Okay. Here’s a quaint anecdote that I finally have some time to relate.
I was leaving my doctor’s office and walking towards the elevator, and a black guy was coming out of the door right behind me. “Is this the way out?” he asked (very loudly). I said, “Yep!” and pointed roughly where I was going.
We get on the elevator together. I notice his right eye is filmed over with something that looks green. But he’s chatting away at me (I don’t know it is, but I seem to have a gift, random people all over the world think I want to listen to their life stories all the time, I don’t mind it). “Look atta da money belt!” he said, and, just to clear things up, I am not trying to imitate a black man, he was just plain talking WEIRD, okay? Anyway he raises up his sweatshirt a little and I see a gigantic (we’re talking like six to ten inches) dollar sign (“$”) that is serving as his belt buckle, and the damn thing is studded completely with rhinestones. Quite a sight.
We amble out of the building, and he keeps right behind me, stops when I start to light a smoke, and introduces himself as Bobby. Although it came out, “Blothy!” He’s a nice enough guy, although he bums a smoke off me, which is another curse I have in life — I actually give out smokes. He is struck by my Zippo and goes into some kind of stuttering fit, calling it, “That’s — dat’s — that there — we call that — that’s an OLD MAN lighter! Ya gots ta have tanks of gazzzzzoline for that! But look, see, look, in this wind, it still lights! Ya gots the old man lightah an izzzzzz working!” I nod.
As he would finish a point, by the way, I would say, “Well, gotta be going!”, wave, take a step, and he’d just follow me and keep talking.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you smoke the maj-wannna?”, he asked. After ascertaining it was “marijuana”, I informed him that I used to smoke a ton of it, out of bongs the size of the Taj Mahal, but had to quit because I’m getting older and it just makes me paranoid now. Bobby was incredulous. “NO! NO! DON’T SAY THAT, MAN! I just smoked the mahhh-jwanna at…at…2 PM today! You can still smoke it!” I repeated that, unfortunately, I can no longer hang. He quizzed me further to make sure that in fact, I could really no longer hang, as I judged he had a joint he was about to pull out and suggest we smoke. I again reiterated, in vigorous terms, that I used to be the most bad-ass majjj-whanna smoker this side of the Mississippi, and he quieted down.
Next he launched into a discussion of HIS past life, things he had to give up. “I used to…umm…the fast life! The limouzzzzzzineizzeess! The fast women! You know! Party like Scarface!” (at which point we both, at the same time, said, “SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND!”) “The clubs be calling me, like, Blodddy, Bobbly, Bobby, come outs to party. And I went to those clubs with the women in the furs, and the gold chains, and the suits with the jewels all in them…” (I have never seen a “bejeweled suit” but I kept nodding) “Fast women! Fast cars! And I’d…”
At this point he stopped, and began to hop on one leg, shouting at the top of his lungs, “DAMN! DAMN! DAMN! DAMN! DAMN! DAMN! DAMN!” over and over again, until he had performed about two 360-turns of his body.
I thought he was just making a point. Namely, that the fast women and the fast cars and the jeweled suits were enough to make a man hop on one leg going, “DAMN!” over and over. So I said something like:
“Yeah, I can see how that’d get your motor going.”
To which he replied, quite breezily:
“Oh, no, man, that’s the Tourette’s.”
Okay. This is not a funny disease. But I really had to lock myself down from laughing. I’m sorry. I hope it doesn’t make me evil.
Bobby then went on to talk about drugs some more. “The Purple Haze, you know, the Purple Haze, it’s this little strip and ya sticks it on your tongue like AHHHH…” (he demonstrated, and I guess I’m not down enough anymore, because he was basically showing me a drug that acted like a Listermint strip, and I’ve never heard of it, although I’m sure it can be done — at first I thought he was talking about acid…) “…HHHHH and it just dissolves and then and then and then and THEN you can drink all night long and not get drunk and you hear mussssssiicc. You hear yourself some mussssssiiccc. And the White Knights and the Flying Gulls and the…” (he proceeded to rattle off about ten names of drugs that I assume are variations of MDMA, or Ecstasy)
We had moved almost to the stairs now, and I finally just ripped myself away and made a bold retreat to the parking garage, waving the whole way.
You gotta love it, you GOTTA love it. 🙂