I've been swearing to myself quietly in densely crowded places. Maybe I'm not getting enough of the right kind of sleep. I say the right kind because I'm almost rocking Hunter S Thompson vampire hours. It's mostly doing the the freelance jig, so I'm up till 4 or 5am coloring in a race car. It's an exercise in delirium and a subtle feeling of nostalgia because almost twenty years ago I was doing a similar things with construction paper and cardboard. It was more fun then.
I was thinking the other day about my friend Ricky, who I grew up with. He was a year or two older and imparted to me the wisdom of collecting all the Power Ranger I could find in our dingy, boxy Kmart for the riches they would incur later. By the time I was in high school he spent his afternoons swimming through his passel of boxed toys.
Once his mom threw me out of her house for staring blankly down at her huge breasts that spilled out of her crudely modified Looney Tunes t-shirt. They where unnaturally white and I wondered how such a small woman, she technically was a midget, managed them . Ricky never mentioned it.
Years later I ran into him. He had died his red hair black. His conversion to goth was at least six years to late. Nothing worse than a lonely goth kid. I guess they're all lonely.
He had found his mothers body laying in her cramped tile bathroom.
As it turns out her breasts were, in fact, unnatural. Beer warped many of the musty, ground-up townies in my neighborhood, and she was no exception.
I had been away for five years. I had disappeared to a small reform school in the woods. It had changed me in a way that I was sure would render me unrecognizable to anyone that had know me before. He knew me. Ricky addressed me in an off handed, almost bored manner.
One summer we'd mad up an elaborate handshake that involved pistol and exploding rocket pantomimes and a few homages to Bruce Lee ( The greatest Martial Arts Master in the universe.), but we'd forgotten it. He was telling me all about this great Wolverine drawing he did after studying a wizard guide all night, and how he sold a bunch of Transformers, and about his mother, and his job at the gas station. He talked about his life in a detached monologue as if he where reciting a tv episode or blithe, but funny joke he had heard at the bowling alley. There was a sense that he was leaving out all the most captivating parts without realizing it.
I was thinking about this because Ricky, above all else, shared my passion for drawing comics and delving into our own personal fantasies.
He's still in his, and I am not.
