Well. There are many things I want to say. So many, many things. My perpetual problem plagues me once again, has been plaguing me. I have so much material for writing, so much content that I am completely overwhelmed, and feel unable to write any of it. I have old material, that I am revising, I have material that I am working on, have worked hard on, New York writing, and I have a little novel idea that I already have made progress on as well. I have the entire book in my head, and just have to actually write it, but that’s the part that takes the time, and the time, as we all know, is precious, and limited. It is the reason why everything I ever want to write about has not been written. And here we are, I want to write yet again, but with so much to say, and never enough time to say any of it. The thing to do in this case, I know, is just write anything, and whatever comes out, that’s it, and at least something was written. At least some of the story was told, and some of the story is much, much better than none of the story. So here I will tell you, on this fine morning in March, some of the story of what’s going on here now, in East Nashville, a true paradise on Earth for many of the East Nashvillians, although I guess just because it’s America, there are still people here who are not living their best lives. But for me, in general, I can’t believe the absolute paradise I have just teleported into, from the horrible Hell and Misery that I was previously a part of. To be able to step outside, into grass, into trees, and the singing of birds, into my very own yard, to sit at a nice picnic table and play my guitar, to hear the clicking, high-pitched grinding of squirrels devouring big nuts, to open the blinds on the window of my room in the morning, sunlight streaming in, and to see directly in front of me a handsome squirrel going bananas on a big, tough nut, my God it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen from a window, and it is my window, and my yard, from my room. (Well, it’s rented, but hey. It’s mine right now.) A room that I have decorated with my things, my books, my guitars, my Squishmallows. I guess I am particularly happy today, but I am happy every day that I’m here, that the sun is shining, and I can look out into my lovely yard, and hear the birds chirping, and see the squirrels frollicking. We have mostly clover in our yard as well, which now has hundreds of incredibly dainty, small flowers, that still attract all of the pollinators, tiny bees and flies, and they hover all over the clover field, which to them is I’m sure a magnificent forest, a huge bounty of food. They are grazing, in a way, just like cattle, scouring the field for the sweetest, tastiest nectar, sucking away at the sugary goodness.
I don’t have much energy because I woke up early this morning, and went to bed late (I thought about saying “bedded late”, I have been reading the ancient tomes), but I am not upset. I would gladly wake up every day in this way, and sacrifice sleep for it, because what woke me up was an incredible thing, that I have never seen as of yet that I have been here, for one month now, and that was, Nick Harding in the kitchen, making breakfast, at 7:50 am. Still, it is surreal to me, that we are in fact both awake at this very moment, going about our business, now 10 of the clock. I felt like I was dreaming. I heard his movement, and I walked out into the living room, and he immediately looked up at me, like he had been caught being a naughty boy, and whispered, “Sorry!” And I said, in my underwear, still half-asleep, “It’s alright.” I thought it was Josh, because although Nick had been hinting that this was coming, and had been trying for a few days, and had told me of his new plan last night, to not stay out all night, and come back early, and take a powerful sedative, to wake up early and restart his sleep schedule, I knew this was coming, but to see it in reality is another thing. Someone says, “It’s coming, it’s coming,” and it finally comes, and you’re still shocked, even though you knew it was coming. Nicholas Harding, the entire time that I have known him now, has been staying out, later, and later, and later, a creature of the night, and sleeping in, later, and later, and later, waking up with an hour of sunlight left in the day, and watching it disperse through a crack in his bedroom window. He has been as nocturnal as the Count himself, and the only way you would have ever seen him in the “morning” was to wake up early enough to catch him before he retired for the day. I would spend all day, many, many hours of the day, living my life, before Nick Harding had risen from his tomb, to begin his night. So to see him, standing there, in the kitchen, cooking bacon and eggs, in his hat, sweatshirt, sweatpants, morning sun streaming in through the windows, birds chirping, and his cat, Brady, out in the living room with him, also shocked and clearly very pleased with this new development, at 7:50 in the morning, was understandably, totally surreal. It took me many minutes to process that this was happening, that it was in fact reality, and that I was not dreaming. I kept repeating that I couldn’t believe this was happening, and Nick said, “You think you’re still dreaming, don’t you?” We had a great morning chat, in which he told me his new plans for life, taking the week to get his sleep schedule in order before he goes back to work, getting back into morning gym workouts, and, of course, very soon he