King Louis II
There’s a person in everyone’s life who gets blamed for a lot. A hell of a lot. You know the one, the backstabber. The girl who wronged you, the guy who sold you out for 50 pieces of silver, and must therefore be the reason the whole rest of your life looks like the back end of yesterday’s cigarette butts. Mine isn’t Flo, but Michael thinks it is. It’s Michael.
I first met the guy on a cross country road trip to see some whales off the coast, at some cold and lonely cliffs somewhere. Johnny Opinelli – this guy I knew from high school who had something constantly wring with his teeth – said we should do it and I believed him because I’d just finished reading “On The Road” and thought I was living it. More on that in just a moment though. Johnny wanted to detour by this town I’d never heard of and never did again because apparently some great correspondent known as ‘Biscuit’ had offered to show us the best spot for seeing whales. Biscuit wasn’t there, and I wouldn’t meet him until 4 weeks later, when his name was very much Michael O’Hara.
Anyway, to understand how much this guy meant to me you need to know “On the Road”. It’s a famous beat-era American novel by Jack Kerouac, and he wrote it based on his real experiences and real people he knew, just fictionalized and romanticized a little. It ended up inspiring countless hippie road trips, millions of bad hitchhiking experiences and a collective adoration of acting on impulse and wrecking yourself and you life in search of a higher, shining dream. I read this book like a bible, an instruction manual for how to be in life. I saw myself as Sal Paradise, setting out after some dancing messiah clown and burning my time and my life, marrying women and running away, being what my heart decided to name free. When this guy came out of nowhere, hell even meeting him after a friend’s correspondence… it was so perfect, too perfect. I fell in love with Michael O’Hara as my own Dean Moriarty. As my hero, my savior, and of course, as my best friend. And I’d never met the guy.
So we made it through this little detour town, knocking on doors and hotel rooms and even asking at the post office for an electoral register, forgetting we only had the name ‘Biscuit’ to go on. So we headed for the cliffy coast anyway, and tried to see some breaching mammal wonders. If you’ve ever tried to go unaccompanied whale-watching you’ll know just how successful we were. If not, I’ll be not seeing any whales isn’t a big leap of imagination for you. Hell, you’re probably not looking at any right now, you might as well be me. So we did what all men on road trips who want to be great do, hit the bars. And we hit them so hard, we hit a few other guys in them pretty hard too. It’s hard to drink without fighting, and vice versa. We get all relevant though, when one of them turned out to be the oh-so-sought after Michael Biscuit O’Hara, and I learnt his name from the police report. If I wasn’t his best man before, I sure was now. We hit each other like drunken brawling freight trains… and it was the metaphor that endures.
There are so many stories of me and Mikey, there must be a million anecdotes, I bet if you interviewed all the people who knew us they’d each give a different one to sum up how we were, but since I’m a little biased, Flo gives the best one. It was two years after the trip across the country and the group was solidified. We were living the dream, you know, the literary corps of lovers, friends and heroes all in this perfect group… you’ve heard it. Anyway, we were watching an old episode of Captain Planet playing in one of those indie clubs in the big cities – the kind that think Pac-Man and garish 80’s clothing made of parachute material is the definition of classic décor. We couldn’t hear the sound or anything, but everyone knows the Planeteers, and we were arguing about which ones we resembled. I demanded that Michael was Wheeler, and he disagreed, saying I was much more like Wheeler, and that he was nowhere near as rebellious and hot-headed. What happened next was what Flo described as “the transfer-off of the century”, in which both Michael and I attempted to force each other to be wild impulsive heroes, force each other to be the cool-guy bad boy Wolverine of the group so that the other could be the chisel-jawed good guy Cyclops. I think I actually said “You’re supposed to be Dean Moriarty”. Which seems like a stupid battle, until you actually have it.
But I guess I should talk more about what I set out to, it helps people listen. About people who you blame, even for things that have nothing to do with them. Like how me and Flo turned out, I blame that on Michael, he made me the way I am. I blame my goals, my self image, my hopes and dreams and my failures all on this guy. I guess it’s time I stopped, considered how much of it he deserves, but I know it doesn’t matter if it’s connected to him at all. He’s my channel of hate, and it stops me hating a lot of other people. It excuses a lot of other people.
