Part III: Vic
If there ever was a person who truly qualified as Freshly Baked, it was Vic. Vic already held legend status amongst the crew before I met him. He was 5 years older than everyone else and had moved away to San Diego. He had returned because of an unfortunate PCP incident. (that's all anyone knew) The first time I saw him was at Lance's mother's house months after I had met the others. He was sitting on an exercise bike wearing a sun visor. They were watching a beat up video tape of the notorious footage of Bud Dwyer blowing his head off at a press conference. Every time the scene would end, Vic would say "again."After the fifth viewing Lance started to protest. "Dude, there's other stuff on the tape."
"Again" Victor would command. And they would rewind the tape. By the tenth time everyone was numb to it and bored and left Vic in the living room to watch the shooting ad nauseam. From the kitchen we could hear the scene being played out over and over.
"Everybody get back, this thing is loaded." BANG...
..."Everybody get back, this thing is loaded." BANG...
I didn't know what to make of him.
My initial weariness of Vic got worse the next time I saw him. He and Louie were having a barbecue at their mother's house. They had a half pipe in their back yard and beer in coolers so there was no reason to go inside. When I finally needed to get one from the fridge, I froze staring at the door. There were dozen's of obituaries cut out from the paper and taped to the fridge. Louie walked by and I asked "What the fuck?"
"Yeah man, my brother's pretty fucked up." Now I was seriously rattled by this quiet dead pan weirdo and I avoided him for several months. No one told me Vic was a hospice nurse's aid, these were the people he cared for, got to know, and had tended to on their death beds.
After my reservations were put to ease, I became utterly fascinated by him. Vic was far more into his hispanic roots than Louie and when he did speak, it was always in soft, low volume home boy slang. "Yo bro... it's time."
"Uh, time for what Vic?"
"Cerveza."
"Uh, do you want to get a beer?"
He would just stare for a moment and then get up and leave. "Ok, I guess we're going to go have a beer now."
His man of few words persona constantly drove my imagination wild. I pictured him being a mixture of the man with no name, the Fonz and an Aztec prince all wrapped up in a piercing & dread lock package. This fascination hit overload one night when Vic, Jonathan and I decided to eat mushrooms. The three of us sat in my living room and tripped our faces off. Vic pulled out an ounce of weed and dumped the whole thing on a T.V. tray in front of him. He rolled a joint and offered it to me. I declined. Jonathan was sitting at the kitchen table oblivious to the offer, he was intensely sculpting with play dough and talking a mile a minute. He was rambling at both of us but really he just enjoyed the sounds his mouth made. After about two hours I realized Vic hadn't said a word, and was still smoking a joint. As Jonathan continued to chatter on, I started watching Vic. He would roll a joint, casually smoke the whole thing, then roll another. Always with the most nonchalant, I'm a bad ass look on his face. By the end of the night he had smoked the whole ounce. He was smoking joints like I was smoking cigarettes. I began believing Vic was some sort of super human. He wasn't like you or I. I started picturing Vic as this alien who had superior knowledge. His wisdom was beyond our earthly comprehension and he only spoke occasionally and briefly because his thoughts and awareness were too powerful for us to grasp. There were deep meanings and cosmic ideas percolating in his mighty cranium and-
Vic stood up. "Hey Robert."
It had been so long since he spoke that Jonathan went silent mid sentence. We both stared at Vic a little spooked.
He pointed to his eye and then pointed at me. "It's all good Vato... you know, everything is going to be o.k."
He sat back down.
Jonathan and I glanced at each other and there was another moment of silence. Then Jonathan yelled "Fuck yeah it's o.k. We are OFFICIALLY tripping balls." and started to chatter again. But I wasn't o.k. Now I knew Vic could read minds too. I looked over at him and he was leaning his head back on his chair grinning at me. Shit, Vic knew I knew he could read minds, after all, he was reading my mind thinking about how he could read minds. Fuck, he IS super human after all. Then I realized, the super human said it was going to be o.k. and I felt amazingly calm. It's all going to be... O.K.
After the psilocybin wore off, I stopped believing Vic was psychic. However, for a long time to come I held the belief that he was the silent thinker of great thoughts. But as with all things familiar, the shine on Vic's mythos began to wear off over the years. I came to realize that while Louie seemed drunk even when he was sober, Vic held himself together amazingly well no matter how fucked up he was. I overlooked the fact that Vic could smoke a whole ounce of pot in one sitting. Those few words he uttered were the only one's he could muster in his drug haze. There weren't great thoughts hiding in his mind, he was usually blank. Even with that realization I still felt like Vic was my favorite and I had to agree with Lance's proclamation "Vic is truly, undeniably, the most Freshly Baked of all."
The Sniveling Goat
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