Ricky but Rick when he wants to impress part 4
I only saw Ricky cry once. Perhaps he cried many more times as a young adult and then more as an adult until finally, as an elder man he realized that the vulnerability of tears was unnecessary and damaging. But he cried because he was fat. We sat in his room that stunk of cheap incense and marijuana, listening to undiscovered rock, undiscovered like trash discarded along a forest trail might stay undiscovered. We smoked cloves because they made our lips taste sweet and mixed with lead paint we thought it might get us high. But really it didn’t matter to me what Ricky looked like, as he sobbed. He was ugly. But he wasn’t ugly because of any carbohydrate and fatty acid excess, nor was it due to his thrifty wardrobe. He was ugly because he should never have been. Ricky knew too much, and knowledge is often the greatest of enemies to aesthetics. After he was done, crying, Ricky turned to me and simply asked,
“Do you know how to be happy?” At first I thought it was a rhetorical question. But then I realized that perhaps he was looking for some substantial answer. I felt like smashing his face into the television set. Ricky had a way of innocently reminded you of how little you knew and how little you had control over. So I just shrugged. And of course Ricky already knew. And of course he was right and at the time, it made no sense to me.
“You gotta realize that everything you think you know is dead fucking wrong.” I looked dismissive, perhaps because I didn’t care how to be happy. I was only concerned with feeling good, and I had some ways to do that. Happiness, however, was a goal much like abstinence, reserved for priests and people that have some semblance of connection to a poetic ideal life, but certainly not for people such as myself. I was simply a stimulus-perception-response machine. I was a normal person. I just wanted reward, internal reward, and that could be gotten with things that made sense to me. But for people like Ricky, pleasure was nothing beside the hazy disconnection of happiness. Ricky detected the dismissiveness, the cynicism, the overall patronizing facial expression, and continued,
“You like Jen right?” This was a rhetorical question because there wasn’t a day gone by in the past month that I hadn’t spoken some detail about Jen, something that made her cute, something that made her adorable, an explanation for my feelings, some defense of the fact that I knew there was something real, something worth working for, something worth risking my singular safety for. It was a rhetorical question like breath was a rhetorical action. I took Jen’s virginity that summer and for the first time I replaced virginity with something, something meaningful.
“You think Jen likes you?” I knew what he was saying but I ignored it. Because ignorance is the final resolve of man. I could almost have laughed at the first question. I could almost have dismissed it as nonsense. But this one didn’t make me laugh. I knew that my feelings for Jen were reciprocated but the notion that they were not held some form, some volume, some density.
“Well she doesn’t.” I still wanted to smash Ricky’s face into the cyclopic television set, but this time I wanted to do it out of love.
“You think she does but you’re wrong. You think that you are destined for something but you’re not. You think that you have friends but you don’t. You think there’s a reason everything happens, but there isn’t. You think you know how to read, you don’t. You think your clothes are nice, they aren’t. You think that you’re attractive, you’re not. You think that I like you, I don’t.” I had to interrupt, I was compelled to interrupt, I was driven to defend myself because I thought I deserved a defensive position (which I didn’t),
“First off, I think you’re full of shit. And secondly, if I were to think that way, how could I be happy, I’m happy that Jen likes me. I’m happy that I like Jen. I’m happy that music makes me feel good. If I were to walk around thinking the opposite, then what would be the point of getting out of bed?”
“There wouldn’t be. But, you’re wrong about that too. Happiness is bullshit, they are one in the same. But as long as you ignore bullshit, you’re fucked. You embrace it, you’re life is wicked.”
“Wicked?”
“Yeah, it means intense, to a great degree.”
“Yeah I know what it means why the fuck did you say wicked.”
“Because fuck you.”
