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Ricky
I didn?t like Ricky very much when I first met him. I was a friend of his roommate in college, Paul Kosinski, and Ricky abused him without pity. Paul was a bit of a mess anyway; he did way too many drugs and needed occasional hospitalization for schizophrenia. One time Ricky had melted the plastic pieces to Paul?s chess set and had them out after Paul was released, trying to convince him that he was having a flashback. There was a week when there was some lousy PCP flooding the campus, and every night I?d find Paul writhing in bed and moaning, saying he?d never do it again. This went on for the whole week until the PCP ran out.
Intensely intelligent, Ricky had been through the grinder at a military prep school on Long Island, La Salle Academy. His parents were just as difficult as mine were, so I knew where he was coming from.
He looked at it as tough love. He felt that if someone couldn?t take that sort of ?joking around? they weren?t going to make it in the real world. He wouldn?t mess with me because I could turn it around pretty easily, but the kids with the least clue got hammered.
One of his and his crony?s pet projects was Todd Zelnik. Todd grew up an orthodox Jew in a Hassidic neighborhood, and intended to go to Med. School, which wasn?t very likely. Ricky and his friends were going to teach Todd to be a ?man of the world?, and the poor guy fell for it hook, line and sinker. They kept setting him up to go after girls that would have nothing to do with him, encouraging him through all the rejections.
There was a rumor going around campus that there was going to be another ?Big Bust?, and they terrified Todd, saying that the cops were going to give everyone blood tests and then Todd would have no chance to get into Med. School. Of course, since Todd wanted to be a man of the world, they had taught him to smoke pot. They told him he was screwed unless he drank enough booze the mask the pot. About a fifth of whisky would do it.
I came back to the dorm one night to find plaster casts of a flaccid penis and testicles glued to all of the room doors like knockers. After I finished laughing I found out that they had convinced Todd that every man of the world needed a stainless steel condom, and they arranged for someone to come by to ?fit? him. Like I said, this guy was not destined for Med. School. They waited until he finished secretly masturbating, a well known 8:30 p.m. regular occurrence, and told him the fitter had come by. They all sat in a circle and had him straddle a couple of chairs while he tried to get it up to take the mold. I just hope they didn?t use plaster to take the mold. I think I would have heard about it if they did, between the high heat generated and the tendency to incase and remove all the hairs when the mold is separated he could have been hurt pretty bad.
Even after this, he still came back for more. They got him to join the French club, because girls loved guys that spoke French. He got a minor role in their production of ?The Little Prince?. When the production was staged I went along with the group to cheer Todd on, and whenever he came on stage we erupted in applause. I found out later that when Todd got back to the dorm there was a note for him; Todd-I didn?t send you to college to become an actor, Your Father.
He dropped the performance immediately and he never questioned the note. The R.A. eventually caught wind of it and gave the guys hell, but Todd kept coming back for more.
A few years after college we all reconnected for Paul?s wedding. I was sharing an apartment with Frank, my crazy artist buddy, and we started going to concerts, movies and events together as a trio. Three big kids just hanging out and having fun. Ricky kept his ear to the ground so we got to see some wild things, especially the avant guarde art festivals around NYC, one of which was done at the just completed World Trade Center. The organizers had booked the show so far in advance the Port Authority Administration never thought it would come off. It was a really wild show and they didn?t really trash the place, only fucking up the ground floor Plexiglas windows around the front with spray paint.
Ricky wanted to get out of the family business and moved out to LA and we lost touch for a while. Frank and I moved to a house in Melville but after a month or so I came home from work to find a few pieces of furniture scattered on the front lawn and all of his stuff cleared out. I was a little pissed but had no problem finding someone to move in and share the rent.
A few years later I went to a performance of Twyla Tharp?s A Catherine Wheel, with music by David Byrne. The show was at the Opera House of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and as I was leaving the building I got the urge to look behind me and spotted Ricky and Frank coming out the concert hall doors. I had a bag of pot out in my car, and they had a bottle of Rock and Rye, so after getting a buzz on we decided to go into the city to Sardi?s. I kept the half-full bottle of the vile stuff for years, occasionally offering it to them when they wanted a drink. Eventually the fruit in the bottle completely decomposed and an old sculptor I knew, Jacob Lipkin ended up drinking it. We were back to our old hijinxs in no time. I had started taking sculpture seriously at that point, Frank had gotten married, and Ricky had taken over his father?s house construction business in Patchogue.
Sundays were a regular movie night for me. I lived near an art house cinema in Huntington so Ricky and I would get together at my place for dinner before the movies. I love to cook and it became a weekly ritual, and we?d do bachelor holidays together as well. I had an old Komodo ceramic cooker that I loved to experiment with and it turned out great steaks, roasts, turkeys, and surprising enough to us at the time, pizza.
He respected my work as a sculptor, but he couldn?t help saying something pithy enough about a work in progress to put a real speed bump in my creative process. After a while I would only show him pieces that were far enough along that it wouldn?t faze me. Throwing a wrench into the works was one of Ricky?s favorite hobbies.
He was in constant attendance at any of my openings and I still marvel at his ability to be witty and urbane in a crowd, something I?m still struggling with. He was in seventh heaven when I started working at the NCMA. I?d invite him to all the private receptions and openings, and one of the high points was when Christo and Jean-Claude came by to give a talk. He was a real Christo fan, often arranging a vacation to see one of his installations. We ended up spending over a half an hour with them outside smoking cigarettes.
