Dude Goes What

“Turn it down,” I said. What I really wanted was for Buddy to turn off the unnerving coincidence of music and life. I live with a soundtrack, much of it my own doing.

It had started when I set up an elaborate sync scheme between my 8,000 song iTunes library and my iPhone. It took a long time to rate my songs. In fact, I changed my rating criteria twice and had to start over both times. There was a subtle art to doing it correctly. I synced more 5 star songs than 4 star, etc. I built a penalty box for overplayed songs. The penalties were worse for 1 star songs than 2 star, etc. No song in the penalty box, or played in the past week, was synced to my iPhone.

I established rules related to genres. If I overplayed one type, like Reggae, the rules reduced the amount on my iPhone. Buddy would say, “Dude, it’s not possible to overplay the Reggae.” I collect much less music now because of the work needed to add it to my iTunes library.

I tweaked my iPhone frequently, creating more rules for the behavior I desired. That effort breathed a certain life into it, nurturing an uncanny ability to pick songs just right for the moment, as if the iPhone iKnew.

I had a growing concern it had other abilities. Had it prompted Buddy to start playing music? It selected Clap Your Hands no doubt, but did it somehow manage to play Talking Heads?

“Let me turn this on.” Buddy grabbed something that looked like a solar-powered alarm clock. “Watch.”

What I thought was the solar panel was a grid of LEDs that blazed with an intense sky-blue neon. I turned away. “Point that somewhere else!”

“This would be great to scare cats.”

“You don’t have cats,” I said. “What is it?”

“A sun lamp. I stare into it a couple of times a day, eyes closed of course. It makes the days longer.”

“A sun lamp should be yellow.”

“A sky lamp then.” Buddy shined it back in my face.

“Turn it off.” The glare made my eyes water. “The halogens are more than enough.”

“It’s easier to work with bright lights.”

“Where’s your work?” I asked.

“I couldn’t start anything interesting. I tried shit but ended up with crap.” He turned off his sky lamp and dialed down the intensity of the halogens. “This place was a complete disaster around Thanksgiving.”

“I remember.”

Buddy had a tradition of painting murals on his walls while girlfriends hung out. His projects evolved over the course of their relationship. At one point, he was so inspired by the movie version of The Lord Of The Rings, he depicted several of the sweeping battle scenes using the likeness of friends as the faces for the orcs and sundry evil characters. He used the faces of his girlfriends as elves or other good characters. Sometimes, he used the same face as elf and orc.

Several girlfriends had prominent roles, invariably armed, fending off a surge of orcs and black riders. When each relationship ended, Buddy changed the mural so the orcs ended up victorious. The carnage was spectacular, and Buddy would memorialize the girlfriend as a future black riders.

Now, Buddy had painted the proverbial light at the end of a tunnel on his art closet door. If this mural was Buddy’s best recent effort, he must have been mired in some awful funk. I always helped him out of his funks. How had he gotten out of this one?

I pointed to the closet door. “Waiting for a train?”

Today, Buddy hung character sketches from our high-school comics. I hadn’t seen those drawings in years.

Our characters experienced a foreshortened, overwrought transformation which famous comic book characters, such as Superman, underwent from the innocent 50s to the conflicted 70s, decades of trauma crammed into moments. One of our first characters was Buttercup, inspired by The Princess Bride, the movie, not the book. Buddy’s Buttercup was drawn as face shots reacting to the heroic fighting around her and about her.

I created my own character, Puckerface. Rob and Buddy didn’t like him. They turned Puckerface into a villain who captured then seduced Buttercup, and after that ordeal, she became Blossom and he became pariah. She grew a luscious body and a 15-year-old’s idea of reasonable breasts, which in Buddy’s defense, were actually reasonable. She liked to start fights, especially with those who earned her affection. She was Buddy’s favorite.

I responded. I created another character - Retribution, a stupid name but we hadn’t yet learned to disguise intent or embellish shortcomings. Characters sought out Retribution and confessed the full details of a savage crime against their souls. The horror stories enraged him and triggered his special abilities: He was compelled to destroy the perpetrator in an often brutal manner and at a time of significant consequence.

Retribution became too damaging a force to the characters in our comics and even to our friendship. After much protesting, I let Rob create a story where Blossom survived to confess Retribution’s own crimes against her.

