The Return of the Yawning Man: Remembrances

I was talking to him on the phone the other day. He had been to the movies with a friend, to see Wonder Wheel, actually, and when I complimented him on the sheer nerve subjecting himself to be seen entering and exiting that film at this moment in time, myself having sorely missed it while at work, he told me that yep, he was having a delayed hostile response from his friends right now, because he considered the film one of the better ones of the notorious filmmaker, and trying to give people recommendations when they asked what to see was proving extremely volatile. “Well, you have no worries here. You know I love his work to bits. Remember when I forced your hand into handing over your DVD copy of Annie Hall, when we were breaking up, because it was the dawn of the DVD age, and all I had was the wretched video cassette, one of father’s rescues from those rummage sales he used to love?”

“Yes.” Followed by Desert Silence, another term I coined in my diaries when being with the Yawning Man all those years ago. “Man, those things used to be expensive.”

“I know. When you got those two discs from Santa that one year, including all of four episodes each of Friends, well I can tell you, they weren’t exactly cheap, either”, I responded, feeling both defensive, and guilty after the fact.

“I mean can you even conceive of people today buying random DVD’s or Blu-rays containing four episodes of a given show and nothing else? What was that about, selling not entire boxes containing the whole season, but just individual discs?” I continued, in a more amicable tone. “Of course, back then, I was the people buying those crazy things.”

“Yes, and I was the man buying the ridiculously expensive first draft of a DVD player in the first place. I must have blown half of my Education Financial Aid on that dreadful machine.”

“Yes, the half you didn’t use for the amp for your electric guitar!”

“Yes!” Laughing now. “Well, we were poor enough anyway.”

“That is correct. We had to eat tuna and porridge and walk to get downtown, but we sure had our thousand-mark DVD player the size of a bread box, our amplifier, and let’s not forget my Buffy the Vampire Slayer boxsets, all for VCR, all imported from the U.S.A., each costing a small fortune. I remember having to sell some of my beloved CD’s to get the money to collect the second half of season five from the post office.”

“But it would have killed you, not knowing what happened. Hell, it would have killed me, too. Willow was so fine.” Dreamily.

“Yes, yes, Willow was gorgeous. I remember swearing I would never get rid of them, no matter how tight I was for money. I still have them, by the way. Of course, they are basically worthless now.”

“You mean you don’t have them on DVD?” Incredulously.

“Of course I have them. But I, you know, have the video cassettes, too.”

“If that isn’t anal behavior, I don’t know what is.”

“Fuck you. Besides, when I was doing the Swedish Death Cleaning at the house before the folks sold it, I got rid of so many video cassettes I had stashed in the cupboard of my old room, I thought I was going to go into cardiac arrest out of just – sadness. All those Woody Allen flicks from the Seventies, the rarities, bought used for a hundred marks each, the imported Rocky Horror Picture Show, When Harry Met Sally, Ghostbusters, all those werewolf movies without subtitles, remember?”

“Do I ever? ‘Silver bullets, my ass!’”

“I filled two enormous garbage bags with only video cassettes. The only ones I just couldn’t get rid of were the taped X-Files, seasons six and seven, I made when we lived together. The ones with the covers I made from pictures from the fanzine, remember?”

“Yes, and how hard it was to get the channel to even show properly. We had the antenna inside our living room, leaning against the wooden bar stool, and a metallic coat hanger hanging from one of the bars, and still the picture was clear maybe seventy percent of the time.”

“Oh man, I had forgotten about the indoors antenna!”

“Yes, Tuesday night, Third Rock from the Sun, Ally McBeal, and The X-Files, with me standing next to the antenna, holding one of your bras next to the thing just so that you could tape your damn TV-show.”

“Yes, you were so incredibly sweet to do that, by the way, and I thank you for it even now. But there was also pizza, do not forget about the pizza!”

“I would never forget about the pizza!”

“I know. It’s amazing how we were able to eat like that in our twenties, without the guilt or the insomnia or the nausea. Shit. On closer inspection, that is precisely how I still eat. Perhaps I should start watching those late-night snacks.”

“A Pizza is not exactly a snack.”

“I know.”

When I lived in his vicinity, the Yawning Man was notorious in that he was the absolute worst borrower of all time. He would never return anything he borrowed from friends. You would never think this about him, when you saw him approaching, all endearing smiles and the Beatles haircut and trustworthy beard and a cable-knit sweater that was just oozing the Hey, I’m a Nice Guy -vibe. Then he would ask for the book, the video, the tape, or the guitar, in one famous instance. Sure, the guitar was his brother’s, but he just would not return it at all. As time went on, no one would borrow anything to him anymore, leaving him all but clueless as to why. Why, indeed.

He had our friend Trent’s The Far Side Gallery, Gary Larson’s cartoon collection, in our house the whole duration of our two-year stint of living together. I have clear memories of leafing through the book while having lunch at his house before we were dating, and making him read it when we were dating while I was cutting his hair with a pair of Fiskars kitchen scissors so that he would stop fidgeting and claiming in a panicky tone that I was about to poke through one of his ears – which, to be honest, I was. I even remember the book just lying about in his apartment way later, when he was living in Helsinki.

I believe Trent did not see his damn book until five or six years later, when I forced him to take action. This was years after we ourselves had broken up, and he was owing me too a bunch of stuff we so innocently had cutesy-cutely undivided when not yet having the proper tools to make a clean break, so we ended up carrying along a lot of each other’s belongings for a long time, until the inevitable hostility and acrimonious ending to our hemming and hawing finally began. I believe he is still holding some of my books hostage to this day.

In our later years as friends renewed, he is the master of the Stood Up. He doesn’t do the just not showing up -thing, but he does the texting at the last minute that he can’t make it -thing. For almost ten years this used to drive me crazy, and I would swear to myself that next time, I would tell him to go jerk somebody else’s precious hours and I was done being treated this way and what the fuck, man? Now, I have embraced his never showing up with a a Zen-like acceptance, and the fact that, well, I am never going to see him again, and that our friendship will forever revolve around our hour-long phone conversations every few months, sometimes more often, other times more seldom, while I am circling the lake on my daily walk, talking on my lime-green hands-free, and he is feeding one or both of his kids and/or washing the dishes, yelling into the speaker with the water splashing and the silverware dinging not in the background but straight into my ear. He also hates it when I mention this to him, or dare to reprimand him on the never showing up on our randomly enough agreed-on dates. So I don’t mention it, except when absolutely necessary.

Last week, though, when we spoke, I was not on one of my walks, but just on my lunch break at work, while he was driving to his workplace, and when I complained I could hear nothing he was saying, he asked if I heard him better when he hunched over the steering wheel to be closer to his phone attached on the dashboard. Yes, much better now, I answered, and he started laughing, telling me he looked like one of those old ladies, driving with his nose practically touching the steering wheel.

“And things are good?” I asked.

“Yes. Oh, and I finally went to see The Last Jedi!”

“Good! Did you read my piece on it on the blog?”

Desert Silence. “Umm, no, sorry. Not yet.”

“Well have you read it at all in general lately?”

“Not really. You know how I am.” This time, the silence was of the desert quality on my end, with the words Boy, do I ever written inside the thought bubble hanging over my head. Meanwhile, he continued: “But I always read it when there is a story about the Yawning Man! When you are a big published writer, may I start selling tee-shirts with the term written in the front?”

“No, you may not. At least unless I get my cut, man.”

“Fine. But at least I didn’t yawn once during this phone call.”

“I am so proud.”

So, here’s once more thinking of you, V.