Who Needs Friends by Andrew McCarthy

Author:Andrew McCarthy [MCCARTHY, ANDREW]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2026-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Cleburne, Texas

The following morning, crossing over Main Street behind a filthy white pickup, Eddie is lamenting the state of things in his home state, and the hard political swing Texas has taken to the right. “You got a lot of good folks here. They don’t want their daughter delivering a rapist’s baby—they just got conned into something.”

We enter the R&K Café II. “I don’t know where number one is,” Eddie preempts my question.

It’s a large, open, and square room with well-spaced wooden tables and chairs. (As a New Yorker, I’m always surprised to see how much room tables are given out in the rest of America.) A wagon wheel hangs from one wall. Paintings of cowboys roping steer hang from another. The ceiling fans are idle. A sign behind the register reads “Happy Trails,” and one over the bathroom says “Hold Your Horses.” The place is full and boisterous. There are men with large bellies and beards under mesh caps, some families with small children. There are a lot of hoodies and Carhartt jackets. Waitresses hurry by with large plates of pancakes as well as biscuits and gravy crawling up their arms.

Like he did with so many things, Eddie first introduced me to the joys of breakfast in a diner when I was a young and impressionable college freshman and mimicking his every move. Around the corner from his apartment in Greenwich Village, there was, and still is, the greasiest of greasy spoons in the city. Nothing about the place has changed since I first walked into it in 1980—my wife, who is game for most experiences, refuses to eat there. Yet it has always felt to me like a haven, like home. It must be why I love and seek out diners to this day. I mention all this to Eddie.

“Well, little brother, we are connected.” We haven’t reminisced since my arrival, but now we laugh about past exploits, road trips, and drunken nights.

Then I press Eddie to take me a half hour north into Dallas to the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, from where Lee Harvey Oswald is said to have shot President Kennedy. He grumbles but acquiesces.

It’s a deceptively comprehensive experience, detailing both the Warren Commission report that stands as history’s official record and the various conspiracy theories that have long endured. After standing in the exact spot from where Oswald was said to have shot Kennedy, Eddie concludes it could not have gone down the way the Warren Commission said.

“That was absolutely fascinating,” Eddie—who had never been to the museum and had no interest in going—confesses as we drive back toward Cleburne into a glaring afternoon sun.

“See, dude,” I gloat. “So, you know what we get to do next?”

“Oh, no.” He cackles like a boisterous adolescent. “Be afraid, be very afraid. What?”

The Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo is currently on at Dickies Arena.

“No. Absolutely not. No fucking way,” he says.

“Have you ever been?”

“Never.”

“You’re a Texan and you’ve never been to the rodeo?”

“You ever been to the Statue of Liberty?”

“Never.

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