I first met the guy on a cross country road trip to see some whales off the coast, at some cold and lonely cliffs somewhere. Johnny Opinelli – this guy I knew from high school who had something constantly wring with his teeth – said we should do it and I believed him because I’d just finished reading “On The Road” and thought I was living it. More on that in just a moment though. Johnny wanted to detour by this town I’d never heard of and never did again because apparently some great correspondent known as ‘Biscuit’ had offered to show us the best spot for seeing whales. Biscuit wasn’t there, and I wouldn’t meet him until 4 weeks later, when his name was very much Michael O’Hara.
Anyway, to understand how much this guy meant to me you need to know “On the Road”. It’s a famous beat-era American novel by Jack Kerouac, and he wrote it based on his real experiences and real people he knew, just fictionalized and romanticized a little. It ended up inspiring countless hippie road trips, millions of bad hitchhiking experiences and a collective adoration of acting on impulse and wrecking yourself and you life in search of a higher, shining dream. I read this book like a bible, an instruction manual for how to be in life. I saw myself as Sal Paradise, setting out after some dancing messiah clown and burning my time and my life, marrying women and running away, being what my heart decided to name free. When this guy came out of nowhere, hell even meeting him after a friend’s correspondence… it was so perfect, too perfect. I fell in love with Michael O’Hara as my own Dean Moriarty. As my hero, my savior, and of course, as my best friend. And I’d never met the guy.
So we made it through this little detour town, knocking on doors and hotel rooms and even asking at the post office for an electoral register, forgetting we only had the name ‘Biscuit’ to go on. So we headed for the cliffy coast anyway, and tried to see some breaching mammal wonders. If you’ve ever tried to go unaccompanied whale-watching you’ll know just how successful we were. If not, I’ll be not seeing any whales isn’t a big leap of imagination for you. Hell, you’re probably not looking at any right now, you might as well be me. So we did what all men on road trips who want to be great do, hit the bars. And we hit them so hard, we hit a few other guys in them pretty hard too. It’s hard to drink without fighting, and vice versa. We get all relevant though, when one of them turned out to be the oh-so-sought after Michael Biscuit O’Hara, and I learnt his name from the police report. If I wasn’t his best man before, I sure was now. We hit each other like drunken brawling freight trains… and it was the metaphor that endures.
There are so many stories of me and Mikey, there must be a million anecdotes, I bet if you interviewed all the people who knew us they’d each give a different one to sum up how we were, but since I’m a little biased, Flo gives the best one. It was two years after the trip across the country and the group was solidified. We were living the dream, you know, the literary corps of lovers, friends and heroes all in this perfect group… you’ve heard it. Anyway, we were watching an old episode of Captain Planet playing in one of those indie clubs in the big cities – the kind that think Pac-Man and garish 80’s clothing made of parachute material is the definition of classic décor. We couldn’t hear the sound or anything, but everyone knows the Planeteers, and we were arguing about which ones we resembled. I demanded that Michael was Wheeler, and he disagreed, saying I was much more like Wheeler, and that he was nowhere near as rebellious and hot-headed. What happened next was what Flo described as “the transfer-off of the century”, in which both Michael and I attempted to force each other to be wild impulsive heroes, force each other to be the cool-guy bad boy Wolverine of the group so that the other could be the chisel-jawed good guy Cyclops. I think I actually said “You’re supposed to be Dean Moriarty”. Which seems like a stupid battle, until you actually have it.
But I guess I should talk more about what I set out to, it helps people listen. About people who you blame, even for things that have nothing to do with them. Like how me and Flo turned out, I blame that on Michael, he made me the way I am. I blame my goals, my self image, my hopes and dreams and my failures all on this guy. I guess it’s time I stopped, considered how much of it he deserves, but I know it doesn’t matter if it’s connected to him at all. He’s my channel of hate, and it stops me hating a lot of other people. It excuses a lot of other people.
posted by Cal Samson at 10:32 PM
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