The Mentor

by Pat Connid

  “Lantern wore a formfitting costume. You’d have to do about ten thousand sit ups, man,” he said, smiled and scratched his head, a couple little small silver things fell from his mop, flashing in the sun as the dropped to the pavement. “I just don’t want to lose you as a friend, man. Now that you got a bit more cool to be around and all.”

  “Just because I got my own wheels doesn’t mean we won’t hang.”

  He looked toward his car. “Well, you’re not at the theater anymore, either.”

  “Dude, trust me,” I said and he looked up, smiling. “The moment I run out of gas money, I’ll be right there back in your car again.”

  He jumped down onto the pavement and spun back.

  “Just remember you got something this Mentor pendejo don’t got.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” he said, closing the door to my van and backed toward his car until I could see him out the open window. “You got friends man. Don’t forget you got friends.”

  I started driving away and remembered something, pushed the button to bring the window down.

  “Hey, man. If anyone asks you, you know, for a reference about me—just say I’m good, reliable, trustworthy… that sort of thing.”

  “Reference for what?”

  “Don’t worry about that. Just say nice things about your buddy if anyone calls.”

  “K,” he said and went to the passenger door of his car, crawled in and hopped into the driver’s seat. “But you know how I hate to lie like that.”

  “Thanks,” I said rolling away slowly. “And, I do not cut my own hair, fucker.”

  “Then you got to get a different fag to cut it. It’s terrible.”

  I cringed. “Jeez, don’t say stuff like that. Either way, I’ve got a real good looking chick that cuts my hair.”

  “NO, bad idea,” he yelled as I pulled away. “Get yourself a nice fa... gay dude to cut your hair, trust me. Never a woman because they take their boyfriend shit out on you when they are doing the cutting. And your girl?" he added as I turned the corner to leave, "Obviously, he beats the shit out of her.”

  PAVAN HAD BEEN MOSTLY right about my friend situation. One guy, though, I had known for years: Doc Drake.

  Doc was an artist I met in the too-cool-for-you Virginia-Highlands section of Atlanta about six months after I’d moved to Georgia. When my model-turned-model-who-didn’t-want-to-live-with-me girlfriend left for New York, I’d crashed at his place for a couple months.

  When I’d met him, back then, he was working on an outdoor mural with a fellow painter. The two of them had been commissioned to paint an entire wall of this tapas bar with Atlanta-centric highlights.

  Of course, one person’s “highlights” may differ from another’s. Actually, very likely, they will always differ.

  So in between the giant fuzzy peach and the Gone with the Wind house, Doc had depicted downtown’s 1946 Winecoff hotel fire—the worst in U.S. history— with burning bodies, lapping flames and weeping firefighters. He’s got a thing about buildings, I learned over the years. Especially bad things happening to buildings. Probably some sort of phallic, Freudian connection there, but I’ve never bothered with locking up too much gray matter contemplating it.

  Naturally, upon seeing the colorful depiction of said hotel fire, the restaurant owner asked firmly that Doc cover it with some representation that did not include singeing human flesh or, he’d hastened to add, anything else that would remotely turn off folks that were coming in to, you know, eat.

  Understandable.

  Artists are proud of their work but also want to get paid for said work, so he obliged. However, by that time his partner-in-art had gone off on what turned out to be two-week heroin vacation, unavailable. Doc doesn’t do drugs anymore.

  At least… not all of them.

  Much.

  He told me one time that he’d done so much pot, acid, coke, speed, pills and whip cream gas in his forty-two years that he was permanently stoned. He thought the notion was cool. But, then again, he was permanently stoned.

  So, some years ago, coming back from a midnight improv show one night, I saw this crazy, bald freak with Elvis Costello glasses painting on the wall at nearly three in the morning, and I asked what the hell he was doing. He initially ignored the question, instead asking me if I had a moment to get him a Dr. Pepper. We’ve been friends ever since.

