Many years ago, back in the early 1990s in Ocala, Florida, I met a guy. Well, not just a guy, but The Guy. We called him The Guy because for a while, we didn't know his actual name, which was Matt, so The Guy stuck. He was what you'd call husky, large but not fat, per se. He has short hair that hung down to his eyes in the front. Nothing really remarkable abut his appearance, you'd walk right by him and hardly notice, but inside there was some weird stuff going on.
For those of you not familiar with the city of Ocala, it' a special sort of place. It's not a big city. There is no "Ocala skyline" to speak of, really. It's a town that has sprawled over a large area. It was once home to many horse farms, but most of those have been replaced by deed restricted developments. There are many well-to-do and even wealthy families there, and that mentality seems to create feelings of privilege even among the middle class. In short, Ocala is a pretentious town.
I went to a community college there while living in a town a bit to the south. I had nothing in common with those pretentious types so I associated mostly with the punk and metal crowd. The Guy hung out on the periphery of the metal crowd, which was mostly centered around the band Killing Addiction. I got the impression he was tolerated by those guys but not fully accepted. He listened to a lot of that type of music and so they let him hang around enough so that we were aware of his presence in those circles.
One semester, he was in a painting class with my friend Robert. My friend John and I would often go up to the painting classroom after class let out to talk to Robert as he was packing his stuff up to leave. That's where we first started talking to The Guy...
Our first encounter with The Guy was innocent enough. He was working on a painting he called Blue Airplane. He called it that because, well... it was a blue airplane. After that, John and I would talk to him outside sometimes. We would inevitably talk about music and it turns out his favorite band was Carcass, a grindcore band whose album covers consisted of collages of autopsy and crime scene victim photos. He would share with us such observations as how you could cut up a Carcass album cover and make a puzzle out of it, and how if you look really closely at the covers you could see a penis. A little weird, but entertaining.
Another time we had a look at one of his paintings, he was working on something a little more involved. According to his description it was a man in a motel room with a blow-up doll he stabbed laying on the bed, and he's biting his nails nervously as the police are pounding on the door. I'm not sure what the inspiration for that painting was, but he definitely put some thought into it.
One day, we're talking to Robert about The Guy, and he has his own experience to share. Apparently when they were talking while leaving class one morning, they walked by the toilets and The Guy said he had to take a leak. "You wait right here" he told Robert and went to relieve himself. After a moment, Robert decided to wash some paint off his hands and went in as well. The Guy was in one of the stalls, not at a urinal, and Robert could hear the sound of urination, but The Guy's feet, visible under the stall door, were perpendicular to the front of the toilet bowl. Robert was baffled by this, as were John and I. The best explanation we could come up with was maybe he was making a Carcass puzzle with his own penis and stuck it back on sideways. It's still a mystery to this day.
As time went on, we would occasionally see The Guy around town, usually at the mall. One evening, John and I see him hanging out with some people there and he comes up and starts talking to us. At some point he asks us what political correctness is, thinking we'd probably know. Our anti-social ways back then were pretty much the antithesis of political correctness, so we gave a rather cynical answer. He responds "I figured I wouldn't like it whatever it was." He then starts telling us about a recent trip out to Daytona Beach with some friends of his, and how a guy he says was on PCP came up to them talking shit, so they all started beating him. The Guy said he started kicking him when he was down on the ground and then proceeded to act it out, in the middle of the mall, kicking this imaginary person shouting "Hahhh!" with each kick. We did a "well, we have to get going" and left.
One of the last times we saw The Guy was after we stopped at the mall in Ocala after we came back from a trip up to Gainesville. On the way up there, we stopped at a convenience store just north of Williston where John "found" a trench coat in the back room by the toilet. Upon examination of the coat in the car, we noticed that on the back there were these silk screened letters that were blacked out with a marker or something. The letters spelled out "GUCCI KID". John tosses it in the back seat and we go about our day.
Fast forward to early evening back in Ocala and we see The Guy and talk to him in the mall parking lot. John tells The Guy we have a gift for him and he hands The Guy the trench coat. He tries it on, it's a little small. The sleeves only go halfway down his forearms. The "GUCCI KID" is clearly visible on the back, even in the twilight. John and I are both holding back laughter, but he detects some amusement on our faces and asks us what's wrong.
"It's not a fag jacket, is it?" he asks.
We assure him it's not and that it looks really cool. He seems satisfied its alright, thanks us and heads back inside the mall. His generally unrefined look along with the ill fitting trench coat gave him the appearance of a homeless veteran. We just laughed and took off. I think we ran into him only once more after that. We asked about the coat. He said he gave it away.
I wish I knew his last name so I could look him up and see what he's up to these days. I haven't heard about anyone getting chopped up into a Carcass puzzle, or any PCP user vigilantes in the central Florida area so I guess he's doing alright. I'm always going to wonder about that toilet stall incident, though.