My Friend Oded

A New Friend


Surely it must have happened to you as well? You meet someone of the same gender for the first time and you instantly hit it off and without any logical reason you feel that you have known him for a lifetime. Subsequently, when you talk to this person, you find that you have a lot of things in common, especially humour and it is as if you were boyhood friends.



I met my friend Oded in Israel. I went there for a meeting with someone with whom I was negotiating business and Oded was this person’s lawyer. On completion of the deal, my Israeli counterpart took us all to dinner to celebrate the agreement and Oded and I became firm friends over that meal. He had us all in stitches in the way he described his misadventures on the painful road to his final divorce.



Apparently Oded fell from Grace with a bimbo of some impressive qualifications and even more impressive preferences in the bedroom, all of which were described with an innocent tongue-in-cheek manner which could not fail but have us all almost screaming with laughter. The time came, said Oded, when the novelty of the bimbo’s gymnastics wore off and Oded-the-father-of-two and loyal husband finally managed to evict the randy-goat-Oded and to triumphantly retake the battlefield of his sex life, becoming Master-of-All-He-Surveyed.



However, guilt began to gnaw at him persistently. Why had he betrayed his wonderful, beautiful, intelligent wife with a woman so inferior to his spouse? His wife was not only his partner in life, but his business partner as well, since she was also a lawyer and worked with him at their law firm. How could he betray her with a stupid bimbo like he did, for the sake of the bimbo’s personal proclivities, as scientifically interesting as those proclivities in truth were? He decided to manly come clean and purge his soul to his innocent loving wife in order to put a final stop to the tortures of his conscience and to make a clean new start, henceforth for ever faithful to his one true love.



He informed us that evening at the dinner table that in retrospect he realised that his decision to confess all to the love of his life was not the best choice he had ever made in a life otherwise rich in successful choices, both professional and otherwise. He did not so much mind the loss of his Mercedes as the million dollar home he was evicted from with a speed which surprised him and, in fact, raised his professional admiration for the legal abilities of his wife to new heights. When I suggested to him that the results as he described them would tend to indicate that his now ex wife was a better lawyer than he was, he had no hesitation in admitting the fact in front of his client who was paying for the dinner and was also enjoying the description of the misadventure.



And that was the beginning of our friendship. Oded had several Israeli clients with business interests in Cyprus and as a result he was a regular visitor to our island, my home country. After our meeting in Israel and our automatic friendship, he would subsequently always come and stay with me at my apartment whenever he visited Cyprus. He would always arrive with a new bimbo and he would always find me with a new lady friend and, as we could never remember the names of each other’s rotating female companions, we called them sisters-in-law for ease of reference. To this day, Oded refers even to my wife as his sister in-law. Whenever he came I would take him to interesting restaurants and treat him and his companions to sumptuous meals.



Two Years Later

Two years after our first meeting, I had another appointment in Israel, so I phoned my friend to let him know and, as expected, he told me that I would be staying with him at his apartment, so when I arrived at the airport Oded was there waiting for me. He said that he had another visitor from the US, a famous film director who must remain nameless here and that this friend was to meet us at a wonderful new trendy and very expensive bar restaurant that had recently opened in Tel Aviv.



It was a warm summer evening and he drove me to this really wonderful open air bar full of wealthy looking people. His American friend came almost at the same time, so we sat at the bar and ordered our drinks. The American entertained us with stories about Sharon Stone, whom he had directed in a popular film and as he was talking, some plates of appetisers were put in front of us, which I assumed were the introduction prior to my friend slaughtering the fatted calf.



Regrettably, in this estimation I was in some error as it shortly became painfully transparent. I asked for an additional plate of something and my friend Oded looked at me with surprise and asked me if I was still hungry, in a tone which suggested that I should try to control this unmanly slavery to my stomach.



His friend looked at me with a huge knowing smile on his face, the face of a man who knew enough to have a good dinner before he accepted a dinner invitation from our mutual friend Oded. The penny dropped. My friend was a miser and Scrooge would have to take his correspondence course if Scrooge wanted to be in the running for the championship title!



The American had obviously been through this before and he was looking at me with a smiling, obvious interest in how I would express my embarrassment and how I would try to pretend that I was not hungry.



Unfortunately the De Greeks are not a subtle lot. We tend to remember the largess with which we treat our friends and we expect them to reciprocate in kind when their turn eventually comes up. And the sympathetic smile on the face of the American spoke volumes to my primitive self.



I turned to the pretty waitress behind the open air bar and asked for a menu, which she pulled out from beneath the bar as if a rabbit from a hat, to coin a phrase. As I looked at the menu, I asked her in a firm clear voice to help me by indicating to me the most expensive items on her menu. She showed me the relevant items and even MY eyebrows went up at the imaginative pricing.



I asked her to bring three portions of the most expensive dish and because the portions I had seen being carried by waiters to waiting patrons were about half the size of those served in Cyprus, another three portions of the second most expensive dish on the menu. Oded said that he was not hungry, but I assured him that if he did not want to eat that it would be fine, as his friend and I were willing to eat his portions as well.



This is the time Oded’s friend for some reason began to giggle uncontrollably. No, hysterically would be a better description, I can safely say. He tried to keep the conversation going but could not speak at times from the tittering racking his whole frame. I think he understood what was about to happen.



Despite Oded’s claim that he was not hungry, when the food came he dug in with gusto and this made the American giggle even more.



In truth the food was delicious. I asked the sweet girl behind the bar to come to my aid once more, by telling me which was the most expensive desert on her menu, without even looking at the thing this time and I ordered six of them. It must have been a choice that Oded would have made himself because he again dug in with enthusiasm.



I was enjoying a Cuban cigar with my coffee when the girl brought the bill. Since I was the one doing the ordering, she naturally brought the bill to me. I pointed Oded out to her and told her in a clear firm voice that “He” will pay. To his credit, Oded stoically accepted the bill and paid it while the American was screaming with hysterical laughter.



The American telephoned me in Cyprus a few days later to apologise for his behaviour and to tell me that he would be waiting for me in case I ever found myself in Hollywood. I don’t know why but he was still laughing as he was saying this.



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Oded is still my friend after all these years. I tease him about his weakness with picking up restaurant bills and he now laughs at it and at himself.



In truth, to be fair to him he has brought business my way several times which made me a great deal of money but he would never take a cent from me in return.



I also call him “heathen” on occasion because he is a Jew, but he knows that this is also spoken in jest, in my poor attempt at imitating the haters of this word, so if you are not a Christian and if I ever call you a heathen, please be assured that it is spoken in a self deprecating manner and that I have come to know you well enough to feel friendship towards you.