minstrel jester bard
spits on his hand shakes it off, promising something
drives through the roundabout the wrong way, promising something
cig in the car twice over
all kinds of things that are odd but work because they’re done with confidence
Brendan is a man with a John F Kennedy vinyl, a room that's insufferable in the best way possible. I love people who love things. I love people who know what they like and how they like it.
An invite to a party that he’ll know two people at and an invite from him to the same party that I’ll know one person at. That one person being him.1
When I walk through the front door I walk into someone that I actually do know, though this is the kind of person that you just see places, eternally so. It was a real joyful surprise. Later on in the night a guy who organizes for the anti-fascist group on campus with me walked through the door and I did a massive jaw drop and yelled ANTI-FASCIST EVAN and we dapped each other up. This night is mostly about Brendan though who repeated the worst bit you’ve ever heard over and over on the basis of a game of higher and lower.2
Other things happened in between the part of the story before this and the one after but none of this in between really matters to the telling because it’s about people after all, the people I want to talk about are mostly in the beginning and the end. Because much of this is reality I feel comfortable leaving much of it out, or to your own respective imaginations.
At some point in the night he runs out of cigarettes and even though my pack has two lonely hanger-ons in it he insists we go get more. The girl who finished his last cig ends up inviting herself or being invited in some way that works out for the three of us. I drive because he's drunk and I haven't had anything in the last hour, I reckoned I was just giddy off the company. I quadruple check myself, do a roundoff in the parking lot to prove I've got the balance for operating a motor vehicle. It's his car that I’ll be driving, he hands me his keys from the passenger seat, it's got a bright blue inhaler attached and the key for the car got this orange wrap round the bottom.
In the passenger seat he sets up the map for the eternal salvation that Cumberland Farms sets out to be albeit it falling short when compared to the Garden of Eden that is Buc-ees. I ask for 2 minutes of silence just to make sure I'm all set for the driving. They oblige for 30 seconds because the girl, Yushi3 finds a Crosby Stills and Nash CD in the seat next to her. She’s a big fan, her and Brendan both have two copies. I tell her that the demo that Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell sing of Our House sounds like love and then pull out of the driveway backwards, playing Our House, dodging between the precariously parked cars. I drive 10 under the limit because the first thing I am is stupid for getting into a car unsure of just how sober I am and the last thing I am is an idiot for daring to go any faster then I need to in such a stupid position.
To my credit and the credit of my sobriety I drive well. Brendan smokes my second to last cigarette out the window and I take a drag as an apple core falls out the window. Yushi is in the backseat talking to us as excitedly as we're talking to her, mostly about music. She’s fantastically excited and I hope I didn’t scare her at any point because the night had made me twitchy and excitable and my hands are slapping the wheel and my mouth is yelping out any given snatch of song.
I park the car at a pump that's out of commission and then spin round the station till I find one that's open, he runs inside and I fill up his near empty tank in exchange for another pack of cigarettes. He tells me of his eternal gratitude and I tell him it's nothing because it isn't nothing. It's everything to have kindness, to have trust.
We pull into the house’s drive way again, my throat raw from the song of the road. Sitting in the car, windows down, chill creeping in, smoke blowing out and he lights another, another cigarette. This time he wants his guitar, and his harmonica box. The girl is worried now, "are you sure you can drive?" she asks me. I found myself a bit fed up, didn't I just drive us to the gas station and back without a word of protest or a "woah woah woah slow down"? I hadn’t drank in over an hour at this point and I swear by this twice over and she's convinced maybe because it's fact or maybe because she wants a good story for the morning. I tell her if she wants to go back to the party feel free, we're already here. She wants to see the guitar though, so do I, so do I.
Now we're off to Brendan's house, the road winds back and forth and still I stay below the speed limit except for one speed bump where I intentionally sped up just to see how it felt, it bumped if you’re curious. At Brendan’s we walk through the door and intrude on a birthday party and extrude our bit into absurdity. Leaving just as fast as we came, guitar and pack of harmonica's tucked under our arms I spin my way into the car and ask for another song on the queue and I get mine because I'm driving. Yushi had elected to stay in the car for the guitar pickup for reasons. When we drive back the way we came I go the wrong way around the roundabout as a homage. I moth-grin at the moon looking down at me, almost ignoring the road, ignoring them talking. Her nails are too long to strum the guitar. The moons been there most of my life. It's something I won't lose, fingernails come and go.
On the porch two man duet of It aint Me Babe. Real earnest like, like a waif he's playing that guitar fingers red and freezing then fingers red and bleeding. Like a sinner I’m singing like it’s my last chance to make it into heaven. He’s a modern day matchstick girl warm in the glow of our newly hatched friendship. He takes requests and the whole parties out there at some point but the point before that one it's just me and him, me him and black country new roads Concorde. I die free this time. He seems to be as big a fan of me as I am of him, we thanked the other for meeting another over and over at least every time we meet. This time was no different. On the deck he said I play harmonica like I'm in prison and I got the soul for it Don't know what it means but it means a lot to me.
I felt as if he'd been beat over the head with manic deliverance before and had since decided life was worth enjoying. He lived in the narrow space between possibility and reality. He say's dude hell yeah as if it's the only thing he knows how to say and you can feel the honesty behind it, he's a commotion and a frantic rush towards a slowly opening door waiting for the chance to burst through it.
We met of course at a concert, I remember more of it then he does because he was drunk and I think I hit on the girl he was seeing, he's since told me me he doesn't even remember who she was at this point and I don't disbelieve him. It was a good concert, the kind where you spend half the show in the parking lot knocking your head against prophets and idiots4 and all manner of people that I know only in passing now, that I imagine won't ever know in anything larger then passing. He was supposed to be in passing but then he transferred and now the only passing we do is the 40oz Budweiser bottle. It would be halved but it's more like eighths because I'm always reevaluating how much I want to be drinking these days which is funny as I'm too busy most days to be drinking at all.
I think quite a lot when I'm with him, mostly about myself. I worry that I'll bring him around my friends and they'll say he's an asshole, that he's pretentious and insufferable and not good for much other then a good story to tell after the fact. I worry that the friends who say this will be the ones that I’ve worried are dull and unsympathetic to any cause that is not self-serving. I worry about how they’ll see him because I worry about how they see me. I can't hazard another thought about something so meaningless, something so ponderous when I have a friend who's got good taste. I see myself in him, see a friend and see someone who get's some it whatever that it may be.5 All I know is that some friends turn up without any warning, wandering through the door and hanging their coat up. He had found himself indifferent at some point and then found that he'd rather have anything other then indifference, any discomfort was worth the avoidence of indifference. He tells me he does nothing all day, I believe him. Sometimes I join him on that nothing and we just talk.
It means a lot to talk. Every good person on this earth worth talking to has something they want to talk about. Never trust anyone who doesn't have at least three steadfast opinions.
It's pride on the knowing.
Recently I feel that my writing has been scarce, without padding, all of the fat trimmed off. I miss the fat.
4 stacks of playing cards, you guess if the next card will be higher/lower, if wrong you drink the for the # of cards in the pile, the people you play with you count, they count at whatever speed they want to. if you finish your beverage before they finish counting whoever it lands on has to drink for double that time. hectic hectic game.
introducing her now because this is when I felt like I was properly introduced to her in the timeline of the night, before was prelude.
often the exact same kind of person
I CANNOT ESCAPE DEAN MORIARTY