MY GOAL DESTROYED OUR FRIENDSHIP

HOW BEING GOAL-OBSESSED RUINED MY FRIENDSHIP

by Ellen C. Weiman

(e-mail: soph1stel2@gmail.com)

It might have been just because we got on each others’ nerves, but less than three months after moving in to a Chelsea apartment together after college, Jane and I hated each other’s guts.

Well, the way I remember it, in that short time Jane compiled a list of my flaws which fueled her contempt for me, while she adhered to the rules and carried on her Don Quixote-esque noble cause of a life. And so it became that our more than twenty year friendship was destroyed because of my passion and pursuit to become a newspaper reporter. 

Jane and I went back to third-grade together, two pupils among the 50 in Miss Bloom’s class at Brooklyn’s elementary school near Coney Island Ave. Somehow we found each other, connected with each other, and together happily played Barbie, jacks, stick-ball and jump rope for many years after. 

Even when I moved to Long Island in fifth grade, we stayed in touch by being pen pals – her monthly missives enthralling me with descriptions of the urban life I missed and the boys she loved, and mine to her consumed with kvetchings of the vapid, vacuous and just plain boring existence in suburbia. We’d visit each other over weekends, thanks to our parents as transportation, and when we got old enough, by ourselves on the Long Island Railroad. She went to one of the city colleges and me to a NY state school near the city. I thought our lives paralleled in many ways. 

I also loved that at the end of her letters she always drew some kind of free-style pencil sketch of a knight riding out of his castle, over a drawbridge, on his steed, or something in that genre. Crusader-like, someone looking noble and soon to be victorious. I always admired, and envied, her natural talent. I liked to do many things, but never had one specific direction, until my second semester of freshman year of college, when I came under journalism’s spell.

I remember sitting there after we both graduated our respective colleges in the Lundy’s in Sheepshead Bay of long ago, us getting excited when we came up with the idea of rooming together. Our ages exceeding the legal drinking age at the time, we actually splurged on cheap glasses of wine with our $7 meals at this local, famous establishment, toasting our new adventure. And we began to scour the city for, at minimum, a one-bedroom place we could turn into two. Proud to say I found it on West 16^th Street near Eighth Ave, with a rent we could afford and a temporary wall with a door my dad and brother erected in the middle of the living room for my equal-sized bedroom. This, I thought, couldn’t have been more perfect. 

If I recall correctly, Jane got a regular 9 to 5 job working for the Yellow Pages. She did administrative stuff, I think; she rarely went into detail about her actual job or even the politics or intrigue of her colleagues there. In the two years we stuck it out there, creating a wider and more angry gap between us as life went on, she pretty much always arrived home at 5:30 and stayed in her room evenings and weekends. Except on the nights she met her married lover. 

Let me interject here that truth be told, I really don’t know whether they slept together or not. But I do know that Jane was in love.

He, on the other hand, was older and in a loveless marriage, she told me. He was smart, witty, good natured, good humored, good hearted, VERY handsome, yet totally misunderstood and unappreciated by the woman who was his wife. He was Jane’s “knight,” someone noble, only he was shackled instead of riding his steed onto victory, and it was her noble cause to console him and make him happy. If she had dreams for the future of her life, career goals, life goals, she never talked about them, and after awhile it was hard to care.

I, on the other hand, shortly after we moved in, began to work three jobs daily – a secretary by day to the editor of a major conglomerate’s corporate magazine (with the hope of some writing assignments too); a freelance reporter for three of Manhattan community papers after hours; and as an on-call paid “slave” at the New York Post, luckily working various night-time through morning shifts running around from desk to desk in the newsroom, answering phones, delivering papers and coffee to and taking orders from the male editors, hoping for a break and a chance to write some stories myself – just like the desire of the other eager young women around me. I was among those who were trying hard to achieve the spotlight – to get a reporter “tryout” – by merit, not sleeping with one of the editors. The spotlight, either way, was highly competitive and hard to achieve.

So, for the most part, I slept every third day. I carried clothes with me and toiletries to change for any occasion, and would get high to finally calm the pumped adrenaline on the evenings and days I was off from my jobs. I tiptoed quietly when arriving in the apartment in the wee hours of the morning, and I did my best to muffle the “flesh noises” when, on rare occasions, I brought a man home to “spend the night.” I was no louder than the woman upstairs with loose bed springs and a very active sex life, whose noises came through my ceiling like it was made of egg crates. The time was the late 1970’s by then, with Plato’s Retreat and discos booming, with Erica Jong’s Mile High club and “zipless f#*ks” embedded in the culture. I was pretty much always running on fumes, I was immature, insecure, and scared beyond belief when I thought about it, but I was in the arena I wanted to be.

Every week I would scotch-tape my published community newspaper stories to the walls of my bedroom, and would save the place of honor above my mattress for the articles I got to write at the New York Post. Editors would throw us female “dogs” a bone every once in a while, letting us work on or write some innocuous piece that might end up on page 25, right before the sports news. Though I didn’t appreciate having to write captions about “Buxom Brooklyn bathing beauties on the beach,” or wake up the Con Ed spokesperson at 3 am to find out why the city was just plunged into 8-seconds of darkness, assigned by a drunken editor – the spokesperson called it a “momentary voltage dip” -- all these stories were building my portfolio, and I was glad to have them.

