Pigs on the Wing (Part One)

At that point in my life, Tim Fusco was easily the coolest person I’d ever met. I landed at the California University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 1982. The first year of an eventual five-year dual degree adventure. I’ve told you guys about all of that a little. I was in my first college dorm room. I knew right away that my random roommate was trouble. He just seemed like a poor man’s Vanilla Ice without any of what I’d later find out actually made Vanilla Ice kinda cool. Ice became a contractor and built ridiculously garish homes in Florida. He had a reality show. These monstrosities were abominations utterly devoid of taste. But here was this once-was guy just excited to be making something. Even supposedly ugly stuff needs to get made. Only things that don’t ever get made are truly ugly. But yeah, this dude had none of that. He was just some Pittsburgh shitbird without an ounce of interest. But Tim, Tim was so very improbable in this dorm, this college, this state that I was mesmerized.

You put all your stuff away, hook up your stereo you brought from home, and then walk out into the halls to see what’s happening. This is your very first moment of not living at home. You’d been away from home before, but you still lived there. Now I lived here. You live here. We, the past me and the present me scrolling through memories live here together with this lummox and a building full of other kids sniffing around and looking for possible tribal markers.

Let me be clear. To be a tie-dyed 17-year-old Deadhead in a Western PA coal town in 1982 was to be an outlier. My tribe was certainly going to be a small one. But the markers were very easy to spot. I saw a couple of possible contenders. I saw Led Zeppelin stickers on unpacked record crates nestled into a dorm room with open doors. I saw guys with Rush or Scorpions t-shirts. Not really my thing, but I was getting closer. And then I see Tim.

At the end of the hallway comes this tall, lanky, um, person? Half sauntering, half strutting with his eyes down and his hands clasped together just above his waist. It becomes clear this person is a guy. He’s wearing what I’d later realize was the only get-up I’d ever see him in. Faded black Levis. But not denim. Remember those levis that were just cotton of some sort, and they’d immediately fade to grey. Best pants I ever had. Absolute punk uniform requirement. At some point in time, they disappeared; I’ve tried finding these damn things for decades. This was the first time I ever saw them. I distinctly remember him wearing combat boots, as well as I remember him only wearing Converse All-Stars. Whatever one is actually, the truth is all he ever wore. He might have worn all kinds of other shoes too. Who can say? His shirt was a white or black t-shirt with the neck, sleeve, and waist cuff, cut off, so the material rolled up on itself. Usually, they were blank, but sometimes they said Bauhaus or Dead Kennedys or just “Too Drunk To Fuck.” His hair was perfect Syd Vicious spikes, and he had a tight leather choker with a little padlock holding it together. He was preposterous. He looked like he was wearing a very well-researched and sourced Halloween Costume. I hadn’t been sat down and made to listen to The Sex Pistols and the DK’s “In God We Trust, Inc” yet. I didn’t know this world yet. This world I’d tumble down into for years. So he just looked so alien to me. When he flaunted past, I sorta said, “Hey,” in that way young men do when they’re sizing each other up. He just kept going with his own non-committal “Hey.”

I met a couple other guys who seemed to have the same, “wow, I’m so very far from home,” frequency buzzing from their ears. It’s always the ears. Almost the entirety of my human connection and community revolved around a perfect center core of music. We didn’t necessarily love all the same music, but we LOVED music. It was actually beyond love. Music for us ventured into dependence. Music was our weapon and our armor, and our spoils. There was hardly a part of me on that first college day that wasn’t formed or steered by music. My clothes echoed the Grateful Dead. My drive to be an outlier stemmed from the imagined lives of people like Lou Reed and David Bowie, and its edges were softened by Pink Floyd. A decidedly Gilmour-centric version. The only parts of me sitting on this dorm bed in the room of a new-found possible friend that wasn’t forged in music were the parts of me that were here because of my Dad. This five-year dual engineering degree was his plan. I went along with it because I really didn’t have any other ideas, and I knew it would make him happy. Make him proud. No matter how much I fucked up, he and my mom had my back. Not joyfully. Not easily. But they were there.

I’m sitting there and in comes Tim. I was fascinated by him. He was incredibly inward-facing. He spoke very little and always seemed on the verge of an anxious collapse while also telegraphing that he was fucking bulletproof. He existed in some strange cognitive dissonance. He’d met and connected with one of the other guys who’d somehow found each other and were in the first moments of forming a tribe. We were in Mike’s room. Mike Labarbera from Long Island. He dug the Dead too, which is why I suppose I was here, but he was playing The Mothers of Invention. Mike, all smiles, laughter, and divine sight hidden under a permaglaze of THC. Even without the THC. He called pretty girls “tomatoes.” God, I love that.

I just watched, and Tim stood there in his ever-present lean against a door fiddling with something in his hands, always at belt buckle level. He’s forever in that posture in my mind, even in the memories of him lying on a bed, sitting in the grass, or sitting in my car. Always leaning. Always fiddling. I think I was forming a crush.

