The Visible Man

  6 Now, this kid: Let me talk about this kid. His name was Dave. He smiled as he slept. That was, and that will always be, the thing I remember most about him. (11:18 [2])

  7 I was pretty sure I was going to hate this kid. He looked like someone I would hate. He looked like someone who put a lot of effort into slacking. The fact that he didn’t talk once during a nineteen-hour van ride made me think he was snooty or boring or stoned, or maybe all three. But the second he woke up on Monday, things were different. He seemed so gentle. He carefully folded his dirty T-shirt and placed it inside the cardboard box he was using as a drawer. He put on a different shirt that made him look like a cowboy. He briefly exited the studio and crossed the hallway to knock on his neighbor’s door, and the youngish woman who opened it immediately handed him a fat orange cat. She must have been the cat-sitter. He brought the cat back into his apartment and had a little conversation with its furry face. He must have stroked that cat’s head for twenty minutes. He played with its ears, asked it if it had had a nice weekend, gave it a bowl of water. He held the cat’s face up to the window so it could see outside. They had a real relationship. (11:32 [6])

  8 Around 5:30, Dave calls his girlfriend on a cell phone. It’s clear that this is his girlfriend, because he calls her “Baby” as often as he calls her “Julie” and immediately tells her how much he misses her, and he reiterates that sentiment every time the conversation loses momentum. Obviously, I can hear only one side of this conversation. But most of their dialogue is rote and easy to piece together. [Y____ holds a hand to his ear with his thumb and pinky extended, mimicking a phone conversation.] “Don’t believe the haters. Austin’s still happening.” “They played one good show and three bad ones.” “It was nice. A lot of people were wearing khaki shorts.” “The best deal is Iron Works.” “He was supposed to meet us at the Sword show, but he was too drunk.” “Tina took care of Murray for me. Tina. From across the hall. The redhead.” Just totally normal stuff, the kind of stuff anyone might say to a girlfriend who lives in a different city. They talked for an hour, and she did most of the talking. But there was one thing Dave said near the end of the call that was more opaque. [Again, Y____ puts his hand to his ear like a phone.] “They’re real heavy dudes. They’re the heaviest dudes I know.” He elaborated on this, but only slightly. He was extremely enthusiastic. “They’re actually coming over here tonight … Yeah … Julie, I know! But … but—exactly. I mean, they’re just so heavy. I’ve never hung with dudes like this. They’re heavier than everything. They’re the heaviest dudes I’ve ever met.” He kept repeating that same phrase: heavy dudes. Was some kind of ponderous metal band going to perform in this modest apartment? I was involved with this. I was mentally involved. (11:35 [8])

  9 Now, I know what you’re thinking, Vicky—my whole reason for pursuing this project was to observe people when they were alone. I’ve stated that thesis time and time again. But—remember—all the rules I’ve outlined are my own rules, created by me, for my own motives. I can break them whenever I want. Any self-imposed rule can be suspended without explanation. People forget that they have that ability. You forget that, too, Victoria. (11:27 [5])

  10 Dave cleans his apartment, or at least he cleans everything that might get touched. The bathroom is too gross to salvage, but he makes the kitchenette livable and files half of the loose records. He listens to piano jazz as he cleans—that Charlie Brown music that makes everyone happy. He leaves for twenty minutes and brings back a case of Guinness and a case of Bass. He washes his biggest, coolest beer glasses and dries them with a towel. He talks to his cat. “Don’t let these heavy dudes scare you, Murray. They’re just heavy.” The cat stares at him for a long time. He’s like a cat from a cat food commercial. He’s an actor cat. I think to myself, “This cat should be on TV.” (11:37 [10])

