The Last Time I Saw Richard--Chapter 1.
He opened the door and enveloped me in a gigantic bear hug. “Thanks for coming, man. I wasn’t sure you were going to.”
“Please. You should know me better.” I broke the embrace and looked at him. “You’re my bro. Any time you call me, I’m there—what the fuck.”
It was the first time I’d been to his apartment in two years. It was the first time I’d seen Richard or even spoken to him in two years. Richard was like that. He was one of those friends you’ve known forever and see never. He was the type who invariably dropped into your life for a period of a couple of weeks, wound your shit up like a bunch of rubber bands, and left you at the end feeling half melted and limp, like a Dali clockface. Richard was just like New York: always moving, always doing things, always fun, always exhausting … and almost always frustrating. Most frustrating was how he could disappear for weeks or months (or years) at a time, and then show up again and completely upend my life—and at the end, when I was exhausted and half-crazy and nursing the world’s worst hangover and wondering if my friends or my girlfriend or my boss would ever speak to me again, he would just vanish without so much as a by-your-leave. And somehow, he always made me grateful for having been put through hell.
This time was no different, I’d thought. My cell phone had gone off in the men’s room at work at three Friday afternoon and there he was, the guy who would have been Dean Moriarty if Kerouac hadn’t already written him, asking if I could come over to his place because he wanted to talk and maybe go have a drink or two. I told him I had my hands full just at the moment (which elicited a snort from the stall next to mine), but I’d be happy to head uptown that night for a visit. Richard thanked me twice—and I heard the uncommon gratitude in his voice but dismissed it, figuring he was probably just hard up for a drinking buddy this weekend. It was mid-June, and everyone I knew in Manhattan was off somewhere on vacation, so it didn’t surprise me.
What did surprise me was getting my first good sight of Richard once I broke his bear hug. He was—damn, “a mess” doesn’t start to describe it. “Wreck” comes closer, if by “wreck” you meant unshowered, unshaven, disheveled, ragged, bruised, and just plain ripped to shit. His brown hair, which I’d never seen unkempt, was wild and stuck out at odd angles; I wondered when he’d washed it last, and noticed that he was starting to really go gray at the temples. There was more gray in his beard, which from the look of it had gone several months without being trimmed. He wore torn, stained jeans and a CBGB/OMFUG t-shirt that had seen better days—probably around the time CBGB had first opened its doors. The poor bastard looked like he’d received a makeover from an irony-crazed hipster in Williamsburg.
Richard’s apartment made his appearance look almost reasonable. For most of ten years I had coveted his Upper East Side digs with the Central Park view—all the while wondering nervously about what he did for the money to keep the place. But now … have you ever seen one of those news stories about the crazy cat ladies, where they take the camera into the house and it’s all full of garbage and filth and shit, and you just know it smells like a lion house crossed with an ape house crossed with a toxic waste dump site in there? Yeah, that minus the umpty-zillion cats was Richard’s apartment. There were food containers all over the place, most of them full of half-eaten stuff that was now becoming an experiment in recombinant DNA. I could smell the rot from here. The couch had been upended, the cushions shredded and strewn about the room. Coffee cups and glasses, some of them broken, littered the floor. There were bloody footprints on the carpet. And in a bizarre touch, Richard had nailed his bedsheets over the windows, and drawn primitive shapes all over them with a laundry marker.
“What the fuck,” I said again.
Richard followed my gaze to the windows.
“Protection,” he said.
That took a minute to sink in. “Dude, from what? You’re on the nineteenth floor.”
“I’ll tell you about it over a drink. Come on, let’s go.”
He reached past me to pull the door open wider, meaning I guess to go out and drag me after him—and the smell of him hit me. I think the only reason it hadn’t up to that time was because the smell of his living room was so overwhelming. But Richard—Christ, Richard smelled like a shit-and-rancid-tomato sandwich. I actually reeled back from him as I grabbed his arm.
“No. No sir. Not like that you’re not. Go take a shower, man. I’ll still be here when you get back.”
He shook his head. “Can’t. That’s how they get you, they find you by your smell.”
“If that’s the case, then they can find you from fucking Jersey, dude. Go. Shower. Now. Or you get no drinks with me. I don’t care if you wanna look like a refugee from Quest for Fire, but we’ll never get into a bar if you smell like one.”
Richard looked suspiciously at me, and I wondered how I had gotten dragged into more of his crazy shit. Oh yeah; I answered my phone. Right.
“I’m serious,” I said.
He looked down—and he was so much like a little boy who didn’t want to take his bath I almost laughed.
“Okay, fine,” he said. “But I’m not wearing any cologne. No cologne! None!”
“I never said you had to wear any,” I replied, raising my hands.
“Goddamn cologne started it, fucking flowers and shit,” he muttered, turning away. He disappeared around the corner into the hallway, and I heard the bathroom door slam shut.
“What. The. Fuck,” I said.
