The Mentor (23 page)

Naturally,
upon seeing the colorful depiction of said hotel fire, the restaurant owner
asked firmly that Doc cover it with some representation that did not include
singeing human flesh or, he’d hastened to add, anything else that would
remotely turn off folks that were coming in to, you know, eat.

Understandable.

Artists are
proud of their work but also want to get
paid
for said work, so he
obliged.  However, by that time his partner-in-art had gone off on what
turned out to be two-week heroin vacation, unavailable.  Doc doesn’t do
drugs anymore.

At least…
not all of them.  

Much.
 

He told me
one time that he’d done so much pot, acid, coke, speed, pills and whip cream
gas in his forty-two years that he was
permanently
stoned.  He
thought the notion was cool.  But, then again, he was permanently stoned.

So, some
years ago, coming back from a midnight improv show one night, I saw this crazy,
bald freak with Elvis Costello glasses painting on the wall at nearly three in
the morning, and I asked what the hell he was doing.  He initially ignored
the question, instead asking me if I had a moment to get him a Dr. Pepper.
 We’ve been friends ever since.

Doc was, as
one might surmise on meeting him, a little crazy in the cue ball.
 Overly-suspicious.  Some guy in the middle of a three-day coke binge
would talk to Doc for five minutes and go, “that muther is
pa-ra-noid
.”

He is so
worried someone would try to steal one of his paintings and claim it as their
own, he, um, marks all of his paint with a DNA sample.  One can guess what
that means and one can also subsequently guess I will never have one of his
paintings hanging in my home.

“Hey man,
finally decided to show,” Doc said as I stood on the threshold of his studio.
 He’d converted the garage attached to his home into a workspace.  

He had a
pair of goggles strapped to his head, and his normally pale face was streaked
with what looked like every color imaginable.  Closing the door behind me,
he said his face-rainbow had been born from “the tryst of a gentle mist and the
love of a supernova.”  

So, yeah, I
take back the stuff about him not doing drugs much anymore.

I stepped
into his workshop and grabbed a paper mask, holding it over my mouth and nose.
 Doc Drake was an artist, working with a variety of mediums.  Especially
those mediums that seemed to roast brain cells like campfire marshmallows over
a county-wide forest fire.

“I’ve
called you every fortnight for the three months, you never call back.”

“Nobody
says fortnight, man.”

“I’ve got
this thing with numbers, you know that.”  

Stepping
cautiously through his workshop— it was dark and mildly dangerous— I saw
several half-finished pieces of his art.  Doc had never subjected himself
to art school-- he characterized them as oppressive or restrictive and, when
he’s really agitated (read: high), he calls them fascist moron factories.

The
workshop was itself a constant work in progress and, I only guessed at this, if
a cop popped down there for a quick look around, there’d be some health
violation worth imprisonment and possibly the death penalty.

I asked
him, my mouth and nose covered, “What chu been up to?”

He brought
a hand up to rub an itch, leaving an additional smear across his fleshy head.
 Leading me through the dark space, twisting and turning through piles of
materials and supplies, he led me over to a large canvas, at least six feet in
length and width.  Before me, a bizarre city-scape, bits of newspaper
glued here and there.

“Working.
 Always working,” he said and put on a clear mask, twisted a valve at the
end of the clear hose that lead to the mask, and took a deep breath.  I
stared for a long moment and when he hung the mask up he shrugged, slapped me
on the shoulder with a long, bony hand, and said: “Inspiration, Dexter.”

Whatever.
 Sometimes it’s best not to ask him.  The biggest fear would be that
he’d tell you.  

Dropping my
paper mask on a pile of rags, I said: “I need a favor.”

Concentrating
on this latest work, Doc raised his arm and nabbed a rubber tube capped with a
small brass nozzle which hung from the ceiling in a collection of dozens of
similar tubes, then danced in front of his latest creation.  After a full
half-minute he finally squirted out a small pinhead of paint near the open
window of one of the skyscrapers on the canvass.  Was it a balloon?
 A bird?

