“Oh crap, Alan’s at the door, gimme a minute here hang on,” I said as I rushed away from our front door and its fisheye peep hole. I knew we had to air the room out, our building’s owner Alan was at the door, and I was already in trouble with the friggin’ guy. I stubbed out my joint and hurriedly opened my bedroom window.
“Wait, hold on, Eddie, you know you can’t be here.” I said.
“What do you want me to do, jump out? Looks like I’m already screwed anyway, what else am I gonna do?” Eddie replied. He was always a nervous and paranoid guy; now he was also drunk and high and his personal nemesis had arrived at our door – excuse me, my door. Eddie didn’t belong here at 164 Prospect Park West.
I had an idea: “Dude, get in the closet.” Very reluctantly, Eddie got in my closet, moving my unused electric guitar out of the way. I closed that door, strode down the hall and opened another (my front door). His barely stifled giggles escaped into the hall. Beau and Yvonne put out their joints.
I swung open my front door. “Hey Alan what’s up.” Alan and his building landlord (plus part time henchman) Ben walked in, sans greeting. I guess uninvited entrances were a perk they felt they’d earned, seeing as how I hadn’t paid rent in going on three months now.
“What is going on here, I heard Crisalli was around,” Alan said as he and Ben crossed the kitchen, heading down the hallway with its four bedrooms (mine was at the end).
“Eddie? I haven’t seen him in awhile, since he got on a bus for Portland.” That was partly true, Eddie had, a few months ago, done his biennial exit from the tri-state area, discarding all of his belongings and, this time, heading to Oregon. I’d heard from him via his cartoon postcards a couple of times.
“Hmmm,” Alan grunted as he opened my bedroom door. Ben followed him in, shaking his head. Yvonne and Beau nodded at them distractedly.
“What’s going on in here?!” – Ben, a little agitated.
“Nuthin’ much, just hangin’ out” I said as I winced at Ben’s near miss, almost kicking over an open 40oz. St. Ides by my dresser. It was 2pm on a Thursday, a workday…I guessed that Alan was probably think-muttering this to himself.
Alan – “Doesn’t anybody have to work today?”
Us, in near unison – “eh, you know day off- no I’m not working – uh, no.” There was no response from the closet, thank goodness.
“Well, can you please let us know if you see Edward? And your rent’s way overdue, if case you’ve forgotten.”
“Nope, I haven’t forgotten, I’m a-workin’ on it!” I said perkily. Luckily my three other roommates were at work this day, picking up the slack. The general rent strike (caused by my continual non-payment) wouldn’t begin for another month.
Alan and Ben left, I was very relieved. I went back to my room after making sure they were really gone.
“Man, what is up with those guys, such assholes!” Yvonne said, displaying drinking-pal friend loyalty. “Forget it, do we have any left?” I asked.
“Oh yeah!” – Beau
We drank and smoked the rest of our supplies over the next hour, celebrating my ‘escape,’ then began a debate over who would head out to the bodega, next to the 11th Street Laundry. I stood up and remembered something.
“Shit! Eddie!” I swung open the closet door; Eddie was just sitting there smiling.
“Eddie, I’m so sorry I forgot about you!”
“I was gonna see how long you’d leave me here, see man, you don’t give a damn about me Hardesty, you never did.” At that moment I thought, as I often had in the past two years, about Eddie’s weird influence on me, for sometimes better but usually worse. I had never thought about my influence on him and wouldn’t for a while yet.
Eddie had arrived in my life one day two Octobers before, in 1991, complete with a hilarious (though this was ALWAYS determined by how much I’d had to drink) back story, courtesy of our mutual friend Steve. I walked to work at Screen Memory Video that morning and saw Steve pulling up the gate and unlocking the front door. There was a guy with unkempt hair, wearing a weird old-timey vest, standing there with him. He kind of peered at me.
“Hey Bill!” Steve greeted. “Here’s that guy I told you about, he’s also looking for a place to live.”
Steve opened the front door and disabled the alarm, inviting us in. We chatted, commiserating about our mutual housing woes. And that’s pretty much how the Eddie era started. I had been drinking a lot those days, just in general, and this would prove to be a case where my judgment proved to be a little sketchy.
