The Weirdness Continues…

Freddy Left the White House with a Dark Cloud Over His Head

by Anton Saurian ^©1993; Edited by S. Solomon

Our story continues from the previous post. The cassette is flipped, as were all wigs in attendance…

M: Oh, and remember Freddy? Well, I'll tell ya, Squatch and Freddy had a very major connection. These guys were like room-mates in prep school or something. Right?

AS: Dah.

M: They had this incredible connection. God, the last time I saw them had'da be ten years ago, down in Washington, before that New Year's party. I stopped by to visit Squatch, and he said, ‘Hey, we're gonna go visit Freddy Blinder at his apartment.’ Freddy was workin' for the, uh, what administration...?

AS: He was vorking for Reagan, down the hall from Ollie North! He was some kind'a management assistant.

M: Yeah! Right, he's in the White House. I'm like, okay, ‘What has happened here?’ Something wrong has happened to my buddy: something deeply wrong has happened that this hard core Dead-head should be working in the White House.

I knew that he'd gone back to school, to Columbia, to get an MBA, or something like that. Alright, this is a guy who dropped out of Concordia a few years before. He was trying to get some kind of weird…

AS: ...a degree in Alchemy. He vanted to be the first Bachelor of Alchemy in five centuries. The academic powers-that-be showed him the door.

M: Yeah, but he finished first in his class, anyway. He did! Jeez. And, you know, now Freddy was workin' in the White House!

Something drastically bad has happened here. So, so… I'm like, Squatch, ‘take me to him,’ and off we go. We get to his place, and it's this little, yuppie-type apartment, y'know, relative to what I'm used to at the time. And, there's Freddy. He's dressed in his running togs or some shit, and you can see his silk tie draped over the chair. I'm like, ‘this is fuckin' real!’. The fuckin' guy has turned coat and I don't know how it happened.

So, I walk in and it's like, ‘Hi, Freddy, how'ya doin’?’. We have a beer, and the whole while I'm sayin' to myself, ‘what the fuck happened to this guy?’

All the sudden, our eyes meet. There's this little glint in his eye. All the sudden, he's kind'a lookin' at me, and it's like, I look over and he's got this very knowing expression... this ‘I know that you're weirded out by me’-look. But, there's this sparkle kind'a happenin', too. And he looks at me and he says, ‘I'm fine. Really. I'm just fine.’ I says, ‘Oh, yeah?’

He turns to Squatch, who's in the kitchen getting the steaks that Freddy made for us, and he says, ‘Hey, Squatch, let's show Marco that I'm fine.’

Squatch cuts off a little piece of steak and stabs it on the end of a knife and wings it, pweeeyoo!  It flies across the room and Freddy lunges, ‘gl-unnk’; straight down his gullet from twenty-feet! (Marco's mime of this action elicits the evening's biggest laugh. The fans are boiling in the aisles.) This was Zen! Zen and the art of being in the Here and Now... one-hundred percent. He was showing me that he had this precision. That he hadn't lost it a touch!

AS: Vun time, I saw Freddy at his most drunk, totally scattered and scary; literally on the ground in a puddle of beer and mud. I said something to him, can't remember exactly what, something about his presence making me feel straight, and ‘Velp,’ he says, ‘Ho-oe, yee-ah’ and he gets himself up and walks on over to that little tree, remember, in front of Kathy Anderson's old place.

M: Oh, yeah. Kathy!

AS: He walks on over, more like stumbles, and grabs a branch with one hand and proceeds to do a dozen one-handed chin-ups! This is a guy who, moments before, could hardly get off'a the ground.

M: As a true testimony to Freddy's precision, the last time I saw him, after that New Year's bash, he was sitting in the bath-tub, which he did quite a lot. He was wearing a funny hat, wrapped in a garden hose, with a smile from ear to ear.

AS: A few months later, two White House aids were dismissed from their jobs for alleged drug use in the Presidential Mansion. No one can be quite sure, but I'm pretty sure that Freddy left the White House with a dark cloud over his head.

Hic Finis Est