  Doc was, as one might surmise on meeting him, a little crazy in the cue ball. Overly-suspicious. Some guy in the middle of a three-day coke binge would talk to Doc for five minutes and go, “that muther is pa-ra-noid.”

  He is so worried someone would try to steal one of his paintings and claim it as their own, he, um, marks all of his paint with a DNA sample. One can guess what that means and one can also subsequently guess I will never have one of his paintings hanging in my home.

  “Hey man, finally decided to show,” Doc said as I stood on the threshold of his studio. He’d converted the garage attached to his home into a workspace.

  He had a pair of goggles strapped to his head, and his normally pale face was streaked with what looked like every color imaginable. Closing the door behind me, he said his face-rainbow had been born from “the tryst of a gentle mist and the love of a supernova.”

  So, yeah, I take back the stuff about him not doing drugs much anymore.

  I stepped into his workshop and grabbed a paper mask, holding it over my mouth and nose. Doc Drake was an artist, working with a variety of mediums. Especially those mediums that seemed to roast brain cells like campfire marshmallows over a county-wide forest fire.

  “I’ve called you every fortnight for the three months, you never call back.”

  “Nobody says fortnight, man.”

  “I’ve got this thing with numbers, you know that.”

  Stepping cautiously through his workshop— it was dark and mildly dangerous— I saw several half-finished pieces of his art. Doc had never subjected himself to art school-- he characterized them as oppressive or restrictive and, when he’s really agitated (read: high), he calls them fascist moron factories.

  The workshop was itself a constant work in progress and, I only guessed at this, if a cop popped down there for a quick look around, there’d be some health violation worth imprisonment and possibly the death penalty.

  I asked him, my mouth and nose covered, “What chu been up to?”

  He brought a hand up to rub an itch, leaving an additional smear across his fleshy head. Leading me through the dark space, twisting and turning through piles of materials and supplies, he led me over to a large canvas, at least six feet in length and width. Before me, a bizarre city-scape, bits of newspaper glued here and there.

  “Working. Always working,” he said and put on a clear mask, twisted a valve at the end of the clear hose that lead to the mask, and took a deep breath. I stared for a long moment and when he hung the mask up he shrugged, slapped me on the shoulder with a long, bony hand, and said: “Inspiration, Dexter.”

  Whatever. Sometimes it’s best not to ask him. The biggest fear would be that he’d tell you.

  Dropping my paper mask on a pile of rags, I said: “I need a favor.”

  Concentrating on this latest work, Doc raised his arm and nabbed a rubber tube capped with a small brass nozzle which hung from the ceiling in a collection of dozens of similar tubes, then danced in front of his latest creation. After a full half-minute he finally squirted out a small pinhead of paint near the open window of one of the skyscrapers on the canvass. Was it a balloon? A bird?

  “I don’t have a ton of time, man. Working day and night before they take the SunTrust building down and mess up my painting.”

  “You can still paint if it’s demolished, though, right? Take some photos.”

  “Wha?” he said and looked at me, his face a hybrid of amusement and pain. “You can’t paint something that’s not there, man! Dis-honest.”

  “What about the bird you just painted? Is that there now?”

&nbs
p; “Not a bird.” He took a swig of water. “Guy jumping out of a window. And, no, totally different… that’s artistic license. Completely different. You wouldn’t understand, non-artist.” Doc tugged on the rubber hose and it retracted up into the ceiling, the brass hook indistinctive, at least to me, amongst a myriad others. His eyes were still focused on the painting like he was trying to work through some sort of imbalance, trying to correct a problem only he could see. “What sort of favor you need, Dexter?”

  “You still have your Quiet Room set up, right?”

  “Sure,” he said and moved liquidly in front of his painting. In the dim light, I could see sweat beading on his forehead. All various colors of droplets, he looked like he was perspiring Skittles. That said, if he were actually sweating candy, this would not entirely surprise me about Doc Drake.

  “I need to put my van in there,” I said, and he stopped, turned to me, spun in a slow circle then sat down on the floor. He put his head in his hands, which left handprints of blue paint up both sides of his head.

