Everyone had finished eating our fine meal for the evening. Once again, almost all of my friends had come to a cookout hosted at my house. We had eaten some killer steaks, watched some television, and had thrown back some cold brew. Everything was cool. Tim was chilling on the sofa in my dimly lit living room, with his arm draped leisurely over the shoulder of Melissa, his flavor of the week. He about pissed his pants when Sean, sitting on the floor between Anita's feet, told us how much he had just spent on a new bass guitar. "Holy shit, man! That costs more than some of the shit I want to put on the truck!"
"Yeah," Sean quietly replied back, "It'd be a great guitar if it didn't cost so damn much, and I still prefer playing on Mikey's. I probably would've been better off buying you parts for your truck."
"Any time, man," Tim said with a smile. My how my friend's were different.
Eventually, we all started winding down. Tim and Melissa were sitting in my room, amid piles of books, art supplies thrown about, and indiscernible piles of clean and dirty clothes. They were talking about movies when I walked back into the living room. Sean was sitting on the couch now, with my acoustic guitar in hand, strumming away at some little tune he had just picked up as it drifted past his ear. Anita was across the room from him in the comfy blue recliner reading the newspaper. She gave me a look of recognition over the lifestyle section as I walked past. I was intently listening, when I heard a car pull up. I walked to the door and opened it, but no one was there. A cool breeze blew in. It was another one of those windy autumn nights.
One windy autumn night, Sean and I were driving around in his vast Buick with bench seats and leather interior. We were just bumming around town with nothing to do. The radio was blasting some violent punk ballad and we were both screaming along with our most punkish voices. Well somehow we end up in the fine town of Tuscola eating at the Dixie Trucker's Home. Now this could seem extensively boring to most people, but not to Sean. He had read enough of Jack Kerouac to be excited by this miniature road trip, and he knew how to pour that excitement all over me. As we sat there, talking poetry and literature, noting our muses and our inspirations, we noticed that two girls kept glancing at us and smiling. Had I been with anyone else, we probably would have sat in that coffee stained wooden booth for another two hours and then left, never knowing what was on the minds of those two young women. Sean would not have this. In a burst of quiet self-confidence, he glanced at me from behind his coffee mug and said through the cloud of smoke pervading the air,
"Let's go say hi." He started to get up, and I, being cowardly, began to protest. He shot me a quiet smile that told me that he wasn't going to take no for an answer. So I stood up, and moving in time with the tinny country music playing in the atmosphere, we made our way across the diner towards the two girls that were staring at our obvious approach.
"Hello," Sean said with another of his quiet smiles and a small wave, "We just thought we'd come over and introduce ourselves since we noticed you sitting here by yourselves." The girls looked us over for a minute and then one of them, blond, obviously the more spontaneous of the two, asked,
"Are you guys in a play or something?" I knew why they asked. Looking down at my clothing, I took a quick inventory of my wardrobe and accessories: suit, tie, jacket, vest with pocket watch chain hanging, wingtips, and my vintage umbrella. I adjusted the fedora on my head and shot a look over at Sean. His accoutrements were as odd as mine; zoot suit minus tie, clunky black combat boots, wallet chain swinging not unlike my watch, and a few metal necklaces hung around his neck. I watched as he confidently ran a hand through his spiked orange hair. Yes, I could see how we might look like we were in a play.
"No, we aren't in a play," Sean said. The quieter of the girls looked up at us and behind layers of thick brown hair asked,
"Then why are you wearing that stuff." By now, I had caught the same bug that Sean had been infected with and started running the gauntlet with him.
"We're wearing this stuff because this is how we dress," I told her with a big shit-eating grin on my face and a slight look of defiance in my eyes. We sat down and chatted with those gals for about a half an hour before getting bored. So after finishing our coffee and saying good byes, we walked out of the dimly lit diner and out of those girls' lives.
The drive back was more of the same. Talking about music and screeching out lyrics as we came nearer to home.
"You know Wade," Sean said to me, "Tonight was very Zen." He was always speaking with a strange Buddhist style that was often times over my head but made me feel spiritual none the less. He was right though. This time, I did understand. I cast a glance over in his direction and said,
"Yeah, it was rather Zen wasn't it?"
One windy autumn night, Tim and I were driving around in his giant beast of a Ford Bronco. The engine was roaring as it fought the howling wind for ground. We were making great time, or we would have been if we had anywhere to go.
"This kind of sucks man," Tim hollered over the radio.
"What do you mean?" I yelled back.
"Well, we have jack shit to do. We need to find some women!" I supressed a small chuckle. I was content to just drive around yelling over the radio as thoughts entered our heads, and Tim always said how it sucks that we didn't have anything to do and how we needed to find some women. It didn't matter that neither one of us were single. On the same token, it didn't really seem to matter that neither of us could even stomach our girlfriends anymore either. It didn't matter that there wasn't much to do in Mattoon. On the other hand, it did matter that driving around wasn't cutting it at that point.
Skipping forward about fifteen minutes, we could be found sitting in the back of Common Grounds, playing checkers and sipping whatever brews were our particular poison that evening. I was losing, but that was okay. The light rock coming over the radio so quietly that I couldn't distinguish the song was getting irritating, but not yet annoying enough to make us get up and do something about it. We were just there, sitting on that black leather couch, talking about girls we thought were hot, people we'd love to kick the living shit out of, just noting our next plans for a crazy adventure and things such as that.
