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bff's
Well, well, well, if it isn’t August. The Tour de France is over. I moved to New York. This is a piece for a best friend. He read it and asked me to change only two details, which makes him the best editor, too. I have made the other two segments of HITMAN focused solely on the Tour de France, don’t worry. If you are new to the Tour de France, here is last year’s post where I explain it.
WHAT HITS
The attitude of the Tour de France 2025. The Netflix series got me into the sport but watching the tour knowing they weren’t filming this year’s race made me realize how much their presence may have messed with the athletes. Pogačar and Vingegaard are arguably the greatest cycling rivalry of all time. The series leans into that rivalry but fails to show the care and respect they have for each other. I love this sport because, yes, it’s competitive and strategic and a total mind game. I also love this sport because all these dudes take it seriously, but they’re calm and kind and joke around. They go so damn fast that they have to race with each other’s lives in mind. They were absolute grounded chillers this year who raced hard and laughed after. This quote from Tadej Pogačar is a good example of how they all moved publicly through the Tour. When asked by a reporter whether he had “won the war” against Vingegaard and his team after Stage 12, Pogačar reframed the question, “No, I would not call it a war. It is just a game that we play and that we getting paid good, and we make a show,” he said. “It’s not a war, it’s just a game and I won one match. I’m just happy.” In writer Jonathan Kaplan’s words, “Translation: This is sport, not war. This is France, not Ukraine, Gaza, or Sudan.”
Other things that hit? I went to see Sunset Boulevard the performance after Nicole Scherzinger won the Tony and realized I have participated in standing ovations before in my lifetime, but never ones in which it was spiritually required of me to rise with the audience in freak awe and gratitude for what was given. We gave her four throughout the show. The book Lonesome Dove has been such a trip to sit with through the summer doldrums. It’s 800 pages and I never want it to end. Finally, I went to a deeply offensive reading with my buddy Ida where we listened to three male novelists verbally destroy women through fiction(?). It was surreal. At one point mid-story, a writer stopped reading his work and said, “by the way, this is not autobiographical,” and continued to read from the perspective of his main character, who was addicted to posting about sexual strangulation anonymously online. The protagonist went on to cheat on his fictional trad wife with her fictional younger sister “writhing on a picnic blanket in a sheer nightgown.” And look, you can write whatever you want. That’s the beauty of it. You can write about sex and cheating and women. You can write about anything. It’s incredible. But when the story lands nowhere and it was all for …shock? Who is that for? What made this experience a hit was it was a great motivator. Not only do I have three new characters after witnessing what we witnessed. But for every hour you spend second-guessing your work’s meaning or merit, there is someone who is not. And they’re charging you money to listen to it. So, uh, all good, girl. Don’t stress. Maybe don’t even think? Kidding. Ha. Kind of. Anyway, keep writing your screenplay. Seriously.
A DRIP on Van
A few weeks ago, I bought a resale ticket for an experimental opera at Lincoln Center for six dollars. How experimental can opera get? I don’t know. I watched one opera in Wichita fifteen years ago, annually watch Cher and Nic Cage watch an opera in Moonstruck, and there was a phase in my childhood where my dad got really into blasting Luciano Pavarotti singing "Nessun dorma,” through the house as a sort of unagreed upon family alarm clock. These combined experiences are my knowledge of the form. I was curious to see what could be classified as experimental. Seconds after the purchase, I learned two day-altering facts. First, the tickets were Pay What You Can pricing and my reseller had upcharged me one dollar on a $5 Pay What You Can ticket. Second, the experimental opera had been canceled for unforeseen circumstances. Six dollars burnt on a road to nowhere. Not the first time, partner.
Wrong. The pianist who was supposed to play for the experimental opera was going to play a fourteen movement sonata instead. Both concertos and symphonies belong to the group of compositions known as sonatas, deriving from the Italian ‘sonare’ aka ‘to sound.’ Sonata emerged as a way to describe any piece of music for an instrument, or group of them, as distinct from one that was sung by voices. If it’s music for voices? That’s a cantata. I raised my crooked neck from my cracked iPhone screen, reborn. I wasn’t going just anywhere. I was going to sound.
