Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [54]
Afterward we both climbed into the cabin of his truck. A pickup truck! How completely perfect was that?
Brad explained that he might as well give me a ride back to his apartment since he lived across the street from the bus stop I would be using. No mention was ever made of giving me a ride back to my dorm.
This notable lack of old-world hospitality didn’t prevent me from saying yes to an invitation to come inside and see his work. Sure, I knew I was taking a risk going into the apartment of a stranger, but I was dazzled by the fact that he had an apartment. Everything in it was his. The chairs were his. The food in the refrigerator: his! He paid his own bills. He had his own truck. What didn’t this guy have?
And what an apartment! Although it was only a three-room flat at the back of a multifamily classic Berkeley brown-shingle house, its central room was dominated by a real restaurant counter, purchased at a thrift store, with four red leather stainless steel stools and a Formica top. Whatever Brad lacked in charm, he made up for with his very own real-life version of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks! Take that, Mom and Dad! No more molded plastic dinette sets in my brave new world! Since you saw me a month ago, I have totally changed. Now I live life in the kind of vivid 3D realm neither of you could even imagine, let alone handle.
It only took a couple of minutes inside Brad’s apartment for me to notice an uptick in uncomfortable silences. But more than likely, they were my fault. I was young and inexperienced. And anyway, it made sense that Brad wasn’t verbal. He was an artist. Words were not his thing. I couldn’t wait to see his paintings. His disrespect for the work of others told me that a door was about to be opened and I would inhale the icy clean air of pure insight. Which is why I was so surprised that he had only two paintings to show me. And those paintings were … well, I wasn’t sure what they were. They were kind of hastily executed knockoffs of ancient Near Eastern erotica onto which Brad had collaged a border of glitter, sequins, and plastic doll heads. Now my challenge was figuring out what expression to put on my face as I looked at them, in order to best reflect a sophisticated level of appreciation I didn’t feel.
“They’re supposed to be bad,” Brad explained, when I remained silent. “They’re intentionally bad.”
That caught me off guard. I’d never heard of anyone doing anything like that. But now that he’d said it, I could see how that might be the kind of interesting choice a real artist might make. Still, I didn’t get why he hadn’t done them just a little bit better. Or a whole lot worse. But then again, I was the idiot who didn’t always understand what Bob Dylan was saying.
“Great. Really great.” I smiled and then just kept on nodding.
Looking back, I wonder if there was anything Brad could have done right then to turn me off. If he’d been Jeffrey Dahmer I probably would have rationalized the severed heads and penises in his refrigerator with a simple “Well, they needed refrigeration. Where else was he going to put them?” The truth was, Brad’s indifference and lack of consideration only inspired me.
Even though I’d only been living in Berkeley for a few weeks, I had begun to adjust to perplexing encounters with the opposite sex. First there was the guy who followed me back to my dorm and read me his free-form erotic poetry until I said I had to go inside and do my homework, at which point he got mad and accused me of not listening to my own body. Then there was the guy who came up to me on the steps of Sproul Hall while I was petting a dog. “How come you’ll give all that love to a stray dog but you won’t give me any?” he asked repeatedly, more or less daring me to give the wrong answer. Later, I actually thought about what he’d said because, after all, this was college so it couldn’t be as stupid as it sounded, could it? Finally there was the guy who, perhaps after reading too many fake Penthouse letters supposedly written by