wouldn't you like to be a Pepper too?

Let me tell you about Gene and Randy. They don't know each other, and I'll never introduce them because they're from two separate parts and periods of my life. I don't like to mix people who don't know one another, who don't have a shared context beyond knowing me. My sister and I call this 'sphere mixing.' I'm not a good sphere mixer. It makes me nervous, makes me feel like I have to be the one who smoothes things over and makes sure everybody is having a good time. I can't deal with that pressure. So I'll talk about Gene and Randy separately...

Last Saturday night, I had one of the most enjoyable evenings I've had in a long time. I made plans to have dinner and hang out with Gene. Gene is a writer by trade, and he's a damn good one. He's published several excellent books and he's been a journalist for 25 years. He hails from the Midwest and has the burly build to prove it. He speaks with a Midwestern accent. It's not quite as pronounced as what you hear in Fargo, but it's not far from it. His meals invariably involve meat, cheese, and starch. He drinks a lot of beer. His teams are the Cubs and the Tigers. He has an extra special place in his heart for the MC5, the Stooges, and Funkadelic. He's an authentic Midwesterner. ...Gene's physical largeness is not off putting at all. On those rare occasions when I've had a chance to spend time in the Midwest, I've tended to look down my nose at what in my nastier moments I like to call the Fat Slobs of Flyover Country. More class and regional snobbery on my part, I guess. I like telling people that being in the Midwest does wonders for my self-esteem. It makes me feel sexy in a way that I never feel in Body-Beautiful LA. But I never feel like I'm better than Gene. His size is an integral part of his overall cuddliness. When he hugs you hello and goodbye, you feel enveloped in his warmth and good vibes. He's a rotund, pleasure seeking missile. Gene loves him his food, his drink, his doobie wah, his ladies... Yes, that's right, his ladies. He may be overweight, very overweight in fact, but he does well with the ladies. They dig him because he lives the right way. He doesn't give a shit. He doesn't get cheated out of life. He lives well, and you can choose to live well with him or go away. His approach to life is so different from mine. I tend to live scared, rarely taking risks, rarely opening myself up to the possibility of unqualified happiness. I've mentioned before that I don't do in the moment. I'm always worried about what's around the corner. I don't know what Gene's inner demons are, and we all have these demons, but he appears to live with so much more openness than I do, knowing that we all go around just once, knowing that when you die they put you in a box so that you can decompose underground. And that's it. There's no sweet hereafter, so you may as well get all the good stuff in with the life you've been given. I wish I could exist with this kind of abandon, but it just seems I'm constitutionally incapable of it. Still, this doesn't mean I can't at least taste a little of what it's like when I hang out with people like Gene...

Gene knows so much about music, but not in a penis jousting kind of way. Are you familiar with this term, 'penis jousting?' When I was in college, I hung out with a very serious intellectual crowd of mostly men. I had a female friend who was on the outside looking in at these guys, and when they would pontificate on heavy socio-philosophical subjects - the future of capitalism, the relationship between commodity fetishism and alienation, etc. - not hearing one another as they discoursed, raising their voices for the express purpose of having others hear how brilliant they were, dropping all kinds of references to Hegel and and Sartre, my friend would turn to me - she knew I was an imposter/wannabe among these folks - and she'd say, 'there they go again with their penis jousting.' It got to be a running joke. Whenever one of these heavy-duty conversations would start, she and I would look at each other and say, 'prepare for the joust!' Nobody knew what we were talking about, which made the joke that much more satisfying. The term stuck in my mind and is equally applicable to rock geeks who try and one-up each other with their grasp of esoteric rock knowledge. It's depicted with varying degrees of success in High Fidelity. This is a roundabout way of saying that Gene is most definitely not a penis jouster. He loves his music for the sake of the music itself, and he's always open to things he hasn't heard before. Openness of this sort is an important quality to have, in my opinion. I like people who are curious, who ask questions and are enthusiastic, who always believe that there's one more band or singer or song that will just tear the roof off the mother sucker...