Soon after her confession, Blossom became Ambrosia, who wasn’t nearly so reasonable. Over time, she grew intimidatingly beautiful. Buddy complained about drawing her and I complained about writing her dialog. Only Rob seemed to have the ability to work with her. No one controlled her. She was the disaffected superpower of our entire pantheon, able to compel the most intransigent to some vital act.

“I was bored with all the shit lying all over the place.” Buddy handed me a Tripel Westmalle, some kind of bitter Belgian ale, over brewed by repressed Trappist Monks.

He tried to use his foot to slide the dimmer to one of his floor lamps. He gave up, bent over and turned it on by hand. He then turned up his overhead track lighting to maximum brightness. Buddy’s sixteen halogen lamps were so bright, I squinted. Usually, several bulbs were burnt out limiting the harsh glare.

“Retribution.” I said. “And Blossom?”

“They’re funny looking now.”

“Almost as funny looking as your place.”

“What’s so funny?”

I drank the monks’ ale. “I expected Ambrosia.”

“Couldn’t find her.”

“It used to be that the only time you really cleaned up was when you’d start dating someone. Any dates?”

“No.” He drank.

“So who was the woman?” There had to be a woman to explain Buddy’s clean studio.

“I got sick of bad ideas.” He peeled the label off his beer. “Whenever I wanted to start something, I threw shit out instead.”

“Threw shit out?”

“Yeah. It was fucked up enough that I kinda enjoyed it. The place is clean now. No women.”

Buddy was discarding, not cleaning. If he was going to clean, I would have had to help. He always needed my help.

He shook his mouse, woke his computer. He clicked. Tina Weymouth’s thumping bass blasted Buddy’s subwoofer. Talking Heads played Crosseyed and Painless, the version from the movie Stop Making Sense.

We walked up to his third floor loft. A couple of dull lights made the stairwell look weathered and grimy. Buddy opened his door and walked in. He never bothered with his lock, blithely indifferent to the risk of theft or vandalism.

He went to the kitchen to put beer in the refrigerator. After I scrubbed my hands, soaking them for warmth, I wandered around his large art studio. Beads curtained off his bedroom. Traditionally, his spaces were defined by the random position of his unclean couch, distressed coffee table and mismatched chairs. His vintage TV was too heavy and too boxy to push around. It was the closest thing to a fixture.

Buddy’s inner eight-year-old normally had free reign with his art supplies. Battles raged on paper, canvas or computer tablet; drafts, broken pencils, discarded styli, ink stains on furniture, food containers, half-spent, uncapped tubes of paint, plaster, dirty clothes and even latex littered the battlefield. When he couldn’t unleash his fury onto some project, he’d play first-person shooters on his PlayStation for hours, leaving it entangled in a knot of cords.

He loved to show me either his panoply of half-finished art or scenes of industrial video-game carnage. His work used to mirror the exaggeration and overtly graphic objectifications of video game art. Over the past couple of years, it became quieter and more contemplative, a jarring conflict between art and artist. Maybe he should paint a tranquil mural of Mount Fuji on his wall.

I looked for his projects. If not on the wall, they would be draped on tables or chairs, or scattered on the floor. Even his workstation was almost bare, missing the typical spread of magazine clips, color printouts or old photos. A neat stack of paper was in a lucite in-box, with a sketch pad as a paper weight.

“Why so clean?” I shouted.

“I discovered cleanliness.” Buddy talked as he stacked dishes. “It’s like better than sex! Give me a mop and I’m close to organism.” I heard squeaking sounds from the kitchen. I imagined Buddy jerking a mop handle.

“Cleaning drives you crazy.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You can still get off polishing the furniture.”

Water beat against the aluminum sink basin. Silverware clattered with glass. I said, “You’re a dick.”

He stayed in the kitchen. He wanted to give me time to walk around, I guessed.

His walls were freshly painted although he hadn’t spackled over the large nail pockmarks. He preferred ten-penny nails and a framing hammer to thumb tacks or push pins. He had shattered several plastic push pins, leaving tiny metal splinters embedded in the dry wall. Buddy would cover the gouges, long nails and push-pin slivers with a succession of drafts, concepts and off-topic sketchups, stuck to the walls as if suspended on porcupine quills.

Buddy’s apartment looked more like my writing desk, spartan, each carefully selected tool in place. His chairs and couch were square to the coffee table. The PlayStation and its cords sat in an open storage box by the TV.