I’m new to a city for the third time in my life. The first time, Chicago. The second time, Denver. The third time, New York. I arrived at the city of gold knowing full well real gold is under the tree back home, back home, back home. This one will bring me something new but nothing better than the others. My hometown has steadfastness, Chicago has grit, Denver has air, and New York has anonymity. Everything has what the other has in different proportions. Everyone is through with the current government and the current government pits the groups of people of various sizes against each other. Everyone wants to protect their neighbor except for scared people and I’ve met scared people in each place. The people, mostly, are awesome. Trust me, I’m watching them. A few weeks off the plane and I’m like, oh, duh, it’s the same. Rooting somewhere new is hard but I’m less surprised by it. I have tactics. I’m pounding the pavement and doing lots of new things solo with a lot of old best friends on my mind. The first part of any honest beginning is looking back.
“Best friend” carries adolescent weight. It’s a phrase you stop using but still consider with the same feelings you had at nine. As I’ve aged, it leans offensive to use the phrase. I now say “good friend” and pepper in “dear friend” for special events. My good friend told me years ago, “friends are a season, a reason, or a lifetime,” which is a fair nursery rhyme to repeat through your guilt until the it fades and you appreciate the quote. A new friend told me Billy Ray Cyrus told the same thing to Miley Cyrus in an episode of Hannah Montana. The daily news email I get ends with five new things from pop culture to try and balance us back to levity after we read a bunch of people will die because of money. In this section, they keep pushing Billy Ray’s new relationship on me like I’ve got cards in the game. All of this is relevant.
I have several people I want to reach out to and say, “We didn’t do anything wrong. I’m proud of you. Your heart is entwined with mine forever,” But instead I DM them the heart emoji when they post a picture of their kid. It’s why I cried, like everyone else, watching the last scene of Wicked as it materialized the experience. Nobody filmed our version. We didn’t know it was happening. The nuance of our individual evolution snagged on something we couldn’t put to words. The relationship turned on a dime by a degree. A change so imperceptible I couldn’t point to it on a map yet so massive the only thing right enough to mark it would be that one of us developed the ability to fly, the other to stand firmly on both feet. Fortified, each.
My current definition of ‘best friend’ is the person I talk to the most in my current year of school who will step down to a ‘good friend’ when my homeroom changes over the summer. This method takes the edge off, to think of one year chunks like grades and four year chunks like high school. Last year, my best friend was 68 years old. On paper, I was the assistant manager and he was head of security. Five days a week, we’d spend seven hours of the day trading one liners and the last hour of the day trading stories while we waited on the rest of the departments to clear out. I talked to him more often and more openly than anyone else in homeroom.
Van works in Denver and has a place in Vegas. He goes every weekend. This is a key characteristic in both understanding Van and our relationship. Vegas started to represent everywhere we wanted to be. We all deserve a metaphorical Vegas we can go to every weekend. He made it real. He has his neighborhood, his bars, his routines. He’d leave after our closing shift on Saturday, arrive in Vegas at 3am, and have a T-Bone steak. He used to live there and loves the energy. If he skipped a Vegas weekend, he’d get antsy at work and pace back and forth in front of the door. I’d yell, “You ready for that flight, Van?” and he’d pipe back, “Six hours to go!” and then we’d collectively go kick somebody drunk on white wine out of their own 50th birthday party.
Van has lived a wide life. I started writing his stories down. These are a few.
Van once woke up naked on a couch in a house in a cul-de-sac that he mistook for his own with his cowboy boots on his chest and made it out scot-free. Van once told a judge, “I thought sodomy was illegal in California,” after the judge told him what he’d be paying in alimony and the judge responded by sentencing him to 30 days in jail. Then, his ex-wife walked across the courtroom and handed him an envelope selling him their million dollar house for a buck. Van once bought a brand, new T-Bird that was stolen within the year. In the months he had it, it required over $2,000 worth of repairs. The first time it broke down he had traffic backed up “from asshole to appetite” outside of Sacramento. A year after it was stolen from his ex’s driveway, he passed it on the highway. It was parked, the engine smoking. He pulled up to the man cursing over the hood, yelled, “Enjoy!” and drove away.
Van once met one of the most powerful members of Hells Angels in a tattoo shop in Monterey. I am too scared to type the name of the Angel because Van taught me to take the Hells Angels seriously and after watching several YouTube videos on the person he met I have decided to take Van’s word. I’ll call him Mars. Mars liked Van so much that he gave him his number and told him to call him if he ever got into trouble. Five years later, the girl he was dating brought him to a Hells Angels party in Texas and they wouldn’t let Van leave on his way out. The number folded and faded still worked. He said, “Mars, it’s Van from the tattoo shop.” Mars said, “Hand the phone over.” The Angel’s face went from red to white as he brought the receiver to his ear. He hung up the phone and told Van, “Get the hell out of here and have a great night.”