Steve and Eddie went to NYU film school together, that’s how they met almost three years before. Steve dropped out because he wanted to spend more time actually making films. Eddie dropped out because one day he had freaked out, taken off all his clothes, stepped out of his apartment building and sat on the hood of some car. He said he was trying to get “taken away” Eddie would talk a lot about getting “taken away,” one of his favorite “frets” as I called them. I found out later his main “fret” was a fear of “eternal recurrence,” that the same exact thing was happening to him over and over.
Anyway, Eddie was taken away and then had his first ever stint at the mental ward at St. Vincent’s (where he was also born). He told me a variation of this story several times, always with that weird clenched teeth angry-nervous giggle of his (the same giggle that leaked out of my closet two years later when Alan visited). He told me he spent quite awhile trying to think of what to reply to their oft-asked “what were you thinking?” He wanted to come up with the worst possible thing, you see, because he thought it would be funny.
He arrived at “I thought I was Jesus Christ.” They promptly strapped him to a wheelchair and rolled him into an observation room for several more days. He didn’t know it at the time but he had had his first psychotic break, the one that would lead to his diagnosis as a schizophrenic. He dropped out of NYU right thereafter.
Eddie told me this story for the first time about an hour after we first met, and then he changed the subject to apartment hunting. By then we had left Screen Memory and were sitting out in front of Connecticut Muffin (Steve, aware of my both my housing crisis AND Eddie’s loquaciousness, let me leave for another half hour). I saw that he had a pen on him and he kept taking out bits of paper or napkins and jotting things on them. I knew I’d never met anyone who was crazy before, well… OK, schizophrenic (but I always thought of him as Crazy Eddie) and thought this might be kind of fun.
I told him “let’s go for it!” and even entrusted the apartment search to him. It didn’t bother me in the slightest that Edward was unemployed because he received SSI checks every month. On the 3rd of every month he headed down West 10th Street in Manhattan (he was staying with his Mom) to what he called his STM (Schizo Teller Machine) to pick up his monthly dole. It also didn’t bother me at all that he refused to take any medication for his Schizophrenia.
A couple of days later Eddie called and told me he’d found a place. He sounded happy yet sad because he knew he’d now have to (maybe) get a job. We headed over to the Flatbush Avenue office of Alan Vogel. Alan struck me as a crusty yet amiable enough older guy as I listened to Eddie and Alan discuss. Eddie did all the talking, in fact; he handled his business in a way I never saw him do again. Alan told us to meet a guy named Ben at 1657 Eighth Avenue; that he’d let us in and show us around.
As we left, Eddie started laughing. When asked about that he said, “I can’t believe he bought it! I’m such a con artist! He thinks I’m a regular guy!” Instead of being concerned about that, instead I thought it was pretty funny. I was a little tipsy after all. My continued involvement with Eddie would require my being drunk, a prereq I was only happy to fulfill.
We walked south, where the numbered streets had run out, which meant we were more in Windsor Terrace now. Ben and the super, a guy with the unlikely name of Jose Feliciano, showed us a nondescript three-room apartment on the corner of a nondescript block on Prospect Avenue. There was a dead roach on the kitchen counter.
“Yeah whatever we’ll take it.” I may not have been all that jazzed but Eddie was super-excited. He felt like he finally had a plan, and I guess so did I. We would move in the next day.
Our glorious flat at 1657
That night we were out drinking at The Carriage House and Eddie revealed he was a cartoonist and also a songwriter. His cartoons, depicting chain-smoking angry tacos and an arrogant above-it-all meditative burrito named “Burrito Ohm” were really hilarious! In fact I couldn’t stop laughing; Eddie had such a weird edge about him that I took as very refreshing. And he ate up the attention. I think he felt vindicated somehow, like somebody finally ‘got’ him.
Mixed in with his ‘thank yous,’ though, were seriously stated concerns that the fame brought on by his creativity would eventually lead to his ‘assassination.’ I was just delighted that he would use that word instead of ‘killed’ and laughed all the harder. This guy was a hoot!
“Excuse me; can I have another Long Island Iced Tea?”
A few days after we moved in I noticed a couple of things, that he hardly ever slept and that he “brushed” his teeth with his finger. Oh, and that he liked to take baths with no soap. He’d already told me he stopped wearing his glasses because he could “see too well” (I took that as a kind of brilliant commentary about society or the world) so I figured maybe he didn’t use soap because he’d be “too clean.”