Gene lives in a great Bachelor pad in the Angeleno Heights. If you can imagine what Mad Men would look like like if it was set in Palm Springs, that's his apartment. The furniture's mostly white leather, modern design. The place has a groovy fireplace and shaggy rugs. There's even some tiki lamps strategically placed throughout... Gene is a very good host. He makes a mean gin and tonic. He asks you what music you want to hear. It's a tough question because he's got so much of it. I feel like telling him, "I wanna hear it all!" And it's not just music on an iPod. He collects LPs too. They're stacked all over the place. I left the music question up to him. I'm always afraid that my choice will not be just right. I defer the responsibility to others when it comes to choosing music, unless I'm by myself. The other thing I should mention here is that Gene's also a collector of reel-to-reel tapes. Remember them? He's got a Mission Impossible-style reel-to-reel player. A few minutes after I arrived at his house on Saturday, he he said to me, 'get a load of this,' and then proceeded to play me bits of the White Album on reel-to-reel. It did not self destruct after five seconds. It did sound fucking incredible. I've listened t0 the White Album thousands upon thousands of times in my life, and I've never heard such differentiation between the component parts of the songs as I did when Gene played it. I couldn't believe it. The guitar solo in Happiness is a Warm Gun was so low, with just enough fuzz around the smacked-out edges. I asked Gene if we could hear the solo again. He advised against it telling me that you have to let the afterglow of a sound like that settle into your brain. I usually don't have that kind of discipline, but he's right. The fun was just starting...

It's a short hop from the Angeleno Heights to Chinatown. For some reason, you can now get Vietnamese food in Chinatown, so we went and had Pho. I usually don't love Pho. To me it tastes like dishwater with noodles. But this place Gene took me to, buried in an obscure strip mall off Broadway, was great. I had a bowl of Pho with thin slices of steak and brisket. We shared some sumptuous spring rolls. We drank Vietnamese beer. But the best part of the dinner was the conversation. He talked about his divorce, I talked about my ambivalence about relationships. Both of us are coming around to the conclusion that we probably don't want to have kids. He told me that he's always thought of me as the type of guy that would definitely have kids. I told him that my juvenilia doesn't necessarily mean I'd be a good parent, but I thanked him for the compliment all the same. We talked about women, the kind we like, the kind we dislike, the kind we have no feeling for one way or the other. He agreed with me that a woman doesn't really begin to come into her true beauty until she turns 40. We talked baseball and how one's approach to watching the game changes when your team is completely out of the race. You wait for the roster expansion in September and hope that one of the kids in the farm system might be the next Pujols or Lincecum. You can watch the game in a more detached manner, the absence of emotion in some ways making the viewing experience more pleasant... About half way through the meal I remember thinking that I was really enjoying myself and felt happy and content. I wondered why all my relationships with other people, men and women alike, couldn't be this satisfying, where I feel like I'm getting as much out of it as I give. It's not even that it was an unusually special evening. It's more that Gene was present and engaged. He asked me questions and took an interest in what and how I was doing. He drew on his experiences not simply to talk about himself, but to shed light on things that I go through, anxieties and doubts I have, as well as faint hopes. And we hadn't even gotten to the best part of the evening yet.