was telling me “I’ve made a decision. (A famous Nick Hardingism.) I’m back on the dating apps.” To which I replied, “You got off of them?” (It felt like he had been on just as many dates as ever, which was, nearly every night. But now that I think about it, he had been having a lot of boys’ time.) He said, “Yeah I was trying it out, trying to date more organically, but…” (This phase of organic dating can’t have lasted for more than a week.) In short, he’s looking for real love now, which I would say is a great and noble thing to be searching for. I went back to my room then, Nick to his, to watch The Patriot with Brady, I think because just yesterday we had been talking about, if we had to fight in any war, any kind of military conflict, what we would have wanted to fight in, and Nick was for certain, the American Revolution, which I thought was a very good choice. We talked more about it this morning, when I went into his room, to behold the most incredible scene, that I still could not believe I was seeing, that was Nick, cozy on his bed, watching a movie, with his window curtains actually open, with his room not dark and cave-like, and not lit by the harsh overhead light, but by in fact, true, real natural sunlight, and with a candle burning, with photos of his family now on the windowsill, and with Brady at his feet, in a state of perfect contentment, he looked like he was purring his soul out just being alive in that moment, I still couldn’t believe that this was really happening. And he had so effortlessly switched, like he had been doing this every morning of his life. And he did comment, “I’m good at switching.” We rekindled our war discussion, as he was watching The Patriot and I could hear the sounds of battle, and I said, “You wish you were there?” And he laughed, and said, “Dude… I’ve been thinking more about it.” And his answer was still Revolutionary War, OR, to be in the Roman Legion, infantry style, because then if you die, you die with your boys. He said the worst thing would be to die alone. I mostly agree with that, except I would not want to die in an absolute maelstrom of chaos, which would unfortunately be very likely. I would rather have a picturesque death, in battle, and with some time to say my last words to one of my comrades who had really gotten to know me, and who would promise me that they would kill the bastards who did this to me, and win the fight, and carry on, and stay alive, and tell everybody that I loved them, and all of that stuff that you say when you’re meeting your untimely end in war. I would not want to just be blown up by a mortar as I stormed the beach, too loud to hear anything from the bombs and the gunfire, with my guts out.. wow, umm, anyways.. where were we. Well, basically, that’s it. My answer was still in medieval times, and if I was a common man, I would want to be an archer, but of course if I could choose it I would be a knight. To which Nick replied, “Oh of course, if I can pick I’m going to be George Washington.” And I said, “As in you would want to be George Washington himself, or you as in Nick Harding substitute for him?” And he said, he, Nick Harding, which I said, that is an incredible amount of responsibility, and do you think you can do the job? And he laughed and said, “F*** no.” And the whole time, the fact that we were having this conversation here in the morning, still, that the sun was out, not to set anytime soon, that it was in fact the beginning of the day, for me and him, I still could not believe.
Other things I could write about include having a moustache, having already been infected by Southern culture, where people do in fact have moustaches, and now hardly without meaning to, I now have one too, and I have also been infected with Squishmallow disease, as have I have learned, all three of us masculine men in this household, via women in our lives, and how I am beloved at my local Kroger Starbucks because I only order black coffee, (“This guy’s a legend!” one of the baristas recently commented to his manager.) When I first ordered it, he told me he loved me. He said, after understanding that I just wanted a small black coffee, “Man, I love you.” I guess that nobody orders just a black coffee at Starbucks. Or at least, not at this particular Kroger Starbucks. It is a kind of crazy thing to do, I guess, like not having a smartphone, which is also continuing to win me much renown. Both of my roommates have commented that they have talked about me having a flip-phone, Nick to his therapist, and Josh to his friends. Also, I will just say I have full permission to write anything and everything about Nick, who told me, when I asked if I could write about him, “Yeah, you can write about me. You can use my social security number for all I care.”
Some of the other things Nick has said to me:
*In all seriousness* “I think about them all the time.” (Them being first editions of books.)
“Whoever it is, whatever I did, I’m sorry.” (Him telling me about getting a random call from someone who knew him from high school and would not reveal their identity, and started accusing and shaming him. He said he knew that all they wanted was, what’s the word, to be heard. (I can hear a flute playing in the background right now, some martial tune from The Patriot. I feel like this is something like having your kid home from college.)
When I went to talk to him about kitty litter. I said, “I need to talk to you.”
“About what? Is it gay?”
“A little gay.”
“Ok, carry on. Pro-ceed.”
