MTV has this show on every year around mid spring that I have seen since I was seven. It's about Spring Break. It's wet and wild. Fun and Freaky. A lavish display of exotic kinks with women's breasts squeezed into tiny bikini tops and butts in booty shorts. They giggle at the cameras, holding big, red cups that foam over. They guzzle down beer and hard liquor and then their tops come off. I didn't expect that when I first saw it. Yet, there it was. Three sets of white trash breasts, naked and jiggling on the screen of my parents' basement television set. I stared as long as I was allowed and a lot harder than I ever had before.
They were my first set of real 'titties'. Titties. That's what Kenny McCormick called them. I wasn't that buddy-buddy with him, because of the outrageous way he talked when he wanted to, but I knew that much from him. If Kenny was good for nothing else, it was learning the wrong way to talk about anything. He had taught me how to curse, after all. So, I knew they were called titties. I don't know if that was important or not, but that's what they were called. At least, that's how they were referred to in the town I grew up in.
South Park. It was not exactly like the cities and beaches and places shown on MTV's Spring Break special. I had never known there were cities like that, though, when I first flipped on that channel. I hadn't even intended to watch that channel. It was just on it. My best friend had been over that afternoon and he had been watching music videos. I remember because he had been complaining about all the minorities in them these days. I had found it weird that he said these days. He was only a couple months older than me and as long as I had been alive, music videos had always been nothing but minorities. Regardless, that's why the channel was on MTV in the first place. I had just turned it on to watch some late night special about something I have since forgotten. When I saw the girls in their skimpy outfits, however, I had just sat there and watched.
I soon found out that I wasn't alone. My best friend had watched it too. He told me so when I asked if he had ever seen a pair of titties. He told me not to be stupid and of course he had. Of course. He had done all sorts of things like that. He was always doing things before me. At least, when I talked to him then, I thought he did. He really didn't always do things before me. He was just a better liar than I was.
Eric Cartman was a liar if he was anything too. I had known him all my life and all that time he had been a liar. He lied about anything. Actually, he lied about everything eventually. When we were children, I thought he was afraid of getting in trouble, so he fibbed a lot. When we were teenagers, I thought he was trying to be an asshole, so he spun a web of lies for his own pleasures. By the time I was what was called a 'young adult', I had a truthful answer for all the untruths he had told me since the very first moment I met him. Eric lied for both those reasons and one more. He was a pathological liar. I think that in medical terms that implied he had no control of his lying. I'm no doctor. In my vocabulary, all it meant was that Eric had lied so often about so much that he had to keep lying to make up for it. I suppose that's the primary reason why I never started lying. I didn't want to end up like that.
Like they said, once you tell one lie, you have to just keep going.
And he kept going. Eric lied to me about everything at one time or another. I guess I made it easy growing up. I can't say I was ever the brightest crayon in the box, but I can say I was the most gullible. I was like the white crayon. I could be turned into anything if you just added color. Eric Cartman was an explosion of color. He was red fury, blue sorrow, pink passion, green envy, black hate, and everything in between, beyond, above, and below. He turned me into what he wanted when he needed me, then sucked his shades up and went about his merry way. In the end, I was usually a murky grey color from the remains of what thoughts, stories, and falsehoods he had stuffed into my skull. I was never quite sure what was up and what was down when he was done strutting his stuff.
It was in that dizzy fashion I grew up. He grabbed my shoulders and spun me around like a top so many times, I was just dazed all day long. My eyes would be shell shocked, wide open, with my mouth in a plastered on smile of vague confusion. That's what I looked like, yes sir. A bewildered doll strung up on strings that never stopped dancing. Unfortunately for me, Eric never let me rehearse, so I was constantly tripping over my own two feet. To that end, I was frequently in and out of trouble because I got caught as he was sneaking out the proverbial window.
I was in trouble the day that window sucked me up and out with him and his lying ass. That's for damn sure.
