All Hail Richard. The Exit and the Lifeguard. Call me Plutonium. Solid band or improv group names all. For me, during a two year-plus period of my life, these were eras. These were eras not dictated by where I was in life, or even what was happening around me – certainly not by anything over which I had any willful control. These were eras determined by the will and whims of one Chad; a performative illustration of both the youthful need to, and pure expression of the right to, say anything and everything that comes to your head.
I first met Chad when we became roommates during my second semester at Columbia College Chicago. I’d spent the first semester – a summer semester – in the dorms on South Plymouth Court. While I wouldn’t discover this immediately, so afraid was I to communicate with the person with whom I’d share an apartment for at least the next several month, Chad would turn out to be one of the two most prolific authors I’d ever meet, and one of the fastest typists, to boot. This, made all the more impressive by the fact that Chad has only six functioning fingers to type with.
This is Chad’s story to tell in detail, but as a kid, he’d had two aneurysms and a stroke by the time he was nine. This meant his left hand turned into what he called “The Claw,” his pointer finger the only real functioning digit. Outside of calling it “the claw,” Chad would frequently refer to the fact that he was “crippled,” getting out in front of any potential comments or annoying questions. In the beginning, though, I didn’t know any of this about him, and because he also liked to bullshit, I didn’t believe most of the things he told me. For instance, he once told me he was Paul Newman’s cousin, and that Paul had given him his first beer. When he let me participate in the bullshit, though, that was when we started to relate.
Over the course of that first semester, we slowly got to know each other. The first real things of any substance we said to one another were over AOL Instant Messenger, despite usually sitting about fifteen feet from one another in our little studio apartment at 1212 South Michigan. Slowly these turned into actual words, and eventually we’d go on outings together. Sometimes it was just walking up Michigan Avenue, or going to see movies down the street together, or maybe checking out a bar where there was some kind of music I didn’t really care for, because my musical tastes have always been pretty pedestrian.
Transportation was as close to free as you could get. For $70, you got a season pass for the CTA, so buses and trains were unlimited. Even though the big city freaked me out because it was so big, I explored. My first semester I walked around talking pictures of filming locations for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and High Fidelity, slowly realizing how many of my favorite films – like Wayne’s World took place in, and in some cases were actually shot, right here.
Since transportation was cheap, I spent my student loan overages on things like DVDs and CDs and the occasional meal; Chad would end up being more adventurous with his money. One day he came home with a light-up blow-mold penguin Christmas decoration. You might have seen the kind, they still sell them every year. Ours – and yes, we co-parented – came with a bowtie.
These were still the early days of ordering things online, which was how I finally got myself a (sort of) functioning computer for my time at Columbia College Chicago. Chad actually helped me source the parts for building my own PC, which never quite worked right. I eventually learned how to use Adobe Premiere on his computer when he was out of town or didn’t feel like writing. When it came to our leisure time, Chad, again master of the unconventional, decided he’d search the internet for a couch for us. Neither of us was rich, though, so he settled on a mid-way option for us. A nice fold-out couch to sit in front of our entertainment center.
The couch, by the camping company Coleman, was, as you might now imagine, inflatable. Not only was it a comfortable option for what became our “living room area,” but it also fit in the elevator just fine, so we would occasionally bring it down to the building’s pool and use it as a flotation device. Eventually – and I don’t know how or why, though I’m sure he does – Chad decided that the couch was so important to our lives that it should also be what we name our blow-mold penguin. Couch the Penguin not only became the mascot of apartment 1204, he became a character in at least one of Chad’s student films.
Columbia College Chicago was, at the time, the film school with the largest enrollment. After years of the concept of independent film saturating our airwaves, the idea of being a filmmaker seemed approachable and exciting and, in the case of Columbia, cheaper than the other options, and more central. Chad and I both leaned toward writing comedy, specifically satire, even if we both had dreams of making films about subjects important to us, like retelling the story of Santa Claus. Indeed, one of the many things we found common ground on was loving Christmas and Santa and the stories surrounding them. Couch did start his life as a Christmas penguin, after all.
Hanging out on our Coleman inflatable couch in the pool one day led to Chad deciding that he was The Lifeguard – there was a sign on the wall reading “no lifeguard on duty” – and that, in kind, I should also have a sign-based nickname. I became “The Exit.” If kids in the early 2000s had been calling things “random,” Chad may actually have fit that definition. This was his way of exploring, and I loved it. After all, a lot of brilliance came out of it, and I, for the most part, was a comedy snob and a stickler about what was and wasn’t funny, until Chad basically decided that he was an inevitability. I’d grown up on silliness and loved it, but now I was trying to be a grown up. To my great fortune, Chad was the keeper of a specific, helpful form of arrested development. The kind that freed me back up to create.