A stylus was on his Wacom tablet and three more were in a cup with several pens and colored pencils. One time when I organized for Buddy, I found a stylus tucked away in his crusty couch, another buried under a pile of dated rough-drafts, and two more mixed with his silverware in a kitchen drawer which hadn’t been cleaned out since he moved in. His forks were so dirty, I wondered what he ate with.

After years of honing my writing skills, I had learned to stifle both my childish puissance and the temptation to pursue any flight of fancy. I sat and ground out sentence after sentence until my work was complete, usually ahead of schedule. We both freelanced. I had a robust list of regular clients. Buddy had a tenuous skein of half-interested, half-freeloading acquaintances.

Buddy usually pinned portraits of girlfriends, a loose term, to a cork-board hung next to the beaded bedroom curtains. I remember a big fight when he forgot to take down one girl’s picture and put up another. I picked up scattered beads for weeks.

Today, he hung character sketches from our high-school comics. I hadn’t seen those drawings in years.

Freezing rain drummed on my car roof. The steam from Buddy’s coffee fogged my windshield. With gas almost $4 a gallon, I turned off the engine, leaving my music playing through tinny speakers. The coffee and I grew cold together. Of course Buddy was late, waiting out the rain somewhere warm.

Buddy’s real name was Jim Lee. He was a graphic designer who wanted to be a comic artist. When we were kids sketching out comics, he drew and I wrote the copy. Neither of us was good at creating a story. Our friend Rob did that. A different Jim Lee became a famous comic artist, depriving Buddy of his rightful identity - Jim Lee, Comic Artist. This theft occurred about the time Buddy started calling everybody “Dude.”

I hated “Dude.” Thomas Byron Reeves suited me. I ignored him when he addressed me that way. For Buddy, it became sport.

“Dude? Hey, Dude? Dude? Come on! Hey, Dude.”

“What?!”

“Dude goes what.”

“Stop.”

“Hey. Dude. Buy me a beer.”

“Sure, Buddy,” I said.

Each time he demanded beer, I answered, “Sure Buddy.” Soon, others called him, “Buddy.”

Freezing rain started to change to sleet, and pinging to pelting. My iPhone thought it funny, so it played In This Home On Ice by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, a band that sounded like Talking Heads. My iPhone filled my head with instructions:

Shake your rattlesnake skin

Lyrics by a juvenile poet sacrificing clarity for cute wordplay - ‘shake,’ ‘snake,’ and ‘skin’ with a ‘rattle’ thrown in for effect. If a beautiful woman asked Buddy about the lyrics, he would offer some elaborate deconstruction. I, however, was interested in asking him what he had been doing since Christmas.

Buddy rounded the corner carrying beer. Clap Your Hands sang:

And now that we fattened the cow
And set out to plow unknown enemies

I hopped out of the car. The sleet stung my bald spot. I scurried across the street to the entrance of his apartment building. I wanted to stay dry, and I wanted to keep my clothes clean.

“Dude,” Buddy said. “You’re ugly and your fuckin’ feet stink.” I jostled my once-hot coffee on my gloved hand and down my pants leg. The coffee would stain my pants then freeze. Would freezing set the stain so the pants were ruined? I shoved the coffee at Buddy, took off my dirty glove and brushed the coffee and sleet off my leg. I looked at his filthy crocs covered with wet road grime.

“Checking me out?” he asked. Hot breath steamed from his mouth.

“It wasn’t cold enough for shorts?”

“Nah, not snowing yet,” he said. “I’ve been wearing the same pair of jeans for a week.”

“They have a patina,” I said. The wind and sleet stung my face. I breathed in the damp February chill before wiping the back of my chilled hand on my slimy nose. The scent was bitter, like cold coffee.

“Sepia,” Buddy said. “It goes with the jacket.”

“Is that what I smell?”

“I didn’t know sepia smelled.”

“Maybe it’s the leather jacket,” I said. “You aren’t supposed to let it get wet.”

“You suffer from olfactory paranoia. You need to see somebody about that.”

“Like who?” I asked.

Buddy put two fingers against the side of his nose and blew snot into the bluster.

“You,” I said, “are gross.”

“Want a beer?” he asked.

“No. I brought coffee.”

Next entry: Unspackled Porcupine Quills