It was about a year away from when things in my head and in my life would go bat shit crazy. I was a freshmen in art class one day, listening to my Walkman as I drew. I was listening to a recording of a record (vinyl? I guess we call them vinyl now) my father often listened to at home, and which I found funny. It was basically two guys doing skits, pretending to be old, backwoods characters.

Derek was across the table from me, and while I recall him mostly talking to some guy beside him, he asked me what I was listening to, and I told him it was comedy. He wanted to listen, so I took the headphones off my head and offered them to him. He put them on for maybe twenty seconds, took them off, placed them on the table and with a dismissive laugh and shrug turned to the other guy and said, “its just two old guys talking,” and then went on talking with the other guy as if I didn’t exist. I was and am and will likely forever be one hypersensitive little shit, so yeah, it embarrassed me a little. Even so, I put back on the headphones and went back to my drawing.

I didn’t even remember it until recently, in the wake of Derek’s initial Facebook messaging. Even so, I don’t think it was his messaging that triggered this memory — not entirely, anyway.

After hearing about Bill Cosby being let out of jail, I couldn’t help but think of the records my father had of his stand-up, and how I used to enjoy listening to them as a kid. His stories about when he was a kid in particular. His story about the chicken heart. His story about lighting his parents’ couch on fire and how his father would shake his head and go, “What’s wrong with that boy?”

And then there was that bit he had that has always confused me as a kid, the one that dealt with his itch to get his hands on Spanish Fly, which I later learned to be a sexual stimulant. It kind of made me sick, thinking about all the shit that pudding-popping, Jello-jiggling, family-man, serial rapist got away with all those years. And so I thought of other records I listened to, and I remembered about Derek listening to it and laughing only at the fact that I could find something funny that he thought to be so lame.

Still, that was the only vaguely negative interaction I ever had with Derek. Granted, it was really the only interaction I can recall having with the guy, but even so, it didn’t make him an asshole, it just made him someone who had different tastes in comedy and might have been a bit insensitive in expressing that fact to a hypersensitive classmate.

I don’t condemn him for it, but he was clearly intent on condemning himself for being the asshole I never recall him being. Not just with respect to me, of course, but I can’t even recall him being an asshole to someone else.

And it did interest me to discover that this memory took place in the high school arm room, particularly given his apparent appreciation for my art and the desire he evideny always had to be an artist himself.

Art was also the topic of the message he sent me around noon on Wednesday, as I was preparing for work.

He said that I was a great artist and that he admired my talent. While he was quick to add that he was poor, he wanted to buy an original piece from me. If he paid for shipping plus whatever I wanted for it, he asked, would I make him something to hang on his wall?

Absolutely, I told him.

I confessed I would be horrible at commissions, but if he could at least give me a ball-park idea of what he was looking for, I’d do my best. He said I should call him, as it was too much to text and he had poor communication skills. I told him I was getting ready for work, but I could call him tomorrow.

Later, at work, he messaged me again, saying that he knew me, and that when it came to art I had the tendency to overdo it, and he wasn’t rich. All he wanted was something simple, like a caricature. I messaged back asking for more details and he again insisted that I just call him.

Goddamn it.

I thought he had been pressing me to call him because he felt that he communicated poorly through writing or it simply wasn’t his preferred means of expression, and I understood that. I’m the exact opposite. When it comes to communicating, I prefer writing and imagery to the spoken word. So I went to take the trash out and, out there by the dumpsters, I lit up a cigarette and finally called him. At least this way I’d have an excuse to get off the phone in a short amount of time.

He didn’t know who I was at first. Even after I said my name. Only when I mentioned we went to high school together did it finally click, and this should’ve been a red flag. It turned out that talking to him verbally made our conversations even more confusing. His thoughts seemed rather disconnected and he repeated himself a few times without even realizing it. His voice was all over the place and sometimes he struggled to say things, like he was placing incredible effort to remain focused and push out the words and string together the sentences. In short, he sounded horrifically drunk, maybe heavily medicated, but most certainly out of it.

I tried desperately to piece together what he was saying.

