Ode to Dustyn

Having Dustyn as a roommate is sort of like having a rooster, except rather than cock-a-doodle-dooing in the morning, Dustyn hawks loogies when he wakes up in the afternoon – tremendous loogies which shake the house and have probably shown up on the Richter Scale. Breathing in through his nose to gather phlegm and snot – a noise akin to that of trucks downshifting on the highway – he will hawk and spit into the toilet while peeing with the door open in his underwear.

Dustyn is Native American, so he’s beige, hairy and has scholarships. He’s lived in Oklahoma, Missouri and Indiana so far. He wears glasses which make one think of Easy Rider-era Peter Fonda. I’m pretty sure he has a mustache. Hold on – let me go check…yeah, he does. He also has this weird anti-dandruff shampoo in the shower that smells like Tire Barn and doesn’t work. The majority of my female friends have a crush on him. Little black kids think he’s the ugliest person they’ve ever seen – at least according to two, whose proclamation Dustyn overheard while biking back from school last year. He knows how to cook remarkably good ramen noodles.
“I don’t mean to brag, or anything,” he said one evening, slurping his noodles loudly, “but my noodles are the fuckin’ shit.” He doesn’t even use the powder.

You always know when Dustyn is around because he has a tendency to stomp, rather than walk. While other roommates, such as Austin, modestly fight gravity and either tip-toe or delegate their weight to other parts of the body in an effort to soften their footsteps, Dustyn makes no attempt to conceal the fact that he’s present and accounted for. Sometimes when he’s stampeding down the stairs in the early afternoon he will hawk post-awakening loogies, (or aftershocks, if you will) either opening the front door and spitting into the bushes surrounding our porch, or spitting into whatever trashcan happens to be in close range. Sometimes he’ll sing, too. The Sisters of Mercy’s “Black Planet” was a big hit during fall of 2007, for example. After making coffee and telling me to go buy weed for him, he’ll ask if I’ve eaten yet, and where I want to go. When I first moved in with Dustyn, I felt as though he was using me for my car, since he doesn’t own one. But as time wore on, it became more apparent that he was using me for companionship – to vent about an irritating and condescending teacher; to ask who in the fuck I brought home last night; to just talk jibberish all afternoon – and that’s perfectly fine with me. I believe our record of nonstop jibberish clocks in at around four hours. I even gave him an extra copy of my car key that I have for some reason. He’s using it now to go get cigarettes.

Aside from going to Herron, eating out, using my car to go get cigarettes and staying with Erin, his girlfriend, Dustyn rarely leaves the house. The first thing I noticed about his domesticity is the fact that there are always blankets and pillows in the living room, and this dates back to a time when I hardly knew him, but would find myself, by happenstance, in whatever house or apartment he resided.
“I’m cold,” he said the other day, when it was like 70 degrees in the room. But the blankets aren’t just for Dustyn – they’re also for his friends, for those who sleep over, or for those who happen to find themselves incapable of finding their way up to their bedrooms. There’s even a spare mattress leaning against the wall in the living room, which he brought down for some drunk and aloof guests sometime last year. I can’t even count how many times Dustyn has tucked me into the couch.
“Need anything else?” he’ll ask.

“Did you guys just wake up? You look like shit,” Dustyn pointed out to friends Adam and Krystal, as they staggered toward us last Sunday, ironing their jeans with their hands and squinting in the sunlight. About four of us were strewn about the outside seating of Peppy Grill, this terribly awesome, dive-y breakfast food-oriented restaurant located a ten-fifteen minute bike-ride from our house. Dustyn is always the funniest, most observant person in the group, Peppy or otherwise. He generated about 85% of the laughter from out table while we ordered, waited, talked, smoked, and ate our way through Sunday Brunch. Our friend Bechtel disappeared for like fifteen minutes to take a shit, as he alleged, but I guarantee that he was laughing as hard as he could at Dustyn’s shrewd eye and sharp tongue; I think I heard him while I waited in line.