That’s what I remember most clearly. I remember feeling like I was attracted to him, and that felt weird. That connected to The Thing at 8 or 9. Not necessarily a trigger but familiarity. And yet I knew it wasn’t the same sort of attraction that I’d feel if a tomato walked in the door. The California University of Pennsylvania in 1982 was fucking light on tomatoes.

Guys get crushes on each other. We rarely admit it, but we do. Maybe it’s something else, and we just use the same term, but sometimes two straight guys meet, and one gets pulled into the other’s orbit. That’s the horrible thing about crushes; they never happen for both people. Only one gets to carry it around. It might turn into something else for both of them. It might turn into love, but the initial crush is always one-way.

I don’t remember much more about that first meeting with any of those guys. I just know we all stuck together and became friends. This bond served us well and perhaps primarily existed because we were all such targets of derision by most of the people there. We were weirdos and fags and queers. We were all the familiar names that kids like us got called. But we closed ranks, and we loved it. We flaunted it.

We all hung out together whenever we weren’t in class. Tim got lucky and had Fred as a roommate. Later known as Fred Hate when we started the band. They got lucky. The rest of us got stuck with some version of my poor man’s Vanilla Ice. Whoever Mike’s roommate was is forgotten; I guess we just pushed him out. Some other guy’s writing about the creeps he got stuck with in a college dorm. We gravitated to Mike’s room. Second floor and right before the stairwell. We’d get cases of Old German beer in waxed cardboard boxes with bottles you had to return, all with worn rings around their center from the endless bottling plant apparatus. It occurs to me that this box couldn’t have held 24 bottles. Isn’t a case of beer 24? It had to have been 12. And yet that’s memory, a case. Myriad versions of a single moment can be written in memory.

We’d smoke pot and listen to Zappa and whatever else anyone could get Mike to put on. I’ll tell you this much, those three years in California, PA and not just Mike but other friends as well made Frank Zappa repellent to me. It’s just too much, guys. C’mon! Switch it up a bit. It’s fine. Other guys and some girls drifted in and out of the scene and I can see snatches of them but it’s all the backs of jackets or just the eyes or I can hear just the Western PA accent from some mouth through the smoke. The core remained intact and attracted other components over time, but at first, it was just a handful of us.

The crush with Tim morphed into an odd friendship as we got to know each other. What was strange about it was that I was close to him without ever really knowing anything about him. He was so entirely guarded, yet he’d toy with people by dangling little parts of him into the light only to snatch them away at the last second.

Tim was basically a sociopath. I’m not entirely confident he felt empathy or compassion. But somehow, he escaped the label by being, just, some other thing. Hard to say. I loved the guy, but I always felt like he could pull the rug out at any minute. It’s not easy to admit this. As I write this, it feels like maybe Tim and my friendship with him was a measure of what I felt about myself and what I felt I was worth. Back then, we were just the two weirdest and smartest guys in a band of a handful of “fags.” Tim and I found a lot of things together as those years progressed. We found Eno together. More for sure, but Eno’s enough. At one point, we had an apartment together, and we’d play “Ambient 1: Music for Airports.” all night, just looping and loud and perfect. Try it. Believe me. Christ, I love this record with the power of a thousand suns.

And on one of those nights, I got into a thing with Robin. Robin, the girlfriend I lost my virginity to. We argued. I sulked. She sat there stunned and alone. I walked away. Proud. Confused. Tim came out of his bedroom. She saw him. I was gone out of frame. She went with him into his bedroom. I hear it from my room. I’m pulsating with confused hate. I’m paralyzed. She fucked Tim. We never spoke about it. These things happen. You use one hand instead of two. You fuck up. You don’t use two hands. You drop the third out.

And so we stuck together, and maybe he was or wasn’t a sociopath, but we needed each other for unknown or at least unclear reasons. No one who could see the full movie of my life at this moment would call me “straight.” The sex addiction formed by The Thing and the chasing of shame it excited would surely cancel that out. I don’t know about whatever Tim had left of his life. I can’t imagine him still alive. The point is that nothing about our friendship was sexual or loving, or ambiguous. One look at Tim, and you knew this kid had been through the wringer. Someone else’s wringer. But here we were. In a dilapidated Western Pennsylvania coal town college. We were two supremely fucked up lambs who found each other at the abattoir.

To Be Continued

Post Script:

As I sit here and read this back, I keep thinking that there’s no story here. I know that the real payoff of our friendship happens in the end, but still, I feel like this isn’t enough. What’s the point? What’s the point of writing about loving a sociopath. But I think that I’m starting to realize why I’m doing this. Surely I want you to like it. Surely there’s that. But I think I also want to tell you everything. I want to expose the very most hidden parts of myself to an imagined witness. I want “to lead with that which I most want to hide.” I preach that all the time. I guess this is me slowly doing just this. Because if I can imagine just one other person knowing ALL of me, well, then I’m bulletproof.