Day 9: Two years ago on my 34th birthday
I purloined my mom’s car and drove with my best friend Dave Hale to see our other
best friend dapper-as-hell Dave Thompson and his boyfriend of (shit) 10 years now cool-as-hell Matthew
Wilson. Dave Thompson has always been a mentor, an older brother, a cultural savant
and just a dear friend. We used to host bacchanalian wine dinners mingling with
the P-town noveau riche, the hoity-toity of haute couture. Our lifestyle was a
worship of aesthetic decadence. We went out attired in Armani and Ferragamo
partying til eight in the morning. We drove around with his top down on his BMW
drinking ‘Roady Soadies’. He was a self-confessed formidable ‘Fine-dining fag’.
Our burgundy-coated apartment had a
humidor and a wine library and a bar and cool art adorned on the walls. We
lived in an apartment in an 1855 mansion on High Street which to me will always be the coolest house in Peoria. We had a turret that looked over downtown, a
couch we both had sex on with our respective partners, the pulsing neon-panorama
screeching behind us, a marble headed statue of Caligula in the window. We both had a fetish for single malt scotches.
Silos of Balvenie and Laphroaig and Glenlivet and (shit) Oban stowed in oak
casks since before I hit puberty aligned the top of our bar like athletes at
the outset of a swim competition ready to dive into the shallow end of the
kiddie pools of our liver. Most nights we would stay out on the deck smoking
cigars listening to Opera. Listening to the dulcet mezzos of Cecelia Bartoli
and Joan Sutherland scale the rungs of musical clefs, crescendo in dynamics and
crash in applause, the sun, poking stipples of spring light behind the bushy
bad 80’s permy limbs of the Burr oak tree with a plaque stating that the tree
was present during the Revolutionary era.
It was crazy times. I arrived back to Peoria after
transferring to Illinois State from
Bradley (I transferred, but not my credits, I lost a year). I spent all day in
lurking outside the office David Foster Wallace even though he was on
sabbatical that semester. I spent all night partying and drinking, my room
being the official smoking deck on Manchester sixteen. Since, in my arrogance I
felt I was being coerced into taking
classes I already passed I stopped going to class, descended into the catacombs
of skyscrapperesque dorm where I crashed, where the computer lab was located
and just wrote my ass off, pecking into the eggshell white of the page waiting
for a metaphor hatch. A semester later I flunked out of Illinois state with a
beer in one hand and a 300 page manuscript in the other. I had no clue what to
do with my life. My hair had just grown long.
I moved back to Peoria and moved in with Dave. He ran a high-scale Italian restaurant a
couple of hours away and was only home twice a week. I fed his cat. I sat out on our deck chain smoking ONYX
cigars working on my novel which quickly doubled from 300 pages to 600 (the bulk
of which were cut) drinking Amarone at 70 bucks a bottle as if it were tang.
Life was good.
Two years ago
on my birthday when I made my annual drive cross state to visit Dave in Iowa
(he moved shortly after my father passed) I was shocked (well maybe not
shocked) how he had pulled a 180 and was now, along with his life partner, a
devoted Vegan.
Where before we would have gone out and ordered escargot
and sirloins, perusing the wine menu while blathering pedantically about
verticals and vintages now we shopped at organic co-cops and ate at select places
where everything reeked of patchouli. When Dave ordered something his entrée seemed to arrive 15 minutes
later and was covered in what looked like green culled from the He-man slime
era. He looked good. He had lost 20 pounds and at least ten years. He seemed
lighter. He quit smoking. He drank in almost prohibition moderation compared to
the daily decadence that was our life All of a sudden everything was Vegan. Even the
dog food. Even the sugar because he claimed regular sugar somehow used
cattle-extract to whiten the grains.
Everything was fucking Vegan.
Vegan.
***
The first Vegan I knew was named Alexis Pippen and
she was, ebullient. She attended IMSA (Illinois Math and Science Academy) has a
shock of red hair, wore checkered skirts
and socks that stretched to her knees. She was precocious, read the tarot and
had devoured the collective works of Shakespeare by like age six. She went to
Med school and is now a successful doctor. I’ll never forget the summer of ’97
when at the last moment the great Pat Mullowney called and said he was trying
to hit some fireworks. He picked me up along with Alexis right when the
deafening caterwaul of overhead iridescent light scratching chandeliers into
the blackboard of the sky and how we walked down the center of main street,
Peoria at a pause, everyone’s neck tilted, lost in the blinks of the neon
orchestral avalanche exploding above our foreheads.
Later that night we broke into Pat Mullowney’s
father’s liquor cabinet, a bottle of Grand Marnier shuffled between us. Alexis
and I would kiss on the pool table. Later we would go out to (fuck) panache and
Rizzi’s when she would order she made sure that nothing had cheese or meat on
the meal.
That was the end of the date. Alexis went on to
achieve amazing things in the medical field. I continued writing. Continued eating meat.
I swore I would never date a Vegan again.
***
The second vegan I dated was named Hippie-Nikki. We
hooked up one night in late 2004 at a house party off of Bradley avenue. We
made love under an evergreen tree in the front entrance of Bradley park at
three in the morning under the swift banks of the October breeze.. I lost my
wallet and a kid found it and phoned me up the next day. She was a philosophy
major and had dreadlocks and was the
size of a hemp shop fire hydrant. The inimitable Dr. Greene at Bradley
monikered her Daedalus from the Joycean
doppelganger in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Hippie-Nikki 100 percent
blew me off for a year then, out of nowhere showed up and we started hanging
out again. I hired her to work for me at the library and everyone made a big
deal about her dreadlocks for some reason. She started a cool philosophy club
at Bradley. She was Vegan. She seemed bound and determined that I should at
least be open minded to a Vegan lifestyle. When I informed her that everything
is consciousness, everything has a conscious pulse, that the crazy thing about
having a body is that life lives off other life. Hippie-Nikki continued to
inside I tried to be open minded. I told her I was open minded. She made a
Vegan pizza which looked like someone shot a muppet and then slow cooked it for
45-minutes before basting it with extra virgin olive oil. Gradually I grew
impatient. Our dining options were limited at the time to One World (which had
a Vegan menu) and home-vegan cooking. She gave me these packages of Tofu which
seemed to contain more water than a placenta. Finally she started seeing a
philosophy major who also had dreadlocks and whose appetite was more in her
ballpark soybean hotdog area code.
I couldn’t be more relieved.
Again, I vowed that I would never do vegan.
***
After leaving Dave Thompson’s pad in West Des Moines
two years ago Hale and I both fired up a cigar. We had been feasting on nothing
but soy nuggets for the past three days and we wanted meat. We were salivating.
We wanted veins and grease and gravy.
Thus we engaged in one of the most disgusting, ass
scratching heterosexual-American male made meal we could think of at the time.
We dipped into a suburban plaza and stopped at a White
castle, getting a box of fifteen sliders.
We then went across the street and drove through the KFC drive-through
ordering four famous bowls (intrinsically popcorn chicken and potatoes) with
extra cheese plus a side order of gravy. We then got a six-pack of beer and a bottle
of hot sauce and pulled in at a rest stop off of I-80.
As if with alchemical finesse we then placed the
White castle Sliders in with the famous bowl mixed the taupe-colored pottage
together dousing it with suicide red drips of hot sauce.
We then indulged.
“You know what Hale,” I said between artery
thwarting chomps. “I love Thompson to death and would do anything for him but,
honestly, fuck vegans!”
“Yes,” Hale assented before we alighted our beers
and took a gratuitous slurp.
Fuck Vegans indeed.
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