That was the first day of summer when I was eighteen. I had never known that figurative phrases could be real until then. As usual, it was Eric who showed me different. He was always doing that sort of thing. He was the best at it. Whenever he found out I thought something, he made it his personal business to change the way I thought. The funniest thing about it was that he always wanted me to think just how he thought. I don't know why. He had plenty of thoughts. He really didn't need mine. Yet, there he would go, grabbing my head and giving it a witty shake until everything was stirred together. He would sort through it right quick, too. The pieces he tossed out disagreed with him and the ones he let me keep, well, they were all his own ideas. I let him do it, because I had never really believed my own way of thinking was all that grand to begin with. After all, I was friends with Eric. My judgment couldn't be all that great.
As it was, he had come to get me and change my mind that day. It was a Tuesday. I remember that. It seemed so important at the time that it was a Tuesday. Why that was isn't something I remember. When it comes to my memories concerning my past with Eric, some of the details are sketchy. I think that's the dizzy. I was always staggering around in my head, trying to gather myself, when he would get started. Sometimes, those beginnings faded into the background noise of the chaotic carnival that was my world whenever Eric was parading around.
But it was a Tuesday. It was summer too. He came the way he did practically every day. He boldly announced his presence by slamming his fists into my door until I creaked it open, still wondering who it was, as if it could be anyone other than him. He would bound on in, talking a mile a minute to me, or at least, I assumed to me. He would point and poke me in the forehead before we would be off. I rarely got a word in edge wise. It's difficult to be heard when Eric's in the room. Of course, the level of his booming voice has something to do with that, but that's not the problem I suffered from really. Mine was in his simple disregard for my opinions. In all fairness, he disregarded everyone's opinions but his own. Occasionally, he even disregarded those. Mine, however, were a special sort. He wouldn't even give me a chance to voice them. He managed to drown them out as he spun me out the door and swept me off to whatever insanity awaited.
I always found his habit of doing that strange. Sure, most things with Eric were strange, but this was particularly strange. With others, Eric wanted to hear their opinions. He didn't care one way or the other about them, but he wanted to hear them nevertheless. He lusted after them. He hungered for them. The sheer appetite he had for them was obscene. His gluttony for them bordered on the levels of psychological addiction. For all intents and purposes, he needed them. He couldn't degrade people without their opinions. As sick, as twisted, as it was, Eric indulged himself in other people's opinions for the sole reason of berating them about how devilishly wrong they were for having them.
There wasn't a thing in this world that got Eric off more than other people being wrong. I had seen lust before. I had been formally introduced to it via Kenny McCormick. He was good at talking bad and there wasn't anything better to talk bad about than girls. He would stand there in his beat up, orange parka and say the nastiest things about body parts I hadn't even known existed. The look on his face was lust. L, U, S, T, lust. It's an unmistakable look. It looks like a drug addict's face when they've been stone cold sober for two weeks now and someone sprinkles free cocaine on the floor. It's needy and desperate and fiery. Like some sort of clingy emotion sent from Satan. That's lust. That's the look Eric got when he was itching for a good round with someone he knew had opinions different from his own. It was a mad craze of his, but, like any addiction, he couldn't control it. He needed it, to be right, more than he needed air.
I know. Eric told me so.
That's why it was so strange that he never wanted to hear my opinions. Yet, he didn't. He heard me start talking and he would waste no time in fixing me all nice and neat. He would smack a hand over my mouth, pull me against his big, fat belly, and tell me in that heavy accent of his that I really didn't think like that, no sireebob. I thought just like him. Yes, I did. Oh, yes I did. And then, of course, I would. I didn't need to be told twice. I never needed to be told twice. If he figured I should think like him, then I figured he was right. I just could never figure out why he didn't want to put up a fight about it. He never did, though. Eric would just steer me in the right, or wrong, direction and push me down for my next coloring session. There was never any fighting. I don't know if I just wasn't worth it or if he really didn't care or what, but there wasn't. That was strange.
