Missing the Big Picture by Donovan, Luke (great book club books txt) 📕

star of the movie, is a twenty-five-year-old with an unhealthy obsession with pornography and strip clubs. He cannot find a close relationship and uses porn as a sexual outlet. I wasn’t obsessed with pornography as much as Paul, but I feared that by the time I was twenty-five, some of my friends would be married and I would be spending my nights alone in a strip club.

At Nite Moves that evening, Randy didn’t want any lap dances. Whenever a stripper came up to him, Randy said, “No, I bought a sandwich and have no more money.” Afterward, I thought that we’d really bonded. The day Randy and I went to the strip club was March 15, 2003. I wanted to go on that day since on March 15, 2001 I began to hear Eric’s voice and on March 15, 2002, I began to her Rich’s voice. Randy could tell I was very excited and in a great mood. He thought it was the naked women. It was more that I didn’t hear any voice in my mind on that day. On the way home we hypothesized about what it would be like to put “exotic dancer” on a resume and what kinds of questions strip club managers ask in interviews. Randy told me that we were close friends. The one thing that bothered me, though, was this: if we were close friends, why couldn’t I visit his dorm room?

Even though it had been a while since I heard voices in my mind, I was still convinced that I’d been communicating with these boys telepathically. Previously, during these conversations, the voices had told me that Randy knew everything that was going on in my mind. At the end of April, I decided I was going to open up and tell Randy about the voices and that I thought I had been talking telepathically to Carmine, Eric, Tyler, Gabe, Sam, and Rich. I was nervous to tell Randy that I heard the voices and that I actually listened to them. I came up with a clever way of disclosing this information. I told Randy that I read an article about a bunch of women in a retirement home who were talking telepathically. I made up a list of characters—Sophia, Tamika, Gertrude, Yvonne, Eunice, and Priscilla—and substituted them for Eric, Carmine, Tyler, and the others.

I began by saying that one day Priscilla (Carmine) wrote Eunice (me) an e-mail, and they formed an online friendship. In this way, I told Randy about the last two years of my life. Randy wasn’t stupid and started to catch on about five minutes later. I broke down and told Randy about how I was suicidal when I was eighteen, and how my mom cried with me and begged me not to take my own life. Randy really couldn’t digest all of this information. I was disappointed in the way my friend was responding. As I was working up to finally talking about my near-suicide attempt, Randy interrupted me and asked if he could have my bagel. My stomach was in a knot and I could hardly eat anything, since even remembering the day I saw my mother cry made me uncomfortable and sad. Apparently Randy didn’t want my bagel to go to waste. My life was very different than his.

Randy told me that the worst thing that ever happened to him was that he was made fun of in elementary school. Randy’s life wasn’t perfect, but he did have a lot of encouraging friends, which was something I envied. Randy ended the lunch by telling me that he would take what I had told him to the grave. I knew I had made Randy feel awkward, since every other time we’d hung out it was just mostly for laughs. Then I started thinking that if we were friends, why didn’t Randy just tell Carmine that it was his suite, too, and I could stop by. Randy would never do that, and it irritated me.

I got frustrated with Randy and decided to write him an e-mail calling him a liar, a hypocrite, and a snake. Randy didn’t write back, and for the next month, we had no contact with each other. I didn’t like to leave conflicts unresolved, so I asked to meet with Randy in person. We talked on the phone, and he acted like nothing had happened. He said he would stop by my house after he finished work as a painter.

Randy was wearing paint-splattered overalls when he arrived. I wasted no time confronting him. Randy said he didn’t get the e-mail, which I thought was strange because I had sent Randy over a hundred e-mails throughout the course of our friendship. I confronted Randy about Carmine and how I thought Randy was spying on me. Randy denied everything. Finally, I told Randy that he was extremely deceitful, and I was surprised that he could be like that when he came from such a deeply religious background. Randy left, and he was quite upset. It had always been extremely important to handle Randy’s faith delicately. When I called him a religious hypocrite, that was the end of our friendship.

Randy saw things in black and white; and he rarely apologized for anything. Randy had poor conflict resolution skills. Even when things got rocky with his girlfriends, instead of talking them out, he just called it quits. That was the last time that I would ever spend free time with Randy again. Our friendship, which dated back to our junior year of high school, was over. Randy didn’t seem to care, but I was upset. In less than a year, I went from having numerous friends at college and friends back at home to having most of those ties cut. I had to find another group of people. I wanted to start a life away from the voices and anything that represented them. Plus, when I was friends with Randy and away at college, I was always the