He spoke on how when he went to high school, he just didn’t get it, didn’t pick up on things, and it didn’t prepare him for the so-called real world. Not in the least. He left school thinking we were the only free country, he confessed to me, and that the rest of the world were the poor and oppressed, scrambling just to eat bread and drink water.

He kept bringing up duck and cover, too, as if him and I grew up in the 1950s as opposed to the 1990s. My assumption was that he meant to draw parallels with the education system, which was providing data that we were taught to believe would give us safety and control in the world beyond high school when in fact it was a bullshit sham propagated to give us the illusion of control and safety.

He felt betrayed by the school system, by society at large, and he has continued to feel lost, as if his life has been a waste. In a better world, shit might have been different.

He called himself stupid a few times, and I insisted it may have just been ineffective education and propaganda that were to blame for his ignorance and confusion, not some lack of intelligence. He also made references to being a bad person, though without saying it so blatantly, and I again assured him that I’d seen no evidence that was the case.

He then confessed to me that he had liver cancer, or that his liver was failing, and he may not have a lot of time left. This made me hope he wasn’t drunk. In any case, that’s why he started reaching out, messaging people, apologizing. That was the weight I had sensed in him — he was looking death straight in the eyes and found life to be unfair, and felt guilty over his suspicions that he had been unfair to others in his past.

At some point, after my cigarette had burned down to the filter, we got disconnected. I messaged him. He didn’t message me back until my break, when I was in my truck with Sean, and after I had taken two or three hits off the joint he offered me.

And I thought communication was difficult before.

Though he had spoken little of the art he wanted to purchase from me on the phone, which had been the reason I called, now he was back on the topic. I told him the last person I had sold a piece to, it had been only $25. I asked if that sounded good. He said no, it was too little. I asked him to give me a price, and he said no. I was getting mildly frustrated. The pot did not help matters.

Marajuana, at least when it comes to me, serves as a sort of amplifier for whatever my attention is invested in at the time. If I’m focused on relaxing, it boosts it. If I’m enjoying Cosmos or a nature documentary, I’m drawn in like you wouldn’t believe. Art, music? I’m entirely absorbed. Frustration and concern? Welcome to my personal hell.

Our conversation ended and I went about the rest of my work shift high, frustrated, and socially anxious.

Then I got a text. It referenced me by name, and said that with my permission, they would “post all my stuff.” The text had no name, just a number, but I assumed it was my sister’s father-in-law, who I had sold the aforementioned piece to. I was slightly confused because he had mentioned “stuff,” suggesting the plural, and he had only a single piece, so when I texted back “yes, please do,” I added that I assumed it was from him. The person texted back that I was wrong.

Instant paranoia. Depths of paranoia.

I knew he wouldn’t fuck with me like this, so it couldn’t be my sister’s father-in-law. So naturally my first assumption that someone had hacked into my computer and stolen all my writings, or found my blogs despite my pseudonym, and were going to publish them on the net under my real name and embarrass me and bring shame upon my family and judgement upon me by everyone.

I asked who it was. It took them forever to answer, and they kept fucking with me, and my paranoia deepened, I became self-loathing, and I finally looked up the number on the net. A Florida number. Derek told me he lived in Florida.

I checked Derek’s number. It was him.

Indeed, I was too high. When I texted back, called him by name and asked what he meant by “stuff,” his response was entirely incomprehensible. I didn’t respond and I haven’t heard from him since.

I was more than a bit irritated and emotionally spent by the end of the shift, but after that faded, my sympathy for him remained. He’s feeling guilty and betrayed and afraid and alone as he’s dying and maybe perpetually drunk as shit in Florida.

It feels as though most people are born into our society and they adapt rather quickly, that they can pick things up with ease, and they’re eager for adulthood. I was never that way. I remember when my sister, Eve, and I were attending school and my youngest sister, Linda, was excited about attending school the following year. So excited, in fact, that she filled up a bookbag with random things and hung it on the hooks in the hallway where Eve and I hung up our school things.

Unsurprisingly, she adapted to society just fine. Eve didn’t do too bad, either. Both have done infinitely better than I in this respect.

Maybe Derek, for whatever reason, is just another member of my category. Another one of the lost children of America. Another lost soul spinning in circles on planet earth.