Wake Up and Smell the Beer by Jon Longhi

Author:Jon Longhi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manic D Press, Inc.

Despite this rather odd initial information about him, Theodore turned out to be a nice, likeable guy and I got to know him pretty well as I dealt with him long distance over the next couple of years.

So at one point I finally asked him, “Hey, man, I heard this rumor a while back that you put this ad in Maximum Rock'n'Roll asking young punk rock girls to send you their used tampons?”

“Oh, yeah,” Theodore said blithely. “I'm in this punk rock band called the Crack Whores and my lead guitarist Bobcat Bill has all those old tampons shellacked onto his guitar now.”

Theodore had always been eccentric and his essential oddness grew more pronounced as time went on. He always had a tendency to ramble. Though he was prone to delusions of grandeur, he held it together and his business grew.

But I knew he was having problems in his personal life when his girlfriend left him. They had been together for three years and neither of them were spring chickens. I figured that Theodore's neuroses had grown like huge fungi in the poisonous atmosphere of Manhattan, and they had finally driven her away.

I didn't hear from Theodore for a couple of months. When I did, he placed his usual order. In the midst of our conversation he casually mentioned that after his girlfriend left him he had a nervous breakdown. He had to be committed for a month. But he was okay now.

After that, Theodore steadily drifted further and further out there. It was like the lifeline that connected him to the rest of us had snapped and he was floating off into outer space. His ability to pay his bills became more and more sporadic. This steady process of disintegration reached its final stage in a phone call I got from him last week.

He wasn't calling to place an order but just to chat. His debt with us had already grown so big he couldn't afford to even pay that, much less buy new stuff. So he had just called to talk. Now this wasn't ‘talk’ as in ‘have a conversation’. What Theodore really needed was someone to listen to him, someone to absorb the endless flow of conceptual diarrhea that was continually spewing from his fevered mind. This stream of consciousness monologue went on for forty-five minutes until I realized that it wasn't going to stop of its own accord. I tried numerous tactics to get Theodore off the phone, telling him I had a client waiting for me, an emergency call on the other line. I even lied and told him I was late for a doctor's appointment, but none of these tactics were successful in getting him to hang up. He hung onto our connection with a personal desperation that made me feel that hanging up on him would almost be the equivalent of turning off his life support system.

Theodore's mind rapidly moved from one unrelated topic to another with the fluidity and irrationality that usually only appears in schizophrenics and drug addicts.

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