Marvin is a specimen.
Marvin exists in a state of perpetual, almost inconceivable squalor. He himself is a meticulously clean person but he just doesn't give a shit about his natural surroundings. There's food on the floor...and all sorts of junk and boxes and papers and books and clothes and CD cases and broken glass and glossy, color prints of things I try not to see...and what appears to be at least ten thousand foil packets of condoms. You have to sort of feel your way through the shambles because he's covered all the windows with garbage bags and cardboard and keeps the lighting so low--maybe out of embarassment...maybe just because he likes it that way. I'll have to ask him about that sometime.
Marvin, to sum up, has hair down to his ass and a thick, bushy beard that utterly fails to disguise the fact that he possesses the kind of face only an extremely near-sighted mother could love. Marvin weighs at least three hundred pounds and does nothing but sit around on his fat, lazy ass all the live-long day and deal drugs and eat and do drugs and suck back hour after hour of Harold Tyler, Boy Nihilist...to the point that sometimes Marvin knows what Harold is going to say or do before Harold does.
Spooky.
All that said, Marvin is a good shit who sells quality smoke at reasonable prices.
But...that isn't all Marvin is.
Not by a long shot.
About six months ago, right out of the blue--though, admittedly, we were both really, really hammered at the time--Marvin asked me, just like that, if I had ever heard anything about "the movement". Lower case. Low key.
Like any good citizen I, of course, feigned complete ignorance. But he just laughed and leaned over and slapped my leg.
"Don't worry," he grinned, "you're among friends here. You're one of us, man, I can tell."
"Who's us?" I asked, my heart speeding up.
"Us ghosts, man," Marvin replied, with a look that said the thought had only just occurred to him. "Yeah...that's us, man: ghosts haunting the machine." And then without further preamble he started babbling on and on about how it was our sacred, appointed task to “sow the seeds of insurrection in the highest places” and "bring true enlightenment to the blind and the meek and the stupid".
“Our time is gonna come, man. Our time is gonna come...” He kept repeating that over and over again that night but whenever I asked him who? whose time? he just got quiet and inscrutable on me, touching his finger to the side of his nose and shaking his big, shaggy head. “No mas, man. You’ll see.” Marvin the machiavellian motherfucker. He would have made a good fifteenth century pope.
“Tom! Man, I was just thinking about you.” He flapped a big, soft hand in my direction by way of greeting. “Hey, you been sick, man? You look a little green around the gills. Perhaps you need to partake of some of the sacred herb,” he ventured, pointing at his filthy water pipe, packed with what was undoubtedly primo weed. “I think you’ll be pleased. This stuff is definitely creeper, man, so, y'know, watch yourself.”
Marvin is blown away by the fact that I’m thirty-seven years old and still enjoy toking up on a semi-regular basis. He thinks it’s completely cool...but sometimes I get the impression that he’s still got his doubts about me--covert glances; artless, probing questions. I’ve been buying from him for over a year now so you’d think that by now he’d trust me but I guess if you’re in Marvin’s position it pays to be paranoid.
I fired up the bowl, taking a couple of good, healthy hoots of premium purple haze. It was really good shit, with an extremely nice buzz to it. I nodded my approval to Marvin as I passed him the pipe. Then I launched into this incredible stream of consciousness rant about my cab ride over, which he listened to with great interest, not saying much until I finished.
“Yup, yup, that’s what I’ve been hearing,” he said, enveloping the end of the pipe with his wet, labial lips and taking a monster toke.
“They’re running wild in the streets, man.” Marvin didn’t need BLAIR and a virtually infinite database to figure out that change wasn’t just inevitable and inexorable, it was happening right now. His people, his ghosts, emboldened by recent successes, were taking over, man, and things were going to be run a helluva lot differently from here on in. “You shouldn’t have gone out, man, not now. It’s too fuckin’ skanky out there. You gotta learn to think things through better, you know? Right now you should be just maintaining, man, keeping your head down and not...fuckin'...calling attention to yourself or shit. Fuckin’ rights.” This kid was half my age and scolding me. “The brothers and sisters are on the move, man, cutting off the avenues of retreat, seizing the means of production--” Then, just like the last time, he caught himself, like he suddenly remembered that despite my proclivities I was still the enemy--demographically speaking--and therefore not privy to certain information.
