MY IMAGINARY FRIEND EDDIE

Since moving to Georgia, I haven’t made a whole lot of friends. Being a married male in my late 30s, I have no idea how to go about making a new friend. I imagine I should probably get involved in some group or organization where the people have similar interests as me, but that would likely require a lot of wasted time and energy for perhaps, one measly, half-ass friend. So rather than join some pathetic group like Westside Jews with Ambivalent Feelings about Living in the South or Gay Death Metalers Who Fancy Squirrels or Homogenized Milk Drinkers, I thought it much easier to conjure up my very own imaginary friend, and that is Eddie.

I call Eddie more often than he calls me, usually about twice a week. Typically, he calls me on Sunday when there’s nothing much to do in the whole state of Georgia except go to church, have a barbecue or shit on a log.

“Hey. Ya wanna have a beers and watch duh footballs,” says Eddie.

“Sure,” I say.

Eddie comes over and gets so comfortable on the couch sometimes that he passes out and drools, but I don’t mind because he’s my pal.

We watch a lot of TV, mostly it’s the jewelry-selling channel or Emeril, the cooking genius, or sometimes we watch the golf channel for hours. Eddie doesn’t ever demand the remote, but sometimes I say “Eddie, why don’t you decide what we should watch?” and pass him the remote and he takes it and inevitably we end up watching a poker game with some guy wearing a big, stupid hat, a gal with enormous boobs, a billionaire in a baseball cap, pink shirt and tie and some pseudo celebrity like El DeBarge, but it’s not really him. Eddie always roots for the girl with the big boobs, but she never wins.

Sometimes, I go over to Eddie’s to watch TV. He has a gigantic bong that we call Bongosaurus, though I must admit the bud Eddie gets is pretty weak. I usually have to pretend that I’m stoned or smoke for a half hour straight to get high. We like to watch the music videos with Eddie’s other pals (I forget their names) and of course, Emeril, or really the same crap that we watch at my house.

When we get restless, we go for a drive through the city on Eddie’s ATVs. He has two of them. Lucky bastard. But he always gets to wear the camouflaged helmet with the deer antlers attached to it. He’s never offered that maybe I could wear it once. Selfish prick. One time, we got pulled over by the police, who told us that you can’t drive ATVs around on city streets and Eddie pretended to be a backwoods hick that was lost in the city and they bought it hook, line and sinker. He had them eating out of his hand. They even pointed us in the direction of the North Georgia hills, so we could git duh hell outta there. Eddie’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but when the hammer falls, wait, stop that!

I think my wife has mixed feelings about Eddie. She likes that I have some social life and have stopped conversing with the air conditioner, but she finds Eddie to be somewhat dim-witted. One time, she called him “dumb” and another time she called him “Beavis.” Not to his face! She didn’t like it that one time when he asked her to bring him a 7-Up. I didn’t like it because that was the last 7-Up in the fridge.

Recently, I had a baby, a little girl, and that takes up a lot of my time. The other day (I think it was Sunday), Eddie called and asked “Hey. Ya wanna have a beers and watch duh footballs.”

I said, “I can’t. I’m covered in baby poop.”

He said “Ah, really, OK,” and hung up the phone. He sounded sore.

I really was covered from head to toe in baby poop. I wasn’t trying to blow him off.

But now the baby is sort of my friend and I can talk to her about all sorts of stuff and we can watch Emeril together. On Sunday, we like to just lie around and she usually poops on me.

Sometimes, I feel guilty that I don’t call Eddie anymore. He doesn’t have a girlfriend and some of his friends are also married and one of them I think has six babies from at least two women. Everybody in Georgia has four to six babies. It’s ‘cause of the Christianity and the general stupidity. Even babies have other babies.

But I digress. What was I talking about?