A certain American president is dominating 90 percent of what we see, hear, and discuss, so I’ve decided to write about a somewhat anonymous but highly unusual person I’ll call Melvin.
Melvin was intelligent. He did his undergraduate work at MIT and was studying veterinary medicine when I roomed with him and another vet student at a large university. Melvin is difficult to describe. I like to think he was Andy Kaufman before Andy Kaufman was Andy Kaufman. His life was a performance, not on stage, just walking around. The difficulty with Melvin, like Andy, was understanding the purpose and meaning of his performances.
For example, I could hear Melvin in his room when he had women over. During climax, he would always shout, “Christ was a Jew!”
After a time, I asked why he said this. He probably was employing his distinctly odd sense of human when he answered, in complete deadpan, “What else would you possibly say?”
I always suspected he was mimicking a character from a William Burroughs novel or some equally obscure place.
As a vet student, Melvin studied much more than I did. One evening, I was in the living room of our campus townhouse entertaining two women friends. He had a test the next day and was upstairs with his books. He obviously needed a break, and he took one in performance mode.
Melvin came running down the steps, frantic, dressed in cutoff jeans, no shirt, no shocks, no shoes. It looked like he was sweating. He carried a beat up old guitar.
“I’m on in 10 minutes,” he said to the three of us in a panic, “and I can’t play a thing.”
Then he ran to a window, opened it and jumped out.
Andy Kaufman couldn’t have done better.
But the best of his bits occurred when I and our third roommate walked him to a house where he was to meet a blind date. We wanted to see what she looked like and stood nearby as he knocked on her front door. When she opened it, we could see she had an exquisite body. It was rare and perfect in every way. She was not, however, attractive. My recollection is she had a slight resemblance to Richard Nixon.
Melvin looked at her and excused himself for a moment. He walked to the street and, with a rather demonstrative gesture, threw his glasses under the wheel of a passing car. Melvin then looked at me and the other roommate and said, in a tone of old movie contempt, “So long, suckers.”
He went back to the house, went inside, and wasn’t seen again for three days.
I’m certain that by the end of the three days the young woman who looked like Nixon knew almost certainly that Christ, indeed, was a Jew.
Now isn’t that better than Donald Trump?
By Lanny Morgnanesi
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