Yorey

I was 15 or 16, young enough so that being downtown by myself felt like quite an adventure even if I wasn't doing anything but wandering about. So I wandered all the way out to 33rd street to see if my friend Amber was around. She wasn't. Crossing the street from Ambers on my skateboard I nearly met my end. A white Porsche came roaring down the street, screeching to a stop damn near on top of me, the bumper mere inches from my knees. I glared at the little gnome behind the wheel. Said gnome smiled back.

"Hey dude, sorry about that. You want to come up and smoke some pot?"

And this is how I met Yorey. I'd heard of this guy before. In fact Amber had even taken me to his place once hoping to introduce me but he wasn't around. I'd been impressed with a piece of art that hung in the entry way to his aparment; an old frame hung on the wall around a picture of a chair clipped from a magazine and held in place with scotch tape. A dead bee hung from the frame by black thread, looking like the bee'd decided to end it all, and had hopped from the chair. Taped in the upper right corner was a newspaper article describing an increase in insecticide residue in The Sacramento Valley's air.

As soon as I laid eyes on Yorey, with his spikey black hair and giant grin I knew who he was. I accepted his invitation to smoke some pot and spent the afternoon checking out his artwork. His one room apartment was packed with art most of it nicely framed.

Amber came by later and the three of us got good and drunk. I became a regular at Yorey's after that.

Yorey was the perfect Fonzy to my Richie Cunningham. I thought this guy was the coolest and he was happy to bask in the glow of teenage adoration. My parents were not happy about me hanging out with someone their age, which of course made Yorey even cooler.

A pair of dog tags hung in Yorey's apartment and I noticed they designated his religion as Buddhist. "Hey man, are you a Buddhist?" I asked, having never heard him discuss spirituality beyond the usual Catholic guilt trip symbolism that too many artists were fixating on.

"No dude. In the army you have to go to curch if you say you're a Christian, so some guys would get smart and say Atheist. Well, they made the atheists run laps on Sunday morning, I told them I was a Buddhist and they didn't know what the fuck to do with me. I got to spend Sundays reading in listening to the radio. I told 'em I was meditating." Always working the angles.

I took art very seriously and I loved the canvases that Yorey had assembled. Hearing him talk about his own art however made me crazy.

"Oh fuck man, look at this one. Right there dude, doesn't that look like a pussy man? Fuckin' snatch, and I didn't even know I was painting it. I'm a fuckin' genius man." Everything was a tit or a snatch. Yorey would get drunk and drag home tree branches that he saw "snatch" in. He blacked out once and when he woke up he had a door. He couldn't find any snatch or tit on the door so he was unsure of why it was there. He was equally confused as to where it had come from. He walked the neighborhood looking for houses missing their doors. It was a big solid door, the kind you'd find on an older home and it ended up part of Yorey's permanent collection.

Yorey would find snatch and tits in the art of the masters as well. He was pretty sure that all artists have operated on a snatch and tit obsession from the dawn of time. I realize now that he may have been right, but at the time it drove me mad.

He infuriated me still further when I asked why he painted. "Well I used to play tennis to meet chicks, but I hurt my knee, so I need someway to get some pussy. Fuck man, chicks dig artists man."

The artistry that we kids admired most was in the financial arena. The Porsche, the nice matts and frames for his paintings, his clothes and his master's degree had all been purchased with credit. Credit cards were used to pay credit card bills and his limit grew ever skyward until, all his toys secured, our man declared bancruptcy. We thought this brilliant, and he'd agree. He was most proud of himself as he used his food stamps ID card to scrape the ice of his Porsche. He was stickin' it to the man. He was spitting in the face of our consumer society. He was driving a realy cool car.

Riding in the Porsche allowed an angst ridden to teen to determine just how strong his suicidal impulses really were. If one wanted to live, one did not voluntaril get in this vehicle. On one occasion we moved at a good 65 mph down the freeway with the front half of the car tucked under the back of a diesal. Gritting my teeth and balling up my fists I realized, I really wasn't ready to die.

Not that being in Yorey's apartment was any safer. The guns were not kept away from the children and truth be told they were safer in our hands than in his. Our friend Ryan was coming down off of acid. He'd come to Yorey's because that's where you went at 6am when you were downtown, coming off of an acid trip. It wasn't a safe place for your brain, but it warm and maybe you could get some sleep or sit still for a bit at least. Once the sun had come up and we were all readying to start our day Yorey decided to play with a pistol. The shot was very loud inside that small apartment. Ryan's eyes were very big. I jumped up, and traced the path from the pistol to the new hole in the wall, determing that the bullet had missed hitting Ryan by less than a foot. Ryan didn't visit Yorey's much after that.

I continued to visit pretty regularly. It was great to bring new girls by. Yorey was the perfect prop to complete our crazy artist costumes. I guess I was employing art to score a bit of snatch and tit myself, even though I'd never describe it in such crass terms, perfering words like "Passion" and "love". Most of the girls just got scared away but there were some who thought my friendship with a crazy old hermit in a cave full of paintings was a sign of real depth.

I got a place of my own downtown with my friend Christian and Yorey was one of our first house guests. He got in a fight with a mutual friend of ours in the hallway outside our place and put her hand through one of the small planes of glass on our nice French doors. The missing piece of glass was perfect Yorey said as it allowed him to reach in and unlock the door whenever he wanted to visit. A few days later he did indeed "visit" while I was at work. He stole back a painting he'd given me, leaving a suicide note in it's place. I'd meant to start a collection of his suicide notes, figuring it'd make a great book someday but I kept misplacing them.

Yorey's money started to run out around this time. He still had the car and the framed paintings but he was having to find work to keep the malt liquor flowing. He took his master's degree and got a job bussing tables. He did a great piece of art called fork orgy with desert forks that he stole from the plates of attractive rich women. Everytime we'd see Yorey after that he'd have a different crappy job. The Master's degree, in psychology of all things, didn't seem to be of any help at all.

The worst of it was that he stopped painting. He was sure that this celebrity or that celebrity would want to buy his paintings. Always he had some plan. Always he was just on the edge of that big breakthrough and while he waited there was no point wasting his time with art shows or making slides or letting anybody other than his young friends see his work. The crank, the booze and the depression took their toll. Yorey was aging. The Porsche had gone uninsured and unregistered for at least a year when it finally died on him. He lost a big chunk of his identity there.

My relationship with Yorey had begun to resemble that of a nephew and his crazy uncle. I cared about the dude but the cycle was tiresome and I didn't see him doing anything to escape it. I'd encourage him to paint when I saw him, and he'd tell me he couldn't paint unless he got some pussy. He'd even get mad at me from time to time, sure that I could deliver fresh pussy to him if I chose to do so. He called me the silver tongued devil and was sure that I had the power to make people do whatever I wanted. For some reason I didn't want him getting laid it seemed.

I had my own life going and Yorey was hard to get a hold of so we lost touch for awhile. I found his apartment empty, and it seemed unlikely that he'd ever move so I was sure he was dead. I wondered if it was suicide. Then, about a year later I ran into him again. He'd been evicted after decades of insane drunken behvior.

My crazy uncle is getting ready to have a false hip. Luckily he has V.A. health insurance so he's getting taken care of. He is on disabillity from his job making sandwiches and he quits drinking for a few months every few months. The same old paintings are still lying around his apartment and he's still waiting for this celebrity or that celebrity to want to buy them.