I don’t remember where exactly I met Rob for the first time. I assume it was in the parking lot of the Meijer supermarket we used to work for. We spent long hours walking back and forth pushing rows of shopping carts into the store. It was mindless manual labor and for a young man of that age it was exactly what I needed at the time. I didn’t fit in with the other kids I went to school with, not for a lack of trying from some people to bring me into the loop. Having a job is joining a tribe with a goal. Most people fail to understand this. When people aren’t pulling their weight and the chief of the tribe doesn’t appear to care, the tribe can fracture and you end up with sub groups within the tribe. I hated bagging groceries and so my tribe ended up being the cart retrieval crew, a group of young men wearing reflective vest, sunglasses, and carrying nylon rope to hold the row of carts together. We had our own language and culture out on the pavement. We were doing things with shopping carts most people had not seen until Jackass aired on MTV. Cart surfing was a fun pass time, riding the side of the cart and balancing on two wheels while cruising down the hill.
For safety we were paired up and sent out in teams. There had been multiple stories of abductions and assaults in that parking lot so were wore beepers that would sound an alarm with security if we saw something that needed their attention. Rob and I would team up, grabbing carts, talking comic books and movies, our taste in many things were almost identical. This was during the great comic boom or the roaring 90s, that time just before the crash when people had invested thousands of dollars into over printed magazines with fake fans and inflated prices. Rob and I were some of those shmucks that bought into the boom with hopes of cashing in or joining the ranks of those in the industry. I wanted to be an artist but found my calling with writing instead. Rob on the other hand possessed a natural talent for art and even sold pictures at work to co-workers with the cash. Juvenile cartoons with a hint of realism were his trade. One bagger paid him twenty dollars for a commissioned piece of a man penetrating a squirrel. It sounded funnier at the time. While I studied art and graphic design at the local community college, Rob sat at home with his sketch book learning on his own how to draw.
There was a sad mood that hovered over Rob. When you looked at him you would see a young man, dirty in appearance, malnourished, and a sense of style that could have been pulled from a Quintin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez film. To look at him one would not thing he had much to offer, to listen to him was to find out otherwise. He was smart, a sponge of useless knowledge that would vomit from his mouth and leave people mystified and feeling dumb. There were people that loved him and others who despised him for the reason of wasted potential, but that was all of us. To be a young man without direction wandering out into the world could only lead to three things, self-destruction, sloth, or success. At any given time, we were guilty of all of these things.
Rob grew up out west on an Indian reservation. I won’t pretend to remember which state he lived in because I don’t remember. I had no idea he was native American until he told me, he could have passed at Italian or Greek. His parents weren’t the sharpest tools in the shed and had a long list of horrible mistakes in their past that they expected their children to fix. I was hanging out with Rob one night when he asked to stop in to see his family. I was the only one that owned a car at the time. We pulled into the Airport Inn where his mother, father, two brothers, sister, and nephew were living in a one-bedroom hotel room. His mother didn’t speak much an had a scowl on her face that would make the average Russian woman of the Stalin era appear chipper. It was up to the kids to pay their way and most of them had dropped out of high school to find jobs. Rob earned his GED at 16 and therefore had an advantage over his other siblings. Paychecks were handed over and money was used for rent, food, and cigarettes. When big purchases were made the parents were the soul decider and the kids were to keep their mouths shut. For the life of me I can’t figure out what his parents were thinking. The kids left one by one as they discovered their independence causing a divide in the family. Whoever left was shunned and not allowed back until nobody was left. The youngest brother left first when he was hired in at a local factory. When their parents demanded the pay check he told them to “fuck off,” found an apartment, bought a van, and moved out. The pressure to make up for the loss was put onto Rob and while he supplied the family with money it wore on him and eventually, he was kicked out. That was how he ended up as my roommate.
Let’s back up shall we. Rob had met Nate before I started to work at Meijer and Nate left not long afterwards. I didn’t remember ever working with Nate but he was fond of telling me they thought I was a stuck-up asshole when I first started working there. Rob was a follower and while he had the potential to be so much more, he decided to be the side kick to Nate’s world of debauchery. If they could be compared to anyone Nate was Jay and Rob was Silent Bob with it being unclear who was leading who. It was the easy path and it was the road we all preferred at that time. We didn’t have a cause, a great war, something to motivate us to do anything. Nate and Rob were caught up in the MTV world of seeking out “bitches and money.” The cold war was over and there was no 9-11, all we had was a blow job in the White House and people constantly reminding us we were poor. Fight Club would later become our religion.
Coming from a nomadic people, Rob was constantly shifting through jobs, leaving and coming back always thinking the new job was going to be the big one, the money maker, the job to solve all of his problems. The job itself never mattered it was the pay that was motivating factor. In between, Rob would pick up shifts at Olga’s as the dishwasher and in his words, “I get paid and there is free food.” He wasn’t referring to screwed up orders from the kitchen either.
I think there is a time in most people’s lives when they are permanently scarred and while they don’t realize it, they never move on. Rob’s taste in women goes back to the reservation, a place with little to offer and few options for the young. Rob had a girlfriend when he was 13 and they soon found themselves pregnant. Trying to do the right thing, Rob took a job at the local Seven Eleven to save up for his coming family. The naïve delusions of youth can be a powerful thing until your world comes crashing down. While leaving work Rob passed the dumpster, heard something inside, and found his girl inside, wrist cut and bleeding to death. He climbed inside with no help on its way and watched her die taking their child with her. Later, he would try to join her and was sent to a psychiatric institution. I learned all of this years later on a drunken night where we tried to out do one another on who had the shittiest story for a game I would like to call Victim Porn.
For a while it looked like we were all getting our shit together. Rob was out of his parent’s home, he had a car, a union job at the local trash company, and there was talk of him becoming a tattoo apprentice. I landed a job at one of the local hospitals. Nate was still being Nate and that was what needed to change. The moment any of us started doing well the hammer would fall and we were beaten back down to the lowest position in the group. If Nate wasn’t doing well nobody would feel like they were doing well. Of course, it was a woman who would end the group. I met my ex-wife at the hospital and while we all hung out together there was a divide taking place. For Nate and Rob to be single while I had somebody was unacceptable. Rob sided with Nate trying to make Christie feel like shit and it was over. One night, Nate and Rob stopped by and while Nate stayed in the car Rob came to the door asking if I wanted to hang out. “Oh, porking the pig?” he asked seeing Christie walk to the kitchen. “Fuck you Rob.” I said before telling him not to come back. Nate stayed by the car yelling some crap about “bros before hoes” and they never came back to the apartment.
Rob and I once attempted our own comic book, an action crime thriller with vigilantes and drug kingpins. I wrote the script and worked on inking while Rob drew the panels and penciled the characters. We were about three pages in when Rob stopped working on the project. To this day I still have those pages filed away just in case…
I ran into Rob years later. His first question was “so when did you get divorced?” At the time his assumption was wrong and Christie and I were still married. Meanwhile, Rob told me about the stripper he married named Scarlett and how they split when she went back to work to pay their mortgage. There was a pattern, a lifestyle that Rob was accustomed to, and it wasn’t feeling secure. Rob had finally started that apprenticeship and was on his way to become an artist. A few years after that, when I was divorced, I spotted Rob at a local coffee shop. He had large gaged earrings, multiple tattoos, piercings in places that looked uncomfortable, and a perfectly shaved head. I don’t know if he recognized me as the new bald man that I was. We never spoke and to this day I wonder how far he had gone on his adventure to become an artist, the only one of us still following that path.