This is at midnight, Nick only returning home for a brief respite. And something about the way he said it, especially, “Pro-ceed” putting his little twist on the pro like that, just killed me.
I was there to high-five Nick the moment he had received his award from Tinder for being in the “top 20% of profiles”. He said, looking up from his phone, “Guess who’s in the top 20% in Tinder profiles??” We high-fived. Then he said they shouldn’t be telling him that because his ego would go through the roof. I can’t remember his exact words, the way how he described how his ego would soar, but they were good.
I was showing Nick the second mattress that I had bought, in the midst of my failed mattress adventures, raging about how it was a piece-of-garbage sponge cake, and he had come in and was sitting on it, and I showed him, that I could easily bend it at a 90 degree angle, I showed him this and said, “This is not right. Look, I can easily bend it at a 90 degree angle. That’s not right.” And he stopped mid-sentence (extremely rare), having then fully processed what I had said, and laughed and looked at me and said, “What a f***ing test though.”
I mentioned again about writing about him, and he said his step-dad was a writer, and he had written about Nick before, and that he (his step-dad) had said to Nick’s mom, “I only married you for Nick.”
I could keep going. This is effortless for me. It is just as effortless for Nick, to say all of these incredible things. Nick told me about killing beavers, killing beavers for his step-dad that were destroying their special pond on their hundreds of acres of property in Vermont, and how his step-dad had paid him for each beaver he slayed, $100 a beaver, and he got $350 dollars, because he killed four beavers, but the fourth he shot in the water, and it sank and he couldn’t get the body. This story was a short segway in a conversation about a woman who was a hunter, who told Nick that she could dress a deer in 10 minutes, that Nick was currently seeing. On some of our very first nights together in the house, Nick was fretting over sending a message that he felt was too romantic to this woman who he was I think not supposed to be falling in love with, as that was not what she wanted, but he didn’t want to lose her at all.. Something like that. He was telling me about this, and he said, he knew women very well, growing up with two sisters and watching Sex and The City with them. “Everything I learned about women I learned from Sex and The City. There’s four types of women….” And, to this hunter girl he was seeing, he had said something about, “I’ll have to be careful about riding alone with you in a pickup truck on the country roads.” Or something, because I guess that’s a thing they say, or a song, about falling in love with a blonde girl while driving in a truck on country roads, basically what I just said (I don’t listen to country music, I don’t know about this stuff.) And he thought that was too much, and he was in great despair, putting his head in his hands, groaning, saying, “She’s not gonna’ text me back. 100%, she’s not gonna’ text me back tonight. If ever get a text back it’s not going to be until after this weekend.” And she did text him back that night, in only an hour, which was extremely relieving for him, so relieving that he texted me and said, “She texted me back. We’re good.” (Because of course I was also so invested in this) and said that she was in the shower or something. In the meantime, as he fretted and tortured himself, he commented on the chess set that is the only piece of decoration or homeliness in our still-barren living room, on the standing counter of the kitchen sink, and he said he had always wanted to learn chess, to which I replied, “You are a 31 year old man and you do not know how to play chess?” Excuse the stereotyping, but I mean, come on now. And he went to prep school??? (Well. So no he didn’t. It was revealed later that this enigmatic and fantastical man was full of lies, and a general ne’er-do-well. That may be something of a spoiler, but.. it fits, doesn’t it.) So I taught him, easing him into this, because I knew it would be a lot for him, in this moment, a lot for him to handle, and after starting with the pawn, and then moving on to the rook, then the knight, finally the bishop, he says, “Ok, hold on. Let me run this back.” And then he took a deep breath, and said, “God, I have to think. I haven’t thought in so long.” And he was being completely genuine. This man was, and generally is, but particularly so at this time in his life, in those first few days that I had known him, operating on pure, primal instinct, animal energy, running off adrenaline, testosterone, caffiene, nicotine, and mango-flavored White Claws, of which he downed one in the middle of our game of chess. He stopped and said, “Hold on, I need to do something.” Getting a large 16, 20-ounce White Claw out of the fridge, and saying again, “I have to do this.” And I knew. I knew what was about to happen here, but still I had to confirm it, and I looked him dead in the eyes and said, “What are you about to do?” And he laughed, and he said, “That’s a great response.” He said, “I’m going to chug this.” He said he could chug it “really fast.” His best time being seven seconds or something. I said, “Let’s time it.” He pulled out his phone, and he said, laughing, “What?? I’ve had my timer on this whole time??” And the timer on his phone had been running for nearly 10 days. It was approaching exactly 240 hours, it was on 238 hours and 40 minutes. And I said, “Dude, screenshot that, that is insane. In an hour you’ll have it at exactly ten day-“
“It’s gone.”
