Bridesmaids.

I found my old review for Bridesmaids while I was going through some old e-mails between Ricky and me. I wrote it before I got hired at Pop Connect so it’s unpublished and it’s too late in the box office game anyway. Either you’ve already seen it or you haven’t at this point and you don’t need me to tell you what to think about it. But I did love the movie. I think it’s the best comedy I’ve seen in a while and it’s great to see Kristen Wiig getting her time in the spotlight outside of SNL. Let’s reward talent after all and Mrs. Wiig has got some serious, Golden Globe-totting talent. Bridesmaids is the anti-chick flick. It has all the makings of a chick-flick, but turned on its head and filled with the raunchy gutter comedy you’d expect from a bro-flick. I loved the shit out of this movie. Too bad I never want to see it again. It was the last movie me and Ricky went and saw together.

Even then, before any real blows, I think I knew that something awful was coming our way. Our quiet moments suddenly felt restless. She’d smile, but you could tell that there were other things working in that stupid head of hers. At Bridesmaids, I’d glance over at her and she’d glance back at me. Normally, this simple look would have ended in making out. But this time she just looked back at the screen like I’d been a stranger she’d accidentally locked eyes with. At the time, I wrote it off to Bridesmaids being a really good movie. It’s not the type of movie you make out at, I told myself. You make out at cheap horror movie sequels, shitty romantic comedies and Avatar. This was pure, cinematic genius. A game changer. No, you couldn’t ruin it with making out. Shit, I was just kidding myself. I really was. And looking back, I wish I’d spent more time talking and less time making out. 

She moved out last night, took all her boxes and moved into her best friend’s house a few miles away. All while me and Cormac were at a strip bar. Cormac likes finding excuses in my life to go to strip clubs. Got your bachelor’s degree? Hell yeah! To the strip club! Parents just finalized their divorce? I’m sorry. We should get some lap dances to reignite our belief in love. Grandma’s dead? That’s a bummer; we should go see touch tits in her memory. But when we got back that night she was gone. No note. No nothing.

She was like red food coloring in a glass of water. Before her, my life had always just been boring. Seriously. Ever since I popped out of my mom’s baby door I’ve been at war with the mediocrity in an attempt to procure something interesting in my life. But my life never got above the 2.5 kids and dog mark. I don’t remember much from anything from elementary to high school. When you hear people in their forties and even thirties talking about their school days they always get distant and nostalgic like it was some holy time in a holy place. But I only remember random day—exceptions not rules—where interesting things would happen, like little blips on a heart rate monitor.

All in all, I just don’t recall it that much. I guess that’s sad, but that’s life. We want to remember our high school years differently, better if you can dig that, than they actually were. That way we can tell ourselves that there was a time when things were better and we don’t have to stub our toe on the hard table leg of truth that is we’ve been boring our entire lives. Wonderbread and day-time television boring.

Which is why whenever I’m on planes or trains or on the subway, I’ll get to know the person next to me and I’ll pretend I’m fascinating. I’ll make up all these adventures I’ve never had. I’ll talk in a weird accent and bullshit some small British towns I’m from. I’m friends with celebrities and know all their amusing and offbeat stories. My life suddenly goes from public access to primetime. And the people I’m next to will nod and smile and laugh and lean in, eyes big and mouth cracked a bit like I’m Christ returned with fascinating gossip about his BFF Gwyneth Paltrow. And then I tell them goodbye and slip back into my old white wallpaper life with no speed bump along the way. 
Ricky and I met on a train like this. I was coming back down from my older brother Craig’s house in San Francisco. I’d just graduated from college and had been doing some job searching up there thinking that I could pursue the offbeat and artistic bachelor life of a city guy. But those hopes were cut down in their prime when I realized I had an irrational fear of homeless people. So I was heading back to Southern California and to Cormac who was planning on commemorating my return by a visit to Spearmint Rhino’s. He’d already sold off all his behavioral meds just so he could have a fresh stack of ones. 
I sat down next to her with every intention of pulling out the cockney accent I’d been perfecting the past few months. I was going to be Theodore Radcliffe, a law student who had worked his way out of the docks and was on his way to the airport so he could fly back home and reunite with the mother who had tried to abort him.

She was dressed in a red flapper dress, with black stockings and pearls. A large peacock feather stuck out from her briar patch haircut. Her eyes were hidden behind a pair of aviators. I thought she might have had a hangover.

Before I could get a “good day ma’am” in, she choked out a sob and pulled a handkerchief out from her purse.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. She touched the handkerchief to her eyes in a dainty, ineffective gesture. “I’m not normally the type of girl who cries in front of strangers.” And she proceeded to cry.