From the very beginning, my film school experience was less than ideal. I have never considered myself a “story teller,” and on hearing that I had my first teacher ask me why I was even in film school. I mostly meant “I’m not good at this verbally,” but, well, let’s just say that was the beginning of a downward spiral that made me question – and sort of forget – a lot of the things I had learned on my own before film school. Many of those thing centered around the freedom to write not toward a grade or a deadline, but the sheer act of creation. I won’t diminish Chad by making him a mere symbol of that, but there’s no doubt his abandon helped bring me back from the brink.
Similarly, the TA in my Production II class – where we finally got to shoot stuff on color film! – Scott Pettis, reintroduced me to improv/introduced me to real improv. I’m self-taught, so I tell myself, but there is one night that is kind of critical to how much of an improviser I became. We were recording audio for The Couch Diaries #532, a contemplative, weird little short film starring myself and Couch the Penguin. I provided the body, face and voice of Lime the Wizard, with Couch playing himself, but Scott dubbing his voice in. I’m guessing this is because humans can’t hear Couch’s true voice – I’ll ask Chad later and see what he says.
During a break in recording, Scott, Chad and I decide we’ll try to improvise something. It starts out as an NPR parody but within seconds becomes its own thing, Scott playing the host, Dickie Allenstar, Chad as Gerry the producer, and me as the guest, Richie Delwasp. It’s rough, and I am nervously mono-syllabic for portions of it, but in the room with someone as in love with comedy and the rules of comedy as Scott was, and, well… Chad, I was caught in the middle, which was exactly where I belonged. We recorded a few that night, and then occasionally over the next few years, all the same plot, some great, some duds.
I eventually released those as a record entitled Do You Enjoy Chicken at Meal Time? Chad decided that that phrase was the perfect pickup line because, “Even if it doesn’t work, you still have some chicken.” It still makes little to no sense, but it also still brings me delight. The group was called The Richard Trio, because Chad had decided that his personal god was Richard, and if I remember correctly, Scott and I both had to swear some sort of allegiance to Richard.
I spent my final semester at Columbia not in Chicago, but on a studio lot in LA, beginning an 18-year adventure that I’m still making sense of. Chad joined me the following semester, sharing a room with me (there were eventually three people in this one room, and nine people in this three-bedroom apartment at once). During the period where it was just the two of us again, Chad and I would occasionally take the bus from where we lived in North Hollywood out to Santa Monica every weekend to enjoy the beach. There we’d swim, then I’d get something to eat, and end up with some sort of distressing indigestion that ruined the whole vibe.
One such weekend, I woke up to what felt like Chad staring at me. “What do you want, Chad?” No response. “What do you want, Chad?”
“I am not Chad. I am Plutonium.” It was then expected – for the next several days, if not weeks – that I would refer to Chad as only Plutonium, because that’s all he would answer to. Don’t get me wrong, shit like this would usually drive me crazy for a brief period, but the lesson, I eventually learned, was that I cannot control what Chad does, I can only control how I react to what Chad does. The secret, as it turns out, was just to play along with whatever Chad’s game was at the moment.
Chad continues to write like an absolute beast, usually under the name Grizzly Moose. One of the books contains poems for penguins and the other, as it happens, was co-written with Couch the Penguin. Chad and I both have a penchant for creating entire universes that only we inhabit until it finds its way onto paper. The depth of canon and lore to the absolute nonsense I create, much as it might have always been a part of me, was unintentionally nurtured by a kid who, apparently, actually was Paul Newman’s cousin, and who one day pitched a website “idea” to me.
“We should buy stolendress.com, so the slogan can be ‘Did we steal yours?’” he said to me, apropos of nothing. Yes, part of me was pissed off at him yet again spraying an arbitrary string of words at me when I was writing some all-important to-remain-unsold screenplay. The other part of me, though – the part that refused to grow up – bought that stupid domain name, and made the graphics to support it, and started writing essays for it. It is now, for better or worse, the banner under which I produce just about everything I make. Chad had done it. He had made his impact. The Chad Era, as it seems, would stay with me.
