There are three types of people that attend film school. They are, in no particular order, A.) Legitimate artists and filmmakers, skilled and serious about their craft. B.) Kids who want to make movies but lack any sort of creative intellect and finally, C.) The recently graduated who didn't want to join the military. Pistol Pete was of the latter.
I'd been living in the dorms / converted air force barracks for roughly a year and a half and was feeling morose about seeing my time there coming to such an abrupt end. The CCA populous was a motley crew, not by choice but just by nature. We were atoms reacting and responding to one another, the island of misfit toys, broken and stupid and usually drunk. Jones was of Korean descent and his mother spoke no English. Having been born and raised in The States he spoke no Korean. At home and at Christmas he would sign to his mother, "going to bed", "I'm hungry" and "goodbye". Pink was a heavy kid from somewhere in northern Colorado and had been raised in a coal mine. Every summer, when school would end, he'd sadly crawl into his mom's car and drive back to The Black Lung where he would spend his days in a dark cave, slamming a pick ax into the ground, a little flashlight helmut covering his head. Self proclaimed "Uncle Stevie" was dabbling in alcoholism and could be found at any given moment tumbling through the halls or picking cigarette butts from the outdoor ashtrays. He had a girlfriend of Greek descent named Roxy who's father was on the Olympic weightlifting team once upon a time. Lauren looked like the third Olsen twin and was bisexual. This meant she could have had any guy in the place of her choosing and with a 10 to 1 male / female ratio, the battle was on. She was raw meat thrown to the vultures. Some of us would have stood a chance had we not all been jobless, carless, drunks; something we quickly discovered women considered to be negative attributes.
For Thanksgiving, Jade and I invited Lauren to spend the holidays in the mountains with ourselves and the parental units. She complied and I would bet that any guy in the building would have given his left nut to have been in my position. I was excited to see who Lauren was outside of the big crowd, who she was face to face. So far I had just seen her as the pornography crazed, pierced clitori aficionado. When there was no one to impress would she be intelligent? Tasteful? Taciturn? Upon arrival on the mountain top the three of us partook in a jolly good snowball fight. Jade was snapping photos of us during our playful rendezvous while Lauren kept removing pieces of her outer garments, complaining about the heat. Although there was snow on the ground, it was a warm winter, but that was the least of my concerns. My girlfriend had a camera. This hot bisexual was removing her coat, hat, mittens.....no....leave the mittens on you......bad girl.......I was sure I'd seen adult films begin this way. Sadly, before I could begin segueing the conversation towards pinker territory, we were called in by Jade's mom for dinner.
We eat turkey and we eat cranberries and we eat stuffing and we eat pumpkin pie and afterwards we all retire to our bedrooms, wishing we were dead, our poor bellies bloated to Ripley's Believe it or Not proportions. As I lie in bed, reading a book, Lauren pokes her head into the room. I act casual. I act like I don't have a plan up my sleeve involving her touching my girlfriend's boobs. "Howdy". She smiles and says, "Is there a bathroom up here?" and I say, "er.....yeah.....right down the - down the hall," and she disappears for I don't know how long. I actually lose track of time she's been in there for such a lengthy period. I read a chapter, I read a second chapter, I'm well into my third chapter (20? 30 pages later?) when I hear the door open and remember that I'd forgotten that she had excused herself. I pretend not to notice the squeaky hinges and her gentle footsteps down the hall. She's only human and we ALL ate a pretty hefty meal. Sometimes you gotta drop the deuce and it's all very natural and that's just fine but I try not to picture it, her, doing it. While not trying to picture it, I picture it. She sits squarely on the toilet, her knees bent just slightly in towards one another, her tight jeans and red thong in a little bunch around her ankles. It's actually sort of a cute image in a very strange way until I imagine her gripping the sink, gripping the shower door, a towel pinched between her teeth, her face as red as her thong as she tries not to scream through her butt birth. I try to shake the image away but only manage to burn it further into my mind. Lauren peaks her head into my room just as I'm rubbing my eyes, scratching the vision from my retinas. "Hey," she says and I try to play it cool, extra cool, super cool, "hey", I say. Jade walks into the room and sits down on the bed. Lauren says, "we should get a plunger in that bathroom. There's no plunger. I just.....hahaha, I just clogged up the toilet BIG TIME and couldn't figure out how to flush it down so I just used my hands to sort it out," and I stare at her, the image in my mind changing, morphing to one of Lauren on her knees, her pants and thong still pushed down around her ankles. She's bent over the toilet and covered in sweat. She's elbow deep in her own muck and she wipes her perspiration from her brow with her forearm. I pray to God that he gives me the old image back, the clutching, straining one. Anything for this. My kingdom for a new memory! Jade laughs and asks her why she didn't just ask for a plunger and Lauren pauses, stares at us as if we're mad and says, "How embarrassing would THAT be". Brains and beauty. You rarely get both.
