Tuesday, June 17, 2003
PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE ACT 1: Divest
PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE
ACT 1: Divest Now protests at College Hall. In prominent attendance: me and several of my best friends, including Andy. The next day the campus newspaper has a front page photo of the demonstration on the marble steps of the green stone monstrosity we’d occupied. Andy stands out among six or seven of my other friends in the photo, severe and anachronistic in his trenchcoat and tidy moustache.
ACT 2: Doctor Andy is moving to San Francisco to finish his residency. Already, chance encounters have occurred at sleepy coffeehouses on whacked-out avenues. He’ll be moving in with his brother at 10th and California. He’ll be working at a big hospital at California and Commonwealth, about two miles east. He arrives amidst fanfare and revelry. Andy is a supercharged person. With Andy, life is always lived to the hilt, and then retold at top volume with bellows of laughter.
ACT 3: It is evening, a few days later. I get a call from Dr. Andy. “Was it you?” I begin to smile but try to staunch it - he’ll hear the grin in my voice; it’ll be over before it starts. “Me what?,” I ask. He’s good - he can tell. “Dammit, it was you! How many of them are there?” “How many of what?” “These - these - picture things! I don’t know what they are! Did you do this?” Andy is not a merely smart guy - I am actually in awe of his mental capacities. Now that he’s been rendered inarticulate, I see that I’ve pushed him as far as he can go. “Yes, it was me.” (Howls of laughter.) “I’ve got seven of them. Three messages. How am I doing?” “Pretty good. You have all the messages.” “How many total?” “That would be telling.” Dr. Andy erupts in a familiar roar of hilarity and hangs up after inviting us all over for wine and dinner and wine.
ACT 4 (FLASHBACK): I have brought the College Hall demonstration photo from 6 years ago to work. It’s 2-1/2 x 2-1/2 inches; individual faces are about 1/3” square. I put the photo on the photocopier and set it to enlarge, to maximum. The picture comes out big. I enlarge the enlargement. The photo no longer fits on the page; details are growing indistinct among the oily blots of pixel. I continue to enlarge and re-center until the entire page is a welter of smears and spots, barely recognizeable from arm’s length as a representation of a human - but at a distance of 20 feet or so it is unmistakeably Andy’s face, looking like he had just bedded, and then killed, a beautiful double agent who’d tried to thwart whatever plans he was obviously hatching. He looks knowing. Virile. And Sneaky. I make three copies and attach three captions to these - “Nice Warm Hands,” “Le Fromage et Sur la Tete,” and (I think) “The Doctor Will See You Now.” (If any of you reading this remember for sure, Heidi, let me know.) I run off a bunch of each of them. I go out the night before Dr. Andy gets to town and tape 30 of the posters - 10 of each caption - along his way to and from work, fifteen on either side of the street, well spaced apart, in various locations, at various heights, facing different directions. Dr. Andy sees the first one from across the street and thinks he must be seeing it wrong. Then he sees one up close and confirms his own worst fears. I am not the first suspect he calls but I’m high on the list.
DENOUMENT
Dr. Andy finds posters for about 8 more months. I still have one for a keepsake.