The good news was that he’d gotten a job at an ice cream stand in Bryant Park. He actually worked there a couple of days too, before he started taking the train out to the same stop and just pacing the neighborhood for a few hours. He couldn’t work anyplace for long because without medication he was too paranoid and anxious. He’d get a job and then just stop showing up. It turned out the moving in payment was the only money he ever gave to Alan, but of course I didn’t know this just yet. Later on I would be struck by the irony that there was once a time when I was the only one paying rent.
About three weeks after we moved in he gave up his pretense of work and stayed home. I came home from a morning shift at the video store one day to find him in his underwear in the living room painting the walls an iridescent dark blue.
“Dude, did you ask Jose Feliciano if we could do that?!” Eddie and I called our super by both names because it was funny.
“No no man, it’s cool!” he said as he tracked bright blue paint over our hardwood floors. “Why do you worry so much?” He wasn’t painting to the edges either and he was mixing in drawings of Taco and a character I later came to call “The Freaked Out Guy.” I was starting to get pissed but I squashed it with a few forties.
With Eddie, with every bit of worrisome news there was always something funny. The next morning we were walking up Seventh and he was singing this song called “Yes, We Sell Corn.” It was about a guy in a market telling a customer that they sold corn, and then informing him in what aisle he could find it. I was laughing so hard; the usually jaded Park Sloper pedestrians were staring and/or sneering at me. But I was a little shaky hung over too so there was that. Eddie shushed me because, “I don’t want to get discovered yet, and I’m not ready to be famous. I don’t know if I can trust ‘them.’” With people staring at me I was even starting to get a little paranoid myself….
That wasn’t Eddie’s only song, he had one about a guy going to the beach to count “all the grains of sand” and another funny yet apocalyptic one called “Give Me the Totals.” His humor often involved the end of the world and his perceived role in it. His illness gave him a Messianic narcissism that I found wonderful and entertaining, especially when I was drunk. When people were around I liked to just wind him up and let him go.
But a year later he was far from laughing when terrorists bombed the basement on one of the World Trade Center towers. He kept saying, “They’re gonna come back, they’re gonna come back and knock one into the other and then they’ll both be gone. You think I’m crazy man?! People don’t understand man….just watch.”
I tried to cheer him up from such nutty ramblings, mostly for the sake of my newly tenuous sanity.
I kept trying to get him to find another job, or at least use his SSI check on rent (he preferred beer and sushi, lots of sushi). A month after Eddie stopped paying rent, Jose Feliciano stopped coming by; thereby halting his efforts to keep our snowballing roach problem at bay. It wasn’t just roaches. One morning about 2 am and in a stupor, I woke up to hear scratching in the walls of my bedroom. Knowing Eddie was probably awake (he was) I assumed he was messing with me. In the dim street lamp spillage I could see four baby mice sitting on my floor staring at me. I grabbed the closest thing I could get, air freshener, and sprayed it on them. They ran off.
The scratching continued, Alan and Ben started making unannounced visits, and Eddie apparently no longer slept at all. I went with him one day to visit his Dad, so he could ask for money. James lived in a leaning brownstone a couple of blocks down Flatbush from Alan’s office. Inside the apartment were hand painted walls and cartoons everywhere. James’ cartoons. James was very put together mentally but he had no money to give us. Crap.
By now, about three months after we’d moved in, Eddie started to talk about leaving, just disappearing. He told me he did this every couple of years anyway, so now was as good a time as any. I said, “Eddie, you’re really screwing me over if you do this! The lease is in your name!”
“(giggle; THAT giggle) Man, I’m really sorry (he only ever called me ‘man’ or ‘Hardesty’), I guess I’m really fucking you over, but you kind of asked for this Hardesty. (giggle giggle).”
Then, “What comes around goes around.”
Giggle
I saw red, for real, and grabbed him by his threadbare t-shirt and threw him up against our second story window. I leaned right into his face and said, “You’re a fuckin’ psycho, psycho psycho psycho!”
He retorted, “Lush, lush, lush!”
We both burst out laughing. When I woke up the next morning he was gone. There was a note telling me he’d taken the Peter Pan up to Saratoga Springs, he left about $80. He also left his few belongings. A little later, I heard (from Steve) that Eddie was in a homeless shelter up in Saratoga, and hearing that I found that I kind of missed him. He may have been trouble but I wished he’d come back. And I also knew he shouldn’t. Alan definitely wanted to bring legal action against Edward. He asked for him every once in awhile, I guess he suspected that I knew where he was.
