Perkus rifled through his CDs to find a record he wished to play me, a record I didn’t know-Peter Blegvad’s “Something Else (Is Working Harder).” The song was an angry and incoherent blues, it sounded to me, gnarled with disgruntlement at those who “get away with murder.” Then, as if riled by the music, he turned and said, almost savagely, “So, I’m not a rock critic, you know.”
“Okay.” This was a point I found easy enough to grant.
“People will say I am, because I wrote for Rolling Stone-but I hardly ever write about music.” In fact, the broadsides hung in his rooms seemed to be full of references to pop songs, but I hesitated to point out the contradiction.
He seemed to read my mind. “Even when I do, I don’t use that language.”
“Oh.”
“Those people, the rock critics, I mean-do you want to know what they really are?”
“Oh, sure-what are they?”
“Super-high-functioning autistics. Oh, I don’t mean they’re diagnosed or anything. But I diagnose them that way. They’ve got Asperger’s syndrome. I mean, in the same sense that, say, David Byrne or Al Gore has it. They’re brilliant, but they’re social misfits.”
“Uh, how do you know?” As far as I knew I’d never met anyone with Asperger’s syndrome, or for that matter, a rock critic. (Although I had once seen David Byrne at a party.) Yet I had heard enough already to find it odd hearing Perkus Tooth denouncing misfits.
“It’s the way they talk.” He leaned in close to me, and demonstrated his point as he spoke. “They aspirate their vowels nearer to the front of their mouths.”
“Wow.”
“And when you see them talking in groups they do it even more. It’s self-reinforcing. Rock critics gather for purposes of mutual consolation, though they’d never call it that. They believe they’re experts.” Perkus, whether he knew it or not, continued to aspirate his vowels at the front of his mouth as he made his case. “They can’t see the forest for the trees.”
“Thelf-reinforthing exthperts,” I said, trying it on for size. “Can’t thee the foretht for the threes.” I am by deepest instinct a mimic. Anyway, a VHS tape labeled ECHOLALIA lay on the table between us.
“That’s right,” said Perkus seriously. “Some of them even whistle when they speak.”
“Whisthle?”
“Exactly.”
“Thank god we’re not rock critics.”
“You can say that again.” He tongued the gum on another joint he’d been assembling, then inspected it for smoke-worthiness, running it under his funny eye as if scanning a bar code. Satisfied, he ignited it. “So, I’m self-medicating,” he explained. “I smoke grass because of the headaches.”
“Migraine headaches?”
“Cluster headaches. It’s a variant of migraine. One side of the head.” With two fingers he tapped his skull-of course it was his right side, the headaches gravitating toward the deviant eye. “They’re called cluster headaches because they come in runs, every day for a week or two at exactly the same time. Like a clock, like a rooster crowing.”
“That’s crazy.”
“I know. Also, there’s this visual effect… a blind spot on one side…” Again, his right hand waved. “Like a blot in the center of my visual field.”
A riddle: What do you get when you cross a blind spot with a wandering eye? But we’d never once mentioned his eye, so I hung fire. “The pot helps?” I asked instead.
“The thing about a migraine-type experience is that it’s like being only half alive. You find yourself walking through this tomb world, everything gets far away and kind of dull and dead. Smoking pulls me back into the world, it restores my appetites for food and sex and conversation.”
Well, I had evidence of food and conversation-Perkus Tooth’s appetites in sex were to remain mysterious to me for the time being. This was still the first of the innumerable afternoons and evenings I surrendered to Perkus’s kitchen table, to his smoldering ashtray and pot of scorched coffee, to his ancient CD boom box which audibly whined as it spun in the silent gap between tracks, to our booth around the corner at Jackson Hole when a fierce craving for burgers and cola came over us as it often did. Soon enough those days all blurred happily together, for in the disconsolate year of Janice’s broken orbit Perkus Tooth was probably my best friend. I suppose Perkus was the curiosity, I the curiosity-seeker, but he surely added me to his collection as much as the reverse.
I did watch Echolalia. The way Brando tormented his would-be interviewer was funny, but the profundity of the whole thing was lost on me. I suppose I was unfamiliar with the required context. When I returned it I said so, and Perkus frowned.
“Have you seen The Nascent?”
“Nope.”
“Have you seen Anything That Hides?”
“Not that one either.”
“Have you seen any of Morrison Groom’s films, Chase?”
“Not knowingly.”
“How do you survive,” he said, not unkindly. “How do you even get along in the world, not understanding what goes on around you?”
“That’s what I have you for. You’re my brain.”
“Ah, with your looks and my brain, we could go far,” he joked in a Bogart voice.
“Exactly.”
Something lit up inside him, then, and he climbed on his chair in his bare feet and performed a small monkey-like dance, singing impromptu, “If I’m your brain you’re in a whole lot of trouble… you picked the wrong brain!” Perkus had a kind of beauty in his tiny, wiry body and his almost feral, ax-blade skull, with its gracefully tapered widow’s peak and delicate features. “Your brain’s on drugs, your brain’s on fire…”
Despite this lunatic warning, Perkus took charge of what he considered my education, loading me up with tapes and DVDs, sitting me down for essential viewings. Perkus’s apartment was a place for consuming archival wonders, whether at his kitchen table or in the sagging chairs before his flat-screen television: bootlegged unreleased recordings by those in Tooth’s musical pantheon, like Chet Baker, Nina Simone, or Neil Young, and grainy tapes of scarce film noir taped off late-night television broadcasts. Among these treasures was a videotape of a ninety-minute episode of the detective show Columbo, from 1981, directed by Paul Mazursky, and starring John Cassavetes as a wife-murdering orchestra conductor, the foil to Peter Falk’s famously rumpled detective. It also featured, in roles as Cassavetes’s two spoiled teens, Molly Ringwald and myself. The TV movie was something Mazursky had tossed off around the time of the making of Tempest, the latter a theatrical release featuring Cassavetes and Ringwald, though not, alas, me. That pretty well summed up my luck as an actor, the ceiling I’d always bumped against-television, but never the big screen.
Cassavetes was among Perkus’s holy heroes, so he’d captured this broadcast, recorded it off some twilight-hour rerun. The tape was intact with vintage commercials from the middle eighties, O. J. Simpson still sprinting through airports and so forth. I hadn’t seen the Columbo episode since it was broadcast, and it gave me a feeling of seasick familiarity. Not that Mazursky, Falk, Cassavetes, and Ringwald had been family to me-I’d barely known them-yet still it felt like watching a home movie. It led to the curious sense that in some fashion I’d already been dwelling here in Perkus’s apartment, for twenty-odd years before I’d met him. His knowledge of culture, and the weirdly synesthetic connections he traced inside it, made it seem as though this moment of our viewing the tape together was fated. Indeed, as if at twelve years old I’d acted in this forgettable and forgotten television show alongside John Cassavetes as a form of private communion with my future friend Perkus Tooth.