Dustyn was ranked 26 in Halo 3 last time I checked. That means he’s exceptionally good, in case you were wondering. His online name is DUSTY DIRTWEED. He listens to Coast to Coast while he plays at night and makes farting noises with his mouth at George Noorey’s guests, while they claim to be psychic, divine, probed by extraterrestrials, et al. Although he seems to be genuinely interested in the bizarre, intangible energy we seem to be faced with in these days – what will happen in 2012; why are there cults; are we really fucked, or is it just fear – he’s still one of the most driven people I’ve met in my entire life.

Dustyn is a printmaker. His prints consist of pop-culture references, pot smoke, upper-case letters, feathers, explosions, large, sensitive-looking people, guys on motorcycles, and anything else you talk about while he works on them. He mixes the absurd with the real. His prints are everywhere – not just in our house, but in our friend Brent’s house; in Hai Yang’s apartment; in houses and apartments of people I barely know. One of the first prints he ever gave me was a super-sized drawing of Scottie Pippen, of Chicago Bulls fame, getting a cheeseburger slam-dunked into his mouth by a tiny, anonymous player. I taped the print to the outside of my bedroom door when I lived in Chile, and although I’m not entirely sure whether or not my Chilean friends quite understood the pop culture references, they loved it, nonetheless. Dustyn doesn’t wear clothing with prints or graphics on them, however. He hasn’t explained why this is, but it may be related to why Boyz II Men’s favorite band is Metallica, why doctors smoke, or why world-class chefs sometimes eat and thoroughly enjoy fast food. He owns prescription sunglasses, which he wears on particularly sunny days; he’ll also wear them in restaurants, Kroger and the gas station, as he leaves his Peter Fonda glasses at home when he steps out in his sunscripts. Although people who wear sunglasses indoors are usually cops, rapists and/or all-around assholes, Dustyn gets away with it. After all, the glasses were prescribed to him. Dustyn used to wear women’s jeans, but he found some website which ships him Levi 511’s, or 509’s, or whatever the skinniest male cut is. His shoes range from slip-on to water-resistant to whatever his best friend William left us when he moved to San Francisco. He has several coats, including a green Desert Storm-era camouflage number with no pockets, which is allegedly supposed to obscure its wearer from enemies during sandstorms; a poofy, magenta Arctic lab coat which looks like “homeless people clothing,” according to someone – quite possibly Dustyn; and a standard pea coat, with anchors on the buttons, lapels falling to the knees, etc.

Whenever Dustyn finds something to be particularly absurd, obvious, ironic, or bothersome, he will cross his eyes in the northernmost corners of his sockets – by the bridge of his nose – protrude his upper-lip and utter a noise which is difficult to spell out phonetically, but “dyurrrrr” comes to mind. He sometimes inflects upward or downward, depending on the severity of the circumstance; upward usually suggests the banal; downward perhaps a little more difficult to cope with, such as having to clean up after someone, or work on an irritating school assignment. Sometimes he will grab his invisible boner and pretend to masturbate in a comical and unrealistically expeditious way, suggesting that whatever instance has elicited this reaction is so ridiculous that the only way to illustrate it is to get oneself off. This pushes irony to its limits and points out that as detached we may be to whatever trivial matter we putty in our hands, we are prone to it all the same – confronting absurdity with reality. I have actually stolen Dustyn’s cross-eyed lip-protrusion, but I can’t do it as well as he can, even when I practice in the mirror.

Dustyn graduates from Herron in May and will probably need to rent a freight train in order to move all the prints, posters, paintings and t-shirt designs he’s squeezed into his portfolio. Not to mention the blankets, pillows, bottles of Tire Barn shampoo, blank t-shirts, skinny jeans, military-and-extreme-weather-oriented coats and the bricks of ramen he will boil, season, and delight his new Californian friends with. I’m not sure whether or not we’ll find ourselves sharing rent and utilities again, but I’ll always smile whenever a tremor purrs along the San Andreas fault line in the afternoon.