Tuesdays with Shut Up Rick

A Dead Friend Story

[Note to all: this is a piece I originally ran in a zine I made, called Grunt. I’ll email you a PDF for free if you send me a request to buckyofoakland@yahoo.com.

I’m writing this on a Wednesday afternoon. Tomorrow, a story I told about him to the Snap Judgement people is scheduled to air. I talked to them for four hours I think? I have no idea what will be included or cut. So here’s a good version of the story for your enjoyment.

I assume/hope people will come to this Substack from that episode. So I thought I would post this up here to coincide.

More original content to come soon. Thank you for being here.—Bucky]

For five years, I spent an hour every Tuesday with a mentally ill ex-con we lovingly called Shut Up Rick. We met up at a Peet’s coffee in San Francisco at 6pm. For the next sixty minutes, I was subject to the worst dirty jokes and rants about aliens, conspiracies, and his favorite, alien conspiracies. 

I don’t know what he had done time for, what the charges were, but really, nothing would surprise me with this dude. Not murder, not arson, not bank robbery. The guy was just missing that part of his brain that gave a fuck.

Rick got the name because we had to tell him to shut up so often, it became his name. We met at a 12-step group we both attended, one that was notorious for what we call “cross-talk.” It was the meeting with the worst reputation I’ve ever seen. Even there, he managed to offend and annoy everyone.

Sadly, this is the only picture I have of Shut Up Rick. He didn’t really like having his picture taken…”Why do you want to take my picture? Can’t you remember what I look like?”... We took this one because a woman asked for his Facebook profile and he didn’t have one. So we made one. I don’t know if he ever used it past our creation.

Rick interrupted people giving heartfelt shares with dumb comments and snide remarks. He made what would be called “dad jokes” if your dad was a sociopath. This would result in us saying “SHUT UP, RICK!” in unison.

I was working in downtown San Francisco while living in Oakland. Our 12-step meeting met on Tuesdays at 7:30. It didn’t make sense to go home first, so I went straight from my office to the Peet’s that was two blocks from the meeting. This was a part of the city that became a ghost town after business hours. Most of the time, I was the only one there. 

Rick just started showing up. I never asked him to. One week, there he was, in full conversation, monologuing me to death like some kind of felonious Spalding Gray. I never told him to leave me alone, and I never told him to shut up. Not then. 

This was Rick’s golden hour. For one hour every week, he had an audience. The best gift I could give him was listening. This was the one hour of his week when he was free to say whatever he wanted.

But something happened. I began to look forward to it. At first I just tolerated it. But slowly, I began to see my hour with Rick was the hour that would both end the past week and begin the next. 

Rick’s bizarre rants flushed my system of all of the built-up societal bullshit I encountered throughout the week. No matter what bad mood or self-doubting funk I was in, he hit my reset button. Once he got into his groove, Rick was a funny motherfucker.

My days were spent in an office at a job I hated. I was overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated. They wouldn’t interview me for promotions. Mind you, I know I suck in the office world on an interpersonal level. It’s not the world I came from. I was a rescue pit bull who had been fought living in a kennel of pedigree show dogs. But still, I was working in an area at which I excelled, and it paid me pretty well. I went through a lot of trouble going back to school and getting a degree at 35 to get a regular person office job. I got up early to commute an hour or more with a carpool full of other people who hated their jobs, too. It was crushing me. 

This weird, unpopulated Peet’s was like a biodome on the fucking moon, and this Manson-Muppet and I were the only two inhabitants. We created what Hakim Bey called a “temporary autonomous zone” where all the shit that was bugging us didn’t exist. Gone were my whispering, passive aggressive coworkers who had secret drinking lunches I wasn’t invited to. Gone was Rick’s abusive father. Gone was the latest woman to break my heart. Gone was the case worker who talked down to Rick. It was just the two of us, two coffees, and a pack of smokes.

From blocks away, Rick stood out from all the commuters heading home. He had an unmistakable gait, a bouncing, bopping strut, as if he were collapsing and rising with each step. I watched the distance until I saw him, smaller than a penny from where I sat. 

Rick’s best story was about the time he skateboarded from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It was under the pretense that he was getting signed to some skateboard company, which didn’t ultimately work out. 

This was his dream as a kid, to be a pro skater. Apparently he had been really good at skating, but better at crime and heroin. Anyway, he loved talking about this one stretch where it’s downhill for fourteen miles or some shit. 

All Rick took with him for his journey was “a change of socks, a change of underwear, peanut butter, crackers, and a big ol’ sack of weed.”

I don’t know how to compress this next part correctly. In 2016, I decided to move to LA and my teeth started falling out. So for the last three months of my life in the Bay, I was packing, having oral bone graft surgery, and generally living in pain. I was on a liquid diet for eight weeks. It sucked. Right at the end of my time there, Rick stopped showing up. 