Back at Gene's apartment, he poured us some cognac and rolled a big fat bomber. The shit was strong. I've built up an ok tolerance at this point in my life, but goddamn! Sometimes the Green Cross can throw a monkey wrench into an otherwise pleasant evening if it hits you the wrong way and you get overly self conscious, or if the person you're with starts getting weird and you see a side of them that you wish you hadn't seen. We've all been through this. The freak out. The buzz kill. The bummer. Wavy Gravy calming you down in the bad trip tent. I've learned to control this over the years, but it still happens now and then if I get my hands on a speedy strain. There's nothing worse than a speedy strain. Nothing. It's why I'm an indica guy. Leave the sativa to the plebeians and the college kids. Gene's J was a perfect indica. I didn't confirm this because not everybody is as detail oriented (read: anal retentive) about their tea as I am, and I don't want to give people the impression that I'm some kind of wake 'n bake aficionado, even if I do occasionally fantasize about traveling to Amsterdam one of these years for the Cannabis Cup, but I knew from the way the stuff affected me that it was a high-grade indica. And then Gene said, "I have just the thing." He ambled over to one of his many mountains of LPs and pulled out a mono copy of Notorious Byrd Brothers. It's one of my two or three favorite albums of all time, but I'd never heard it in glorious mono. ...I don't want to come off like one of those characters in High Fidelity, but the simple truth is that most of the 60s records I love sound much, much better in mono. I don't really understand why. The word I like to use in describing the difference between mono and stereo is that mono sounds more differentiated, which is strange because the common understanding of stereo is that it separates the tracks into channels and then divides them between left and right. Every kid who grows up listening to rock can remember playing around with the balance knob on their stereo. On one side you might have rhythm guitar, backing vocals, and drums, and on the other you have lead guitar, lead vocals and bass. I can remember listening to songs like 'Day Tripper' and 'Satisfaction' when I was a kid, and loving listening to the channel with the rhythm guitar and no lead vocals. But I came of age after the mono period, so these were all stereo recordings, for the most part. Anyway, it turns out that with mono recordings, you hear all the instruments much more clearly. You even hear bits that you can't hear on the stereo versions because they get buried under something that's more prominent in the mix. ...OK, I'm sounding like a penis jouster now... Notorious Byrd Brothers sounds so goddamn good in mono. You can hear everything. You can hear the mandolin in Draft Morning. You can hear the xylophone so clearly on Goin' Back. Those great Byrds harmonies are perfectly crystalline. At one point, Gene and I were blissed out, listening to Change is Now. There's a very weird LSD guitar break in the middle. Whenever I hear it, I think of hippies getting all freaky at an Elysian Park Love-In. This time, I noticed the bass during the guitar break. It gets completely lost on the CD/stereo version of the album.

"Listen to that fucking bass!" I said to Gene. "It's so..."

"I think propulsive is the word you're looking for," he said.

Gene has this notion of every band having its Pepper. A band's Pepper is not necessarily its best album, but it's the album that's the most conceptually expansive. Notorious Byrd Brothers is definitely the Byrds' Pepper. Considerable portions even sound a lot like Sgt. Pepper. A much lesser known band from the 60s is England's Pretty Things. When we were done with Notorious Byrd Brothers, I asked Gene if he owned the Pretty Things' psychedelic classic. S.F. Sorrow on vinyl. I've been really immersed in British psychedelia over the past few weeks. Gene had it, of course, and as he located the record in his stacks he said, "SF Sorrow is definitely their Pepper." Indeed it is, and again it sounded great. About half way through Side 2, I noticed that Gene had drifted off to sleep. It was past midnight. I listened to the last few few tracks, left Gene a note thanking him for the lovely evening, and left his pad feeling a little better about my ability to relate to other people.

I had to work on Sunday. A few days earlier, I made plans to see Randy for drinks and dinner. We agreed that I'd stop by his house at 6:30, perfect timing because that's when I'd be leaving the office. At about 4pm on Sunday, Randy texted me and said that he'd rather stop by my house and eat in my neck of the woods. When you make a date with Randy, it's inevitable that the plans will change multiple times, usually after you've already structured your day around the plans as they were initially made. It annoys me, but it's one of those things that you have to accept if you're gonna be friends with Randy. He's not organized, and he doesn't seem to grasp that his inability to stick to a plan inconveniences the other person. But I'm flexible. I'm always the pliant one, always the one that puts myself out to accommodate the other. ...I also knew that the reason Randy wanted to come to my house instead is because his wife doesn't like him to partake of the Green Cross, which is pretty funny since he's an even bigger worshipper than I am. He turns me into his enabler, a position I'm not comfortable with because I like his wife. It seems disrespectful to her, and I don't want her to think that I'm a bad person who encourages Randy to do things she won't tolerate in their house. ....So things got off to a rocky start. He changed the plans on me at the last minute and did so only to evade his wife...

