Yet I knew enough already to find it odd hearing Perkus Tooth denouncing misfits.
‘It’s the way they talk.’ He leaned in close to me, and demonstrated his point as he spoke. ‘They aspirate their vowels nearer to the front of their mouths.’
‘Wow.’
‘And when you see them talking in groups they do it even more. It’s self-reinforcing. Rock critics gather for purposes of mutual consolation, though they’d never call it that. They believe they’re experts.’ Perkus, whether he knew it or not, continued to aspirate his vowels at the front of his mouth as he made his case. ‘They can’t see the forest for the trees.’
‘Thelf-reinforthing exthperts,’ I said, trying it on for size. ‘Can’t thee the foretht for the threes.’ I am by deepest instinct a mimic. Anyway, a VHS tape labeled ECHOLALIA lay on the table between us.
‘That’s right,’ said Perkus seriously. ‘Some of them even whistle when they speak.’
‘Whisthle?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Thank God we’re not rock critics.’
‘You can say that again.’ He tongued the gum on another joint he’d been assembling, then inspected it for smoke-worthiness, running it under his odd eye as if scanning for a barcode. Satisfied, he ignited it. ‘So, I’m self-medicating,’ he explained. ‘I smoke grass because of the headaches.’
‘Migraine headaches?’
‘Cluster headaches. It’s a variant of migraine. One side of the head.’ With two fingers he tapped his skull - of course it was his right side, the headaches gravitating toward the deviant eye. ‘They’re called cluster headaches because they come in runs, every day for a week or two at exactly the same time. Like a clock, like a rooster crowing.’
‘That’s crazy.’
‘I know. Also, there’s this visual effect . . . a blindspot on one side . . .’ Again, his right hand waved. ‘Like a blot in the center of my visual field.’
A riddle: what do you get when you cross a blindspot with a wandering eye? But we’d never once mentioned his eye, so I hung fire. ‘The pot helps?’ I asked instead.
‘The thing about a migraine-type experience is that it’s like being only half alive. You find yourself walking through this tomb-like world, everything gets far away and kind of dull and dead. Smoking pulls me back into the world, it restores my appetites for food and sex and conversation.’
Well, I had evidence of food and conversation - Perkus Tooth’s appetites in sex were to remain mysterious to me for the time being. This was still the first of the innumerable afternoons and evenings I surrendered to Perkus’s kitchen table, to his smoldering ashtray and pot of scorched coffee, to his ancient CD boombox, which audibly whined as it spun in the silent gap between tracks, to our booth around the corner at Jackson Hole when a fierce craving for burgers and cola came over us, as it often did. Soon enough those days all blurred happily together, for in the disconsolate year of Janice’s broken orbit Perkus Tooth was probably my best friend. I suppose Perkus was the curiosity, I the curiosity-seeker, but he surely added me to his collection as much as the reverse.
I did watch Echolalia. The way Brando tormented his would-be interviewer was funny, but the profundity of the whole thing was lost on me. I suppose I was unfamiliar with the required context. When I returned it I said so, and Perkus frowned.
‘Have you seen The Nascent?’
‘Nope.’
‘Have you seen Anything That Hides?’
‘Not that one either.’
‘Have you seen any of Morrison Roog’s films, Chase?’
‘Not knowingly.’
‘How do you survive?’ he said, not unkindly. ‘How do you even get along in the world, not understanding what goes on around you?’
‘That’s what I have you for. You’re my brain.’
‘Ah, with your looks and my brain, we could go far,’ he joked in a Bogart voice.
‘Exactly.’
Something lit up inside him, then, and he climbed on his chair in his bare feet and performed a small monkey-like dance, singing impromptu, ‘If I’m your brain you’re in a whole lot of trouble . . . you picked the wrong brain!’ Perkus had a kind of beauty in his tiny, wiry body and his almost feral, ax-blade skull, with its gracefully tapered widow’s peak and delicate features. ‘Your brain’s on drugs, your brain’s on fire . . .’
Despite this lunatic warning, Perkus took charge of what he considered my education, loading me up with tapes and DVDs, sitting me down for essential viewings. Perkus’s apartment was a place for consuming archival wonders, whether at his kitchen table or in the sagging chairs before his flatscreen television: