So. You know how Tom kept secrets from me when he was in the closet? But then, after tearfully confessing his deepest, darkest secret to me she emerged as the liberated, celebrated Tamara who no longer had to hide, no longer had any need for secrets, yay?

Well. About that.

Turns out that's not exactly how it went down.

In fact, more than a year after Tammy came out to me she was still keeping a number of secrets, the most significant of which was Coco. Or as Whitney referred to her, That Twat. (Full disclosure: Everything I knew about her I learned from Whitney, who was not only biased against Coco, but also pretty drunk.)

Coco was Tammy's hairdresser at some chichi salon that charged a hundred and seventy-five dollars for their styling services (the cucumber water was free). Whitney told me the name of the establishment, but it meant nothing to me. I didn't go to salons. I didn't even have a stylist. I had a barber. His name was Richard. He was a sixty-five-year old, morbidly obese right wing racist and misogynist (with a sprinkling of antisemitism as well) who learned his trade in the Navy aboard the USS Intrepid. He loved to tell me witless, repulsive jokes, swiveling me around in my chair to face him as he approached the punchline to see if I laughed, which over the course of twenty-five years, I never did.

But he charged eighteen bucks.

So anyway, here's why Coco was such a big deal. Tom had told me that I was the second person she came out to, after his ex-wife. But in reality he had also come out to Coco before me. Long before me. I cannot tell you how disruptive this new information was. Because in retrospect, the fact (ha!) that I was the second person Tom told was critical in preserving our friendship. Even while I was reeling from uncertainty I took great solace in how much I apparently meant to him.

I guess I felt the way that archeologists do when they discover a new human fossil that completely throws off what everyone had thought to be the timeline of human evolution. Today, the archeological community was stunned to learn that between Australopithecus sedona and Homo habilis there was a heretofore undiscovered species of human, Haircutterus twatus.

(That joke is dedicated to all you Roadrunner Show fans out there. Meep meep!)

Coco, Whitney informed me, was the first of Tammy's guides into womanhood. They spent a lot of time together. Coco took Tammy to the coolest clubs and the hottest bars, both LGBT and straight. (Unlike Richard, who never took me anywhere.) The two of them would dance late into the night, Tammy's anonymity protected alternately by blinding lights and darkness. This in particular was shocking to me. Tom hated dancing at clubs. Hated dancing in general. We would make fun of the idiots on the dance floor. And I wondered uncomfortably, Have I been holding her back this whole time?

Coco also set up what Whitney described with Chardonnay-fueled histrionics as a Shadow Government. (She also sometimes referred to it as The Airhead Council and Twats R Us.) She would get together with Tammy along with a few other hairdressers and shampoo assistants and give their opinions on whatever issue Tammy had been wrestling with. (Richard also gave me his opinions, mostly about The Blacks and what a bitch that Hillary Clinton was. He also did his own shampooing, which was extremely uncomfortable, his tricep fat flapping in my face.)

Whitney was deeply suspicious of all this. First, because Tammy hid Coco's existence from her, which Whitney saw as inherently suspicious, as did I. (Relationship tip: Unless it culminates in a surprise party, hiding things will always be seen as suspicious.) And second because Tammy was sharing intimate details about their relationship and — most galling of all — they always took Tammy's side. Which, in fairness, I had done too. But I was Tom's best friend and I knew Whitney, so I had a right to judge. But Coco? To quote The Most Popular Girls In School, Who the fuck are you?

It stood to reason that I was a topic of The Airhead Council's deliberations as well. Whitney didn't know what they said about me — understandably, she had been focused on what they said about her — but the specifics didn't particularly matter. What mattered was that I was on the wrong side of the one-way mirror. They could see me, but I couldn't see them. It was disconcerting to think that there was someone out there who had become extremely important to Tammy... and I had never once heard her name.

What was far worse, though, was that even after Tammy said she was done keeping secrets from me, she didn't tell me about Coco. (Were it not for my deli counter encounter with Whitney, I might still not know.) And it wasn't because Tammy had left Coco behind. They were still, as Whitney slurringly explained, very good friends who talked all the time. (Maybe they still went clubbing. How would I know?) This was no mere sin of omission, either. Our schedules were deeply intertwined, which meant she had to affirmatively lie to account for her time.

Here we go again.

In a way, this betrayal was the worst of all. Previously, I could sympathize, if not completely justify, Tammy's deceit, born as it was of a crippling fear of exposure. But now that fear was gone and the deceit remained. Which begged the question: Why? Why didn't she just fucking tell me? Uncomfortably, I realized that I needed to at least consider that maybe Tammy didn't just lie to protect herself. Maybe she was just a liar.

Like Whitney, my biggest problem with Tom, and then Tammy, had always been trust. For decades we had leaned on each other, but every now and then I had the disquieting feeling that the time would come when she would let me fall.

Thank God for the dojo.

It was the one place I could go to forget about everything. Marital stress, parenting stress, work stress and on this particular evening, lying transgender best friend stress. I had no idea how exactly I was going to confront Tammy over this latest transgression, but for the moment I could stop thinking about that and concentrate instead on learning new and frequently horrifying ways to injure people. Those ancient Japanese masters were seriously twisted.