“I don’t
have a ton of time, man.  Working day and night before they take the
SunTrust building down and mess up my painting.”

“You can
still paint if it’s demolished, though, right?  Take some photos.”

“Wha?” he
said and looked at me, his face a hybrid of amusement and pain.  “You
can’t paint something that’s not there, man!  Dis-honest.”

“What about
the bird you just painted?  Is that there now?”

“Not a
bird.”  He took a swig of water.  “Guy jumping out of a window.
 And, no, totally different…
that’s
artistic license.
 Completely different.  You wouldn’t understand, non-artist.”
 Doc tugged on the rubber hose and it retracted up into the ceiling, the
brass hook indistinctive, at least to me, amongst a myriad others.  His
eyes were still focused on the painting like he was trying to work through some
sort of imbalance, trying to correct a problem only he could see.  “What
sort of favor you need, Dexter?”

“You still
have your Quiet Room set up, right?”

“Sure,” he
said and moved liquidly in front of his painting.  In the dim light, I
could see sweat beading on his forehead.  All various colors of droplets,
he looked like he was perspiring Skittles.  That said, if he were actually
sweating candy, this would not entirely surprise me about Doc Drake.

“I need to
put my van in there,” I said, and he stopped, turned to me, spun in a slow
circle then sat down on the floor.  He put his head in his hands, which left
handprints of blue paint up both sides of his head.

“That’s
where I sleep, man.  My bike’s in there right now, too… where would--”

“Not
permanently,” I said and sat down next to the painting so we could talk face to
face. Also, that way he doesn’t forget he’s talking to someone.  The floor
was freezing; the cement below in direct contact with the subterranean earth,
and it made my undercarriage a little cold.  “Just gotta pull it in there
until we can see what’s coming off it.”

“Hell’s
that mean?”

At that
moment, his wife, Tiffany, walked into the room.  Over the years, I’d
learned that when she’s in the sort of mood she was in at that moment, you’re
not supposed to talk to Tiffany unless she addresses you first.  She will
often wander the house as a “spirit,” and in her, ahem, vulnerable state,
doesn’t like direct contact with anyone but her husband.  They’re a near
perfect match, I would say.

I said,
“Tell Tiff I said ‘hey.’”  Spirit Tiffany was, as the spirit state of her
always is, naked and this time her skin was stained entirely blue.  There
were spots that were rubbed a little less blue, so this wasn’t, it seemed, day
one.

Doc didn’t
even look at her.  “Going through an azure phase right now.”

“Blue’s a
good color on her,” I said and the comment drew a slight shrug from his wife.

“Last
week,” he said.  “She dyed herself green.”

“Green.”

“Yeah, like
a forest,” he said and grinned mischievously.  “She then pointed out which
plants in nature were edible.”

I shuddered
a little.  My friend Doc, frankly, looks like a turtle that’s lost its
shell.  The images of him involved in
any
sexual act rattling
around in my brain did some real core damage to me.  I turned the
conversation back to my immediate concern.

“I just got
the van,” I said, holding his gaze.  “Need to make sure ‘they’re’ not
listening.”

He bolted
up like gas shot from a geyser, took two steps away from me, then three back.
 Putting his hands to his head, he said:

“What?
 They’re listening to you?  Because of me?”

“Dunno.
 Need you to find out.”

He pressed
his fingers up under his black rimmed glasses and rubbed his eyes with a thumb
and forefinger.  His mouth dropped and he exhaled, exasperated.

“Shit,
man,” he said.  “Yeah, drive it around back and I’ll lift the gate.
 I park the Indian in there, but I’ll roll her out.”

“You still
have that RF signal detector I bought you a couple Christmases back?”  

“Had to get
a new one.  It’s even better, detects across all frequencies, all
wavelengths.  

“What
happened to the one I gave you?”