  “That’s where I sleep, man. My bike’s in there right now, too… where would--”

  “Not permanently,” I said and sat down next to the painting so we could talk face to face. Also, that way he doesn’t forget he’s talking to someone. The floor was freezing; the cement below in direct contact with the subterranean earth, and it made my undercarriage a little cold. “Just gotta pull it in there until we can see what’s coming off it.”

  “Hell’s that mean?”

  At that moment, his wife, Tiffany, walked into the room. Over the years, I’d learned that when she’s in the sort of mood she was in at that moment, you’re not supposed to talk to Tiffany unless she addresses you first. She will often wander the house as a “spirit,” and in her, ahem, vulnerable state, doesn’t like direct contact with anyone but her husband. They’re a near perfect match, I would say.

  I said, “Tell Tiff I said ‘hey.’” Spirit Tiffany was, as the spirit state of her always is, naked and this time her skin was stained entirely blue. There were spots that were rubbed a little less blue, so this wasn’t, it seemed, day one.

  Doc didn’t even look at her. “Going through an azure phase right now.”

  “Blue’s a good color on her,” I said and the comment drew a slight shrug from his wife.

  “Last week,” he said. “She dyed herself green.”

  “Green.”

  “Yeah, like a forest,” he said and grinned mischievously. “She then pointed out which plants in nature were edible.”

  I shuddered a little. My friend Doc, frankly, looks like a turtle that’s lost its shell. The images of him involved in any sexual act rattling around in my brain did some real core damage to me. I turned the conversation back to my immediate concern.

  “I just got the van,” I said, holding his gaze. “Need to make sure ‘they’re’ not listening.”

  He bolted up like gas shot from a geyser, took two steps away from me, then three back. Putting his hands to his head, he said:

  “What? They’re listening to you? Because of me?”

  “Dunno. Need you to find out.”

  He pressed his fingers up under his black rimmed glasses and rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. His mouth dropped and he exhaled, exasperated.

  “Shit, man,” he said. “Yeah, drive it around back and I’ll lift the gate. I park the Indian in there, but I’ll roll her out.”

  “You still have that RF signal detector I bought you a couple Christmases back?”

  “Had to get a new one. It’s even better, detects across all frequencies, all wavelengths.

  “What happened to the one I gave you?”

  “Someone stole it, after I threw to the bottom of my pool.”

  “You don’t have a pool, Doc.”

  “I did,” he said. “They stole the pool, the signal detector was at the bottom.”

  Creeping back toward his workstation, Doc drew a hand across his mouth. He glanced up at a window blackened by black spray paint, then back to me.

  “Quiet room is lined with lead dampeners,” he said, as if I’d asked a question. “Top, bottom, all sides. Inches thick in all directions. It may be the only place on the planet aside from a bank safe or a mile-deep mine where a person doesn’t have radio signals slicing through every one of their cells, jumbling up the RNA, knocking synapses from neural pathways--”

  “I know.”

  “You know how many radio, satellite, mobile, whatever signals you have crisscrossing through your body right now, man?”

  “Nope,” I said and walked slowly to the door. I needed to start heading to the van or he’d go for hours about this.

  “Billions, man. Not even millions but trillions, maybe,” he said and headed in the opposite direction. “What do you think that’s doing to the cellular structure of your body, being bombarded with that kind of radiation?”

  “I don’t know,” I said and turned the knob to the door. “I just need to know, down there in your Quiet Room, if we’ve got any signals coming off my new van.”

  He smiled. “Oh, you bought a van? Yours? I thought you weren’t driving anymore after the accident.”

  “I, yeah, you know... about time.”

  “Cool.”

  He pulled a black handle, slipped through a door I’d never seen, and disappeared, closing the door behind him. The door popped back open and Doc’s wife stepped out.

  “Pull your van around.”

  “’Preciate that.”

  Her soft voice drifted toward me: “Stop looking at my tits, Dexter.”

