Every week, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 42-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
continued from last week
Buddy interpreted the change in demeanor as gaining a kind of power and respect, neither of which he’d ever really been able to achieve in his life. For the most part, he felt like he was a disappointment. He’d grown up poor. The girls down the road wore actual potato sacks to school. That kind of poor. His dad was a preacher. His mom was an angry person who would have benefited from a psychiatric elevation. The whole family, all seven of them, would have benefited, crammed as they were into a single-wide trailer in a farmer’s field. Buddy was the only boy, and he managed to fall short in all the ways that mattered most. He lied, stole, drank, fought, took drugs, hardly went to school and ate more than his fair share when he could get away with it. But so did all the other guys he knew.
Moving from the country into the city was life-altering for Buddy. He worked in a machine shop for a while, but couldn’t really keep it together. He hated the routine. Hated his co-workers, a buncha pussies with wives and kids. He never wanted to be caged in like that. He started busking in the ’80s and never looked back, building out his empire to include the pot and, in his mind, he became a sort of neighborhood shaman. He wasn’t into the kind of malarkey taught in universities and such. He believed in God and signs, fate and astrology. Doctors were all quacks although he’d ended up using them more than most to deal with high blood pressure, a heart attack and diabetes.
Initially, country boy Buddy knew enough to stay out of conversations about politics because any time he said anything, everyone laughed at him, and he’d feel hurt, stupid and angry. A diabolic holy trinity of pain.
It was probably that pain that brought him to the point of becoming a total chameleon. Basically, he manipulated anyone within range to believe he was whatever they needed him to be, which is a very powerful thing. This was his trick for getting along with everyone. His moral compass spun in whichever direction the wind blew.
Then came the pandemic, and news reached Buddy that the government was restricting his movements and forcing him to get a vaccine. Buddy believed the Bill Gates chip thing even when people tried to guide him away from whatever source he was getting this this stuff from.
Well before the pandemic, Buddy’s roommate Buster moved to the Philippines to marry a woman he’d never met. Buddy wasn’t on Facebook much, but Buster kept him up to date on how it was the best thing he’d ever done. This simple act of asserting a success, of Buster being smart enough to take on the world and win, was huge to Buddy. Along with lies about his situation overseas, Buster sent fake news and misinformation, which, reaching people like Buddy, ignited their longstanding mistrust of government. Various communities formed around a common urge to defy authority, and it became us against them. Or rather, them against us, because, at that time, not much of this had surfaced as a widespread problem.
to be continued
“Prize Arm” from The Eagle And The Poodle (Matador, 1996) (download):
