Homage to a Friend/Youth in Suburbia

Short and stocky, yet muscular.  His limbs stuck out, short and thick, like tree stumps.  His head was attached directly to his shoulders, and his clay-colored skin was peppered with freckles.

Jobs he’s had: event security, night watchman, valet at a hotel, lumberjack, storage, car detailer, Dairy Queen employee, landscaper, micro-chip producer, Safeway stocker, strip club cook…

He’s hated every boss he’s ever had.

There was a time when he would refuse to answer any call from an unknown number for fear it might be a collections agency.  At other times, when he would stop paying his phone bill, he would call me from different payphones.  He would spend his day skateboarding from one payphone to another, hanging out and smoking at shopping center parking lots.  He went from smoking Marlboros, to rolling tobacco, to dip.  When I used to visit him at his duplex, everywhere you looked you’d find beer or soda bottles filled to the brim with thick black spit.  It made drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola at his place a risky endeavor.

The duplex was in a poor Hispanic neighborhood, and for a time he almost never left.  Sat around smoking pot and reading philosophy books, or smoking pot and watching Steven Siegal and Jean-Claude Van Damme movies.  We loved the old 80s action movies.  Those buddy cop flicks with the cheesy punch lines and the hint of homo-eroticism. (Tango & Cash or Harley Davidson and Marlboro Man)

He was a man of big ridiculous ideas.  I’d consider them jokes, genius in their dead-pan delivery.  Even after he would repeat the idea for weeks and weeks and months and months.  I admired his dedication to the joke.  Then one day, he’d surprise me by actually pursuing the idea.  I was never really sure if the whole time he was just after a laugh (not mine, but his own).  There was his intention to become a deep-sea diver (he looked at schools); or after a failed attempt at growing pot he told me he was thinking of creating a weed plant that looked like weed, smelt like weed, tasted like weed, but that didn’t get you high. (“Why?” I asked. “Because think of the idiots who would buy it!”)

Our drives were aimless and wonderful.  Stops at the gas station for cigarettes and dip, the local bowling alley, the pool hall, or, best of all, the Goodwill bins.  There, midday on a weekend, we would scavenge for books, as Hispanic immigrants and obese suburbanite families dug through clothing that smelt like other people’s houses.  The book search was always hit or miss, but every once in a while, between the James Patterson novels, the outdated high school textbooks, the financial advice and self-help books, one would find a copy of On War by von Clausewitz, or a coverless Argentinian classic in its original Spanish, or a CD box set of Matt Dillon reading Kerouac’ s On the Road.

Our journey would finish at the nearby Fred Meyer, where outside its sliding glass doors lay a wondrous grey field of blacktop, grazed by four-wheeled beasts of burden.  We would find a spot and gaze out into the suburban wilderness, smoking rollies and sucking on slurpies.