Meanwhile, we kept smoking bowl after bowl of that incredibly potent weed, getting more and more blitzed and having these loopy, dope-addled conversations...tuning in to The Thrilling Adventures of Harold, The Teenage Head every once in awhile just to see what he was up to--
--and so I can honestly say, ladies and gentlemen, that I was right there when it happened, an intimate witness to a truly fateful and historic moment--when Donna Tyler, Harold's long-suffering and (not coincidentally) pre-menopausal mother, finally reached her limit with the little freak. A heated confrontation with the stoned and surly teenager escalated into a full-fledged screaming match. And then Donna, normally a mild-mannered, even-tempered woman, completely lost her composure, lashing out at poor, fucked up Harold, repeatedly slapping him across the face and head while he--along with a worldwide audience estimated at six hundred million--squawked in pain and surprise and did his best to evade her flailing attack.
Even in the second or two it took us to Marvin and I got a pretty good working over--
"--a full sensory, three dimensional, multi-channel virtual slugfest..."
"A cyberspace mugging...complete with a mother fixation and subliminals involving lurid S & M fantasies that would make de Sade blush..."
"...fucking self-indulgent, maudlin masturbatory crap..."
--instinctively raising our hands to our burning faces, checking to see if her heavy rings had scratched or cut.
I wasn't too happy about being used as somebody's psychic punching bag but Marvin, on the other hand, was absolutely irate, appalled and outraged by the brutal assault on his idol and alter ego.
"That bitch!" He spat. "That fucking bitch should fucking die..." His switchboard started to light up and he politely excused himself. He gazed up at the ceiling and flicked his fingers at invisible menus, urgently jabbing thin air; he nodded and blinked rapidly and subvocalized for all he was worth.
Suddenly, the room was full of ghosts.
Meanwhile, Harold had completely flipped out and was in the process of trashing his bedroom, sobbing and half-hysterical--while out in the living room his mother was trying to get through to the police and apparently not having any luck at all...
The cab I got for the trip home was a surly old sonofagun who made a point right off the bat of discouraging any conversation.
I didn’t mind the snub and the imposed silence. It gave me time to digest some the tid-bits Marvin had let slip after taking a few too many hits from that bong of his.
“Whatever’s going to happen 's gonna happen soon,” he’d slurred at one point, fellating the pipe, sucking the bowl dry while I looked on in approval. “If people keep their heads, everything will be cool and nobody'll get hurt.” Then he told me he had put in a good word for me with the right people ("you'd be surprised by who I do business with, Major Tom") and just before I left made me promise I’d pick up the newest release by an outfit from Holland called WILLIAM BURROUGHS KILLED MY MUMMY. Apparently, it explained everything.
I paid the cab and stepped away from it quickly, moving across the narrow grass verge in a slight crouch, making a
beeline for my house-- --until I saw him and then I just stopped.
...and...stood...completely...still.
Waiting to be told what to do.
The big, South African assault rifle the kid had draped over his scrawny shoulders hung down practically to his knees. But I recognized immediately, instinctively that he was no comic figure but instead someone to be feared; someone empowered by a clarity of purpose, a terrible inner calm.
And then it suddenly occurred to me...like this splash of ice cold water...that my life, at that moment, was in very great danger.
He beckoned me over to him, and without even thinking about what I was doing, I handed him my card. Which turned out to be exactly the right thing to do. He swiped it through his terminal and squinted at my particulars while I stood there, blabbing out my name, street address, social security number, birth date, shoe size--and anything else I could think of that might be pertinent or useful to him. After a few seconds he grunted, handed me back my card and dismissed me with an insolent wave of his hand.
And the astonishing thing was it was exactly identical to a gesture I’ve seen my own kids make when I fail to understand something they find so fundamentally obvious that I must be either too old or too stupid not to see it.
I breathlessly identified myself to my front door and