The beatniks next door

Ritchie

Listen and I’ll tell you about Ritchie, the beatnik next door who mothed around like he did never too close never too far.

Our neighbourhood started out like all the others in the 60s, carefully planned technical drawings on French curved streets, mailbox squares here and there, stop signs when the streets met at right angles, the obliques left to manners and good sense. On the page, the square houses tilted nicely against the road, the dotted line behind indicating where the fence would eventually go, and my parents bought our house from a drawing like this, they liked the particular shape of it I suppose, the middleness of it like Ritchie, not too close and not too far from anything.

But off the page the land was chaotic and the neat squares of our houses turned wildly trapezoid during actual construction, all standards discarded, the construction workers, carpenters, plasterers, and roofers did their best and to their credit things are mostly level – apples and marbles stay put – but this was achieved through unconventional means so our neighbourhood appeares half Dr. Seuss who had just come on the scene, and half Timothy Leary.

All this to say our beatnik neighbour Ritchie was not on a different meridian exactly, but certainly registered closer to sea level. He’d climb up to our place always robust, red-faced and bleating and I’d go to him thinking I detected something special, thinking maybe he’d scoop me up take me somewhere amazing, but instead I watched him go normal on me, just another grown-up with nothing to say, and off I’d go up and down in my continuous search for a friend which is maybe why I make them up now.

But I was wrong about Ritchie. I didn’t know he was fascinating until that Hallowe’en he came over dressed as a spectacular monster. My mother shoved candy into his bloody guts and slammed the door. A second later Ritchie’s voice hey it’s me you guys it’s Ritchie and that’s when I found out he was a special effects guy for MGM – did I mention? – we lived in the lesser canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains in the Hollywood Hills district of Los Angeles.

Next day on my birthday I made my way to Ritchie’s house to invite him to my party not telling he was my sole guest. I suppose he brought all the disguises to impress and entertain my friends when what really happened was we went into the basement just the two of us with cake and tried out all the masks. We tried out Dracula, Dr. No, Auric Goldfinger, Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz, Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary’s Baby, Mrs. Bates – I mean we didn’t just try them out we became them – like when Ritchie as Mrs. Bates said in a Sean Connery accent Norman, I think I’m in the wrong movie. My real name is Atticus. Atticus Finch.

You know how earlier I used the word mothing about the way Ritchie was never too close never too far? Turned out that was because he was flitting around everybody – sizing us up, you know, he was working – thinking how he’d achieve convincing gashes on our cheeks or foreheads, the curves our broken necks might take, how he’d rearrange our eyes to accommodate a third, dreaming up the macabre palette from which he’d lend us the colours and expressions of death, excavate an eyeball in favour of its mechanical twin.

Ritchie loved his work and so did I. What kid wouldn’t?

We became friends me and Ritchie – best friends for a very long time – and when I went to his house it was always crowded with his made-up people, some so normal-looking they could have been his brother, his aunty, his triplet cousins who aged right along with him, and the version of me at his kitchen counter bent over scrawling on a piece of foolscap like I did every night in secret or so I thought.

I don’t know about Ritchie but I still make people up. 

Even you. 

I’m making you up right now the way your hand goes to your chin and same time like it’s on a swivel your head turns to the window, your eyes latch on to birds in the sky, maybe you think about me.