The Trip

 When I was younger and believe it or not less jaded I had a great deal of trust for people. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't that naive person who accepted EVERYTHING people had ever told him as gospel, but I was FAR more inclined to take someone who seemed "nice" at their word.
   When I was young and stupid and in California, I found myself in a shop where I encountered a gorgeous Filipino woman whom I thought had to have been the most beautiful human being I'd EVER seen. We talked for a few minutes and simply clicked. She gave me her phone number and when I got back to Texas, we kept in touch and talked at least once a month.
             She kept asking me when I'd make it back to the west coast so she could show me HER city. I was reluctant, but she eventually convinced me to make the trip.  The plan was I'd fly in, she'd pick me up at the airport and I'd spend a week with her and her family. What could possibly go wrong? I got off a plane at the airport excited to see my friend again. I immediately called her at work and she told me to wait in the pick up area. I was on a cloud. A group of REALLY flirty, underage Australian girls kept me company as I waited for my ride and asked me to find them at their hotel to party with them. As I've never aspired to BE a statutory rapist or even be accused of being one I politely declined. I waited for my friend. After four hours I realized my friend wasn't coming, I called her house and no one answered. I took a cab to the address she'd given me and apparently surprised her family who had NO IDEA that I was coming. She wasn't there and according to her family she'd left earlier and was "staying with friends."
           Needless to say I couldn't stay with her family. I had a friend who lived in her city and called him.  I told him what had happened and within' 15 minutes he was there and picked me up. PROBLEM. He was NOT at his home. He and his wife were separated and going through a divorce and he was at his parents home and told me I was more than welcome to stay there. I'd met his parents once before. His father was a likable sort, his mother on the other hand was, let's just say unpleasant. He woke me up the next morning to join him for breakfast and his mother seemed to have a million questions for me, none of them were either friendly or what one would consider a normal inquiry.  It felt like a police interrogation. I was waiting for his dad to come in and say "Okay...we know you did it, just tell us who was in on it with ya and where you buried the body. You don't want my partner angry."
              My friend and his wife had been separated for maybe two weeks and we were talking about his ending marriage. I figured all I could do was listen so I did. As I did I held my tongue because I remembered what his wife had told me about her then mother in law. "You don't know Stella." (not her real name) she said. : "She's being nice now, but she's a controlling, obnoxious old bitch who can't mind her own business. She's truly a horrible person. If you ever get to know her You'll truly see what I mean." At the time I dismissed it as a wife who disliked her mother in law.  Wife dislikes mother in law? Shocker right?  My second day at their home some guest came over, one of whom was a charming young woman who was  roughly a couple of years older than I was.  I flirted with her. It wasn't  some crude come on peppered with innuendo. I merely flirted with her, she politely declined and I figured you lose some...you lose some. What I didn't KNOW was that my friend's mom wanted to hook him up with the young lady in question. He seemed disinterested but that didn't matter. I would later learn from the friend's ex wife that his mom was more than just a tad racist so the idea of a black guy she didn't know staying in her home...AND getting familiar with the daughter of a friend of hers was more than she could take. She wanted me out of their home. She'd gotten contact info out of me during her earlier interrogation and called ...MY MOM and gave her some bullshit story about them remodeling and things being hectic around the house and it "not being a good time."
         Luckily I had relatives who lived not far away and one of my cousins came to get me and I spent the rest of my week with them.  My friend's (now my former friend) mother told him something (to this day I still don't know what)  and the last time we spoke he acted as if I had pissed in his breakfast cereal.  Everything his wife had ever told me about his mother came flooding back. I believed that she was a good person, because I WANTED to believe it, just as I WANTED to believe that the beautiful girl who had invited me to spend a week with her and her family was a good person. I'd wasted a week of my life to learn that I was FAR too trusting and that someone whom I THOUGHT was a friend was a mama's boy who probably still has his mother micromanaging his life. His mother Stella?  I came to realize that her former daughter in law was right. She was a control freak who despised anyone or anything she couldn't control. While I would respect her, I didn't strike her as someone she could either manipulate or control. The ex wife also said something 10 minutes after I met his mother for the first time that tattooed itself unto my brain. She said: "Stella's an asshole." I'd never heard this woman swear and she didn't have a negative thing to say about anyone else she'd ever met, but called her mother in law an "asshole."
                 As I was boarding a plane back to Hobby airport in Houston, I realized that Stella was not only an asshole, but she was the kind of asshole whom proctologists discuss at at their conventions as they compare notes on anuses.  I spoke to the girl who invited me one last time after I returned home. She gave me a weak apology and I can only hope that karma repaid her in spades for lying to me.  My "friend" and I lost touch and I figure if two men who are supposed to be friends have an issue and one won't listen to the other, then he's not worth the energy that either man invested in the friendship in the first place. I wish him no ill will and only hope all these years later that he FINALLY stopped being his mother's marionette. As for Stella? She was either in her late 60s or early 70s when this happened. If she's still alive, I'll wager she's still being the world's most MASSIVE asshole to the poor nurses and home healthcare workers whom god is punishing by subjecting them to her.