up truck. The key turned in the lock, and like a kid brother who knows he might walk in on big sis in her bra and panties, he’d call out a warning “Hello!” as he bounded up the stairs.

In between discussions of tiles and fixtures, we found common ground–our love of Teddy Roosevelt, our disgust with organized religion and hypocritical politicians. His right-hand dude—that’s what they called each other, “Hey, dude!”—looked askance at our burgeoning friendship, making Frank and me feel like we belonged to a secret club where open-mindedness and higher thinking trumped class distinction, income and education.

He voted for Bush, I for Kerry. I tolerated Frank’s jabs at Democrats and his grumblings about “Manual Labor from Mexico” taking away his livelihood.  I empathized.  With a wife and family, no health insurance, bills to pay and a no education to fall back on, his position was precarious.

The United States that once supported valuable craftsmen like Frank with living wages and health insurance is gone.  I pointed out that his righteous anger is directed at the wrong people, but after a two-hour commute with his AM talk radio blaring and veins pumped with caffeine, his mind was made up.

Once Frank completed his masterpiece bathrooms, we kept the elaborate dance going via email, each of us trying to seduce the other with political jokes and barbs.  My heart beat faster when a family medical emergency moved Frank one baby step nearer to the ideas I embrace—universal healthcare among them.

And then last August, she came between us.  Let’s call her Caribou Barbie, the kinda gal who uses the term “kinda gal.” Suddenly, it no longer mattered what I thought; Frank was down for the count.  She’s a female of his own species, willing to have babies—lots of them—with a man whose profession mandates he show lots of butt crack. She strides onstage all lip-gloss and tattooed eyeliner and looks for all the world like one of those strippers you hire for bachelor parties who pretends to be the Avon Lady, then whips off her glasses, lets down her hair and tears off her Velcro power suit.

I miss Frank. A Wal-Mart-sized chasm now separates us. On his side, America rides again, numero uno in a big white hat on a big white stallion. On mine, it’s not so equine, not so white.

So it is with mixed feelings I say adieu to my buddy who once exposed to me his heart —and his crack—on numerous occasions.  Maybe we’ll reconnect when that chasm between us is blanketed with thousands of purple flowers planted by a leader who sees not a red country or a blue country, but a united country.