He was a classical guitarist with an amazing lust for life. A life support for an appetite...for everything. He is probably one of the most intense, brash and absolutely brazen people I have ever known. He was Jewish by birth and Christian by confession. A smart dresser with a smart mouth for whom everything was now and not a second could be wasted.
He was a friend of the Bucolic One. I lived with them both and another when I moved in following my less than fulfilling seven months in the Boys' House of the Church of the Straight And Narrow. The three of us lived together for only one or two weeks. The Amazing Mr. M. found other living arrangements and our friendship continued. I was just shy of my twenty-first birthday. He was six years older.
He had a strange fascination with me and I think he was for a while in love with me. He was an admitted bisexual but because of the kind of Pentecostal Christian fundamentalism he subscribed to he was very torn and conflicted about his sexuality.
He was in many ways an Enfant Terrible. We coincided at a Christmas party at the Boys' House of the church of the Straight And Narrow. Just three weeks earlier I had been kicked out so I invited him along for protection. He had his guitar with him and from the middle of the living room began to sing one of his songs, based loosely on Elvis Presley's "Blue Suede Shoes.":
Well, it's one for the money,
two for the show,
three to get ready
and four to go,
Do the Pentecostal Boogey (woo-woo)
Do the Pentecostal Boogey(WOO-hoo!)
We'll roll all over the floor,
Do the Pentecostal Boogey.
Well, I went to church and I fell on the floor,
rolled all over and I did it once more,
Do the Pentecostal Boogey, etc.
Well, I fell off my pew, rolled down the aisle,
rolled round the altar,
guess I rolled a mile
Do the Pentecostal Boogey, etc.
Well, the pastor's wife, she's really a dear,
last night she swung from the chandelier,
Do the Pentecostal Boogey, etc.
He was funny, volatile, irreverent and very sensitive. While he worked driving a food delivery truck for restaurants he invited me along one rainy February morning to ride with him throughout his rounds. We ended up in a greasy spoon in New Westminster that served up gigantic cubist bran muffins. Then he showed me the music library in the local public library and I sat for some time listening to Mahler through headphones.
Another time he introduced us to a basement café/cabaret run by immigrant Bosnians and for three hours we were in another country listening to music I never knew existed.
Our friendship couldn't last. He was too intense and too volatile. He was increasingly bringing up sexual innuendo between us and I found myself creating distance. On our last visit in a restaurant in a mall downtown, he could feel the growing chill and lashed out. I will not quote him verbatim, but what he said was brutal and obscene and he tried to compare God to an inflamed rapist and that I had no busines daring to refuse him his due. I exploded, I swore at him and he left in a righteous snit. I never saw him again.
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