The good thing about Ronen is that he doesn’t ask questions. No, he does, he just doesn’t ask the annoying ones.
“Hyde, why are you touching that?”
“Hyde, why are you trying to climb that hill?”
“Aren’t you going to get dirty?”
“Why is your scarf on your head?”
“Why are you spinning?”
“How did you never learn how to whistle?”
You will never hear him say those things ever. He encourages it. It’s like being in a natural state, comfortable and completely unjudged.
I see him standing on the corner of Sunset and Laurel with a gouge taken out of his shirt. He’s alone, but looks occupied. I’m not worried about leaving him there while I anxiously search for parking in this impossible neighborhood. I haven’t seen him in over a year, I’m excited. We sit down and it doesn’t matter that the time has passed or that TECHNICALLY we have only hung out in person one time before, closing out a late night hotel lobby before moving to an all night diner in the same establishment. He starts to whistle. My jealousy grows, until I can’t handle it anymore and I admit to him that I don’t know how to whistle.
Ronen has a project. He’s not going to stop until I learn and can competently whistle. Normally I would be embarrassed by sitting there having my friend telling me how to move my lips and breathe in and out, but I’m not. I can’t stop laughing because it’s entirely too much fun, sitting on the corner, trying to figure out how to make a new sound with my mouth. Needless to say, it worked, and now, with about 75% regularity, I can whistle.
Later, he watched patiently while I unsuccessfully tried to crawl up a cement hill by a car wash, and then we stood around stealing someone’s elecetricity and chatted about humans and art and friends and chargers and iphones and palm trees and Cool Hand Luke and sunsets and Mexican food restaurants and plans for the future and sleeping with models (and his confidence that I could accomplish this feat) and not rushing and dirty subway signs and how far places were and people we should meet and other things.
I dropped him off to meet his friends he hadn’t seen in a long time, and went off on my own to see the friends I had plans with.