  My head snapped down, eyes focused on the intricate work of my shoelaces. “Just checking out the shading, Tiffany. Good job on the color disbursement.” And added, because I couldn’t resist: “Papa Smurf coming by a little later?”

  The corners of her mouth twitched as she stepped forward slowly, looking at the floor as if she were carefully walking in precise tracks only visible to her.

  AFTER I'D MET DOC on the street that first night, I’d found him a job as a stunt guy for a local radio show, something between gigs. I’d talked with a disk jockey one night at some shitkicker bar, and the guy lamented over an eleventh gin and tonic about how he didn’t have a suitable street guy. You know, somebody to run out and get celebrity gotcha interviews, or test the airbag on an ’84 Corsica, hit a dry water slide buck naked, whatever. Doc needed the dough and, it seemed to me, just the guy for the gig.

  He lasted about fifteen months with the show, the tour ended when the show got fired.

  Doc’s Q score was markedly higher than the regular cast members and subsequently he was able to perpetuate his “artist” business off the success for a while. During the lean times, he stretched canvasses for other artists. It was a living and didn’t require a tie, so he was in good shape.

  The one thing about Doc that would concern most people is that he’s crazy. I don’t mean, “Hey, that dude is so bananas, he just stripped down to skivvies and jumped in the hotel fountain! What a wacky guy!” I mean CMF. Crazy Mother Fucker.

  But being that high for most of life, floating up there in the atmosphere by yourself, all that time... well, if you stared down at the world too long, you’d be crazy, too.

  After I’d pulled my white Ford Econoline into his “Quiet Room,” he walked around its shell for a full two minutes, as if he may be able to pick up on the signals himself without the RF detector. Goggles on top of his head, he scratched the parts where the black rubber met his skin.

  “Why do you think you’re bugged, man?”

  I said, “Do you think they need a reason why?”

  “Absofuckinglutely right, man!” he said as he walked the length of the cargo van. The vehicle wasn’t terribly large, about seventeen and a half feet long, but you could hide a tracker or listening device in gumball, if the magazines I’d borrowed from the dentist’s office next to Lester’s were any guide.

  He pulled the room’s heavy bay door closed, stepped on t
he kick-plate putting his entire 140 pounds on it, and pulled the handle of the latch downward. And after it locked into place, Doc reached up beside it and dragged a bolt across a metal slat that made it look like he was loading a round into a rifle that had been built into the wall.

  A series of low thwop-thwop pops circled the entire room until every wall glimmered with the flickering light of the gas lamps. No electricity in the lead-lined room-- just more waves to Doc-- except a faint sound of an exhaust fan.

  Standing there in a grubby t-shirt and paint-plastered cargo pants, I’d never seen him wear anything else; he put his hands on his hips, took a deep breath, and said, “This is freedom, man. No invisible demons running through your pores right now. Total freedom. Can you feel it?”

  “I sorta miss them,” I said. “I feel naked, Doc. Hold me?” Doc backed away with an exaggerated look of panic on his face, then laughed and slapped my arm.

  The back van doors wouldn’t swing open in the lead-lined room, so I had to go in through the side door with his handheld detector.

  “You know one day, all the signals are going to make men sterile,” he said between mindless humming noises. “Probably be for the best.”

  Flipping the device on, the amber screen rolled a couple times as the device reset itself.

  I asked, “Speaking of which—you guys still trying to have a kid?”

  Doc shrugged. “Yes. Tiff is waiting for just the right moment.”

  Inside, I stared at the back of the van and scooted along with my knees, checking the driver’s side first. Up and down, I swept the device along the wall. It’s a unidirectional device so you have to be pointing at the place you want to check out. Far as I could tell, there were no spikes as I moved closer to the front.

  “What’s the right moment that she’s waiting for?”

  “She says pink. When her mood is... pink,” he said, his eyes trained on the device in my hand. “You’ve got some bounce on that, man.”

  I nodded. “See that. Sorta faint, so I’m picking up the scatter of a signal.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” he said and looked around the van, eyes darting from corner to corner.