But then, everything with Eric was strange. He was a weird guy. Weird in ways I wasn't, anyways. Actually, Eric was everything I wasn't. He was confident in all that he did and said. He was opinionated and he made sure those opinions were heard loud and proud. I wasn't like that. I could never be like that. I feared repercussions far too much. I don't think Eric feared repercussions. I don't think Eric feared anything. Not a Goddamn thing.
Except, maybe, being wrong.
He was wrong that Tuesday. Of course, he didn't think he was wrong. Eric never thought he was wrong until it was too late to be wrong. Those were the times when it was in his best interest to pretend that he wasn't wrong, even if he had finally figured out he really was. Those were the times when he did horrible things. I tried not to get involved in those things. Whenever Eric couldn't talk his way through something, I slipped away into the darkness. If Eric Cartman couldn't lie his fat butt out of a sticky situation, then there wasn't any other way about it but down. And that meant going down. If Eric went down, I sure as hell wasn't going to be dragged down with him. He had gotten me into enough trouble without that headache. I got them regularly when he was around. Him being wrong constantly made my head hurt. When I was little, I never thought he was wrong. When I got older, I always thought he was wrong. When I was a little older than that, I figured out that Eric was never right, but he was rarely ever wrong. He was somewhere in the middle. This or that, yes and no. Perhaps a maybe. But not a 'no'.
Eric couldn't be 'no'. He was certainly good at saying it. He told me no all the time. About everything too. I didn't have to ask him anything or say something. I was just a 'no' in his eyes. A lot of people were. That mindset came right alongside his insatiable appetite for people's wrongness. If everyone was wrong, then they were 'no's. I was never wrong, as I didn't have opinions, but I was a 'no'. I'll never know exactly how I was grouped into that category. However, I was sharply told 'no' enough to realize just how he saw me. Not that Eric was hiding it. He was always very straightforward about his emotions for a liar.
But. He was wrong. He was wrong that Tuesday. And he was wrong about not being wrong about it. Eric said he wasn't wrong, but he was. He had a hard time admitting this sort of thing. I didn't need him to admit it, though. I had grown up with this grinning fox. I was quite used to figuring out things that really deserved confirmation and having to live without it. After all, Eric had never actually said what our relationship was. Still, I knew we were best friends. I could tell. He came over to my house on the weekend and he ate my chips and he told me stupid jokes and he smiled when I told him stupid jokes and he never told me we weren't friends. We were the best of friends. We always had been. I didn't need him to say anything. Asking him would have only made him roll his eyes and snort as he turned away with that half smile on his full face. Eye rolls and snorts from Eric are not very good signs. They usually mean that he sees you as a couple pegs dumber than he already pegged you. That's never a good thing with anyone, least of all him.
Besides, he probably would have just lied about.
I didn't need anyone to tell me he was wrong anyways. Whenever Eric's wrong, really wrong, no one needs to say a single damn thing. Everyone already knows. Like when he chopped up his Daddy's body and made that poor Scott Tenorman, his half brother, the Ginger boy with braces, eat the pieces. Eric was wrong for doing that and he knew so. He would never admit it. No, not ever. Of course, that's not the type of thing that has to be clarified. You hear something that bitingly awful and it leaves a nasty taste in your mouth that runs down your throat and makes your stomach do flip flops in a pool of acid. I felt that icky sicky feeling for weeks after Eric told me what he'd gone and done. He had to tell me twice. Once after he'd done it and once after he found out just what he'd done. Each time, I wanted to cover my ears and scream and holler and pretend he hadn't said a thing. Ignoring Eric was about as easy as teaching a rock Spanish. So, I had to own up to the premise of how wrong my best friend was. At the time, however, I had thought that Eric was just the coolest kid in all the land. So, I took the vinegar with the honey and swallowed it all nice and neat with my stomach churning and my face blanched pale and white and everything.
