Monday, March 5, 2018

eddie


by nick nelson



when i was a teenager i had a sort of friend named eddie.

probably everybody in america when they are growing up has a friend like or at least knows somebody like eddie.

eddie was a geek but not a total outcast in the school pecking order. hanging with him would not get you tossed into a bottomless pit, it was more like -

“you’re friends with that guy?”

“um - a little bit, he used to live next door to me.”

anyway, eddie was a geek and into the usual geek things of the (pre-video game) era - science fiction novels, rock and roll, star trek, star wars, etc, and he had strong opinions on these subjects.


what you quickly realized in conversing with him was that he took completely for granted that every movie ever made, every tv show ever shown, every book or story or poem ever written, and every song ever played on the radio, had some sort of hidden meaning. you got the impression that he had never thought about it and come to the conclusion that it was so, but that it was just wired into his brain that that is what movies and books or songs were - hidden messages that had to be decoded.

and if you argued with him, he could not understand that you might be saying the movie or song or whatever had no message, but only that it had some different message from the one he found.

i think i remember his favorite sources were the usual suspects - tolkien, dune, bob dylan, the beatles, star trek, but he could find messages in anything, totally forgotten sitcoms, one hit wonder songs on the radio, anything.


eddie had an older brother named fred. fred was a sports fan and bet on sports, and was convinced that every sporting event in america, not just things like the super bowl or a heavyweight championship fight, but every baseball game, maybe not every high school game, but every pro or college football or basketball game was fixed by the mob. and if you questioned whether they could actually do that or if it would be worth their while if they could, he would just shake his head and pity your innocence.

eddie would relate lyrics from songs from the beach boys or otis redding or whoever not just to the bible or the famous events of history like world war two or the russian revolution, but to things like the mahabarata or the teachings of zoroaster or julian the apostate. so he must have read up on those things, maybe in encyclopedias, though i never gave it much thought at the time.


so one day, one of the last times i talked to him, i said something that actually seemed to get through to him or make an impression on him.

i said, eddie, how do you know it is not just movies and books and records that have these messages, but ordinary people just talking on the street or in a doughnut shop? how do you know what you might hear if you just sat on a park bench or rode the subway or bus all day?

and it was like a great light shone on him, and he said, yeah… yeah… that could be…

all that was a long time ago, as you can tell from the cultural references i have been making. i moved away from the neighborhood shortly after that, and eddie became the last thing on my mind.


sometimes i wonder what happened to poor eddie. did my suggestion have any permanent effect on him? make him even crazier? or cause a breakthrough that wakened him from his dreams?

more likely he just grew up, got a job, found a girl and got married. maybe he became one of the first computer geeks and made billions. or joined the army and spent twenty years as a supply sergeant. or became homeless, and is wandering the streets today, mumbling about leonardo da vinci and akhnaton and bob dylan and how they predicted donald trump.


maybe he is still living in the same house, in the same room, staring at a laptop twenty hours a day.

i could try to look him up online, even though he had a pretty common name. the reason i don’t is the same reason i never look anybody up. because they might have some kind of “see who is searching for you” software and try to get in touch with me or think i was stalking them.

i suppose i could use a computer in a library. but i know i never will.

life goes on, and time swallows everything, the cool and the uncool, the “deluded” and the “hardheaded” alike.