Burn Bridges, Stay Warm

Ken Lomax tiptoes the fine line between genius and insanity ever so gracefully. He’s a man who lives like he drives – a hundred and ten miles per hour with the seatbelt unbuckled, blasting Frank Zappa’s “Watermelon in Easter Hay” or something of the ilk, with a giant Styrofoam cup filled with Glenfiddich resting between his legs. Always a loner, Ken avoids long-term relationships on all fronts and deems the institution of marriage old hat. He considers himself an advanced species that has evolved past basic, primitive needs such as sex, ego, and emotional attachment. That is for beasts, he claims. He personally performs all maintenance on his car and can’t fathom the notion of another man tending his garden, yet he handles currency with tweezers and avoids coins like the Plague. His trusty bottle of anti-bacterial soap has become an extension of himself, always toting the lotion in case he must engage in the barbaric ritual of shaking hands with strangers.

Like I said, Ken is a genius and, like the old saying goes, most geniuses are misunderstood. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from an Ivy League college with a degree in Engineering. From there, he received a full ride to a prestigious medical school where he graduated at the top of his class, though he claims to have never been interested in pursuing a career in the medical field. According to Ken, he took the ride to obtain a more thorough understanding of the human body’s mortality and possibly prolong what he believes will be a short existence on this planet in terms of the modern-day life expectancy of man.

“I’m a trial run; the first of my kind off the conveyor belt,” he once said. “Remember when the hybrid cars first came out? They were ugly, crude, shoddy pieces of shit. But eventually the manufacturers perfected them. Now every company has multiple hybrid models. I’m not built for a long life. I’m lucky if I see forty…but I’m okay with that.”

Nowadays, Ken spends the majority of his time on the road, hopping red-eye flights from state to state, earning his income monitoring the development and implementation of the high-tech software brand over which he presides. He spends his free hours in hotel rooms, finishing New York Times crossword puzzles and bottles of Johnnie Walker in record times. He always packs his own sheets and linens and refuses any maid services wherever he goes. The middle-aged, upper-crust conservatives whom he encounters along his journeys are bewildered by this specimen, having never before experienced a foul-mouthed, hard-drinking yankee with the brain waves of Einstein on psilocybin. He enjoys getting his associates shitfaced off incessant shots of tequila and gin. If they refuse his generosity, he acts offended and disrespected, using his reputation in the industry to coerce them. Those who black out, unable to handle the large volumes of liquor, are often subject to odd experiments. He practiced his med school expertise on one intoxicated colleague in particular, wrapping his entire leg in a plaster cast after a long night of binge drinking. When the rube came to the next morning, he told him that he was rushed to the hospital after falling down the stairs and breaking his femur. If he’s feeling especially giddy, he’ll hide forks, scissors, or even action figures beneath the plaster to add some pain to the area and intensify the effect. He’ll wish the gentleman a speedy recovery and vanish to Gary, Indiana or Jackson, Mississippi or wherever the job requires him to travel next. Shortly thereafter, a licensed medical professional will examine the victim’s injury and discover nothing but a healthy lower extremity and a six-inch Jake “The Snake” Roberts figurine with a rotating torso for delivering a nasty clothesline to his plastic opponents. This has become his calling card.

Well, maybe his tightrope walk between psychiatric labels isn’t that graceful. But he emits an unexplainable electricity wherever he goes. If you were to meet him, you’d know exactly what I’m talking about. As soon as he walks through the door, everyone in the room instantly knows that this guy’s some kind of different. I felt this electricity for the first time in the seventh grade when he gave me my first cigarette – a Virginia Slims Ultra Light he confiscated from his mother’s purse – and taught me how to inhale in the woods behind middle school.

It’s not ironic that the same feeling permeates the air on this fateful autumn night.