The next day we all go to a movie, something called Time Line or Time Zone. It's starring, who my girlfriends refers to as, "The Dreamy Paul Walker". The four of us (Jade, Jade's mom, Lauren and myself) get two bags of popcorn and share, two for two. Lauren sits down next to me and at first, nothing registers. The alarms are not yet going off, not yet screaming. I reach my hand into the buttery brown bag and pull out some fluffy, golden kernels and shove them in my mouth. On the screen Paul Walker says something dreamy. Lauren smiles and I turn to look at her, instinctively. It is then that I notice her shoulder, her arm, her hand. It's stretched across the seat, hovering inches above my man dong, stuffed in the bag of popcorn. She is gripping and grabbing at pieces of the stuff, hungry for it's salty goodness. She pulls her hand from the bag and shoves a fistful of the good stuff in her mouth, campaigning to fit every morsel and tidbit of Mr. Reddenbacher into her gab. When she goes back for more it is then that I realize, licking my fingers, covered in popcorn juices, a handful of the tainted stuff already in my mouth, that she is digging through my movie treats with the same hands that she was, just yesterday, digging through her own dukey like some troubled chimp. Surely she washed her hands. Surely she washed them twice right after the incident and a few times since then, but still, there is principal. I am, what some would consider, a germiphobe. In high school I washed my hands so frequently and so repeatedly that they actually began to chafe and peel, raw and red. I flush toilets with my sneaker and I never ever under ANY circumstance touch a door handle that is not in my own home. If food drops on the floor, it is out. No five second rule. No ten second rule. There is only the It's-On-The-Floor-And-Is-Now-Garbage Rule. My mouth filled with flying fecal matter, I grimace, try to hold back the gag, roll my tongue away from the mush and just try to force it down the hole in my throat without making a scene. Through the rest of the movie I continue to hold the bag of popcorn and I continue to pretend to eat the popcorn but I do not touch the popcorn. Instead I just reach into the bag, grabbing imaginary handfuls and shoving them falsely into my mouth. Lauren finishes the bag alone.
Outside, after the film, we're all crawling into the suburban, taking part in the time honored tradition of reviewing the movie. Mostly it was good, we all agree, but sometimes it was bad and we all agree on that and Lauren is about to say something when, instead of a word, a burp comes out and then she covers her mouth and then she heaves and vomit comes out and it is mostly all yellow popcorn that resembles creamed corn. It spills through her fingers and into her lap and I have to reach across her, open the door and let her out. She drops her hands and the mess spills everywhere, splattering over her pink sneakers. She heaves, once, twice, three times and buckets of mucous and bile and golden barf slip past her lips, lips that have kissed both sexes' organs and I will never think of Lauren the same way again. She gets back in the car and says, "I'm better now," and we drive off.
Lauren is strange and Jones is strange and Pink is strange and Eric, who tries growing mold on Starburst candies because he heard you can smoke it, is strange. But through all this, through all these people, none are as strange as the aforementioned Pistol Pete. The first day he shows up he enthusiastically introduces himself with the line we will all become familiar with, "Hey. I'm Pistol Pete. I rap. You wanna hear me spit a few rhymes......for you?" He would talk like this, sort of pausing out his words at strange intervals while his eyes seemed to look right through you. He had a head shaped like an egg and his peepers were big and round. Later on in life I would meet a girl who claimed that you should never trust a person upon whom you could see the tops of their irises. Most people, if you look them in the eyes, you'll just catch a hint of the bottom. The Crazies, The Whackos? The REAL ones? Not just the run-of-the-mill loonies but the Psychopaths (capital P) the ones who torture animals and burn themselves? It's on these guys that you'll see the tops of the irises. You'll stare them in the face, not quite sure what's wrong with their features but registering that something isn't quite right and then one day you'll come home and your dog will be skinned, still alive, wandering around your house with staples shot into it's face and you will find a note from your Oddly Irised Friend, written in their own blood and feces, scribbled roughly upon your ceiling.
