Wow, this is actually appropriate for Veterans Day
I have to admit it’s felt sort of like a vacation for the past few days not having Sullivan around. He’s been visiting family somewhere out of state, I don’t even know where. A few times a week, lately, his ass is molded into my couch downing Jack Daniels and soda and either acting like he’s some smoking hot adonis or talking nonstop about his own and other men’s rear ends. By the ends of the evenings, I’m usually DYING for a little conversation that’s not about someone’s ass or the things that go into it or come out of it. He also grossed me out last week by telling me the head of his penis is like a big potato with the tip lopped off. Not a pretty image. Just venting.
On Saturday, William and I went out to the country to see his best friend Eric, and comparing the interactions is what prompted me to realize I tolerate Sullivan more than I like him. We used to see Eric and his wife Brynn at least once a week before this past summer, when they moved an hour away. Now we still see them about once a month. Brynn had to work until midnight, so we just saw Eric, and he was delightful company. Very intellectually stimulating man to talk to. I’ve mentioned him before, the man whose sister and brother passed away this past year, the man who was, much to my surprise, shocking himself with a taser a couple of months ago, but I don’t believe I’ve ever given him a proper introduction.
We met Brynn first, a year and a half ago. She was an employee at a store we visited frequently. She was stick-thin and gothy, had a lot of tattoos and piercings, and always had a sour look on her face and came off as brash and rude, especially with men. William referred to her as "that nasty girl". Then, one day, something William said sparked in her a realization that we’re not liberal democrats, unlike most people around here, and her attitude turned around completely. She began to squeal with delight when we walked into her store, and came up to us and conversed quite excitedly, smiled a lot, etc., which very much freaked out her coworkers, as I don’t think any one of them had ever seen her not looking or acting pissed off. (For the record, in case anyone is wondering, I am neither democrat nor republican. I try to formulate my views on each issue independently using logic, reason, pragmatism, and very little, if any, emotion, as I think both political parties use emotions– fear, pity, hope, projected empathy, etc.– to manipulate people and cloud their ability to think clearly and consider veracity, real world applicability, and real world consequences.)
Brynn kept describing her husband as a big tough meathead army man, and William and I believed her. Then one day he was visiting her at her workplace at the same time we were, and we found him to be quite different than she’d described. In a good way. We found ourselves conversing with a tall, thin, very soft-spoken, ultra considerate man who I could tell put a lot of thought into every little thing he said. He’s a conservative intellectual, and I cannot stress the word intellectual enough, socially liberal, for the most part, and fiscally conservative, with a natural curiosity about absolutely everything in the world, an innocence about him somehow, more humility than I’ve perhaps ever witnessed in anyone else– a kind, generous, and extremely helpful man, with an inherent sadness about him just below the surface. His family is from the United States, but they raised him in Thailand as missionaries, part of a rather severe Christian cult I’d never heard of before. One of seven children, I believe, only he and one of his sisters rebelled against the cult and were excommunicated from their family. That sister died a few days before Thanksgiving last year of a drug overdose at age 23, was found dead in a hotel room in New York City. She had emailed a suicide note to her mother. Eric left the cult in 2002 and came home to the U.S., eventually joined the army and fought in the front lines in Afghanistan, was additionally a medic assigned to sort out the dead bodies along the way, both foreign and domestic, had his tank blown up three times and was sent home after a couple of years due to injuries. He has a bad leg but tries not to let anyone notice, he’s partially deaf in one ear, and whenever I’ve been with him during an electrical storm, he screams uncontrollably and is very embarrassed about it afterward.
Eric is such a good conversationalist that he can tell me things about football and hunting, two things that usually bore me, and I’m hanging onto his every word. In addition to those two topics, on Saturday night, we sat around and discussed capitalism, laissez-faire economics, how presidents from both political parties have had very good and very bad policies for the free market and private sector economy, and the behavioral trends of our kitty cats. His huge stripey cat, Wesker, was snuggling and purring with me almost the entire visit. After how much fun I had talking to Eric, I realized that I don’t look forward all that much to seeing Sullivan when he comes over. But he’s going through a lot and tells me he loves me and all, seems to rely on me and William for emotional health and support, so I would feel guilty abandoning him. I can never abandon people unless they do something antagonistic toward me. Sullivan is annoying at times, and certainly gross, but is also sweet and gentle with me. I don’t love him, though, as a friend. But I do find him entertaining and interesting enough at times. I think I value someone being interesting more than most people do.
After we left Eric’s, we drove about twenty minutes from his house out to Hanover, PA, to visit this arcade William had been very badly wanting to visit, called Timeline Arcade. They used to be in this little run-down mall out there, and I would look around appreciatively at all of their well-kept classic arcade cabinets and pinball machines, but the noise of all of the machines screaming out at the same time would be too much for me, so I’d kill time wandering around the rinky dink mall, bored, but trying to make the best of it. The arcade moved to a location in downtown Hanover on the top floor of an old closed-down bank. My plan was to look around a bit as usual, and then, as I don’t really enjoy playing most video games, wander off and explore the quaint little downtown area while William played to his classic gamer’s heart’s content, but when we got there, it was already ten o’clock, and the streets looked pretty empty, all of the little shops closed. I don’t have very safe luck walking around by myself through dark streets at night with hardly anyone else around, so I decided to stay in the arcade and try to entertain myself with novelty and details. After exploring the lovely location, I walked around in there bored for a while, but then I saw something funny. The Gilligan’s Island pinball machine I’d been eyeing suddenly displayed "Say NO to Drugs" on its screen and after, showed an image of Bob Denver’s face. I thought that was funny because of Denver’s drug charges, and after studying the display patterns of the screen for a couple of rounds, managed to get a picture of it with my cell phone camera:
Well, what else could one have expected from a beatnik like Maynard G. Krebs?