Van played professional hockey but injured himself so severely in training camp in his first year he could never return. He didn’t think the injury was bad until he saw the referee puke on his skate over to help him. Before he passed out, Van looked to his right and the blade of his skate was at his ear like a telephone. When he told me this I said, “That’s awful, your life changed so quickly, how did you overcome it?” He said, “No, no. I can stand here with you, I can walk out that door.” He went on to tell me that several years later at his alma mater, Boston College, a freshman had an injury 11 seconds into his first match that paralyzed him from the neck down. Several months later during the kid’s first interview he said, “I always wanted to play for Boston College. Nobody ever told me how long I’d get.” Van said, “You see?” I said, “I see.”
Van’s been married three times in the same chapel in Las Vegas. I love this. I laughed so hard and was also relieved to hear of such a thing. We’d exchange relationship woes and he’d give funny advice that landed somewhere profound. I told him my boyfriend and I had to break up because of my impending move. He said, “No, no, no, Cat. Right now you have to end. Only endings and beginnings, maybe you’ll have more. But no breakups. Get rid of that word. This I know to be true. Only endings and beginnings, enjoy the hell out of each other in the middle.”
He also gave practical, day to day advice like,
1. Do not wear Harley Davidson shirts unless you want to get your ass kicked.
2. Do not buy a motorcycle vest with borders unless you want to get your ass kicked.
3. Do not wear a motorcycle vest that says Lone Wolf unless you want to get your ass kicked to death.
4. If you are hellbent on wearing a motorcycle vest, wear a black leather vest with nothing on it.
5. If you’re not going to roll the dice on yourself, who is.
He wouldn’t reserve any of that advice for a quiet moment, he’d nail you with it right when you needed it. I’d be near-tears, slogging through a show report after an eleven hour shift on Christmas Eve where the pipes busted, the show crashed, the pregnant lady passed out and the drunk Uncle delivered on his promise and Van would stroll up and say, “You know who you are. This is all noise,” and whistle on.
What I can tell you of the time before I knew him weaves in and out of relationships and risk. It jumps from New York to California, Japan to Nevada. He was an everything man, still is. He climbed the corporate ladder at a bank in his twenties and was sent overseas to start another branch. He could’ve had it all but the corporate world didn’t feel real so he turned the other way and filled his life with anything that did. He owned a bar in Reno. He was the go-to man for a millionaire Morman who had a monopoly on neon in Vegas. He was a bookie for the ultra wealthy. He once saw a gambling man lay down the title of his house and lose it. He’d tell me this story every other week. “He knew,” he’d say, “He walked in with the title of his home in his coat pocket. He knew coming in he’d lose it. Like he wanted to.” We’d both shake our heads in dismay and then be interrupted by a customer telling us the north bathroom was clogged but they definitely didn’t do it, they just wanted to let us know, and I would respond like I worked for MI6 and say something sleek like, “I’m on it,” before being completely humbled by the capabilities of the human body in the north stall.
Several months into our friendship, Van told me his mother died from pancreatic cancer. He missed her last call. A week after her death, his step daughter died at the hand of a drunk driver. This is when he moved to Denver. He needed to find a place to change in, even if all the outside parts of him appeared the same. After months of friendship, I responded with my own grief. He looked at me and said, “So you understand, too.”
After that night, we really started to roll. Van asked me questions and I told him the truth, listing a streak of mistakes I’d never confessed to anyone. Because he openly claimed his, it was easy. We’d pitch failures up in the air like sport and welcome the other’s joke and reassurance. We’d toss trauma in the back of a warehouse with the energy of two people playing catch in the front yard on a nothing afternoon. No big deal, man. Night after night, no big deal.
On one of our last closing nights together, Van and I found an excuse to say what we needed to when we learned our birthdays were nine days apart.
“Is that why we’re so alike?” I asked.
“No, we don’t let ourselves feel,” he said. “We’re analytical.”
“Sure. I tell you everything because you won’t freak,” I said.
“I worry for you,” he said. “You have to roll the window down a crack to let the dog feel the fresh air. You have to do that again. You have to do it for yourself. We both do.”