Rick used burner phones when he had them and lost them and ran out of minutes. So I couldn’t just call him. I didn’t know where he lived. I was exhausted and my head felt like pantyhose filled with sausage. 

There were times Rick didn’t want to be found. However, he usually called me and told me. 

“The Voices are bad today.” He would say. “I’m staying inside.”

Rick was one of the few guys who had his own cell in San Quentin. If there was a fuckup and you were assigned to his cell, he would tell you to find somewhere else to live. If not, the next morning, they would carry you out of the cell. I never asked for much more details than this, but it had to do with The Voices.

“The way I see it,” he told me. “When I die, they’re going to figure out if I did more good things than bad or not, and that determines where I’ll go.” 

This is why he constantly volunteered anywhere he could: halfway houses, group homes, homeless shelters.

“Do you think I’ll make it?” 

Sometimes, Rick was a heartbreaker. 

I moved to LA without hearing back from him. When I could, I would ask people if they had seen him. No one had. We figured he was locked up somewhere. 

Meanwhile, LA did its thing to me. I was able to keep my old job and work remotely, which was better for the office coworkers and myself. I found a chic Downtown LA apartment that was a refurbished Holiday Inn. Almost immediately, a smoking hot 29-year-old swooped on me like a hawk on a rabbit. I had a new rack of teeth, an intense new girlfriend, a cool place, and I felt like I was on top of the world. 

One weeknight at about 11pm, she called me. 

“I want to go out dancing,” she said.

This is the real problem about dating someone much younger. No matter how smart they are, how accomplished they are in the world, no matter how much you have in common with them, their clocks are fundamentally different.

“I’m already in bed,” I said. “I have a ton of work tomorrow. But I will find something really special for us to do soon.”

So she went out that night, fucked the DJ, and dumped me for him. I didn’t find until a few days later, when I was looking on the internet for an Alaskan cruise to take her on. 

I made a pinball-score amount of money selling my condo in Oakland. The sale closed after months of renovation, and after paying off $36K worth of dental bills, my house, my contractors, and the loan I took out from my 401K, I still had more cash in my account than I ever had. I was going to celebrate with a real vacation!

“So, we’re just friends, right?” Something like that came through in a text. Ugh. 

LA has a way of making you upset over losing something you knew was a bad idea in the first place.

Word got back from one of the sober living houses that Shut Up Rick had died. 

“No way,” I said. “Guys like this always get that rep. But they’re like vampires.”

I knew the best way to debunk Rick’s death was to call the medical examiner.

“I’m looking for Rick Loddy,” I said.

“We have a Richard Loddy,” he replied.

“Early 50s, bad to few teeth, and lots of jailhouse ink? A giant one that says ‘sick’ across his back?”

“That’s him,” he confirmed. Well, fuck, I thought.

“What was the cause of death?”

“Pneumonia,” he said. 

Rick died sober. That’s a win. For recovering drug addicts, we just want to go out clean. I felt a swell of relief.

“Uh, do you want help finding his next of kin or anything?” I offered.

“Oh, we found them. They refused his remains.” 

Motherfuckers. No. 

“Can I have him?” I asked.

“Yeah, you have to reimburse the county for the cremation costs.”

How much does it cost the county to burn a fella? I figured, $75, a $100?

“How much is that?”

“$1040.” 

A thousand bucks. Wow. But I had this money and no cruise to go on. I pictured Rick as a ghost, hoping I’d pay it out. Fuck it. The first thing I bought with my windfall was his ashes.

When you buy cremains, they mail them to you. Of course, they send them through registered mail. 

I told the kids who were working the front desk that I was expecting a package and they should tell me immediately when it arrived. 

A few days later, I got an email notification: a package. I went downstairs. A young woman I was pretty sure was on a yogurt commercial cried behind the mail counter. 

The cardboard box had stickers all over the outside that said “cremated remains.”

“I’m so sorry,” she wailed, her face, literally paralyzed from Botox, did not move. “what happened?” 

“Pneumonia,” I said. 

I took the box to the room, but I felt like I was in a tomb myself.

I went to the pool, where so many selfies and streaming clips were regularly shot over the weekend. 

I sat with him there, and started crying. I thought about all those Tuesdays. We spent 250 hours together in front of that Peet’s. That was more time than I had spent with any one person over those years. 

Rick’s been living with me since. I thought about scattering his ashes on that long drive, if I could figure out where it was. But truthfully, I liked having him around. I have coffee with him in the morning. 

As a favor to the medical examiner, I agreed to help fill out their death certificate the best I could. There was a blank for “profession.” Rick hadn’t had a job since the ‘80s. I wrote in “professional skateboarder” and faxed it back. Congrats Rick, you made it!