Nothing

Read it and find out.

I have a male friend who I've known for around 43 or 44 years.  We worked together for the City starting in 1977.  We connected immediately.  We were both rather lost children.  It soon became obvious that we were lost, drunken children.  We were the childhood friends that neither of us had as actual children.  We both had obvious birth defects that made us nothing more than punching bags for bullies.  He did, however, have a very supportive father whose memory he worshiped.  His mother committed suicide, directly related to his birth defects that resulted from thalidomide use during pregnancy.   

Not meaning to quote Dylan here, but he was married when we first met - soon to be divorced.  I was living with my future husband, to whom I've been married now for 42 years.  He and my husband got along well, or at least decently enough.  After my marriage and his divorce, he, my husband and I did a lot of things together, including setting him up with a variety of female friends.  We frequently "double-dated," going to local night clubs to hear live blues and rock - dancing and drinking into the wee hours.  He generally took those ladies home with him afterward.  Both he and the ladies went into quite a bit of detail about that, and it's safe to say that both parties had a pretty good time. 

He left the City in the mid 80's to follow his dream of becoming a professional photographer.  He credited me with giving him the self-confidence to do that.  He moved to Dayton, Ohio, to attend a highly prestigious photography school.  After that, he worked as a photographer, living in a variety of cities, for the next 15 years.  My husband and I also moved several times, in pursuit of his goal of managing large convention centers and concert halls.  It was a time when that industry was starting to privatize.  Three times in a row, he lost his job as those facilities came under private management, who always brought in their own people for less money.  My friend visited us in each of the three cities we lived in, which ranged from the east coast to the west and in between.  We went to the beach in North Carolina, camped out in Yosemite and Kings Canyon national parks, and screamed into the raging fires of wheat field stubble being burned off in central Kansas.  During those years, he had a number of girlfriends - some more serious than others.  I met many of them. 

After many years, he left the photography business, with it's frequent, spur of the moment travel and heavy physical work load.  He moved back to our home town and worked as a computer technician for a local school district.  He was entirely self taught in that field and was very good at it.  He continued to freelance in photography for his own enjoyment, and he seemed truly happy with his life. 

He went to his high school reunion - 20 years, 25, 30 - I really don't know.  He reconnected with a woman who had been his best friend's wife back in the day.  They married shortly thereafter.  She was an angel of a woman with three sons from her previous marriage.  The youngest was in high school at the time - the other two were grown and off on their own.  She was a regular churchgoer, at a regular protestant church.  They were married for 2 years before my friend decided to give church a go, and I can't say it was a bad thing at the time.  For his wife, it was never a bad thing, but for him, it unlocked something I would have never anticipated. 

My friend had been a volunteer for George McGovern's campaign against Nixon in 1972.  He had paid for a girlfriend's abortion before I met him but after Roe became the law.  We drank together often and smoked our fair share of pot.  He and my husband tried mushrooms together.  He was a liberal, and fairly anti-religious.  Both he and I had horrific experiences at the hands of Youth for Christ as teenagers.  That was why he resisted accompanying his second wife to church for their first two years.  As for myself, I'd had a schizoid religious background in childhood.  My brother and I were sent to an ordinary protestant Sunday school every week, probably to give our parents a break.  We sang songs and had cookies and milk and learned that Jesus loved the little children - all the little children of the world.  Red and yellow, black and white, they were precious in his site.  Jesus was the protector of the poor and down-trodden and preached love and compassion.  I became very familiar with the bible, and could recite the names of the books of both the old and new testaments backwards and forwards.   

Because of my numerous physical problems, my maternal grandmother took me to pentacostal tent revivals and faith healers.  My parents were of the belief that nothing related to church could be bad.  They were wrong.  Not only had I been a bully magnet with no friends - I was eventually branded as "the devil's child" because the faith healers couldn't fix me.  I was baptized 7 times.  The final straw broke when my father signed me up for an experimental treatment that turned out to be the clinical trials for allergy desensitization shots.  I had severe bronchial asthma which made me cough close to constantly.  I was addicted to codeine cough syrup, which was the only treatment available at the time.  A year's worth of allergy desensitization shots cured me, and the doctor was Jewish.  At that point, I was condemned to spend eternity burning in a lake of fire.  I was about 12 or 13. 