Had I known The Iris Rule a few years earlier I may have been able to help him. I may have been able to help all of us. Pistol Pete's irises rested like fat dinner plates at the bottom of his sloping eye wells, the tops completely and utterly exposed, staring into you, wondering what your small intestine looked like. As far as crazy went, Pistol Pete took the taco grande.
He got his hands on some ecstasy a few weeks after he'd been on campus and, after taking a few tabs by himself, decided to sit on the front steps and accost the passing females. They would walk by him on their way to class or just meandering off to run errands and he'd say, "Yo yo yo! What's up! Hey, beautiful! C'mere - c'mere for a second.....". The girls would offer a single glance back before hustling it double time to their bicycles and automobiles. Another girl. "Yo yo yo! Hey, cutie! Hey there! Hey! C'mere! I just......wanna talk". The way he'd say, "wanna talk" made it sound like he meant "wanna rape" and I imagined him doing it more for the violent thrill and less for the physical release. When his gentle prodding towards conversation didn't work he moved onto what I'm sure he would call The Compliment. "Yo yo yo! Hey, you! Blondie! Yeah......you.....I like your hair. Hey! I said your hair is pretty!". And this is how I found him while heading to my camera tech class. He was slouched on the front steps, almost lying on them, one hand in his pocket, probably stroking his drugged out boner and his other hand propped behind his head. When he sees me he pops a cigarette in his mouth and says, "Yo yo yo! Justin! What's up!?" and I say, "did you just call me Justin?" and instead of answering the question he throws his attention to a girl who's walking by. "Yo yo yo! Hey! Hey you! Nice........" he seems to be struggling for something, ".........JEANS! Hey! I SAID YOU'VE GOT REALLY NICE JEANS!!!". When the girl doesn't respond he looks at me and says, "I don't know what is with these bitches. I sit out here complimenting them all damn day and they don't even SMILE at me. A SMILE! That's all I'm talkin'.........about." When I ask him what he's doing out here he tells me that's he's "rolling" and when I ask him what rolling means he looks at me, the podunk from South Dakota and says, "it means I ate some ecstasy. I'm rollin' on ecstasy. YO YO YO!!!" Another girl walks out and I move along to the school.
After class I find my girlfriend in the parking lot with Lauren, the too-cute, vomiting, toilet clogging, turd excavating bisexual. The three of us make our way slowly back towards the dorms, talking about uncircumcised men. I tell them that I knew a kid growing up who said he had to peel his foreskin back before he peed otherwise the urine was likely to spray around all willy-nilly like a sprinkler system. Just as I finish, what I'm sure the ladies consider to be a spellbinding anecdote, I notice Pistol Pete in the same position as he was two hours prior, still on the steps. A girl walks past him, entering back into the dorms, and he says, shouts, "Yo yo yo! What's your problem? I told you I liked your ass when you left and you just ignored me! Don't you know how to take a compliment?" When the girl walks inside, not acknowledging his presence, he mumbles under his breath, "bitch". When asked if he'd moved since I saw him last he just shakes his head. "Nah, I been out here scamming on hottites all day, but tell you what - these girls are some PRUDES". Another girl exits. "Hey. My name's Pistol Pete. I rap. You wanna hear - no, nothin'? Okay. Hey! Nice jeans! I LIKE YOUR JEANS! NICE FUCKING JEANS!". This was a man desperate for something. Perhaps sobriety. He watches the girl go and then notices the two females flanking me. He turns his attention to hire grounds, "Yo yo yo. What's up ladies?" Jade and Lauren both nod and mumble hellos. He says, "those are some nice jeans," and Lauren says "ooooh, thank you." She coos over his compliment and this is just a big mistake, egging him on like that, encouraging his behavior. He says, "you both have the most gorgeous.........blue eyes I have ever seen," and Lauren scrunches up her lips and says, "my eyes are green," and Jade says, "my eyes are hazel," and Pistol stares at them and says, "well shit, at least they ain't brown." I ruffle his hair and the three of us go inside.