“What?”
“I deleted it on accident.”
He then handed me the timer, and crushed the White Claw, in 7.8 seconds. We then resumed our chess match, for the eleventh time that we had put it on pause, because during this match we had stopped many times, for him to review the mistakes he had made in messaging this woman, for him to put his phone on silent to help him get away from it, then deciding that was not sufficient, and turning it off, putting it in his room, then going back to get it, turning it back on because he “needed to know if his friends texted him” but he put the woman on silent (apparently you can do this?). He was also constantly vaping, huffing and spewing vapor throughout. After him crushing the White Claw, we had now “played” for about thirty minutes, what felt like an eternity (actual game time being only about 3 minutes), I just had to end it. Actually, the universe conspired to end things at a proper and natural time there, because somehow the most amazing and effortless checkmate showed itself to me, and I figured, even though we had actually only played about 8 turns in this chessmatch, that was enough for now, and so I took it.
I think I was even talking about this because of the phones, and displaying his primal instinct, but Nick has a terrible addiction to his phone, which he “just realized” recently. A few days after our legendary chess match (there have been no more of those, by the way) I was up to go to the bathroom in the wee hours of the night, or morning, around 4 am, and the bathroom is right next to Nick’s room, and he keeps the door open for Brady to get in and out, and I heard what sounded like two shows, two audio streams happening at once, and the next day we were talking, and I asked him about that, saying “Were you watching two shows at once?” And he said, “Oh, 100%.”
I must confess that I could write for many more hours on Nick, and our relationship. He is an incredible goldmine of writing material. The man is a living, breathing, treasure trove of content. Truly for a writer of the type such that I am, I could not have found a better roommate, and I still can’t believe my good luck in how this has panned out. (And even wilder than I could have ever imagined, in these glory days, the downfall that was coming. For Nick Harding turned out to be lying about just about everything in his life, and was stealing, and forging, and was with high probability what was formerly called a sociopath, and now termed anti-social personality disorder, which seems shocking, and it was incredibly shocking to discover at the time. I would say it was even somewhat frightening, as I felt that I had become intimate with him, and thought I knew him well. But so is the art of sociopath, the confidence man, the fraudster. And perhaps some part of me wanted to believe all of his fantastical tales, his recounts of wild adventures and his deep well of fabricated knowledge, as it was so entertaining for me. I didn’t care so much that it was true or not, I just wanted to keep hearing it. He probably knew that about me, too.) From the very beginning this Nashville business has been fated to be, it seems, blessed or at least destined to be. I don’t know how long this chapter will last, this magical new bromance I have found myself in (only a few days ago Nick walked in on Josh and I and said, “Boys, I have some bad news. I might be moving out.” Which was absolutely shocking and also completely crazy, because he had not paid rent in a few days, and the landlord, his friend, was pissed, and then of course in several hours he had made the payment, “a friend giving him some money” (now in the future, we know that that could mean anything at all), even though he has much money himself, as he has, he told me this, “gold and silver bars” in a Nashville bank, that he brought with him, as well as expensive watches, in the bank, that are investments. And he just came back from a trip to Boston with ten of the most beautiful suits I have seen. He took them all of his bag, one by one, sometimes with matching pants, and showed them all off to me, telling me about each one, the style, etc., which was incredible fun for both of us. So how this man comes into my room and says, “I might be moving out.” because he couldn’t pay his share of the far-less-than-New-York-rent rent, completely baffling. Every day with this man is a new adventure, and other days have started off with, me answering the door, bright and early at 7 am, to a group of no less than 11 firefighters, and just a few days ago, waking up to having no water in the house. I will have to write more of our adventures together here soon.
(From the future.) You know… Knowing what I know now, this paragraph and writing seems to be so full of red flags. And yet, at the time, it didn’t seem that way. He was so artful in his reasons and excuses and explanations, and I also am (well really, was, because I don’t think I will ever be taken in by someone so easily again) trusting and honest myself, and so I really didn’t suspect anything for a long time, and believed him when he told me any of his never-ending explanations and excuses for the strange things that happened with him. There is more to this story, and I should tell it, so that you can hear the full arc. That’s where it really gets good.
HAKUMUSU 