That ruined my cockney mood and Theodore Radcliffe was stuffed away. Ricky (or Velma Cartling as she introduced herself then) went into her own story. Her and her squeeze Marty had been brewing moonshine in the basement of her brother’s house. But some rat had squealed  and the coppers had come bustin in guns reeling like the Fourth of July. She’d managed to escape through a window, but Marty’s weight had doubled with all the lead those bacon bastard cops had filled him with. She had just gotten back from the funeral and was on her way to his mother’s house to break the news. She punctuated it another little sob a dab at each eye.

I knew the game pretty well. After the story came the Q&A session where I would be amazed at how fascinating she was and try and pick out as much as I could. If I hadn’t been so upset that Velma Cartling had outdone Theodore Radcliffe, I might have played along.

“You’re good,” I told her. “I’ve never done a crying thing. Usually I just do accents.”

I expected her to go off and try to defend herself, but instead she slipped off her sunglasses, folded them neatly and hung them from the neckline of her dress. “The crying thing is much more effective. People eat up anything if you bring a few tears with it. I have this one I do, her name’s Martha La Toya, and I really bring out the waterworks for her. She’s a Mexican housemaid accused of murder.”

We spent the next few hours talking about the various characters we’d made and their dramatic pasts. And the more it went on, the more I realized that I was much more interested with her than Matha La Toya, the Mexican housemaid or Velma Cartling, the mobster’s boyfriend. About an hour before my stop, I sent a text to Cormac telling him that he’d have to get some lap taffy action by himself at the strip club. I was going to see if I could make friends.

“So, what’s your name?” I asked.

She looked at me for a few seconds, like I’d posed some complex, theological conundrum, before she raised a curios eyebrow. “Why?”

I shrugged.

She darkened quickly and looked out the window. I was worried then that I’d fucked things up already. Had I moved too fast? Did I swoop in too hard? But she cleared all that up like nothing when she told me: “Ricky.”

I laughed cause I didn’t want her to see how much I was freaking out. “Your real name. Not one of your made up people.”

“That is my real name. It’s Ricky.”

“Is it short for anything?”

She shook her head. “No. It’s just Ricky.”

She was apparently really fascinated with the suburban scenery outside and she wouldn’t take her eyes off of it. I just wanted her to look at me and give me something to tell me that I was barking up at tree worth barking up.

“Well, um, Ricky. My name’s Sam.”

 “Alright.”

She responded too quickly. I’d gone too far out onto the ice and felt it cracking beneath me. Here she was, Ricky, a girl I’d known for a little more than four hours and I was just some guy named Sam. Boring, wonderbread and white rice Sam. I was boring. I was annoying. She thought I was creepy. She probably thought I posted ads of Craigslist. She thought I was one of those people. Jesus Christ and crackers she thought I was a pervert. She was probably formulating a plan right now to reach into her purse and stab me in the neck with a pen. I’d go to jail, I’d have a hole in my throat and worst of all, this girl who I barely knew would tell everyone I was a creeper.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t want you to think I’m creepy. I’m not looking for anything. I just—”

“Sam,” she said and I stopped right then. She turned to look at me. There wasn’t the slightest trace of what was going on in her head.  “Is your stop next?”

I nodded. “Orange Circle.”

“Me too,” she said. And then there was that little wink of a smile, a smile like she had a million secrets that she wanted to tell me but knew she couldn’t. And with that, I knew that this was the start of something worthwhile.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you like pasta?”

“I think so.”

“Did you want to eat pasta with me?”

She nodded. “I can do that.”

And that’s how Ricky ended up back at my apartment and how we tried making pasta but ended up just setting fire to the curtains. We ordered Chinese takeout, watched Shakespeare in Love and the two of us fell asleep on the couch. The next morning she was gone and I thought that I’d never see her again. Then I went into the bathroom and saw she had written her phone number in eyeliner on my forehead.

That’s how this whole shit mess began. If I had known back then that it would end like this, I wouldn’t have even talked to her. I wouldn’t have done anything with her. I would have just sat their quietly and ignored her like normal people do on modes of mass transportation. And I would have been able to tell Cormac “yes” when he asked if I wanted to go see Bridesmaids with him.

Fucking Ricky. Ruining everything.

Final Consensus: 4.5/5


Samuel Wolf is a freelance writer for Pop Connect. Pop Connect assembles various blogs centered on pop culture from our writers and then compiles an actively updated website. We are based in San Diego, CA. We are currently no longer accepting job application. Check out our website for updates.