A new friend knows who you are right now. An old one knows how you got here.
My best friend has been standing next to me since I was sixteen, which means she’s seen every version of me there ever was, including the ones I’d like to forget and the ones I brag about. People hear “fifty-four years” and picture something cute, like matching mugs or a scrapbook. What we’ve got is closer to invisible handcuffs. Nobody locked us together on purpose, but somewhere in the last five decades the cuffs went on anyway and neither one of us has ever once reached for the key.
If you’ve got a friend like this, you’re already nodding. It’s not about how often you talk or how much you have in common anymore, though we've got no shortage of either. It’s that she’s seen the whole thing, start to now, and she’s still here.
I landed in California at sixteen against my will, because we had to flee Miami Beach fast, another one of the moves that came with being Banjo's daughter. This meant leaving behind every friend I had and starting over in a state I didn't ask to live in. Moving was nothing new to me, but moving as a teenager is so much more difficult. I’m saving the gory version of that story for the book I’m writing with my sister, but the short version is a new school, the first week, a group of Mexican girls jumping me, a concussion and a hospital stay, and a new friend who never left my side.
Walking into that first classroom, I felt like an alien who’d spent her whole life on a Miami beach in a bikini, slicked in baby oil and Bain de Soleil, running around with rich Cuban boys. Los Angeles had its own Latino culture and it had nothing to do with Miami. These guys had slicked back hair and drove cars that bounced on hydraulics to old school jams. I was used to hot Cuban guys with wads of cash, so my only prior exposure to any of it was the song “Low Rider” playing on the radio.
And there I was at Burbank High in hot pants and platform shoes, looking like a tan groupie who’d wandered off the Sunset Strip and gotten lost on her way to homeroom.
Joanne saw something in me anyway. Maybe it was the Italian mob upbringing that presented as attitude. Whatever it was, she decided we were friends within days. She was right there at my hospital bed like she’d known me for years instead of days. She also became a favorite of my father’s, and later his watchdog.
Somewhere in those high school years, the two of us put together a slideshow, photos we’d shot all over LA set to music, for some class project neither of us can even remember. It turned out so good that a teacher pulled it aside and had us show it at a school assembly, the whole student body watching in the dark. Nobody in that auditorium caught that one of the slides, shot in Griffith Park, had a couple in the background having sex. Next slide. Decades later, when I started teaching digital journalism, it hit me just how far ahead of our time that whole project actually was, cutting photos to music before anyone had a word for it. The soundtrack was Tower of Power, Malo, El Chicano, Earth Wind and Fire. The carousel is long gone, photos and music both, but I’m still proud of that slideshow.
We were just two teenagers back then, with no clue how long this thing between us was actually going to run.
We ended up dating Italian brothers. I married one of them, my son’s father, Steve. Joanne was maid of honor at that wedding, both of us only eighteen, and at the two weddings that followed. I was hers at one of her two. Her first wedding was set to be two hundred and fifty guests, presents already piling up, dresses for the whole wedding party already bought and paid for, and then she called the entire thing off. When she got married again years later, she didn’t ask me to stand up for her. She said she felt so guilty about the money I’d already sunk into that first dress that she couldn’t bring herself to ask me to do it a second time. I was hurt. The whole thing turned into a communication breakdown and one of maybe three or four knock-down, drag-out fights we’ve had in fifty-four years, which tells you something about how solid the rest of it has been. We got past it, and I was her maid of honor four decades later, at the wedding with the husband she has now.
The thing no one tells you about a friendship this long isn’t that you never fight. It’s that you never let the fight end you. We don’t believe in walking away from each other, and we definitely don’t believe in the silent treatment, or avoidance, dressed up as self care. We just love each other too much to ever leave.
I remember one of the few fights we had that ended with the two of us screaming at each other in our pajamas because we were going to settle this now, even if it meant getting out of bed and sitting in a car in a driveway until we were laughing.
Joanne is my person. My compadre. My confidante. My sister, minus the 23 and Me.
I don’t know how to explain what a friendship like this feels like except to say it’s like sitting in a dark theater watching a highlight reel of your own life, except your best friend is in almost every frame. We’ve been thrown out of nightclubs together. We got kicked out of the male strip club Chippendale’s once, and Joanne left with only one shoe that she hung on her bedroom wall. We rushed the stage at a Rod Stewart concert wearing matching pastel chemin de fer jeans that split down the crotch when a bodyguard threw us off. We rushed a stage again at a Sly and the Family Stone show at the Forum, that time because Sly was so stoned he invited the entire crowd up with him. We nearly got assaulted in that mess and somehow walked out alive, our shirts ripped so badly our bras were showing. On the way home, we sat in the back seat of her father’s car laughing quietly. Thank God it was her dad picking us up and not mine. My father would have seen straight through any excuse we cooked up. He never even knew I’d gone to that concert. As usual, my mother covered for me.
I spent more nights at Joanne’s house growing up than at my own, and her Italian Irish family felt like walking into a mirror of mine. Her father held her, or one of her sisters, up against a wall by the neck when the antics called for it. My father used to throw me across the room, always aiming for the soft couch that was hit with such force that it knocked me on the floor. Different fathers, same parenting. The funny thing about us is that we never feared our parents. We navigated life with this motto: “Who cares if we get in trouble if the fun is worth it.” That fun often involved borrowing, or maybe stealing, her parents’ gold Chevy Nova after they were asleep.
Dinner at either of our houses sounded like a full blown argument, but that’s just how Italians talk to each other, always at full volume. The dishes cooked by our mothers were the same because both families came from the Naples area, another reason why being together felt so familiar. I don’t think I could be best friends with someone who ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. We ate subs with enough Italian cold cuts to put you to an early grave, which might explain both of our heart issues.
