Character test

Warning: not suitable for All audiences

A. Blinken My good wife has decided to have a party. I have a long honeydo list, but I don’t mind, I will do anything she asks, and I’ll have a good time at the party even though several relatives are coming, and in return, I get to invite Andy Dass. Everybody knows Andy. I use their reaction to him as a kind of character test, since Andy is a character himself and there is no way not to react to him. A person’s reaction to Andy is a measure of their self-confidence, because once you get past his idiosyncrasies, he’s a great guy. He’s sixty, medium build and height, with a full head of short but unruly salt and pepper hair. His voice is rather low and always loud and he waves and swings his arms when he talks. It isn’t unusual to see him at a party clearing a six-foot circle around himself as he talks and talks, waving fiery joints, swirling whiskeys or decomposing chicken wings. He’s probably the happiest guy I know, and I think it is because he is completely oblivious to the judgement of others. Like Granny Wise, he really, truly doesn’t give a crap what you think of him, and if he likes you, your disdain or avoidance are inconsequential, he’ll still shout your name from across the street and whack you on the back while delivering some mildly insulting but still cheery greeting. Andy hasn’t always been happy, though. One night, ten years ago, in a long, mescaline-induced narrative, Andy told me of his early struggles with being Andy. For the first forty years of his life Andy tried God Awful hard to fit in and win the approval of others. He was not popular in school, nor successful at work, nor skilled with women. It isn’t that he was dishonest or stupid, the opposite is true. But, he just has the unfortunate gift of making odd remarks; and not simply odd, but awkwardly odd, virtually anywhere, anytime. So, for much of his life he struggled with his gift, and at 40 he decided, to hell with living. He had: a couple of failed marriages; a kid who denied he was her dad; two international corporations that wouldn’t hire him or let anyone else profitable hire him; a state he couldn’t return to because of an outstanding contempt of court warrant (it happened during the initial hearing; the original charges were dropped), and basically no hope of anything more than a miserable and marginal existence. His then marginal existence was working as a statistician in an insurance actuarial company in Chicago. It paid enough to have a studio apartment, a newish but low-end two-door subcompact, and cable TV. Most of the people he worked with were young and headed up, only he and a few others were stagnated, waiting for death or retirement. One day Andy was sitting at his desk, tapping on a computer and daydreaming about death, when a young woman put her things on the desk next to him. She was freshly 22. He told me, "her hair was auburn and so thick she couldn’t comb it, she just captured it in a bunch where it sprung from her head like a fountain." Her face was a long oval, her eyes large and hazel, her nose rather thin but her lips were full and she wore cherry lipstick. Her pink sweater showed a tight black bra struggling with firm young breasts, and her black and pink skirt stopped just above two round, perfect knees. He said his heart raced when he saw her, his hands shook, his mouth was dry. He told me "I hadn’t had a daytime spontaneous erection in years, but suddenly my johnson was so hard it ached, I had to lower my office chair to keep it from thumping the desk." He said, "she put her coat up and the sweater lifted, showing just for an instant her busy navel and a soft, small roll of fat. She leaned over her chair to put her purse behind the desk, and the skirt pulled tight over her pumpkin and I let out a moan so loud it caused her to turn around. ‘You OK?’ I told her, ‘I thought I dumped a load of data, but I was backed up.’ I realized my puppy nose was a little runny, and no doubt there was a shot spot on my beige polyester pants, so I gritted my teeth and spilled hot coffee in my lap. The heat was just too much, and I had to spill some yogurt, too." The way he explained it, he was smitten, love at first sight. Andy said that for the next two weeks it was agony to come to work. Perfume wasn’t allowed in the office, but she wore tangerine body splash and ginger skin softener and lavender conditioner and other lightly scented feminine unguents, and one day he went into a department store and sniffed up and down the ladies’ aisle, until he found a combination of scents that closely matched the air about her, and he took them home and applied them to his bed, and for awhile, it was heaven, but eventually he realized one essential scent was missing, her scent. She often wore a red sweater with a knitted pink kitten over one breast. He searched through stores and catalogs and eventually found one in a thrift shop. He lightly applied the scents to it, and brought it to work and stashed it in his file cabinet. The next morning she wore the sweater, and mid morning threw it over her chair and went on break. He traded sweaters, but could feel the heat in the bag in his desk drawer and went home sick at noon to complete his olfactory replication of her. All this time, he hardly spoke to her, because she didn’t invite him. She never said good morning to him, never addressed him by name, and when she did speak to him, she didn’t look at him. He bought her a small bunch of flowers one day on the way to work, but couldn’t give them to her, so he put them in a glass on his desk; she never mentioned them. He heard her talking with other people and she sounded happy and smart, and she had a girlfriend who called, and she complained mildly about the common things of life but was mostly happy. One day, coming back to his desk he overheard her say, "the old guy who sits at the other desk" and he realized she meant him. After just a few weeks he heard she was getting promoted; he was grief stricken. He told me that he realized if he let her go without doing something that he’d never have the courage to do anything again. She was leaving his life to another floor forever, so he finally said, "could I buy you coffee." She replied, "why?" He said, "because we’ve been office mates all this time and now you’re leaving and I’d like to have said something human to you before you go." She said, "you’re old and boring. Don’t you have a wife or anything?" He said, "no, only a collection aging of