Casual pals / Strict borders

Today: Carrie Frye, writer and book editor at Black Cardigan Edit; and Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, Nigerian linguist, writer, translator, founder of Olongo Africa, and writer and producer of the documentary, Ebrohimie Road.

Issue No. 162

Pretty Good Friends
Carrie Frye

Passing Through the Empire
Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún

Pretty Good Friends

by Carrie Frye

My hairdresser has beautiful manners and big brown eyes. He was a model for a while in New York then returned a couple years ago to his hometown just outside Asheville, North Carolina. 

Back in high school, he had an after-school job for a florist and when it was time for prom, his boss made him a boutonniere as a gift. But it was more installation than boutonniere, featuring several birds of paradise—huge, orange, outer-space-looking—that pronged from his rented tux “like a second head.” He wished fervently that it had been a carnation or rose instead but felt it would be disloyal or rude to take it off. And so there he was, a Hummel-eyed teen wearing a floral billboard: “All night, everyone kept walking up and asking, ‘What is that?’”

This is a species of story I enjoy very much, and I associate it with a certain tier of friendship—the level where there’s affection and inside jokes but you also don’t know one another especially well. It’s a lovely category of association. Mat buddies at yoga; people at your local or at the dog park. When I was a kid my dad would hit the Mister Donut every Saturday morning at 6:00 a.m. to drink coffee with a group of guys he called The Liar’s Club. It was an unmissable date, but there was never any contact between them, outside that Saturday morning context.