The next time I see him is a few days later at the dinner table. He enters the cafeteria with noticeably more energy than when he was "rolling". Strolling across the large hall, glancing over his shoulder every few steps, he finally sits down next to me and stares into the back of my brain with those bizarre eyes and says, "I just took a couple to the noggin' and I am feelin' goooood". When I inquire about what he means he says he's just slammed three beers as fast as he could, in his room, alone. He cocks his head around, trying to see everyone at once. He leans into me and says, "This girl just crawled out of my tv.....just before dinner and I had sex with her. i did it all. When we were done she crawled back into the tv and I shut it off." I nod and take a drink of my milk. Pete straightens up and announces to those around him, "yo yo yo, I got some pills. Anyone wanna........buy some? They're......purple". I shake my head and take a bite out of my chicken sandwich, wondering just where it was that they bought this meat. It was delicious. Eric picks up his tray and says that he might want some. Pistol looks at him and says, "alright, Adam. I knew I could count on you".
A few days pass without incidence and then Pistol Pete is gone. He's nowhere to be found. Vanished. Two days, three days, a week passes. Some people notice and some people are thankful but mostly nobody cares. Around noon, between two of my classes I get a phone call. It's Pete. I ask him where he is and he hesitates to tell me. I ask him if he's in jail and he says, "not.......exactly". He says, "So my pops calls me the other day and asks me if he can come up, just wantsta, y'know, come by and chill. See where I'm at - all that. So I say okay and he comes by and he asks me if I want to get some ice cream and I say, 'hell YEAH I wanna get some ice cream' and when we leave he drives me to a crazy house and I TOTALLY didn't see that comin'". I ask him to repeat this last part. I say, "did you say you're in an asylum?" And he says, "yes. I didn't see it coming, either. BUT" he assures me, "don't worry. I'm in here with some really cool and famous people. Johnny Depp says hello," and then he hangs up, leaving me listening to a dial tone, wondering if I'm dreaming.
A month, a month and a half later, while Jade and I are watching an episode of Roseanne, my doorknob begins to shake violently, as though possessed by an angry spirit. After I pull the dead bolt and open the door I find Pistol standing on the other side. He stares into my soul with eyes like flying saucers visiting from other worlds and says, "man, why you lockin' your door?" I shrug and he enters and sees Jade. He punches his elbow into my side and says, "OH! I get it! Did I just, like, disturb you two? Were you just gettin' lucky?" Jade winces at his idiocy and I smile because she's uncomfortable. I say, "yeah, we were just foolin' around a little bit. Mostly just pinching each other's nipples but....you know how it is". Jade shakes her head and then laughs as Roseanne says something humorous in regards to dieting. Pete lifts up his hand and I see he's clutching a piece of white cloth in it. A security blanket? A Klan mask? The Shroud of Turin? It's hard to say with this kid. He tells me it's a gift. He tells me he's been working on it the whole time he's been away. He tells me I get it because I'm the only one that talked to him on the phone while he was gone. He undrapes the cloth and I see that it's a white t-shirt with words printed all over it. Upon closer examination I realize that they are all names. Famous names. Celebrity names. Pistol says, "It's signed by all the famous people I was in the nut house with. Here's Johnny Depp. Here's Robert DeNiro. Here's Tupac." I'm about to tell him that Tupac is dead when he says, "Here's God's signature. He signed it twice, just in case". I'm about to ask "just in case what?" when he twists the shirt around, revealing God's dual signature on front and back. He had not signed it as Yahweh or Jehova or Jesus. He merely printed the word GOD in a sloppy green scrawl, so unlike the tidy cursive I imagined him to have.
As I stared at the shirt, debating how much I could sell this for on Ebay, I began to wonder if A.) Pistol believed these people to be famous, B.) these people believed themselves to be famous or C.) Pete had actually just scribbled different names down on a shirt in different handwritings. I was sure that the only person who knew would certainly never tell. I look up from the shirt to find his bulging, multi-dimensional eyes staring at me, surely sucking the life essence out of me. He seems hungry for approval so I say, "this is VERY cool. This is.....this is actually pretty unbelievable that you.......got these........so were all these famous people just sitting in there with you or what?" and he looks at me, very serious, and says, "Listen, Justin. I know your secret. I know you're famous. I know that everyone in this place is a famous person and that you're all pretending to be normal people so you can escape the limelight. I know your girlfriend is Kate Winslet and that her fake name is Jade. I know that John Goodman lives right down the hall and I KNOW, I KNOW, that Eminem is in room 104. I've already spoken with him and he's going to help me get a record deal". I stare at him and nod and I am suddenly starting to see the true boundaries of his sickness. He turns away from me and walks over to Jade / Kate, sits down next to her. He says, "Yo yo yo. Look at me. Listen. I want to tell you something". Jade mutes the real John Goodman on the TV and turns to Pete, fluttering her eyelashes. She does this when she thinks that what you are about to say is going to be completely asinine and that she is only listening to make you feel important, wanting to take no interest in the actual conversation. Pete says, "I want to thank you," and then Jade gets a littler more serious and says, "well....you're welcome. For what?" and he says, "you gave me the best blowjobs I've ever had while I was locked up. You lived in my brain and we had the craziest sex every single night and you helped me get through it. Let me tell you something.......you're really good".