“Someone stole
it, after I threw to the bottom of my pool.”

“You don’t
have a pool, Doc.”

“I did,” he
said.  “They stole the pool, the signal detector was at the bottom.”

Creeping
back toward his workstation, Doc drew a hand across his mouth.  He glanced
up at a window blackened by black spray paint, then back to me.

“Quiet room
is lined with lead dampeners,” he said, as if I’d asked a question.  “Top,
bottom, all sides.  Inches thick in all directions.  It may be the
only place on the planet aside from a bank safe or a mile-deep mine where a
person doesn’t have radio signals slicing through every one of their cells,
jumbling up the RNA, knocking synapses from neural pathways--”

“I know.”

“You know
how many radio, satellite, mobile,
whatever
signals you have crisscrossing
through your body right now, man?”

“Nope,” I
said and walked slowly to the door.  I needed to start heading to the van
or he’d go for hours about this.

“Billions,
man.  Not even
millions
but trillions, maybe,” he said and headed
in the opposite direction.  “What do you think that’s doing to the
cellular structure of your body, being bombarded with that kind of radiation?”

“I don’t
know,” I said and turned the knob to the door.  “I just need to know, down
there in your Quiet Room, if we’ve got any signals coming off my new van.”

He smiled.
 “Oh, you bought a van?  Yours?  I thought you weren’t driving
anymore after the accident.”

“I, yeah,
you know... about time.”

“Cool.”

He pulled a
black handle, slipped through a door I’d never seen, and disappeared, closing
the door behind him.  The door popped back open and Doc’s wife stepped
out.

“Pull your
van around.”

“’Preciate
that.”

Her soft
voice drifted toward me: “Stop looking at my tits, Dexter.”

My head
snapped down, eyes focused on the intricate work of my shoelaces.  “Just
checking out the shading, Tiffany.  Good job on the color disbursement.”
 And added, because I couldn’t resist: “Papa Smurf coming by a little
later?”

The corners
of her mouth twitched as she stepped forward slowly, looking at the floor as if
she were carefully walking in precise tracks only visible to her.

AFTER I'D
MET DOC on the street that first night, I’d found him a job as a stunt guy for
a local radio show, something between gigs.  I’d talked with a disk jockey
one night at some shitkicker bar, and the guy lamented over an eleventh gin and
tonic about how he didn’t have a suitable street guy.  You know, somebody
to run out and get celebrity gotcha interviews, or test the airbag on an ’84
Corsica, hit a dry water slide buck naked, whatever.  Doc needed the dough
and, it seemed to me, just the guy for the gig.

He lasted
about fifteen months with the show, the tour ended when the show got fired.

 Doc’s
Q score was markedly higher than the regular cast members and subsequently he
was able to perpetuate his “artist” business off the success for a while.
 During the lean times, he stretched canvasses for other artists.  It
was a living and didn’t require a tie, so he was in good shape.

The one
thing about Doc that would concern most people is that he’s crazy.  I
don’t mean, “Hey, that dude is so bananas, he just stripped down to skivvies
and jumped in the hotel fountain!  What a wacky guy!”  I mean CMF.
 Crazy Mother Fucker.

But being
that high for most of life, floating up there in the atmosphere by yourself,
all that time... well, if you stared down at the world too long, you’d be
crazy, too.

After I’d
pulled my white Ford Econoline into his “Quiet Room,” he walked around its
shell for a full two minutes, as if he may be able to pick up on the signals
himself without the RF detector.  Goggles on top of his head, he scratched
the parts where the black rubber met his skin.

“Why do you
think you’re bugged, man?”

I said, “Do
you think
they
need a reason why?”

“
Absofuckinglutely
right, man!” he said as he walked the length of the cargo van.  The
vehicle wasn’t terribly large, about seventeen and a half feet long, but you
could hide a tracker or listening device in gumball, if the magazines I’d
borrowed from the dentist’s office next to
Lester’s
were any guide.