Recently, I had I had achieved the rank of green belt. My belt test marked a sort of turning point for me because it was the first one that wasn't a complete disaster. I displayed a modicum of coordination and understanding, plus I didn't accidentally knee myself in the head like I had somehow done on my yellow belt test. When I had finished, Sensei Gilbert looked contemplative as he formulated his feedback.

"Better," he said.

I bowed. "Arigoto gozaimashita," I said, grateful for Sensei's tempered praise, and also grateful that there were no Japanese people around to hear how badly I butchered their language.

"Not good," Sensei clarified. "But better." I bowed again. We were always bowing.

Now that Sensei saw a glimmer of hope for me, Darian decided to fess up. "I'll be honest, Aaron. I never thought you'd make it this far." My fellow students laughed knowingly. They had been thinking the same thing. "It's inspiring," Darian continued. "Just goes to show that there's no such thing as a hopeless case." He meant it as a compliment and I took it that way. I bowed. "Now, let's see if we can get you to black belt."

I was highly dubious. I had seen the black belt test and it was brutal. The student passed, barely. Two grueling hours and by the end he was gasping for breath. And he was twenty-two. Half my age. "I don't know that I'll get that far."

"You didn't know that you'd get this far. But here you are." He gave me a self-satisfied smile. "That doesn't just apply to the martial arts, by the way. It's an awesome life lesson, don't you think?"

I liked Darian a lot, but if he was ever going to ascend to grand master, he needed to become more enigmatic by, for instance, not blurting out "That's an awesome life lesson!" when he gave you an awesome life lesson.

There was something else about being a green belt, too. It meant that the other students were no longer obligated to go easy on me. "Green belts are fair game," Sensei would say, with a sadistic twinkle in his eye. What this meant for me was that I would now be on the receiving end of throws. And my fellow NITs — Ninjas In Training (which for the record was not an officially sanctioned acronym) — couldn't wait to throw me. Not because they hated me — I think — but because they knew I'd be a lot of fun to throw.

It had to do with body type. In order to properly execute a hip throw, you need to get your hips under your opponent's hips. It was hard to do with people who were short. It was even harder to do with people who were short and stocky. And it was pretty much impossible to do with Alberto, a brown belt who was five foot six and weighed in at three hundred pounds.

(Alberto is a nice guy, but should you ever find yourself in a fight with him, my advice is to not try to throw him. Or punch him. Or kick him. Just stay out of reach and let his coronary disease fight your battle for you.)

But being the tallest person in the dojo, everybody could easily get under my hips. And the throws were very aesthetically pleasing, my long airborne limbs undulating like the tentacles of a jellyfish, until I hit the mat with a supremely satisfying thud.

It hurt. A lot.

"You need to relax," Darian kept telling me.

"I would," I said. "If not for the fact that I am falling. Backwards. On my back!" He laughed.

"Do you know why the fall hurts?"

"Gravity?"

He laughed again. "No. Well, yes, but... Have you ever driven drunk?"

"Um..."

"Of course you haven't." I saw no reason to correct him. "But you know what happens when a drunk guy gets into a wreck with a sober guy?" I did, but he told me anyway. "The sober guy is hurt and the drunk guy is fine. Because he was relaxed."

"So I should come here drunk?" Another laugh.

"Let me show you something." Darian held out his hands. "Grab my wrists." In my opinion, we spent way too much time on wrist techniques, as if the biggest threat we faced out in the streets was roving gangs of wrist-grabbers. Gimme all your money or I will grab the shit out of your wrist!

Anyway, I grabbed his wrist and then he did a very fast move, an inward rotation of both his hands, locking up both my wrists and buckling my knees.

"Does that hurt?"

"Hai," I said, because I didn't know the Japanese words for like a motherfucker! Truly, it felt like he was going to snap my ulnae.

"So let go."

"I can't."

"But you can," he insisted. "It's your resistance that is creating the pain. I'm not doing anything."

"You're definitely doing something." Even when I'm in pain, I'm a huge smart ass.

"Just relax and breathe."

I did as I was told. And then something really cool happened. As soon as I stopped fighting the pain, the lock just melted away.

"See? All you had to do was stop resisting and let go." I stared in wonder of my pain-free wrists. Was it really that easy? "The same principle applies when you're being thrown," he added.

"I figured."

"And by the way, that's another awesome life lesson, don't you think?"

I bowed.

So. Here's what I said to Tammy when I saw her on Monday morning: Nothing.

Well, not nothing. I said stuff.

Good morning.

How was your weekend?

You've got a twig stuck in your hair.

You know. Regular Monday morning shit.

The point is, I didn't bring up Coco. Which, as you can imagine, was not easy for a confrontational person like me. I felt like a cobra who decided to sheathe his fangs and agree to binding arbitration. Because really, what would yet another fight with Tammy accomplish? Sure, I could make her feel guilty, get her to apologize, but so what? We'd been down that road many, many times, and we kept coming back to the exact same place. You can't berate someone into being the person you want them to be.

Every close relationship is a terrifying leap of faith, my friends. And in the end you might very well fall. But if you stop resisting and let go, it might hurt a little less.

Which is some really awesome life advice, don't you think?