God Help Us All

I stopped over to visit my old friend Rich last night. Rich is having a bit of a tough time, or so he had told me on the phone.

I go way back with this guy, and on a certain level I’ve always gotten a kick out of him. That said, he is, like many of my favorite people, something of a menace to society. Once upon a time he was going to be a rock star (you probably never heard of his first band, Shitsicle, or his later band, bumskuller. They didn’t play out much). These days he’s hoping to become a screenwriter. He’s got some good ideas –he’s always had good ideas– but he hasn’t managed to write anything yet, and in the meantime he’s working at Office Max.

Rich has had many jobs, and I’m confident he will have many more.

I seldom interfere in the private lives of my friends, but at present Rich is posing something of a dilemma in this regard. He has a child now. I’m not sure exactly how old Cassidy is –I’m not good at that sort of thing– but I think it’s safe to call her a toddler. She isn’t yet capable of speaking anything but gibberish, at any rate, and seems uncommonly filthy even for a toddler.

Cassidy’s mother and Rich’s girlfriend is a woman named Trina, a woman I think it’s fair to say is sort of stunted and unbalanced, a description, that to be just, could also be applied to Rich. Trina is taking an extended time-out at the moment, apparently. She has been “visiting” her sister in Wisconsin for the last couple weeks, this after she and Rich had fought over her disapproval of his attempts at growing a beard. Her objections, she had allegedly said, were based on the fact that she found the beard “too pubey.”

Rich was not so much insulted by Trina’s criticism of his facial hair as he was deeply aggrieved by her use of “pubey” as an adjective. Fair enough, it seemed to me.

Last night when I dropped by Rich was wearing an old Def Leppard tee-shirt and cut-offs, which I’ll admit struck me as a bit odd given that it is still winter in Minnesota. Cassidy had a cold, I was told, so Rich was making Nyquil grasshoppers in the blender and spoon feeding this concoction to his child. He was also trying to teach Cassidy to croak, “Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore’” like a parrot. If successful, he announced proudly, these would be his daughter’s first words.

I knew that the real reason Rich wanted to see me was because he needed money, but I sat fascinated for perhaps an hour while he squawked “Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore,’” over and over to Cassidy and she eagerly slurped Nyquil grasshoppers and babbled happily. I could see that Rich was becoming frustrated, and he was also really pounding the grasshoppers.

In my defense I should note that I did mention to Rich that this particular cold remedy didn’t seem terribly kosher for a child of Cassidy’s age, at which point he changed the subject and asked to borrow $100. I gave him the money, of course, and as I drove home I tried to convince myself that I had done so out of sympathy for the child.

That, I fully realize and probably don’t need to tell you, was a lie.