I grew up with Randy. I became friends with him in middle school, and then we remained in touch with each other for the first few years of college before falling off each other's radars for about 20 years. About two years ago, I ran into Randy at a grocery store in Los Feliz. It was good to see him. He had clearly changed a lot, mostly for the better, I thought, and we started hanging out again. But while he's changed, a lot of the old patterns remain in modified form. When we were growing up together, he was among the most popular kids in our school, and for good reason. He's always been very charismatic. He has a way of drawing you into his orbit and giving you just enough validation so that you think you can be part of the crowd of popular snake charmers as well. He uses his charisma to manipulate others into doing things they really don't want to do. He likes to cut corners, to outsmart the array of barriers and limitations life places in front of all of us. I have a very vivid memory of him on the day we were taking our SATs. During the break between sections of the test, he wandered over to one of the smartest kids in the school and just brazenly looked at the guy's answer sheet, and then he wandered back to his desk and changed a few of his answers. He did it so openly, right in front of the adults who were monitoring us, so confident that he wouldn't get caught, so sure that he wouldn't get in trouble even if he was caught because he was such an integral part of the social fabric of the school. And the rest of us admired him so much for doing these kinds of things. I remember thinking that it was funny but that I would never, ever have the balls to do something like that. Maybe I could have gotten away with a lot more if I had only had more chutzpa, and if I didn't live scared. Randy definitely had chutzpa. He brought it to bear on everything in his life. No boundaries. No constraints. If he wanted something he'd just go out there and fucking take it. He was also an excellent athlete, and girls adored him. He would regale us all with tales of his conquests, leaving out none of the details - the color of her panties, the sounds she would make while his finger was in her twat, and what that twat's juices smelled like on his finger afterwards. He reminds me of one of the boys in Larry Clark's creepy movie, Kids...

Randy's riverboat gambling ways eventually caught up with him. I don't want to get into all the details because they're boring and I'm not even all that clear on them anymore, but he more or less got kicked out of school. In my opinion, it was for the best. He's a much gentler person these days. I think the experience taught him some humility and made him much nicer than he otherwise would have been. Still, these things are relative. He's continues to br very self involved, and while he's nicer than he was when we were 17, he's still not an especially considerate dude...

I got home from the office on Sunday at 6:15 thinking that I wanted to have a few minutes to decompress before Randy came at 6:30. I don't know why I thought he'd be on time. He's never on time. It's my own damn fault. There are some lessons I just refuse to learn, and then I feel angry when the same thing happens as has always happened before. It's that old definition of insanity... At 7:15 I received a text message from Randy telling me he was running a little late, as if I hadn't noticed. At 8:00 the doorbell finally rang. Without my even having a chance to say hello, he pulled out his little Green Cross implement and showed it to me, his way of saying that he wanted to partake right away...

With old friends it's interesting how the same patterns that were in place when you were kids together reassert themselves years later, even though you're now both adults and have presumably lived enough life so that those old ways and assumptions would no longer hold any weight. With Randy and me, I find that there's still a part of me that wants to please him, that wants to gain his approval, and that wants for him to like me, as if we were back in 11th grade, with him as the mega-star and me as the one who's just grateful to get a little whiff of what it's like to be on the inside. I felt it very strongly on Sunday night, at least at first. I was pissed that he changed the plans. I was pissed that he was late, so late in fact that I had decided to eat on my own before he arrived. I was pissed that the only reason he seemed to want to hang out with me was so he could have some tea. But I didn't say anything about it, didn't stick up for myself. I basically fell in line with everything he wanted.

And then the strangest thing happened. People who are not true believers think that tea distorts your ability to think clearly, and maybe sometimes it does. But on this night, the tea made everything tranparently clear. I sat on my living room couch and Randy sat on a chair across the room from me. He pulled out his iPhone and began texting, emailing, playing with aps, and whatever the hell else a cell phone addict does with their drug of choice. It was as if I wasn't even in the room. He occasionally broke the silences with boring information about some business venture he is pursuing. But he never asked me any questions about me. At first I began to feel bad about myself. I'm boring. I don't have anything to say. He's not gonna wanna hang out with me anymore becuase I'm just too dull. And then I thought back to the great time I had had the night before, and I realized that Randy's the one who's boring. He has no interests outside of himself, no curiosity about music, or people, or ideas. There's no propulsive bass line in his life. He's just a narsissitic dullard with nothing to offer me. We've got nothing in common with one another, no shared syntax, nothing bonding us, except our past, and there's no way that this shared past will ever be brought into the present in a deep and meaningful way. We're acquainted with each other, and that's about it. In the midst of another long silence, I decided that I would not be the first one to speak. I wanted to see how long he could keep texting and emailing withoutany awareness that I was in the room with him. I really don't remember what happened after that, and the great thing is that I really don't care...