"I think those girls are looking at us," Tim said quietly, nudging me with his elbow and nodding his head towards two girls sitting across the room under a giant portrait of a woman blowing a huge bubble. We talked about them for awhile. "I'd like to have sex with the blond one," Tim said unabashedly. I glanced up and could see why. She was probably five foot six, slender, but had all the right curves in all the right places.
"Good to know," I quipped as I planned my next move in checkers.
"You're kidding, right?" he said with a just a touch of sarcastic measure in his voice. "She is hot, are you telling me that if she came over here right now, sat down beside you and said 'please have sex with me Wade', you wouldn't." I leaned back and sighed.
"I don't know." I paused for a minute before continuing, "There's just something missing. With all these girls, there's just something not there where I need there to be something. Ever since, well, the one that got away." Then Tim caught on.
"You could get still get her, you know?" He said taking a sip from his mug.
"Yeah maybe," I replied, "but I'm not so sure. Plus she seems happy where she's at now. I'd hate to ruin that for her."
"You are not enough of a prick, Wade, you know that right? King me." I looked down at the checkerboard and sighed. I was not going to win that god damned game.
It started snowing as we climbed back into the Bronco. The engine roared to life, and we started making our way towards my home. I exhaled and said,
"You know Tim, tonight was very Zen." He looked over at me and said,
"What the hell does that mean?" We pulled up to a stoplight as it turned red, and I thought for a moment. I looked over at him and admitted,
"I have no idea. Light's green." He looked back to the road, hit the gas and retorted,
"Okay."
I was sitting in art class, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to paint that day, I watched as Sean meandered into the room at his usual leisurely pace.
"What is up my brother?" I said as he walked past me. He shrugged his shoulders and grabbed some clay to make a sculpture. I started to make a rough sketch of a bum with a guitar that kind of looked like Jesus. That's what I wanted anyway, Jesus as a guitar-playing bum. I had just finished up the rough outline and was getting ready to start painting when Sean poked his face over my canvas.
"Yes my good man?" I inquired.
"Guess what," he said walking around and standing next to me.
"What, what?" I said in reply.
"I'm God," he replied with a complete and utter look of seriousness on his face.
"Bullshit," I retorted, "If you were I'd be out of a job. Now seriously, what's up?"
"My girlfriend loves me," he shot out with a smile beaming on his face.
"Must be nice," I half-snorted at him. Having experienced the joy of learning that my then girlfriend was having sex with multiple other people, I was not as much of a hopeless romantic as I had been just one week prior.
"Awwww, Wade," he sighed, his voice dripping with false sympathy thicker than honey drips from the comb. "Like she was really worth the pain she brought with her. I hate to sound like an asshole, but you're better off without her. You're just not enough of a prick."
"I know, I know," I replied, "but you know how I am… Fall to fast, feel too much. You know I never really got over, well you know." Sean knew the whole story. I think he was even a few chapters ahead of what I knew. If he was, I knew he couldn't tell me what was to come. So he patted my shoulder and said,
"My brother, you never will. By the way, Jesus was black." I painted my rendition of a homeless guitar playing Jesus. I painted him black.
I was sitting in my little art studio in the garage. Paint fumes pervaded the area but there was enough fresh air coming in from the open window to keep me from getting nauseous. I felt like shit. What could I do? I sat back in my chair and stared at my canvas. I had worked on this painting for two months, perfecting every little detail, and then, with one brushstroke too many, had fucked it all up. That's the amazing thing about painting, I think… Knowing when to stop. That is a gift I've never had; I always go too far… I was not a great painter by any means, but I had a definite feeling I wanted to express, and it was almost perfect. The problem was that I didn't know when to stop. I didn't yield, and I felt I had ruined my painting because of this. Just then, Tim walked into the room.
"What's up bitches?" he said in a high pitched voice. I explained it all to him. Tim, who wasn't very interested in the beatnik art scene, listened patiently as I explained the whole situation, from beginning to end. I told him about what I wanted to say through the painting. I told him how I wanted the painting to develop. I showed him how I had ruined it.
"Oh," he said, "I see." He paused for a moment. "You really do love that girl don't you?" He had cut me to the quick. He knew me far too well. He knew that the painting dilemma wasn't all that was burning me up. He looked at me and sighed, "you don't need a painting to say what's on your mind you know. As for this painting…" He picked up one of my brushes covered in gobs of paint, "try this!" He smeared paint all down the face of my so-called ruined work of art. I cocked my head to the side, and damn, it did look right. "So, do you want to go get a bite to eat?" he asked.
"Sure," I replied, "and by the way, do you think Jesus was black?"
"What?"
I shivered and closed the door. As I walked back towards the music floating around as Sean plucked the strings of my Fender, Tim and Melissa emerged from the back of the house.
"Well bud," he said, picking up his keys, "it's been fun, but we've gotta get going."
"Yeah," Sean echoed, putting my guitar back into its case, "we'd better go too." I smiled. I walked them to the door, and as they walked out to their cars I could hear Sean say,
"Hey Tim, I bet my car could waste your Bronco in a race."
Tim chuckled, "Yeah it probably could, but my Bronco could drive over your pimp car, so how about you eat shit!"
I could hear them both laughing as they climbed into their consecutive vehicles and started their engines. I shut the door.
Skipping ahead six months changes one's perspective... Looking back on that night that I was looking back, I realize that I'm no longer that same guy... Sure he's here, but he's evolved. I grew up, I learned a lot...
And I finally stopped being a whiney-assed crybaby, and got over her.