5th
Ricky but Rick when he wants to Impress Part ??
Ricky did a lot of things that didn’t make sense. When we were freshman, he once discarded every bit of perishable and non-perishable food from his house, even going to the lengths of removing all spices, sauces, and even old pretzels and bits of potato chips in and behind the sofas. When I confronted him about it, he told me that he wanted to see what it was like to have every bit of food new, everything unopened and fresh. I asked him what it felt like and he said,
“It felt redundant, entirely redundant.”
Ricky collected baseball cards in middle school and he traded them with a peculaliar and adult-like purposefulness foreign to only the most successful traders and business owners allowing his collection to accumulate a wealth of rare and expensive cards without more than a few dollars from his pockets. It was like the world rested on the shoulders of his card collection. But what didn’t make sense was when he sold them at school. One day, he showed up with a giant box filled with cards that had been carefully sealed inside individual protective containers and he had carefully stenciled a price (he used plastic stencils to write the prices with permanent black marker) onto each card. There was no averaging with those stenciled prices. In fact, I recall one card reading 19 cents while another read 88 dollars and 20.5 cents. I asked him why the half-cent and he explained to me that he had to account for the days already passed in his monthly pricing guide. And for a week Ricky attempted to sell his entire collection of baseball cards. But, at three oclock friday afternoon, after five days of extensive peddling, he hadn’t managed to sell a single card. Ricky could talk you into buying anything. He had jargon you’d never heard before but somehow knew meant something staggering. But when the person would hold the baseball card in one hand and extend the required amount of cash in his other, Ricky would slowly, softly, retake the baseball card, explaining that that was the one card he couldn’t yet part with. It was as if he had no intention of exchanging his baseball cards for money or other goods, but had set out entirely to simply sell his baseball cards. To sell the cards worth half a cent, explaining to the buyer that a physical half of a penny would be required, and getting the buyer to physically cut the penny in half at home, returning the following morning only to find out that the card worth half a cent happened to have significant meaning to Ricky. Or perhaps Ricky set out to deny as many people as possible, to say no as many times as one could hope to say no in one week. Ricky discarded those baseball cards in a recycling bin saturday morning, shaking his head, mumbling about the frugality of his classmates.
But the things that really mattered, to me and to Ricky and to everyone else, involved or not, all made perfect sense. They made sense, at a cost, however. You had to believe they would make sense. You had to exchange that disbelief for the reality, the explanation, Ricky took your doubts and he gave you a reason. Not himself, but rather it was revealed to you.
The same day that Ricky’s girlfriend left him was the day he realized that he loved her. It was also the last day their child survived and it was the last day I ever saw either of them. I remember how cold the August rain was and how it reminded me of a song and some kind of anacronism. I remember walking towards his house and when I was only a block away the majority of his building was abscured by the trash piled out of the corner dumpster. It was soaking and wilted and serene and exhausted and I knew right away that the sofa and the desk and the bureau and clothes and computer and stereo were all Ricky’s. I never rang his doorbell that day. I just stopped walking as the rain weighted a shirt so that it slipped from a lamp and fell to the ground before the pile. It was a shirt that I had given him, or maybe it was a gift from his girlfriend. I couldn’t recall but only knew that it had been a gift.
I didn’t need to be told that Ricky had discarded every bit of personal property himself, while his parents were working, and hadn’t even left a note behind, because to leave a note would mean leaving behind something of his. In fact, despite his best efforts, he still left behind an empty room and if he could have devised a way to discard that, without creating an empty space, or a burnt structure, or even a memory, he would have. Ricky never came home. Because, he was home. The moment that he realized that he truely loved someone, someone whose mistrust stemmed from abandonment bullshit that she didn’t even remember, he realized that, not only to prove his feelings, not only to make room for her, not only to openly admit his feelings, not only to recognize and change and integrate those feelings, but more so because he required it of himself all of his past possessions and achievements were to be abandoned. Because he knew what love was and for those of us not too cold or busy or blind we got a glimpse of what that was and that knowledge prevented any of us from ever ringing his doorbell.
Ricky knew that love was the destination. He knew that everything he had to offer, everything he did for others, everything he gathered from others, were merely footsteps. And everything that Ricky had acquired during the first eighteen years of his life had merely been practice, filler, accumulation, and direction until he could finally find love. It was like an hourglass, coming to a single point in which only a single grain of sand can escape, leaving behind every other grain of sand, emerging from sand, becoming itself before returning to a new pile. One that waited for him and demanded him because if he failed to slip through that passageway then time would fail to continue.
I knew that my friendship and hatred for Ricky was over. And when I saw that shirt hit the soaking grass it finally made sense to me why he had bestowed all this wisdom on everyone around him. Why everything he did had meaning, even the things that didn’t make any sense. It was because he had hardly any time to get it all out before being reborn on the opposite side of the glass. He condensed into fifteen years what takes the average person thirty.
The only thing that remains a mystery is whatever became of Ricky, what the bottom of his hourglass resembled, what colors it was, if it even existed or rather the passageway just lead to a shattered opening and Ricky was lost. Because when he discarded everything, ready to present himself open and willing and honest to the only love of his life, he couldn’t find her. He looked, he called, he asked, he disassociated, but he was unable to find her. But like everything else in his life, her absense never surprised Ricky. It never really surprised any of us. Because really, in bare honesty, Ricky checked every place but where she was, the hospital, no mystery for someone that had found her appointment reminder within the mail. I think he knew she was there. I believe that is why he failed to check. I am certain that he looked not to find her but the same reason he sold those baseball cards. He looked because he owed it to himself, and he owed it to her, and he owed it to everyone else. But, unlike the rest of us, he saw reality and he accepted it. He had no internal debate. He simply was real. He simply thought real. He simply did real. And he knew that she was aborting their child and that she was not going to leave with him and so he looked in every place but where she was.