ex-wives." She said, "we have nothing in common," and he told me he said, "that’s not true, we both think you’re the hottest, sweetest tart in ten states." She said, "I’m broke and my roommate has a new boyfriend. Invite me to dinner at your house. I like Chinese. Don’t expect anything." He rushed home, cleaned house, ordered Chinese food and bought two bottles of sake. She showed up an hour late but with drugs, ecstasy and cocaine. "We did the coke with dinner, and had the X for dessert. I ravaged her for nearly two minutes, after which she took her panties off, pulled off her hair band and brought me back from the dead. I was out of shape and for awhile I had to catch my breath while she did all the moving. I honestly thought I might have a heart attack, and I was good with that. Let them find me with drugs in my system, stinking of kitty, my sausage crusting to my eggs and a grin from ear to ear. It’s still how I’d like to go." Of course, he woke up the next morning and she was gone. She took the leftover pork fried rice and left him a note: "Thanks, Andy, it was nice. We’ll never do it again, no matter how hard you beg, so just remember it." He said he didn’t go in to work, instead, in the classic style of burning bridges, he called in and quit and told them to pile all his files and his coffee cup and personal radio on the desk and set fire to it. He told me: "I had been in a kind of fugue state, life had an unreal quality for me. I knew I had been going about things the wrong way in my life, as though I were asleep, aware I was dreaming, but unable to shake myself awake. I had accepted what society had given me, and it wasn’t nearly enough, I was dying from it, already almost unconscious. I knew I couldn’t go back to my old life, so I put most of my stuff in storage, took the red sweater and the sake bottle with her lipstick on it and a few other things and I got in my crappy car and drove. One of my first jobs was loading sacks of cement on to a boxcar; I knew I was going to die of a stroke, but I didn’t. The next day I was sore all over and couldn’t move, I drove all-day and only got out to pee, it hurt so much. I worked everywhere, across the states. In the South I worked in a pine mill for a week and a casino for a week; New England I sat for hours mending lobster traps until my hands cramped and worked in a bakery making pies from fruit glop; Nebraska, I drove in the swelter of a tractor with six huge wheels, pulling a disk as wide as football field and leaving a dust cloud five hundred acres across that still hung in the setting sun when I knocked off. In Idaho I worked timber and logs, and ran green chain and broke my wrist in four places, so they moved me to running a scrap chipper which I liked, but a lot of very uptight, I still say latent homosexual, guys were waiting for my wrist to heal, so I had to leave before the bandages came off. Sometimes I would wash dishes or move boxes of cigarettes and whisky at night. I met a lot of displaced, damaged people, and had the hot and desperate sex of the lonely. None were young or beautiful except a Puerto Rican boy I’d picked nuts with deep down South. I also did drugs: powders, pills and pastes; sometimes I had no idea what they were. An Incan boy about sixteen handed me a wad of green mash one night at a party in a drifter camp down by the American River, I never did figure out what that was, looked like pigeon crap and burned my mouth like dry ice, and I saw my dead wife; scared the crap out of me until I realized none of my wives are dead, that wasn’t my wife, she had the wrong vision. Working and living with the desperate of the world teaches you what is real and what is bullshit. After two years, I was a new man, but still turning 42." Then, fate turned her golden smile on him. He was driving his crappy car, which now smoked and had only one working brake light, to Lake Tahoe when he passed a broken down silver BMW and about half a mile further, a walking guy in nice clothes carrying a brief case. He said, "I pulled over and said, ‘hey, want a ride’ and I could see he didn’t, but he had no choice. He said, ‘you aren’t a mass murderer are you?’ I said, ‘no, nor a sodomite. You don’t happen to have cocaine in that brief case, do you?’ He said, ‘I’ll take a ride to North Lake.’ He did have cocaine, a lot of really nice cocaine. He said, ‘this radio work?’ He turned it on to a talk show. I won’t tell you who it was, because I don’t want to give the old bastard any publicity. I said, ‘this guy is a dope, I could do better drunk with a sheep on my lap.’ He said, ‘you think so, because I’m his agent, and I think he’s burning out.’ We talked for awhile, and instead of having me drop him off, he has me come up to his room in the casino there. He bought me some new clothes and we went to dinner and much later that night he entertained some people, and he introduced me as his newest client, a writer. Two weeks later I had signed for eighty grand, and I’ve never looked back." He told me, "that one night of near-death sex and mind altering drugs had freed me, I knew if I wanted anything good, I’d get it myself, under my own terms. If society doesn’t give you a decent place, why the hell should you change who you are, you don’t owe the greater world anything. I got lucky, but I’ll tell you this, I would have continued to drive around the country doing shit work to live on my terms. Maybe I’d have gone aboard ships as a hand and traveled the seas, but whatever, I’d have stayed me. A deck hand would be nice. By now I’d have graduated to a nice job amidships where the sea isn’t so rough. A swab with a mop on a lunging ship, month after month with mates, men and boys, who knows who I’d be now." He didn’t though, instead he moved up to the mountains among us common cousins, where he sits in his cabin writing, sending his work with the click of a mouse to make ten thousand bucks more. You’ve doubtless seen his work in sitcoms, college beer movies, and late night television monologues. Every six weeks or so he goes somewhere to party, could be Hawaii, could be Havana. He goes to meet people, to get loaded on the kind of drugs only the wealthy have, and enjoy women much too young and far too pretty for him. He meets a lot of great people, but he’s made it clear he still prefers one of our barbecue and beer nights best. "The pressure’s off at your place, know what I mean? I can relax, be myself, just plain old Andy." I hope he’ll come to the party; if so I’ll record it and report back later.