This is probably the part where you start to recognize your own version of Joanne. Everyone who’s had a friend this long has a version of this story, and each one only makes sense to the person who lived it with you. You could tell it to anyone else and they might laugh in the right spots, but your best friend is the only one who gets it.
We went through marriages and divorces together, learning how to be single mothers side by side. My second divorce is when I practically moved into her house in North Hills, a neighborhood with gang activity close enough to hear at night. It never bothered me, because Joanne kept a gun in her closet and knew exactly how to use it. I never once felt unsafe there because I had Joanne on guard. My father kept a gun too, which again tells the familiar story of feeling protected.
One of the funniest nights happened while I was dating my current husband. We’d flown to New York and he took pictures of me waking up in a gold silk nightgown. When the photos came back I hated every single one and refused to show him. Joanne had the fix. After several glasses of Absolut Hunks, named after the character Smith Jerrod from Sex and the City, a show we never missed together, she decided we should just recreate the photos ourselves. She put on her best lingerie and we took a hundred pictures until we passed out drunk in her bed. We woke up to her adult son, Evan, walking in with two of his friends. Joanne, halfway to grabbing the gun because we had no idea who was in the house, jumped out of bed in a white satin nightgown. Evan looked past her at the doorway, saw his mother in lingerie, and said, “Mom?” Then I stepped out behind her in my own nightgown. “AUNT TONI??”
When the photos came back from that night, we were convinced we’d look hot. Instead, we looked like two women who’d been dragged behind a truck. Wrecked hair, faces straining for sexy and landing somewhere closer to constipated. We made a blood oath to never let another human being see those pictures. They’re sealed in an envelope and they’re staying there until one of us is dead, and possibly after.
We’ve had every high, every low, every love and every loss two women can rack up, and through all of it we’ve remained best friends with attitude. We recently hit an ungodly birthday within fifteen days of each other, which we mark every year with some ridiculous themed celebration involving wine, or tequila, or martinis. The milestone years live on in our memory, and occasionally in photographic evidence.
Joanne recently told me that our window for being reckless is closing fast. We’ve got matching stretch marks of the soul at this point. Last week was our milestone birthday celebration. I already planned the recovery day, from bed.
The plan for our shrinking window of recklessness started with a bungee jumping exercise class and ended with steak and martinis. Not so much reckless as feckless.
We planned on getting tattoos, but both our doctors said there’s a bleeding risk. That tells you plenty about our age and about how many prescription meds we’re on these days, which outnumber the glasses of wine I drink nightly and the weed gummies Joanne downs. Part of me still wanted to risk it. What’s the worst that could happen?
The night before, I told my husband I might be coming home in an Uber, or in a police car, or in a hospital bed bleeding to death.
But somewhere between the bungee harness and the last martini, the day turned into a strange little tour of exactly who we’ve become. The class alone should have humbled us. I got strapped in, dangling from the ceiling with nothing to hold onto, and lost control, spinning in circles and yelling for help. Joanne was in front of me, and it was high school all over again. The owner caught the whole thing on video.
We were still catching our breath when a stop for lunch at San Antonio Winery turned into an afternoon with the owner, Santo Riboli, swapping stories about our shared Italian roots and the neighborhoods around LA that used to be Italian before they weren’t, and how younger people are the ones bringing them back now. He kept the wine coming for free and we walked out with a new friend.
Then the day did something neither of us saw coming. At the Yoko Ono exhibit at the Broad, we hammered a nail into a wall with a strand of our own hair tied to it, and wrote a small tribute to our mothers before taping it up alongside thousands of strangers doing the exact same thing. Two friends standing in a museum crying over conceptual art. It turns out that we only knew the version of Yoko Ono everyone gets handed secondhand, not the actual woman who made all of this. Standing there, it hit me that people probably do the same thing to us. They see two loud women who don’t act their age and assume that’s the whole story. Somewhere in that exhibit, hammering a nail into a wall next to my best friend, getting old stopped looking like the end of something and started looking more like a beautiful next chapter.
We closed it out where it all started, at the Smokehouse, an old school Burbank restaurant we’d spent countless dinners at with family, friends, and boyfriends, that still feels like the world felt back when we were sixteen. Steak, martinis, a red leather booth, old classics playing low enough to actually talk over. Harnesses, hair, hammers, grief, and steak, all in one day.
But if I had to pick the one moment that stuck with me, it wasn’t the wine or the exhibit or even the steak. It was hanging from that ceiling, laughing at ourselves, never once worried about who was watching or that it was on video. Unlike the lingerie photos, we were happy to have this one, proof of us just being us.
Somewhere in that bungee harness, spinning in circles and yelling for help, something in me let go. There was a time neither of us would have let anyone see us look that ridiculous. It turns out nearly falling on your ass in a bungee class is its own kind of freedom, the kind you only get once you stop needing to look good, or invincible. We’re not those girls anymore and we’re not trying to be. We’re just two women having the best time of their lives.
This goes out to anyone who has a friend like Joanne. The years don’t erase who you were together. They just give you more of it to laugh at.
That’s also when I stopped caring about the tattoo. I didn’t need it to be rebellious, or to mark our friendship, or to mark another milestone birthday. Ink was never going to say what I actually meant anyway. Joanne isn’t something I need stamped on my skin. She’s already inked somewhere no needle could ever reach. This kind of friendship is a tattoo of the heart, and my BFF has been tattooed on mine since I was sixteen.
In the last hour of the night, we talked about Los Angeles, our family, our friends, our entire shared history, and it hit us both at the same time what we mean to each other.
“I love you so much,” she said. “And I love you so much,” I told her back.
We held on another minute before saying goodnight, and for once our age didn’t feel like a countdown. If we’re going to get old, at least we’re doing it together.
How lucky are we?