I'm punching in the final thumb tack, leaving the nut house celebrity t-shirt to display itself in my bathroom among posters of b-movie monsters and torn off beer labels when I hear Pistol professing his lust for my girlfriend. I step back into the room to make sure he's "just chatting" and not "face raping" her when there's a knock at the door. It is now, at these moments, when you truly, truly believe that things could not become stranger that they most often do. Once that snowball starts rolling downhill, there is no stopping it. It just continues to grow, gathering speed, destroying skiers and smashing villages in it's abominable journey.
I don't recognize the knock, however, I DO recognize that there is a strange sense of authority in it. Pistol's head spins on his shoulders and he says, "don't answer that," and I stand there for a moment before realizing that I'm taking orders from a man that has had tea with all four Golden Girls, probably while enjoying the snug fit of a straight jacket. I reach for the handle and hesitantly open the door, half expecting The Ghost of Christmas Past. As I swing it open though, it only reveals a small black haired man who resembles Casey Affleck. I immediately notice his lazy eye and then realize that I'm staring directly into it. I quickly look at his other eye but it appears to be off center as well. I become confused and can't seem to find myself. I can see the top of only one of his irises. What does this mean? Half crazy? Perhaps. Are his eyes two different colors? Who is this man? Is he talking to me? I don't know where to look. I decide to just stare at the bridge of his nose, splitting the difference between Lazy Eye Option A and Lazy Eye Option B.
He introduces himself as, ironically, "Casey". He says he is Peter's guardian and tells me that he is here to pick him up. I open the door further and Pistol says, "Yo yo yo! I TOLD you I'd be right down. Why you gotta be bustin' my balls all the time? Gimmie one......SECOND!" and Casey says, "C'mon" and holds out his hand. Pistol reluctantly stands up, leaving Jade on the couch alone and steps outside with the (cross-eyed?) man. Casey asks me if I'd like to walk with them to the car and I say "yes". I walk with them down the hall. Pistol turns to Casey and says, "Casey. This is Justin........Timberlake. Are you pretty excited that I'm friends with him?" and I laugh and say, "that's right. Justin Timberlake," and Casey stops walking and looks at me with disgust and says, "tell him the truth" and I say "what?" and he says, "tell him the truth. Tell him you are not Justin Timerlake. Tell him your real name" and Pistol stares at me. His forehead wrinkles into folded terrain and he cocks his head. Never before or after have I seen such strange eyes as Pistol Pete's and on that day I saw something in them that made me cringe. It was the look of a man who's reality is crumbling down around him, being broken, shattered and smashed. The things he knows or thought he knew and loved about everyone were all lies. He waits for it. He waits for me to talk. I say, feeling a little silly, "I'm......not.......I'm not really Justin.....Timberlake. My name is........John Brookbank" and Pistol pauses and the look is gone. He seems fine and I think that it was easier than I was anticipating. Pete winks at me and says, "oh......riiiiiiiight" and Casey tells me to say it again. People are starting to gather in the halls. Class is out and lunch is beginning and why are the walls closing in on me? Why are all these people looking at me? I glance over my shoulder nervously and shuffle my feet. I stick my hands in my pockets. The audience is sensing something in the wind. They smell it and they are hungry for gossip. I say, "I am not......Justin Timberlake. I am not Justin Timberlake. I am John Brookbank" and I'm imagining all these people thinking that I'm the crazy one. They're watching me trying to grasp my identity. "I'm JOHN. I'm JOHN Brookbank. My name is JOHN Brookbank. I am NOT Justin Timberlake. My name is JOHN Brookbank". Casey says, "Peter is sick. Peter is schizophrenic and has been selling his medication. We're taking him away," and I say, "when will he be back?" and Casey says, "I don't know" as he begins pulling him away, down the hall. I stand and watch as they disappear around the corner. Eric pokes his head out from his door to see what all the commotion is just as Pete shouts at him, "Adam Sandler! Adam Sandler! Please help me!"