  11 Around nine o’clock, men start arriving at the apartment, sometimes solo and sometimes in pairs. And these are men. Like, they’re all six feet four or six feet five. Most of them weigh in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds. Everyone has a beard. A few have ponytails. Three of them are wearing bib overalls and work boots. Dave’s empty apartment is instantly devoid of emptiness: It’s now a room of ten massive mountain men, sitting comfortably on unplugged Marshall amplifiers, drinking twenty-four-ounce black-and-tan schooners of beer that Dave mixed over the kitchen sink. It was two tons of flesh and bone and hair. So this is all that Dave meant, I thought. They’re literally heavyset people. But then they start playing the stereo, and I notice they like only certain types of music. One type, really. They play Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality. They play Neil Young’s Live Rust. They listen to a bunch of bands no civilian would ever enjoy—bands with monosyllabic names like Sleep and Tool and Karp. They listen to the Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” twice in a row. They listen to Electric Wizard, and they define all other bands influenced by Blue Cheer as “compromised.” So now I’m thinking, “This is what he meant. This is why they’re heavy.” But that’s only part of it. Around 9:45, these acid-rock gorillas start eating mushrooms. Like, whole handfuls of dried, shit-colored, hallucinogenic mushrooms. They offer some to Dave, but he says, “I’ll stick with beer.” It was crazy. But what made it even crazier is that these mushrooms didn’t seem to affect them at all. They didn’t trip, or at least they didn’t act trippy. Maybe the mushrooms didn’t work. That seems to happen more often than not. But regardless, their personalities remained static—if I hadn’t watched them eat the mushrooms, I’d have never known it happened at all. The only thing that changed was what they started talking about. That’s when I finally deduced what Dave had meant. (11:42 [11])

  12 I don’t know if this was an organization or a club or just an ad hoc collective of friends. That was ambiguous. That was never defined. They clearly knew one another, although they must not have been overly familiar, because they all shook hands when they arrived and again when they left. But whatever excuse brought these guys together was exactly that—an excuse. These dudes wanted only one thing: They wanted to sit around and get heavy. It was the heaviest possible conversation, conducted by the heaviest possible humans, held under the heaviest of circumstances. All they did was argue about morose, heavy shit: The possibility of a world without morality. Ethical justifications for revenge. The concept of genocide as a necessary extension of Darwinism. Someone would ask a question, somebody else would answer it with a different question, and that would turn into a third question. It was like taking a philosophy class with a herd of minotaurs. They debated politely, rarely cutting anyone off and always conceding minor points. But they’d also insult each other, flatly and without tact. “That’s naïve,” they’d tell each other. “Your words are entertaining, but you think like a child.” (11:40 [9])

  13 Part of me wants to call these heavy dudes “brilliant,” but I don’t know if that’s true. They’d all read a lot, certainly, and they all had a lot of opinions. But that’s not really the same as being smart, you know? It’s related, but it’s not the same. Like, they were all prone to conspiracy theories. Every time someone really started to impress me, the conversation would unravel into something stupid. Like, a certain song came on the stereo, and they started talking about the way music was recorded during the 1950s. This one dude starts talking about Pro Tools and studio technology, and he’s fixated on how music producers can now do most of their editing by watching sound waves on a computer. He wasn’t for this or against this—he just thought it was meaningful and super-duper deep. “We now measure the quality of sound through visual means,” he said. “This means a product designed for one specific sense is built through criteria that are measured by a totally unrelated sense. This means something for our ears is created by someone’s eyes. That’s a huge leap. This would be like if it suddenly turned out that the most accurate way to judge the quality of wine was by how it felt when you rubbed it between your fingers, so all the world’s sommeliers started using their hands instead of their mouths a
nd noses. Judging wine would become a tactile occupation, just as judging sound has become an optical occupation.” When he first described this, I was impressed; it was, I suppose, a new way to think about sound. But he just kept going, and his logic went congo-bongo. He kept talking and talking and talking, until he ended up insisting that there’s some massive underground vault in rural New Mexico that’s owned by the Church of Scientology, and that this vault houses a solar-powered turntable with pictogram illustrations explaining how it operates. They devised pictograms, apparently, in case written language disappears over time. This dude insists that the vault was built in preparation for a nuclear holocaust, because no one really knows what will happen to the U.S. power grid if a bunch of nuclear weapons are detonated at sea level. The best assumption, or at least his best assumption, is that all our hard drives will be spontaneously fried and the Internet will collapse and every digital file in existence will either be deleted or spontaneously corrupted. So when human society eventually tries to rebuild itself in some distant future, this underground bomb shelter will be the only source for recorded sound. Scientologists will own the only working record player on earth. Hence, Scientologists will control all the music in the world. He was pretty concerned about this. (11:48 [12])