But the moment of open hostility between me and Jane came when I quit my 9 to 5 job, and decided to put myself in a precarious state to get a full-time newpaper job anywhere in the United States. Even my mom was none-too-thrilled about my decision, saying: “Ellen, you even have dental insurance now,” and my response: “Mother, at 24. I believe I am too young to worry about dental insurance, rather than chasing my dream.” Sounded good. But boy, was I scared to death. I always earned my own money, I always supported myself, I always had savings, and I was about to blow that all – if I had to – in my pursuit of being the next Woodward and/or Bernstein.

So by day I continued my freelance community newspaper work, got as many more shifts at the NY Post as I could, and answered the classified ads in the back of a trade magazine, Editor and Publisher, for cub reporters anywhere in the country. I often slept during the day, or had my night-time NY Posties over when the sun was shining and Jane at work. I wrote stories on my electric typewriter while the sun was up as much as I could; I had my room’s doors closed – blocking the light to the small remainder of the living room – to close off the view of scattered papers all over my floor. I got absorbed in my world and its excitement and baby-step kudos or opportunities I often got; I lived an erratic life but one I was choosing, and I had energy to burn thanks to my passion, and my youth. Just to think of staying up one night now, my body and my mind in my Social Security years, exhausts me. But then it was exciting, and the world I thought I wanted to live in.

Since by then Jane and I talked very little, I didn’t understand the mounting hostility, but I couldn’t miss it. Dishes and pots she used she’d leave in the sink, so when I’d walk in in the morning, I’m the one who got to see the roaches illuminating scatter dance. Her response when I complained was to sprinkle the dirty dishes with Comet. Eventually, my response to that was to take the dirty dishes out of the sink and put them, on a plastic tablecloth, on her bed. The stakes of righteous indignation kept ratcheting up, yet I wasn’t exactly sure why. 

I kept the bathroom clean, my time in the kitchen was never left visible, and as far as I could tell, I was a good person. Were my insecurities so reprehensible? Was what might have looked like a “loose” lifestyle so bad? So I brought a few men home here and there. They never represented a dangerous threat to her – or to me, for that matter. Looking for Mr Goodbar had yet to be published, and most of the guys I knew from work, one way or the other (not editors though). 

Yet, the few times we had it out, she condemned me for not knowing myself well enough, for having too many doubts. She castigated my sleeping during the day rather than doing something productive; she thought my sex-life was dirty, humiliating. Without the insight of therapy till years later, I didn’t see what was going on with her that she needed to judge me, and to do it so harshly. I just knew that the contempt was there and I had to watch my back.

While in the midst of this antagonism, the “black book” for the building we were living in was released; the first step in turning the building co op. The black book meant we tenants with names on the leases got first dibs on the lower inside price of our apartment. It would be a chance of a life-time, I was told, with the neighborhood, the building, the apartment only increasing tenfold in value over the years. It would be more than a Ralph Kramden “get-rich-quick-scheme;” real estate property in Manhattan always is valuable. And so silently, separately, Jane and I contemplated our possible good fortune, and the downside of getting into a financial relationship with someone you despised.

Lo and behold, life intervened to bring an answer to this dilemma. I got a job. I got a job as a newspaper reporter in upper Connecticut, near the MA border. Cow-farming towns that replaced most of the fields of a half century ago with subdivided mini-mansions in bedroom suburban communities, preserving only a handful of the farms. These sleepy, little towns each had their own Finance, Education, Taxes and other Committees composed of people from each area, and this afternoon paper covered all their intrigue, backstabbing and news. To people here, Hartford was “the big, bad city,” and New York was where you went on your honeymoon. I accepted within a day of the offer. 

After I broke it to Jane that I was moving by the end of the month, I realized that I had to walk away from the idea of buying this apartment. My parents had no money to lay down, nor was this where I wanted my savings to go right now. The most compelling reason, I remember still to this day, was that nothing worthwhile would ever come from fiscally partnering with an enemy. So I took my plants, my foam rubber slab of a bed and a few chairs, got my name off the lease and I left.

It wasn’t until almost 20 years later that I met someone who now lived in that 16^th St building, and had bought an apartment there for over $1 million! The black book offer at the time for our place was no more than $200,000. But the real estate taxes were going up shortly after I left due to the tax break the city gave the building due to expire. Any possible profit would have been eaten by maintenance therefore. That’s the rationale with which I console myself, many years later. And no, Jane did not buy it either, I found out.

It took FaceBook to bring Jane and I together again, just a decade ago. I could see that she was married, had at least one child, painted as what seemed like a hobby, and called her life a small, quiet one in her little home on Long Island. During those same years, I had done a year at the CT paper, left to “find myself” and travel around the country, came back to NY, became official spokesperson, speech and press release and position paper writer and image shaper for about 6 city and state agencies during the 15 or more years I worked in government. I got married, had two daughters, and stayed living in Manhattan. 

 She sent me a friend request, with a note that says she remembers that we were friends. She said she remembers that the relationship didn’t end well, but she can’t remember what happened or why. I never answered her. I remember very clearly why, and I am still angry, but too ashamed to admit it.