Masquerade

If I recall correctly, warm nights were the nights of September 2002. I met Michael Singer in one of those even warmer September mornings. He was one of the first people to start up a dialogue with me and he did so during our world cultures class. We walked around the neighborhood. I was studying him. He had dyed black hair, which made his face glow, like a ghostly, pale, white shade. He wore baggy pants and he listened to hip hop. He suffered from an adolescent mind set. He was trendy and he always yearned to belong and be accepted but he never has been and never will be. I could tell this just from watching him in class. He would talk to a lot of people, but his place was with none. His words were foreign to my ears. He spoke frantically, like his body language. His body language and his words seemed to correlate and play off of each other. He would provide visual examples to all his stories in such a passionate manner; he was a born story teller. Early on I could detect that he was a bad case of ADHD. He told stories that seemed surreal but were all bent and twisted until their truths were lost and their authenticity greater. It was a Friday afternoon and I did not know where the evening clouds were leading me to. That night Mike introduced me to a few of his friends. Shane, who is still one of my best friends, who at the time was still a stern faced high school junior. He had no posture and he spoke with a low voice, sometimes mumbling. I couldn’t understand a word that he spoke. I couldn’t understand anything anyone spoke. I had only been living in an English speaking nation for about a month and a half up to then. Shane had long brown hair, and he listened to death metal. He was the first person I ever met that knew who “Cannibal Corpse” is. Naturally we got along. Bob, Shane’s cousin, is an asshole. He’s one of those funny assholes that you only meet once in a life time. After hearing that I never had a Pepsi or even knew what Mountain Dew was prior to that same day he kept asking me if I knew all these fake company names, just to be a prick. “Banana Peels?” he said, “You know Banana Peels?” What a douche bag. The third person there was Chico. He said he was from Puerto Rico and he had a heavy speech impediment. He was short, suspicious, and cross eyed. He wasn’t from Puerto Rico and his name wasn’t Chico. Later on in the night he suggested we go rob people. Last time I saw him, as far as I can remember, he had become a fundamentalist Muslim. From what I heard he’s originally from Iraq and his real name is Hussein Abdullah. That’s all the information I have on Chico. We all ended up in Mike’s house that night. I’ll never forget that night. His house looked old and tired, if that’s possible. There were no plants or anything growing in the front yard, only things decomposing, only crummy bushes and dead grass, all covered with dog turds. The brown brick his house was built with reminded me of London Industrial Worker slums in the 1850’s. Oliver Twist associations arose. I entered through the screen door to a cloud of dense cigarette smoke and a frantic barking little half breed brittany spaniel. I still think “Coco” is addicted to cigarettes. Coco has been a second-hand smoker for so long I used to joke about how if you would let her out for a long enough time she would eventually suffocate on the fresh air of the outdoors. The living room had two big, dark blue comfortable couch-chairs, which were separated in between them by a wooden stool that graced an old lamp on its surface. The house was lit but the light felt dim and fading, it still does. On the shelf situated above the fire place there was a picture of a small blonde child, smiling. It was mike, and in the picture he was standing in front of the stool I had just passed by. The blue chairs were in the picture, in the exact same place, so was the lamp that sat upon the stool. The only thing that had apparently changed from 1989, the year the picture was taken, to 2002 had been Mike. He grew since the picture was taken, physically at least, and he stopped smiling. Everything else had remained the same as it was in 1989. It hasn’t changed since 2002 either, it hasn’t moved for the past 17 years as far as I know. The living room and what seemed to be the dining room shared a connected entry way. In that room, there was a long table filled with crap, newspapers, an electronic dancing hamster, lighters, cigarettes, and lastly, on the end of one corner, there was Tim. Mikes mom was sitting in the corner as well. They were both watching TV and smoking. She greeted me. They all called me “Tom” even though I introduced myself as Tommy. Tim didn’t say anything, he just sat there staring at the TV set in his white beater, smoking and suppressing past memories. Or at least that’s what I like to imagine he was doing. Mike’s mom, Marianne (I didn’t know her name at the time), looked at least 60. She was 49. She had long white hair, crooked teeth, and her flesh hung off of her long and tired face, as if it had been trying to escape the skeleton it had been attached to but finally decided to give up and just remain hanging, in despair. Alcohol and stress had ruined her life. Tim looked too old to be Mike’s father. He had a round and relatively flat face, covered with coarse white hairs. He looked at least 60 as well, I later learned that he is a Vietnam vet. That would easily make him anywhere from his mid 50s to early 70s. Tim is an enigma. I didn’t know these things when I first saw him. I didn’t know his name. I still don’t know what he is doing there. Why he sits there all the time. What is it that he conjures up in his memories and what makes him look like the internally scarred man he seems to be? I think he suffers from battle scars, the kind of scars that leave you traumatized, the kind of scars that are not anywhere to be found on the flesh save only for the eyes. The things his eyes say. The eyes reflect his soul, where the wounds lie. Every time I would come to Mike’s house, he would be there, sitting in the same spot, doing the same thing he did the first time I saw him. He seemed more like furniture then a human being back then. Tim is like the two dark blue couch chairs, he too has remained in the same place since 1989, and probably far earlier then that. Tim, however, is not a piece of furniture. The furniture is not an enigma to me, Tim is. Tim’s an enigma because he is “Tim”, because he is a human being that possesses a name, and subsequently, an identity and thus a story. This is how a person whom I’ve never spoken to beyond the exchange of a 5 word generic question followed by a 2 word generic reply can bring me to writing a 2 page story about a piece of an unknown humanity. Now when I come to visit I at least say “Hey, Tim” when I see him. He replies with a “How are you doin’, Tom?” not expecting an answer from me of any sort. Me, I never expect to answer in the first place, because after all how do you ever expect to reply to a ghost?