THE GREAT GADFLY:

The Friendly Five

You know the drill...

1. Do you remember your first best friend? Who was it?

My first best friend was a really tall drink of water who had the same name as one of the members of the Frank Sinatra Rat Pack. I met him in second grade at recess when I was running around playing and bumped into him, and he just looked down at me with this creepy, expressionless glare. So of course we had to be best friends, and from that point on, we were thick as thieves, with many play-filled sleepovers and various pre-adolescent hijinx. His mother was French and his father owned a hardware store, and they lived next to a funeral parlor and they drank their milk out of large gallon-sized bags which were delivered to their house and looked like gifts from some bizarre alien Easter Bunny. I remember seeing the B52s for the first time on Saturday Night Live at a sleepover at my best friend's house, only we had to turn it off because his father made us go to sleep.

2. Are you still in touch with this person?

No. There was an ugly incident in which we decided we were going to sell all our comic books and become rich, and so we got our filthy mitts on a comic book pricing guide and figured that if we each sold all our comics, we'd make thousands of dollars off our Devil Dinosaur, Shogun Warrior and ROM comics. So I gathered all our beat-up, raggedy comics and went to the local specialty shop to do the deed, and they'd only give me like ten cents per book and I was told that's just how it works in the real world. So I sighed and said okay, and I sold all our comics and we each wound up making like maybe five or seven bucks each, and when I presented my friend with the cash, he was disappointed, but his parents were apparently REALLY disappointed, and there was some kind of resultant parental clash that neither my friend or I understood, but we wound up not being able to hang out from then on, and he went on to become a jock in high school and I joined the art guild. I guess we were bound to part ways eventually, it was merely a matter of finding a reason for our parents to facilitate the split. Sad and gross, but what can you do.

3. Do you have a current close friend?

I remain madly in love with my bestest gal pal in the whole world, the lovely and talented Ms. Lilah Renay. She is luscious and gorgeous, and if I am ever rich and famous, I will put her on full-time payroll simply to be rude to people at parties as needed. I should hope she will extend the same courtesy to me, should fortune find her first. Plus, we have seen each other at our melodramatic best, so we're each only one mere tell-all memoir away from completely ruining each other's lives. And that's a very special gift to share indeed. Not to mention someone has video footage in their possession in which I am forcing her to spell out dirty words on a Scrabble board in what was termed "Scrabble Humiliation", and we are both wearing giant Elton John sunglasses and sparkly hats in so doing (we had the bright idea of trying to come up with something that would be the opposite of porn - we then filmed a sequence in which we tried to feed a hot dog to my roommate's pet chinchillas). We were bored in college; she was a sport.

4. How did you become friends with this person?

She used to be my editor - and more often than not, she still is. That's why I know she is aces at being luscious, gorgeous and rude. We had many exciting adventures writing for the campus newspaper, toting rock stars around in the back of her boyfriend's pick-up truck and coming up with recipes for laxative "poop soups" that we published on the front page while the sports writers tried to lob Nerf balls at our heads. Oh, those were the days.

5. Is there a friend from your past that you wish you were still in contact with? Why?

Far too many to count. Friendships ebb and flow. Sometimes life gets jealous, and it unfortunately has the upper hand. The good thing about old lost friends is that they always seem to pop up when I least expect, which I suppose goes to prove that life may be jealous, but it is also fair.