  14 The question I had while watching all this, of course—and probably the question you have right now—is, “Why were these people in Dave’s apartment?” Dave was thin, didn’t seem like a philosopher, didn’t talk much, didn’t act or posture or trip, and seemed to be into Vince Guaraldi. But it was obvious he wanted these guys in his apartment, and he listened to their conversation with a real intensity. He was a listener. He did a lot of affirmative nodding. And he obviously had some kind of preexisting outside relationship with Zug. That was obvious from the get-go. Zug was the difference maker. (12:44 [30])

  15 Zug was kind of their leader. I say “kind of” because I suspect he might not have said that about himself, and I know none of the other heavy dudes would have said that about him. But—in reality—he was. Zug spoke the most and was more willing to abruptly change the trajectory of the conversation. He’d read more than the others, or at least he was the most willing to casually cite the books he’d read. He was the largest person from a physical standpoint, and he had the most body hair. He ingested the most mushrooms. He laughed the least and was the most nihilistic. Zug was the heaviest of the heavy dudes. (11:50 [14])

  16 I didn’t like the way Zug spoke to Dave. He would kick back his head and snort whenever Dave tried to enter the conversation. Sometimes he’d kind of loom over him and glare. They must have liked each other on some level, but Zug was dismissive. He was cruel, and for no apparent reason. Have you ever seen Goodfellas? Do you remember the scene where Joe Pesci shoots the teenager in the foot? It was too much like that. (12:46 [31])

  17 There was a dispute. What can I say? It was a minor dispute, but it seemed not-so-minor at the time. It certainly doesn’t seem minor now, in light of what happened. (12:20 [22])

  18 It was late. It was well past one in the morning. They were talking about “honor cultures”—societies where everything is based around status and there’s just a collective, accepted notion that any kind of threat or negative action will be met with immediate violence. This is how it is in prison, for example, and—apparently—how it was in Iceland during the tenth century. I don’t know where they were getting their information, but they all seemed to know a shitload about tenth-century Iceland. The larger point, according to Zug, is that honor cultures have more nobility than nonhonor cultures, because they’re more egalitarian and more functional and ultimately more polite. If everyone has the potential to become a vigilante, everyone becomes equal. I could tell Dave was getting annoyed by this, just by the way he kept wrinkling his nose and shaking his head. After five minutes of this crap, he finally interrupted Zug’s lecture. He said the concept sounded childish and anti-intellectual, and that it seemed like Zug was glamorizing a primitive world he’d never want to honestly experience, and that the whole theory was basically just a complicated way of saying, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Now, if anybody else had made this argument, I think Zug would have been civil. But because it came from Dave, Zug started raising his voice. “Don’t you realize that the phrase ‘an eye for an eye’ is actually an argument for restraint?” Dave said he didn’t want to waste time on semantics. He seemed nervous, or maybe even scared. So then Zug says, “Well, you’ve certainly read William Henry Miller’s [sic]12 books on this subject, right?” Fully aware that Dave had no reason to be familiar with some random academic nobody’s ever heard of. So, of course, Dave told him he didn’t know who that person was, which immediately made Zug roll his eyes. To which Dave quietly replied, “Now you’re just showing off.” And that’s when Zug started yelling. He totally lost whatever cool he might have had. “You’re an idiot, go fuck yourself, let the grown-ups talk,” on and on like that. Loud. Embarrassingly loud. Embarrassing in general. (12:23 [24])

  19 Dave just sat there and took it. It went on forever. (12:24 [25])

  20 There was a knock on the door, right after the yelling. It was the red-haired woman from across the hall. Dave answered the door. Everybody in the room got quiet—that unnatural variety of quiet that happens when the cops try to break up a party. She was obviously asking about the yelling, although we couldn’t really hear what was being said. Dave finally came back inside and said, “You guys should probably leave. It’s later than I thought.” Nobody argued. The heavy dudes got off the amps and started filing out, shaking hands with Dave as they said goodbye, mentioning how they’d had a great time. They all left at the same time. But Zug didn’t leave. Zug stayed. He went to the fridge, opened a Guinness and a Bass, and poured himself another black-and-tan. Nobody seemed to think this was unusual. I suppose I did, but I was the only one. (12:27 [23])

