While out and about on the town celebrating my birthday, my drunken revelry brought me to a bar called Belvedere's down in Lawrenceville. It was a really different bar with a bizarre aesthetic. The front room looks like a very traditional bar, but the enormous back room features a ping pong table, two pool tables, two refrigerators, a big-screen TV from the 1980s, a big bookcase filled with old horror flicks on VHS, and about two dozen old rocking recliners of various styles and colors. I rather liked the place.Sitting right in front of the TV was a black gentleman all by himself eating a giant pizza and quietly but rhythmically tapping his fingers on the table while watching what appeared to be one of the early Jason movies. One of the friends I was with went up to him in an attempt to bum some pizza off of him, but she ended up getting dragged into a rather lengthy conversation with him. Eventually, my other friend and I want to know what's going on, so we went to join them. Thus, I got to meet one of the more colorful characters in recent memory.
He called himself "The Psychartist." Or "Firewolf." Or "Visionary 27." I guess it depends on what fan circle you run in. You can call him by his "birth name" Deion, but where's the fun in that. It turns out that the Psychartist fancies himself quite the slam poet, and he quickly regaled us with a rather impressive set of rhymes about the importance of following your dreams. We complimented his style. Apparently, the Psychartist works a day job down at the Bettis Grille and frequently entertains his patrons with these little diddies.
He continued with a lengthy and heartfelt monologue about the dangers of alocholism and the sins of the flesh. Monogamy is very important to the Psychartist. He spoke in great detail about how everyone should follow his or her dreams in order to find true happiness. There's nothing in this world more important than happiness, and if you simply pursue sex with every random girl, "then you'll get AIDS, and no one will be happy." The Psychartist be droppin some straight truth.
The best was yet to come. He asked if we wanted to hear his original CD compilation. Apparently the Psychartist has an amateur band and is trying to break into the big time with upbeat songs featuring uplifting messages. I was truly mesmerized by this man's bizarre hip hop after school special lifestyle, so I couldn't pass this up. He popped his personal CD (which he had on hand) into the DVD player....
It was AWFUL!!!
Imagine the most deranged and gutteral growls and wails from the devil being channeled into a microphone while singing lyrics about the importance of staying in school and monogamy. I remember one particlar track very well because the same lyrics were just repeated over and over again:
"If you cheat on your wife... YOU AIN'T NOTHIN
If you cheat on your girlfriend... YOU AIN'T NOTHIN
You think you're so bad but... YOU AIN'T NOTHIN"
It went on and on like this. The rest of the songs weren't any better, but I couldn't tell him that. He was beaming with pride and annotating every track, expressing the importance of each moral lesson as he went along.
He concluded our conversation with his hope for the future of psychartistry, a term and artistic movement that he apparently dreamed up (or so he says). What is psychartistry? As best as I could piece together, it's when you express your deepest psychological turmoil in artistic form while attempting to convey a strong personal message. I always thought that's what regular old "art" was, but maybe I didn't quite get it. I'll admit, I was drinking quite a bit, and he said a lot of things.
Still, he split a pizza with us, and he was one of the funnier and most interesting characters I've met in some time. You can bet your ass that the Psychartist is going to be incorporated into my novel in some way. He's just too good to pass up.
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"If you cheat on your girlfriend... YOU AIN'T NOTHIN!"
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