Victor Navarro Jr.: Madman Laureate of Pittsburgh’s Little Italy
III
Although he’s a certified paranoid schizophrenic, Victor’s not crazy in the way we normally think of crazy. He’s surprisingly well-mannered and highly educated, albeit very foul-mouthed and shocking. He was born into money so he knows how to behave himself when he needs to. Although most of his teeth are gone, his smile is beautiful. His face is scraggly and mad, but you can still see the once handsome man behind it. One of the girls gave him a nice faux-hawk and dyed the top of his hair in stripes of blonde and black, giving him a very young and hip look. He’s an old man that never went out of style, that never stopped riding the waves of what’s young and happening. His awareness of popular and obscure art, music, and literature screws up your ageist associations. Your mind habitually wants to categorize someone older as uncool, someone you can relate to only in the context of grandfather or elder or some other asymmetrical dynamic- but Victor feels like a contemporary. He feels like he’s right there with you in your generation and gives you the feeling that he is ageless.
He sits outside strumming a busted up guitar, singing dirty old man ballads he wrote with a delta blues style drawl in bad tuning. His smooth long legs are crossed elegantly. His cigarette packs and pens and old books are spread over the table like an elaborate tableau of madness. He smokes whatever cigarettes are cheapest at the tobacco shop two doors down. After sitting with him for five minutes my clothes are drenched in the awful cheap and desperate smell of USA Golds.
He lights one and places it into the ashtray. He picks up one of his new books and opens it wide, pushing his nose in between the crisp pages to smell the spine. He loves smelling the inside of a new book.
“Victor, when did you lose your mind?” I ask him.
He purses his lips and thinks, bringing the cigarette slowly and dramatically to his mouth. There are two ashtrays and one plastic cup filled to the brim with butts and ashes. They are all his handiwork. Victor subsists on a diet of twenty some coffees a day and at least three packs of cigarettes.
A beautiful girl walks by and his mad-dog eyes follow her ass across the street and into the shadows of an alley. I wait patiently for his attention to return to me. Victor’s a pig, but he pulls it off so artfully, you can’t help but laugh at him. Like every feminist poet must concede respect to Charles Bukowski, every feminist poet would love Victor Navarro if they knew him and that’s how I reconcile his chauvinism with my own distaste for such things.
“I lost my mind....” He says and stops, thinking for a minute between drags. He isn’t thinking of an answer, he knows it already. He’s consciously stalling time to increase the anticipation. His cigarette is like a magic wand by which he manipulates silence in order to really orchestrate the perfect moment.
Victor grew up in Pittsburgh in a wealthy family. One of his first memories was standing at the beach with his chauffeur who picked him up and threw him into the waves. It was terrifying. He tells the story so elaborately, like it was the first trauma of the archetypal hero-journey, initiating him into the abyss every artist must wrestle his way out of. He tells it one too many times, like his coming out of the water then was the first ever something out of nothing. He says “chauffeur” with a bourgeois French accent and I wonder how someone with such privilege ended up so down and out.
He was educated at private schools his whole life and eventually went to Carnegie Mellon majoring in Literature. According to Victor, he earned a doctorate in mathematics, but his younger brother, Victor’s only surviving relative who visits him occasionally, confirmed that this is in fact a lie. Victor actually went for over fifteen years, always changing his major last minute, wanting to be a jack of all trades. He finally gave up after one two many acid trips left him hearing voices and seeing reality in colorful, dizzying pixels. He eventually started having “attacks”- hour long spells of intense paranoia and terror which left him curled up in a ball in the corner of a room, unable to speak or be spoken to. He describes these states as pure hell, a raging shitstorm of negative thoughts and terribly intense suspicions of imminent danger. The outer world fades away and he is left alone to suffer the whirlwind in his endless head. When I met him he was having a few attacks every week. We all knew when it was happening because he would start to feel them coming on. He’d warn us again and again and he’d start eating different pills to try and ward it off, but it never worked. If he didn’t go home to be alone in his room, he would just sit in the corner of the coffee shop with his arms over his head like he was sleeping on the tabletop. After a few hours he would snap out of it and the conversations would go on as normal. Dostoevsky or chaos theory or the usual, useless bitching about the legitimate literary and art world we’d probably never be apart of. If he was in a particularly good mood, swimming in the sweet relief after an attack, we’d cover his favorite topic: who’s hot and who’s not.
“Oh, hun,” he’d say, sitting with me on the front steps of the coffee shop since all the tables were full, “that Olivia is so hot. Do you think she’d come to my room and spank me?”
“No, Victor, I don’t think so”
“Why not? Am I too old?” He’d ask.
“You’re a bit too old for her.” I’d answer.
“Am I too smelly, hun?”
“You’re a little smelly today, Victor.
“Uh huh,” he’d respond and smoke in silence for a few minutes.
“Will you come up and spank me, hun?”
“No, Victor.”
“Ok, let’s go get that table. “
