Ricky but Rick when he wants to Impress Part 3
Ricky, Ricky, Ricky, poor Ricky, I thought of you today Ricky. When I looked in her eyes, I thought of you Ricky because there was something in her eyes that terrified me Ricky. I wanted to scream but it wasn’t really a scream like a vocal shout that’s an affront to every vibrational molecule but it was a howl but not even a howl because it wasn’t meant to be heard and it wasn’t at something or about something or from something but it woke up everything inside of me and all that noise, all that noise Ricky, I just couldn’t get any peace. And I finally understood what you meant Ricky, when you told me that nothing is love. That fate is love. And when I looked at the complex interplay of black, blue, green, and brown that speckled a strangely incapacitating moat surrounding a hole that lead to some place where if only I could reach, touch, just fucking grasp, and through tactile stimulation to understand just slightly I might be able to sleep at night, she looked up at the sky. And when she looked at the clouds, and maybe even directly into the sunlight, that’s when I understood what you meant because I was back to nothing and knew then that what I had seen, staring at me in those pearls that simultaneously robbed all the light and emitted the most brilliant shine as though the stars in the sky were not gaseous balls but actually pearls on similar beauties out some place far in the universe, perhaps, looking at a similar me and perhaps that similar me may have been better prepared. And when she looked at the clouds she must have seen something that was physical, a bird perhaps, because when she looked back at me I could see that what you experienced every waking day of your life, Ricky, I would only experience for that moment.
I did love her Ricky. But I loved what everyone else told me to love because Ricky, if I had been able to love what you told me to love, Ricky, I don’t think I would have survived longer than that moment under the sun and clouds and birds. I thought of what you said last night, as her head hit my pillow, because her smile really was Rome. Arms on both sides of her face, I kissed her and I thought of what you said because I wanted so much to be anywhere but approaching that beautiful face. Because love is fate, Ricky, you were right about that. And fate rules free will and fate means that your ego is meaningless, just a wisp of stench in a bed of flowers, almost perceivable but really not even worth mentioning. And when we fucked, I knew that if I opened my eyes I would lose myself, or I thought I’d lose myself, what I was gambling was really my ego and myself was so much more but Ricky, I wish you had stuck around just a little bit longer, because I didn’t realize that anything was underneath that ego. When we fucked, I thought of someone else. I thought of the girl who worked down the hall. I thought of a porcelain woman with eyes that were really just eyes and a body that was formed in some mold of pretense and expectation and rigorous discipline or self-loathing or simply obedience.
I hate you Ricky because I married her. And when I married her, and when I cheated, and when I forgot that moment her eyes pried my fucking egotistical but protective placenta open, making me feel like I was somehow serving my purpose, telling me that I was wrong to think I would escape this, to think I could live my years in the shallow promise of chores and recreation, I hated you Ricky. Throughout the years that she was my wife, when I constructed my ego around strange beds and public bathrooms and the backseat strange cars, I felt okay, Ricky, I felt okay. And fuck you Ricky, okay is good enough. Thank god for that perfume. Thank god.
There have been times, in shopping malls, on airplanes, even inside a church one evening that was utterly identical to the one before except I couldn’t sleep because of something he told me,
“Fate is a funny thing, sometimes it takes only a second, sometimes it takes twenty-seven years, but eventually, when it wears you out, fate will grasp your arm and hand you something that, even in the thousands upon thousands of pages you’ve ever written, is way beyond anything you’ve had the creativity, imagination, or experience to put into words.” I knew that Ricky was somewhere close by.
We weren’t friends because of his sage-like qualities. We weren’t friends because he was funny or because he was fascinating or because he was adventurous or because of any single redeeming quality that might constitute an interest from one person to the other. We were friends because we were in the same school and we were the same age and it was a comfortable childhood relationship. We were friends because, when you’re not yet a teenage boy and testosterone hasn’t compromised your ability to see another male as an equal and you can walk beside him in patience and in tolerance, you don’t really need to develop a friendship based on anything but convenience. The safety and protection and trust that comes from those lasting relationships we carry are unnecessary. Because they are hard. Because they are work. Ricky wasn’t my friend. He wasn’t my companion. He was my bridge.
Ricky and I talked about fate a lot the last few years I knew him. He talked about the day he met his girlfriend, how the Marlboro cigarette just barely removed from gravity by the absolute hair-tip of her lips, sagged in a way that made Ricky feel immediately at home, not at home but emigrated, transplanted, not moved, but relocated to a new place in his life, a new home. A lock of her hair breezed dangerously close to the embers but the chilly October air prevented any chance of physical ignition. But because of the warm-blooded nature of the Homosapien, even the frosted stillness of late February can’t cool the blood of a human being enough to prevent an emotional ignition, one that’s been planned, one that’s taken your free will and has weighted it with ideas and opportunities and needs and desires and pains and dreams and wishes that, despite your personality and despite your own spirit and desire to be someone you are not, you’ve been unknowingly directed to that very point in space and time that a cigarette, sagging, almost magically held to lips by the adhesiveness of dry saliva and incredibly subtle muscular contraction, can show without, instill the knowledge deep into your bones, that you are not alone, that you were meant to be a part of something incredible, something beautiful, something you didn’t ask for but didn’t need to because it was understood at the moment of conception.
Without thinking, because, really, the entire concept of problem solving and decision manipulation and consideration was antediluvian, Ricky knocked the cigarette from Dora’s (actually Musidora but her real name was ever only written in two places: her birth certificate and her death certificate) lips, arcing it obtusely into a barely-thawed puddle of salt and mud. And like Ricky, like the person who embodied fate, who showed me things but only at glances that gave me some idea of truth without revealing it to me, without spoiling it, without taking away the surprises of life, he produced the Marlboros from his tattered denim pocket, pushed the lid with his thumb, and replaced Dora’s cigarette with one of his own. And her eyes never left his comfortable but unconsciously filthy face as she cupped the wind around the tiny flame that was ignited not by the flint and steel of Ricky’s lighter but rather by the endothermia of frisson.