He didn't even cringe when he told me so. I wish he had. Because that was wrong. And he knew it.
He was wrong that Tuesday too. He came on over with his heavy knock and his booming voice and in he went without invitation. I stood in the open doorway. Eric acted like he owned the place. He always did. He tossed his red back pack on the couch and rambled through a list of things I was supposed to have been doing now that I was eighteen, school was over with, and we were, gasp, adults. I hadn't known I was supposed to be doing anything other than getting a part time job. Like he normally did, Eric shook his head, laughed at my gullible innocence that was really just stupidity at that age, and told me all the things I ought to be thinking. He righted my mind with a shimmy and a shake and there you go. He had an arm around my skinny shoulders, a fat cheek to my bed head blond hair, and we were out the door. He left his bag. I don't really know why.
He took me down the steps and down the driveway and down the block. I should have tried to say something in the words of protest, yet I didn't. I just nodded to every word that came out of his mouth. Eric didn't talk about important things. At least, not with me. He just talked about things like music and racism and the way the world was being ruined and how he hated his mother and how much he just thought things were this way and not that. I heard every word, but I could usually only recall every other one. I don't think I really ever listened. Listening to Eric was difficult. He made it so. His thoughts were jumbled in his head and they didn't come out any better. He tried to explain it to me. He said he thought in a puzzle that wasn't finished, so the pieces had to be fitted to make the picture. I didn't get it. I'm bad at puzzles anyhow, so it really didn't matter one way or the other. All I know is that I understood only half of what he said. The other half probably wasn't that important, seeing how we never talked about nothing important to begin with.
Besides, Eric didn't make sense. In all fairness, he never had made much sense. He was a racist and a sexist and a radical and the like. I wasn't. Anything political or cultural went right over my head. I was caught up in a world of trivial details. I couldn't see the big picture world that Eric lived in. He didn't see small pictures, however, so he couldn't relate his big one to my small frames. That's where our confusions came in. He didn't make sense because of it. In some cases, he made such little sense that I thought he was just spouting nonsensical jibberish.
Like when he started talking about whispering when no one was around or said random words that sounded like Spanish but not really. I don't know what I missed from those conversations, but it certainly seemed like I missed a whole lot. None of it important, though. Of that I was sure.
Just like I was sure I wasn't going to like what was at the end of the block that Tuesday when I was eighteen. Eric always wound up taking me places I didn't want to go. He had a natural talent for selecting those places out of a figurative list of possible locations. I guess that's because he thought for me. As we didn't think alike, and we always went where he thought we should go, it was only natural to assume that I wouldn't like said place. And so it was. I never did. Never. Not ever. I complained in vague ways he ignored. I would grimace, cringe, flinch, and sometimes all three. He looked back at me with those semi wide, utterly blank honey eyes and he looked right through me too. What he saw, I'll never know. Whatever it was, however, was something he was quite alright with ignoring. Perhaps he did see my physical displeasure. Heaven knows, he wouldn't of cared.
Eric didn't care one way or the other. I'd say about me, but that really applied to everything and everyone when you got down and dirty about it. When you're as colorful as Eric, you don't need to care. He could make his own splashes, so caring whether you were there or not wasn't much of an issue. I was a white crayon. I was a blank slate, a canvas. I definitely didn't register a care in his world. I might as well have not been there. I wish I wasn't. Getting caught up in the webs and traps of a pathological liar is not fun. I was often in a tizzy and always dizzy and that made my head spin and sputter and hurt. As can be expected, that's not exactly a desirable way to live.
The only thing even remotely resembling desire when Eric carted me down that block was my desire to run. He didn't give me a chance. He spun me sideways, upside down, and his ways weren't much kinder. By the time we were there, I was only vaguely aware that we had been walking for only a few moments. I truly felt like I had spent a lifetime in his clutches. Yet again, Eric Cartman managed to mess with my mind.