Archie

One afternoon Archie, my wife's boyfriend, turned up at our place for the big showdown. Or duel. Or whatever the hell was supposed to happen in these situations. It turned out he wasn't such a bad guy. A bit of a mope for sure but essentially a pretty nice guy.

Max's Bar was closed for renovations so we swung by the liquor store, picked up some beers and then we went into the park for our chat. On my insistence, we climbed a cypress tree and sat up there, about forty feet off the ground, up in the interlocking branches that grew out of the tree truck like an elaborate system of spokes, the fog slowly rolling in, obscuring everything above and below us. I tend to think better when I am sitting in a tree.

Archie and I talked through the situation, trying to untangle the mess we'd all made while we set about drinking the beer. Archie had a lot to say and I was more than willing to listen. Prior to all this, I'd told my wife that she was a beautiful woman and that, in my opinion, monogamy is an unnatural demand to place on any human being for the duration of their entire life. Male or female, it doesn't matter. We are talking about human nature and human sexual desire, probably two of the most unpredictable forces in the entire universe. And you just can't put those things in a little box or on a leash. It just doesn't work.

Anyway, in the spirit of transparency and being a better, less possessive person in general, I conveyed all this to Archie as we sat up in the tree and worked through our beef. And when the beer cans were empty, we hung them like Christmas ornaments on the thinner branches so as not to create an unsightly mess below.

And I'll tell you what...I discovered that I had absolutely no animosity towards this man whatsoever. And who knows? In another life, maybe we could've been friends. Anyway, talking to him, I knew it would all work out one way or another. I gotta say, we really bonded up in that tree, our hands, covered in sap, sticking to those ice cold cans of beer, while little pieces of bark became glued to our foreheads and hair. The only drawback to drinking up a tall, old growth tree is the getting down. Your climbing abilities are somewhat diminished while at the same time your confidence levels become unwisely exaggerated. And this can easily lead to injury. What I'm saying is, we nearly broke our necks on the way down.

After that, we stumbled through the forest, the tops of the trees looming overhead like prehistoric creatures in the fog. I'm not entirely sure if, technically speaking, that area is classified as a forest. We were looking for another tree to climb. We selected a suitable candidate, got about ten feet off the ground, pulling ourselves up from branch-to-branch. The climbing was much more difficult now that we were both drunk. About a quarter of the way up, Archie lost his grip, slipped and fell back, landing on the branch below, and then the one below that, bouncing from branch-to-branch, as he slowly and painfully fell out of the tree in stages, before landing in a heap on the ground below and damaging his back in the process. The poor bastard.

Okay, so after that we decided that maybe there should be no more climbing. Working out way deeper into the trees and fog, we quickly got lost, doomed it seemed to walk around in circles. Nor being able to find the road or formulated any kind of specific plan, we stumbled across an empty house in a clearing surrounded by more trees before I got stabbed in the eye by a low hanging branch and twisted my knee violently coming down a hill.

After this we had to fight our way out of a thicket, getting scratched to hell in the process, before we finally broke out into the open again.

We were on the edge of the local golf course. All this and I only had the one remaining tepid can of beer. In other words, it was a completely untenable situation. And you know how daytime drinking goes...you lurch from one moment to next seemingly without warning. This would explain why suddenly there seemed to be a lot of shouting directed at us from a pair of old zombies dressed in golfing plaid, insisting that we 'get off their course'. My booze-addled brain kept getting stuck on the absurdity of this one point, that as much as I would have liked to, I simply could not just teleport myself off the golf course. A confusing skirmish ensued. It was unclear to me exactly what was happening but the end result was that Archie and I managed to break free and then we were driving in a golf cart across the fairway, then past a pond bordered on three sides by a majestic fringe of reeds- a pond from which birdlife suddenly erupted, taking flight, honking and screeching into the air, presumably startled by our sudden appearance.

Archie shouted something as we drove full tilt over the crest of a hill, hoping I presume, to get some air but realising too late that there was a sand bunker on the other side. We hit the rim of that bunker full tilt, hard enough to eject both of us from the golf cart, tossing the both of us over the dashboard like a pair of crash test dummies.

The rest of the afternoon continued in this way, with many misunderstandings and much violent slapstick. In the end, it was agreed that my wife should spend Tuesday and Friday nights at Archie's place. I would have her for the rest of the time. Best that it was all out on the table.

We shook hands on the corner near my building and parted ways. Archie didn't have much of a handshake. Then it became clear his broken fingers (the spectacular golf cart stunt) were inhibiting a firm grip to seal the deal. That aside, I still thought he was a pretty decent fellow.