Sorry for the digression. 

Shortly after he started going to church, my friend informed me that all women were required to be subservient to all men.  He quoted bible verses to prove that point, while leaving out the parts about men's responsibilities in caring for their wives and children.  We argued vehemently, which was pointless.  He quoted verses saying that no woman was allowed to teach a man, which effectively meant that he would always be right and I would never be that.  We had been friends for around 30 years at that point, and I've always been damn stubborn.  I would not allow such a good, long friendship to be destroyed by what I hoped would eventually pass.  Instead, it got worse. 

He started listening to Rush Limbaugh and joined the tea party movement.  He delighted in telling me about a rally he attended in which the speaker told the audience to grab RINO's by their ball sacks and drag them back across the aisle. He always loved a bit of bathroom humor, and his newfound religion had no problem with that. 

Let me interject here.  Since he started his religious journey, most of our conversations have included complaints about his wife not giving him enough sex.  In general, he started talking about sex a lot.  He started making innuendos that perhaps I would like to give him blow jobs, which I tried to laugh off.  I was fond of his wife and frankly, was accustomed to men testing the waters, so to speak.  It was a common occurrence in every job I'd ever had, long before sexual harassment had a name.  However, he had never behaved that way toward me before his move into the world of the evangelical right. 

My friend had a vasectomy after his first divorce.  He was afraid he would pass on his genetic anomalies and decided not to have children.  When he married again, he had a ready made family, which now includes many grandchildren.  They are all now part of the evangelical right to one extent or another, and their once-normal church expects their members to tow the republican party line.  Their male members are expected to tow it aggressively, while the women are simply extensions of their husbands now.  I guess it's needless to say that he's a trump loyalist who believes the election was stolen and his supporters did the right thing when they tried to overthrow the government at trump's behest. 

My friend is now retired and in a very good place financially.  They own a house in an all-white, upper middle class suburban neighborhood.  Before his conversion, he was adamant about staying in the City and helping to revitalize it's core.  They also have a timeshare in Cabo San Lucas and trade timeshares with other people.  Once a year, they take his wife's oldest son and his family on an all expenses paid week-long vacation - sometimes to Branson, Missouri, and other times, on a "cowboy" tour of Colorado.  They go on cruises in the Caribbean and take guided tours through places like Savannah and Bar Harbor, Maine.

We both had many black co-workers at the City and also had black friends.  His first wife was Mexican.  He now sees those groups as predators, destroying the American dream, and sponging off people such as himself.  He's been angered by "locals" during his trips to Mexico and Jamaica.  He believes non-whites are turning the US into a "shithole" country.  He's damn angry, but still trying to cajole a blow job out of me.  Since I'm a heathen in his mind, his religious beliefs don't apply.  Most of his life, he felt timid because of his physical anomalies.  I know that feeling well.  Through his evangelical, right wing conversion, he is now one of the great white masters, determined to Make America Great Again.  I'm no longer able to have a civil conversation with him, after 43 years of friendship.  I'm no longer a person in his mind, but a possession owned by another man.  However, he has no problem asking another man's possession for sexual favors.  He is currently celebrating the overturn of Roe v Wade, and pretending that the abortion he paid for in the 70's didn't happen. 

He is my own personal story of one of the many faces of the racist, sexist, fundamental evangelical right.  This is the story of his transformation from McGovern campaigner to trump worshiper.  He has a college degree in geology, but now believes the earth has only existed for 6,000 years.  All findings to the contrary have been placed there by the devil to deceive us.  Black people are the remains of a sub-human, inferior race intent on killing off as many white folks as possible.  Our borders should be tightly shut to keep out the riff-raff from shithole countries who are stealing the jobs of good, white Americans.  I don't know how this happened.  I really can't wrap my mind around it.