Ricky but Rick when he wants to impress Part 2
His name was Ricky but Rick when he wanted to impress. But Rick was a lie and when he said Rick it was like watching someone speed by a cop and not get pulled over. Ricky told me at one point, we were smoking in the outer-basement of my grow-up-home and the smoke was hardly being inhaled but rather was exhaled in such a thick puff of white smoke that you might have thought it was really some sort of cloud or exhaust or both, that she was like Rome, that all thoughts led to her. I believed him. We tried to do smoke rings and smashed some of the windows my father had stored with stones that were damp and slippery from moss. We ashed into the mud floor, stepping on the squishy coalescence of dirt and water and shit and old lawn-mower oil and gasoline and the slightest hint of nucleotides not yet decomposed from bloody scrapped knees over a decade old. Mixing the ash in was more of an exercise to test fate as some areas sunk almost to one’s teenage-knee and even more than that it was to prove to ourselves that we still had something to add to the earth beneath our feet. That even as I looked at the friend with whom I directed my hatred of life’s missed expectations, but not even expectations because expectations require some basis of comparison, something better out there, and these expectations on life, with no other to compare, is the futile exercise that really is reserved for mankind and has resulted in the consumption of billions of antidepressant and antipsychotic pharmalogical concoctions that are really designed to bring us closer in being to the animals around whom we are so proud to own and hunt and eat.
And when Ricky told me that his girlfriend was like Rome I knew that he wasn’t telling me that he loved her but he was telling me that his love loved her and the rest of him, the part that could resist, was left cold, damp, and reminiscent of past pains much like the dirt beneath us. I think that was one of the few times I ever truly connected with him. But the connection was not a temporal one, but rather emerged as I grew into adulthood and found a Rome of my own. At the time, I dismissed his comment as nonsense and tried to show him my ability to create rings of smoke with the exhaust from my lips. I never did get a ring but then again I wasn’t really trying to make smoke rings. I was trying to tell Ricky that I didn’t give a shit.
That was the day that I grew up. Because growing up is as much a solo effort as any other form of communication. It’s not the things we feel nor is it the things we experience and learn and develop and build and progress and collect that defines the point at which we grow up but rather it is the perception in the eyes of others that we have progressed into a being of our own desires and volition. It is when our parents or our guardians or our brethren or even our lovers realize that despite every intention and effort, they will never be able to make another single decision for us. And it was when my father found us underneath that barn, in a basement that wasn’t actually an enclosure but the space beneath the floorboards, and it was when he saw a cigarette between my lips and smoke that was too thick to have been inhaled, that was when I became an adult. And that part of us that is left behind, that child in me, the one that owned those scrapped knees and owned the creativity and spontaneity and the desire to experience the world and most importantly, the part of me that could actually belief, mixed into the mud, the final thing I had to offer that earth. Ricky was there, still a child, still holding so many of the things that I had just felt depart, and I hated him even more. And as an adult, I owned my first fantasy of killing a human being.
I remember what he said to me after that. As we walked down a dirt road behind my grow-up-house and I felt anxious and exposed, felt like an adult, he didn’t say much, but he simply said,
“Shit happens man.” Because of that single sentence I owe to Ricky some of the closest triumphs of resiliency and brute advancement through pain and fear and hopelessness that I have acquired during my lifetime. But at the time that sentence only reminded me of how much a child Ricky had remained. It had the strength, the pithy, and the truth that only can come from the mouth of the innocent and inexperienced.
When he turned thirteen, Ricky had a small birthday party at his second grow-up-home. Mostly, I remember the smell of perfume emanating from his plastic mother and the smell of potpourri emanating from the plastic interior of their plastic house. I hated those smells. I have smelled that perfume once before on the woman that was to be my Rome and it was the single reason that relationship ended. Apart from the smells, and the reflective, thick, hardened makeup that coated his mother’s skin, the only thing that remains from Ricky’s birthday party was something he told me in his basement, his enclosed basement, as our peers slept. It was before I became an adult, before he had given me words of wisdom that would carry me through most of life’s challenges.
Ricky told me about his real father, the one that spit genes and contribute to some of his shitty qualities. Because the man sleeping in his mother’s bed upstairs, the cop who threatened to handcuff him to a tree in the rain one afternoon when we were being too loud, was his second father. His real father, the one who probably taught him that “shit happens” had died when Ricky was only six. And Ricky told me about the day his real father, the alcoholic who used to both cry and shout and thrash and embrace and love all at the same time, died because Ricky had the fortune, the permission from God, to watch it happen. Ricky gained an insight that only few will ever bear witness to and was able to achieve it when his slate was still relatively clean and that insight could take up as much space as possible, before it had been filled with the garbage we learn in classrooms or the shit and lies our parents tell us to help us fall asleep on nights that thunder shook the house so violently that it jarred the coiling inside some of the house’s lightbulbs, giving a sudden darkness to only certain portions of the house, almost as though the house had taken become more human, bearing two indecisive voices instead of one coherent thought.
Ricky’s father was clearing some thick trees from the backyard of his first grow-up-house and was too proud and drunk to pay for anyone to take care of a man’s home. And he was too proud and drunk to think about it because his wife had offered some suggestions and he left the house in a grunt of independence and embarrassment that it wasn’t immediately recognized he could do a man’s job and take care of a man’s house on his own. He cut too far into the first trunk. He made a wedge and the wedge was good but it went just a millimeter too far and when Ricky’s dad began on another portion of the tree the trunk began to snap and Ricky said that at first his father just stood there. And when his father turned to Ricky he looked afraid at first, but when their eyes met he looked determined and he looked angry and he smiled the smile of love between a man and his father. And as Ricky’s father ran towards him, away from the screaming trunk, loving his son for the first time in his life, the tree caught up to him and crushed the man beneath. Ricky said that the man tried to get up, almost as though he were doing a pushup, actually lifting the entire tree a foot off the ground, before relinquishing his right to breath and to change.