He leaned back and broke open, “God took everything I loved from me. I’ve tried to play God for so long but I don’t want to be God. I tell you things I haven’t told anyone, I haven’t even told myself. I’ve been wondering what that is. I don’t know that we’ll ever get an explanation.” He paused, knocked his knuckles agains the table, and continued, “We live in this world. We live in this beautiful world surrounded by good and evil things. And we’re trapped, really. We both leave work and partake in our little vices. We sleep. We get up and see everything beautiful but maybe don’t participate in it like we should and make our way through our routine and come back to work. We have conversations throughout that are all so mundane, so pointless, we may as well sit in silence. We get trapped in these patterns. These cocoons of comfort. It’s isolating, it’s lonely. A prison of your own making. These prisons of comfort. And then every once in a while God says, look up, you have a visitor.'” He sat his chair back down on all four legs, and looked at me square, “Thank you for visiting me.”
I sat still, glassy eyed. The wardrobe team had been long gone. We were both off the clock, sitting at our orange vinyl table in the back, caught in a blip of eternity.
“Thank you for visiting me, too.” I said. Too fast and too short, a mirrored love. I was pissed at myself. I wanted to say something as reaching but didn’t know how, “It’s like I met you and…I don’t know. You’ve given me better advice than anyone.”
Van laughed. “Cat, I don’t give advice. I just sit here and tell you what’s happened. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
It’s been four months since that conversation. I shake my head and kick rocks, pacing through the city he was born in, sending him updates on New York like it’s a place he’s never been. He sends me pictures of Vegas and inspirational quotes and updates on his surgery. In this way, we’ll go along.
As it was my first sonata and I did not want to get the experience wrong, I arrived twenty minutes prior to kickoff. I’m trying to stay off of my phone and pay attention to how I’m feeling which has pretty consistently been anxiety. It subsides if I stay off my phone and maybe talk to someone. A quick line or two of back and forth with a stranger in the same setting and the steam escapes the pot. It feels kind of funny to initiate but I haven’t regretted it yet. Some may call this described process of socialization basic conversation. An ex and I referred to it as “talking to the butcher,” (versus buying packaged meat, you’ve got to try to talking to the butcher about the meat deals, butchers are knowledgeable, they like to teach, and then, in turn, as a couple, turn this into a metaphor for living). I’ve got a good friend who calls it rolling the window down. And Billy Ray has a new girlfriend. All of this is relevant.
The concert hall was striking, huge, all wood and angles. People poured in the cascading doors on the right side of it to find a seat among the thousands. I walked across the hall along an empty row of chairs and scouted. How to potentially talk to someone in public is to identify a person in the room who is not on their phone, stake out near them, and together create a team of two people who are either going to sit in silence or exchange a few thoughts. Either route, I deem successful. She looked 75 and sat a few rows back from the herd in a hunter green jacket, gold rimmed glasses, hands folded calmly on her lap. I sat three chairs away, folded my own, and began.
WHAT’S UP, TOUR DE FRANCE?
Traditionally, this is where I ask a real human person to answer two questions about their life but, today, it is a place where I show my favorite expression of love and friendship from the TDF among the hundred stunning acts of love and friendship because this hit is almost totally about love and friendship. Every stage of this race is the best day of my life. But if I had to choose the best, best day of my life I would choose Stage 16. Ilan Van Wilder appeared out of nowhere to lead out his friend Valentin Paret-Peintre in the bitter end of the stage and effectively gave him the win. Nobody was paying attention to Van Wilder. We were all paying attention to the breakaway (little pack of leaders who are riding strong together) with Paret-Peintre and a few other cyclists who have been kicking ass. Then, boom, the breakway comes up the last terrible climb and Van Wilder is there pedaling along and the announcers and I are going “where the hell did he come from?” And then Van Wilder looks back at Paret-Peintre as the breakaway approaches, does this very tiny head nod, and blazes an aerodynamic trail for his buddy to sling shot into and win from. Keep in mind that winning a TDF stage is everything to a cyclist. It’s way better than an Olympic gold medal. Van Wilder could’ve potentially just won it for himself. But he didn’t. The first video is me explaining it in shock afterward. The second is a better video of the hug. I’ve never seen a cyclist get off their bike and run to their dude like this.
Do you have something you’d want me to write about? Just lmk. This is just a game. Talk soon.
Absolutely loved to read this. Thank you!
this is one of my faves, Cat! I lol’d at “wrong” and perhaps “so uh all good girl” may go on my grave. 🩷🩷