I ran into this kid from my neighborhood on the way back from class last week. I didn’t want to walk with him but we were headed in basically the same direction, so that’s what happened. My brain only works in transit to and from class, mysteriously, so I was annoyed that I had to waste that special fifteen blocks chatting with him about his chemistry test or whatever. And this was almost all fifteen of them, or maybe fourteen. He said a word I didn’t know the meaning of and while I was thinking about that he asked me if I wanted to come to his house and have a couple of beers. I remembered that he had a roommate I was fond of, and they always offered snacks. Then he mentioned offhandedly he was working on some songs and would I take a burned CD with me and check them out, they were just at his house. I just can’t tell anymore if people are holding the carrot or the stick.
He kept glancing around everywhere, and behind his back, and up and even sometimes down. After I’d accepted his offer I felt immediately guilty, like we were going to have sex but then I was going to go on a date with someone I actually like afterward, drinking his beers no less, promising I’d call, so I decided to ask him what the deal was with the looking around, and while I debated if this would be like a socially acceptable thing to do with a drinking buddy and wondering if instead I should just ask him what the goddamned word meant because it was really bothering me, on a fine Thursday afternoon when I had no reason to be bothered. But two blocks had passed, and I let it go until he turned down this side street that was five or six blocks out of the way and made no sense to walk down. This with all the looking around and the chemistry and the talk of the “underwater tone” he was getting from his new guitar pedals was too much, Rollins goes way around the train tracks and it was about the loneliest possible place to be walking with all the sun and the coffee and the general disinterest in everything. So I asked him what’s with the production because this nice Thursday was getting into some film noir shit and if the guy wasn’t such a geek I’d swear he was taking me to a drug deal or a bicycle theft or a general non-fine afternoon thing.
While he was answering it occurred to me how lonely this person must be.
He said that whenever he was going somewhere alone, which, more and more frequently, was the case (Here I’ll skip a digression re: his girlfriend’s fondness for white wine and pot, and driving to Taco Bell and then having a massive anxiety attack in the parking lot and hiding from him in the Target nearby for hours at a time, like twice a week or something. Or maybe not. Como Avenue stories aren’t exactly famous for their veracity, more like archetypes or fables that illustrate how fucked up everyone is) he pretended that somebody was following him. Not always someone he knew, although sometimes he pretended that it was a friend or relative, and not always somebody menacing and strange. Sometimes (probably a lot of the time) it was some blonde who saw him at the bus stop and followed him hoping he’d go into the deli and she could get his number while he was getting a gyro, and sometimes he’d drop his wallet. At this point, and we’d wandered way past our destination by now, him looking around like he’s a cheating husband on the soaps on the way to his Puerto Rican mistress, who incidentally has a husband that’s like a linebacker or a mafia guy, anyway at this point he stressed that even while he was pretending he’d dropped his wallet he could feel it in his back pocket. The trains nakkering by off Rollins, which had turned into an industrial district. Me smoking as fast as I can, fascinated in the way that it’s fascinating to watch Sam hit on girls.
When the stories about his girlfriend are told people always emphasize that it’s white wine, not red, white. Once some asshole tried to derail a friend’s girlfriend telling this story on a porch somewhere by delving into the minutiae of white wines and I could have just slapped them for interrupting the storyteller, who is generally shy and was telling the story well. Really, these Como fables/half- or full- truth trainwrecks are best heard around the fifth time or so because then you begin to see where the speculation and prejudice of the different tellers set in.
Now we were further from his house than when we started, as I quizzed him on all of the different strategies he pulled to shake off these imaginary followers of his, aside from aforementioned the take-the-empty-frontage-road-on-a-beautiful-day-when-there-are-tons-of-babes-out-walk. He liked to go into stores and pretend to browse, then suddenly run out the back door as fast as he could go. Or he’d order coffee and pretend someone in the shop was not only looking at them but also intently screwing up their courage to talk to him. I admired him for doing this secret thing to make his life more interesting. I thought that about wrapped it up, so I started steering him generally homeward, trying to prod more weirdness out of him all the while. I got into it and we ducked behind a dumpster for a minute, and then walked around a convenience store eyeballing people, which was my idea, because I was out of cigarettes anyway. Then the real true remarkable part of the story occurred, the climax, dénouement, whatever, the end.
He claimed that every time he tried to shake off these ghosts of his, every single time, something lucky happened to him. Different, little stuff: he finds ten bucks, he runs into an old friend just came to town and they pass fifteen happy minutes shooting the shit, his old lovely bicycle, stolen from him two years ago, is found leaning against an underpass when he tries to avoid the (imaginary) UMPD, who are coming to get him for some unbelievably flip and cool prank he has played. Never fails. One time he even actually does get a girl’s number, when he leaves a party early because his girlfriend’s wacked out on a jug of Carlo and a few bong rips. Himself also not being the soberest person around. He asks a girl out that’s following him, right there on the street in front of traffic and God. Of course he can’t call her because of the girlfriend. But he has her number and this has justified his behaviors, which become more and more elaborate as each day passes and he has to get up two hours early just to get to his morning class. He looks up sewer blueprints and takes taxis across town just to go shoot hoops with his roommates, &c. We are almost to his house and I remark that in fact, nothing good has happened to him yet unless he considers the probable psychological consequences of unburdening his strange Situationist drift thing to me, and he says something good will happen and invites me to choose a path at random to take us to the well-earned, by now, beer and demo tape of dubious quality which I am beginning to think might even be cool considering this guy is so goddamned deviant from general patterns of thought.
We look to the left, and there is his girlfriend, leaning against a Mazda, kissing another guy without any of the wine and dope haze she is famous for. I left to look up what exactly cryptomnesia was.