When I left the museum I went to stay with him in Patchogue while I figured out what my next move was going to be. He had set up the basement as a separate apartment. His first tenant became his girlfriend and the place had remained empty for years.
Bonnie was a really sweet girl and she was the first real girlfriend I had ever known him to have. She had really loved him and had been hinting at marriage for a while. They had been living together for almost ten years. I didn?t know their relationship was on the rocks when I moved in, and within a few weeks she had moved out and into an apartment in the city. She had been commuting to Fordham University for years had gotten a job in NYC. The 2-hour commute each way and living with Ricky had taken its toll.
She had all kinds of good reasons to leave. The place was a mess, the floors were still raw plywood after a year trying to decide on the right rug, and Ricky was leaving some of the most offensive Internet porn on the computer screen when she opened it up. They had begun re-decorating the house a year before and stopped midway due to Ricky?s difficulty making decisions he had to live with. He really hated being wrong or corrected.
Riding in a separate car with Frank on one of our boy?s night out I told him that Ricky was really getting dark and I was worried about him. Frank had really screwed up a project I had set up for him with the museum, and was blaming me for the pressure he created for himself. He railed into me, telling me to stop my meddling, that I had no idea what I was talking about, etc, etc. said ?Fine, you check up on him then, I?ll stay out of it?.
I had started working a tech job few towns away, and other than movies on Sunday night and Monday night burgers at a great local pub we didn?t have that much contact.
Ricky found a new girlfriend on the Internet; he desperately needed someone to go to the local builders? events with. Bonnie was a local girl and everyone kept asking Ricky questions about what had happened, and he was telling them that he had broken up with her. Bonnie was cute and vibrant and xxxx was kind of kind of frumpy and dumpy. She was also a psychological therapist, someone he?d never open up to. After they had been seeing each other for a while we stared talking now and then. She said that I had told her more about Ricky in five minutes then she had learned in over a month with him.
We weren?t doing the Sunday night movies as much but we were still doing burgers on Mondays. His car wasn?t in the driveway when I came home, and I got no response when I called upstairs. I went down and let my dogs outside, flipped on the TV and smoked a joint. A half an hour later I figured he wasn?t coming home and went upstairs to feed the dogs. I found him lying in a pool of blood with a shotgun by his side. My first reaction was to kick him and tell him to stop fucking around. Then I saw the hole up the side of his neck and called him an asshole. Funny things go through your mind in extremis, and when I looked at the shotgun I noticed that it was a beautiful Italian antique over/under. Typical fucking Ricky, I thought. I called 911 and told them it wasn?t a rush, but my friend had committed suicide. I stashed the pot that was in the freezer with the pipes out in the backyard before the cops came. I couldn?t bring myself to call Bonnie, but called her parents to let them call her, more to talk with someone then anything else. The two families had known each other for years. After the cops were done I called Frank and my girlfriend to let them know, and called xxxx the next day.
Twenty years plus prior I had been involved in an auto wreck that had been fatal for the other driver, who had been drunk and had blown a couple of red lights, so of anyone that knew Ricky I was the best able to cope with it. I was still devastated and it took me a couple of days to get out of the fog. There was no note, and no one knew where he got the shotgun. He must have been thinking about it for a while to get the gun in the first place, along with the cleaning kit that was out, and the single shell. From the angle of the wound there was no way it was an accident while he was cleaning it, right up the side of the head and into the brain. If he had only taken a couple of drinks and sat in the garage with the CD playing and the big truck he had running he would have saved everyone some grief.
For a while the cops were the only ones that I told why I thought he did it. He had met his new girlfriend?s daughter that weekend. She was tall, in her mid 20?s and really hot with the touch of the slut about her, just the type that Ricky made a beeline for at parties. I?m convinced that?s what pushed him over the edge.
His brother in law, Roger, concocted a story that Ricky had bought the shotgun for him as a birthday present and had an accident while he was cleaning it, and for his parents sake I didn?t argue.
It wasn?t likely, since Roger was the person in the world that Ricky most hated. Roger was a duck hunter and full time alcoholic asshole, and he wanted the gun.
Ricky?s brother Fred was handling the fallout from the suicide, the estate stuff and whatnot, and when he told me that Roger wanted the gun I insisted that he never get it and convinced him that something like that should never remain in the family. I still casually wonder how it would have affected Fred if he had found the body. He was a film buff drawn to the macabre and had opened one of the first video rental stores on LI when he was barely out of his teens. He did very well, and kept on expanding the store, always keeping a well-stocked selection of slasher/gore flicks and foreign art films over to the side. Students would drive from Stonybrook Univ. 30 miles away for rentals. When Blockbusters started popping up all over they never put one up near him, knowing he had the business cornered in the area. He had recently sold the store and concentrated on mail order and online sales of hard to get movies. He?d travel to Europe and buy obscure tapes and later DVD?s, to make copies for sale, and he did very well. So well that many Hollywood directors were on his customer list. If the movie was going to be released in the US he?d get a cease and desist order for the feature and he?d take it off the catalog.
Ricky?s parents essentially blamed me for the suicide and months later I found out that Roger was actively trying to get the homicide detectives to investigate me as his murderer.
I had to speak with the detective that had first investigated the suicide when I thought the family was acting really strange to find out about it. Bonnie hadn?t told me Ricky had been hinting at suicide if she left him, or of Rogers?s machinations. She had wanted to stay friends with Roger and Ricky?s sister because of her love of their daughter and her godchild, Arianna, so I?ve lost touch with them all.