  21 Dave started cleaning up the apartment, placing empty schooners in the sink. Zug was leaning against the kitchen counter with beer foam in his mustache. He says, “I’m sorry I yelled at you, D.” Dave says something along the lines of, “I just don’t understand why you do that.” Again, Zug says he’s sorry. But then he just starts lecturing Dave all over again. “You need to have more sophisticated ideas,” he insists. He tells Dave that he doesn’t read enough, and that the books he does read are facile, and that he’s sometimes embarrassed by the things Dave says. He’s not yelling when he says this, but he’s talking like a bad father. He says, “All your opinions are received wisdom.” He says, “If you don’t have an original idea, it’s better to just listen to the people who do.” This was real perverse, real condescending shit. It was appalling. I was appalled. Dave just sort of shrugged it off and didn’t say anything. He acted like he was concentrating on half-ass organizing his totally unclean apartment. Finally, Zug stops talking. He downs half his beer in one gulp. Then something peculiar happened: Dave turned to him and casually said, “Are you staying over here tonight?” Zug took another drink of beer and said, “We’ll see.” (12:31 [26])

  22 What was going on there? I don’t know. I have an idea, obviously, but I don’t think it matters. (12:30 [27])

  23 I was upset. I don’t like to admit when I get upset, but I was. He was an awful person. I regret what happened, but only the last part. I don’t regret the first part very much. I suppose I regret it a little, but just barely. I can see the absurdity in what transpired. I can recognize the irony. It’s probably not the worst thing I’ve ever done. (11:53 [13])

  24 Zug is walking around the apartment, looking at the guitars and finishing his drink. And I’m looking at this huge, hairy, heavy dude, and I just hate him. I’m a pretty good judge of character. Everybody thinks that about themselves, but I’m right. I’m different. Zug was a bully. It wasn’t like he was doing anything for the world, or producing anything the world needed. He was just an educated cretin who took advantage of people like Dave, probably in lots of bizarre psychological ways. I was thinki
ng about how Zug had talked all that bullshit about the nobility of honor cultures, and how transparent that was. Sometimes it’s wrong to let people get away with their behavior. (11:56 [16])

  25 I was only going to freak him out. That was the totality of my intention. I thought I would just scare him, fuck with his mind, fuck with his reality, put him in a subordinate position. Was it out of character for me to do this? Yes. But I did it for Dave. Dave deserved my help. (11:55 [15])

  26 I didn’t overthink it. It was just an honest reaction to what was happening at the time. Dave goes into the bathroom and closes the door. I see the light come on under the crack of the door, and I hear the fan running. By now, I have a strategy: I’m going to walk up to Zug, poke him in the chest, and tell him he’s a coward. I’m going to tell him that he’s fake and that everyone knows he’s fake, and that everything he believes about the world is wrong. If nothing else, I want him to think he’s having an extremely bad trip. Then I’ll just run out the door and spend the night in the hallway. He’ll flip. That was my thinking. (12:50 [32])

  27 Okay, I get it. I get it. You’re still not getting it. Let me try to simplify the situation: Dave’s still in the bathroom. I can hear him working in there. It’s gross. Zug is standing in the middle of the living room, looking back toward the kitchen. The positioning seems perfect. I walk straight toward Zug’s face. I can tell he can’t see me at all—and, even if he could, this is a person who’d probably had ten or twelve beers and a bushel of psychedelics. I have all these brilliant things in my head that I want to say, but I don’t say them. I choke. I just say, “Fuck you, man,” real fast, almost like it’s one three-syllable word. And I poke him in the chest with my finger. Hard. I poke him hard in the chest. But, you know, it was only a poke, and this was a huge man. Normally, I don’t think I could have knocked him down if I’d punched him in the face. But this poke really surprised him. Really, totally surprised the shit out of him. He got this hilarious look on his face, like he’d just remembered something awful. His arms shot out. His eyes were like bicycle tires. He tried to back up, and he fell. And he fell straight back, real fast. And his fucking head went right through the fucking table. His skull went through that glass coffee table like a cannonball. It shattered into a million fucking pieces. My first thought was “This is bad.” But then I saw the blood. It was pouring out of the back of his head. It seemed like it was being forced out by a pneumatic pump. Blood was pooling up under his neck, crawling across the floor in every direction, seeping into his beard. His hair was like a wet red sponge. So my second thought was “This is as bad as it gets.” (12:39 [28])