I got a message to him through Steve that we all missed him and wanted him to come back. After a few weeks he did just that, he ended up staying with his dad James on Flatbush. I tried, futilely, to get him to contact Alan and make some kind of settlement. In the meantime he spent his days making little movies with Steve and me.
This was the first of two times that Eddie would split town and each time I said “thank goodness;” but then a little later I’d miss him and ask for him to come back. Where I was in life I figured his entertainment value made him worth the trouble. In fact my whole attitude was that he and his condition existed solely for my amusement.
I eventually got another roommate but we were so far behind in the rent that about 4 months later, when my roommate left (he couldn’t stand the blue walls and footprints; and he was also behind in rent), Alan told me there had to be a change. I’d been in this apartment for several months, with no lease, and I was behind in the rent myself. In fact I was coming off as a bit of an asshole, almost as much as Eddie. So what did Alan do?
HE MOVED ME INTO ANOTHER ONE OF HIS BUILDINGS, A MUCH NICER ONE, WITH A FOURTH FLOOR VIEW OF PROSPECT PARK!
The somewhat nicer abode at 164
I hung in there as an upstanding citizen for a year or so, though my drinking got steadily worse. I did feel more mentally stable without Eddie as a roommate. In the meantime he’d added the whole story about how he screwed me in our old apartment into his “rotation” and when I was around I had to hear it all the time.
Eventually Eddie started asking me if he could just crash at my place, he said he’d hide from our landlord Ben. Since I didn’t want him fucking this up for me, I refused. After three or four job hirings (and subsequent walkouts) and with James getting fed up with him; he started talking about disappearing, this time for good. I was OK with it because it would mean he wouldn’t keep asking if he could move in.
And my usually sober roommates found him to be a little creepy.
One day he left for Oregon. Good riddance right? Not long after I noticed that stories about Edward had moved into MY personal rotation and I started to reminisce. So my friend Susan and I thought it might be a good idea to talk him into coming back; after all he was very far away and had been gone longer than last time. We really just wanted to see if he would do it. So we called him, and he did it.
A week after he came back was the day we left him in the closet during Alan’s visit. What was he doing there in the first place, you may ask? He told me his return from Portland was conditional on me letting him crash in our living room; so I relented. He wanted it look like he was doing me a favor by coming back.
When he returned I immediately got tense, fearing discovery by management. He “slept” (usually naked) on our sofa during the day, under orders to be quiet. My roommates hated me for this but for some reason didn’t say anything to Ben or Alan.
Five days after I pulled a giggling Eddie out of my closet Ben came by in the middle of the work day, he thought he heard something in our apartment, and assuming we were all at work, let himself in. He found a naked Eddie on our sofa. Eddie was really scared but Ben wasn’t even mad. He just shook his head and said, “Why don’t you just leave us alone?”
Eddie got dressed and left in a hurry. The game was truly up for him though; he was too scared to come back. The next year I got sober. I actually spent my entire first sober day with Eddie; we walked to Coney Island, all the while with him telling me what a bad idea it was for me to do this. But I told him for the umpteenth time that it would be a good idea for him to find some medication.
Days passed and then weeks, I felt my head was really clearing up, my priorities were rearranging themselves, just as my own personality kind of “reformatted.” I eventually had a realization, that I had manipulated Eddie as much or worse than he ever did me. I felt guilty, but I also found Eddie wasn’t that amusing to me after all, we kind of fell out of touch.
Years later, after I moved to Seattle, I’d look him up during my biannual New York visits. I found out he decided to go on meds after all. I was glad. It turned out his witty humor was still intact. Now years sober, I gave him a little more appreciation for that. He seemed to have gained a kind of perspective and clarity that I fancied I myself now had.
He even considered doing a stand up act, his meds helped him get over his fear of other people and their motivations. He told me the age of cell phones was a boon for crazy people because they could walk down the street talking to themselves, just remembering to hold up their phones so nobody would stare.
He was also trying to make a line of bumper stickers that said “My Other Wife Is a Man,” kind of a take on the ‘my other car is…’ series.
Unfortunately, the next year 9/11 happened, and it happened during a time he’d decided to experiment and go off his meds. He had a serious setback and lost it all over again just like he did back in ’89. After a long stint (again) at St. Vincent’s, he vowed to never go off them again. And as far as I know, he’s stayed true to his word. He’s still in the West Village even now, and I don’t know if he sees it the way I do, but he and I are both keeping our sanity, just in very different ways.
