On Daves and Davids
- Sep 16, 2023
- 6 min read
by Scott Mitchel May
Daves will fuck your world up if you let them. They just will. A Dave is a guy you meet when you are fifteen and he says he has pot and asks if you want to smoke some pot and you say yes and next thing you know it is two years later and you and Dave are sitting in a car tripping balls on that fluffy cloud blotter outside the house of the girl you are dating and it’s ten PM and you are picking the girl you are dating and her friends back up after they got dropped off an hour ago and are now supposed to be sneaking out to go back to the party you all left from again. That’s when the cop hits you with the cherries and blueberries and you freeze because Dave went to the girl you are dating’s window and is walking back sans the girl you are dating. The cop then asks you what you are doing there, at night, like a creeper. And you say something like Me and Dave were dropping off these girls from a party and Dave wanted to make sure they got inside ok; we were just going to leave. Dave gets there and the cop asks him what you guys are doing there and he says pretty much the exact same thing because you’re both tripping and he’s Dave. I don’t know which of us convinced the cop to leave but he did. Daves will fuck your life up, but they also always land on their feet so if you are in a tricky situation, it’s best to be with a Dave.
David is a lawyer who you call and they tell the DA that they got, basically, Bambi locked up on this Grand Theft Auto beef, except Wisconsin doesn’t have Grand Theft Auto so he calls it Operating a Motor Vehicle Without Driver’s Consent, and asks the DA what’s more likely: the 20 Y/O fry-cook with no priors or any nefariousness to speak of decided to just up and steal a car, or the 40 Y/O kitchen manager with all the DUIs and Drunk and Disorderly charges did. Sure, says David, he was drinking underage and he’ll happily pay the fine for that, but to railroad the kid on this one just cause he was there would be unduly harsh for the level of mistake made. David will talk about AODA assessments and a year’s worth of keeping the nose clean, and then he’ll come get you out of county lock up and tell you that the charges have been dropped, and it’s like the whole thing never happened, but that if you so much as jaywalk they can always recharge you with the thing and you might end up doing 18 months like that fuck up you were palling around with. David is solid and David is smart and David can’t believe how dumb some motherfuckers are.
Another thing about Daves is that they are emotionally unstable. Daves are up one minute and down the next. They are the sweetest dude until all the Daveness comes crumbling around their ears and then they are mean as anyone can be. It’s not their fault, not really. See to be a Dave is to embrace a weird kind of chaotic/devil-may-care attitude. But also, to ride the fine line of not being a problem, or someone to worry about, which, is fucking impossible in the long term. Dave was dating a 23 Y/O when he was 17. She did a lot of blow and introduced Dave to blow who then introduced all of us to blow. The 23 Y/O was fun, smart, good-looking, and paid Dave all the attention he was not getting at home. The attention he never really got anywhere. And we’d all party at the 23 Y/O’s apartment and they’d let us crash and those months were some of the most chaotic/devil-may-care and Dave was as Dave as I’d ever seen him. He had a threesome and told me about it and it was a total Dave thing to do under the circumstances. That’s not what ended things between the 23 Y/O and Dave. I’m not sure what did end things between the 23 Y/O and Dave but I am pretty sure that it had something to do with Dave being 17, smitten, and clingy, because of course it did. When it ended Dave fell off the earth and his Daveness took its inevitable turn towards the morose. It’s the kind of sadness that can only come when one lives in a Dave-type binary of emotion. I never visited him in the psych ward after the attempt, but when he came out, he was once again a total Dave.
I once knew a David so anal retentive that he wouldn’t ever take his baseball cards out of those long boxes, not even to look at, even though they were also in plastic sleeves, and he just kept them stacked, row after row, on a bookshelf. David looked at the boxes and the years written on the boxes and knew what was inside but got no pleasure from the objects themselves. David bought a vintage Camaro and kept it under its protective cloth except for two weeks out of the year when he’d drive it around his own neighborhood to get its juices flowing and take it in to be tuned up. For David, life had an order and rhythm, and things happened at a certain time of day or certain months of the year. David was not mean, or vindictive, but his family was indifferent to him because his rigidity left little room for the chaos of others being who they were. Davids like what they like when they like it and that comes from years of being a David. This David was also a lawyer and never left the small town in which he was from and never wanted to be any more successful than was necessary to facilitate his lifestyle and support his children, wife, and ex-wife.
Dave went and saw Les Claypool not long ago. He lives in Texas now. He says he is one of like five guys who can make new barnwood look like old barnwood in a way that doesn’t look like anyone made new barnwood look like old barnwood. He calls me sometimes and it becomes evident that we split, cosmically, a while ago. He tells me about his girlfriend and the kid he calls The Boy and how The Boy is sweet but kind of a dipshit in the way most sweet people are kind of dipshits. The Boy was halfway to Louisiana once after meeting some girl who said she was 14 on the internet when Dave tracked him down using some sort of Dave-type skill. This kid’s just begging to get sex-trafficked, Dave told me. He got in trouble with the law in Texas sometime around 2012 and had to do a gang of years on probation, a condition of which being that he remained sober, which he did, because Daves don’t jail well and Dave wasn’t going back to that Texas prison-camp-type-deal he was in. For five years Dave worked and was sober and looked after the girlfriend and The Boy and when I talked to him, he seemed happy enough, but he wasn’t a Dave. The day Dave got off probation he visited another friend of ours from back in Illinois who was now in Texas. He’d given her a lamp he’d made out of duct tape and garbage and metal scraps he’d soldered together the day he got out of the prison-camp-type deal, and he knew she’d keep it because she is nice and loves Dave because Dave is Dave. It’s something we say, Dave is Dave. And she did. He gets to her house and asks about the lamp and she says her cat hated it (a lie, she told me, she just thought the lamp was ugly cause it was cause that was the point), and she gets it from the closet. Dave takes a jackknife from his pocket and cuts open the duct-taped wrapped box that made up the lamp’s base and pulls an eighth of some pot he’d stashed there and asks our mutual friend if she wants to get high. A Dave will go a long way to amuse Dave because a Dave is what we all kind of want to be but can never really commit to being, not really.
Dave doesn’t know when to leave. David never shows up in the first place. The rest of us just aren’t lucky enough to know where we fall on that spectrum.
Scott Mitchel May is a writer living in Madison, WI. His short fiction has been published in many literary journals including The Maryland Literary Review, HAD, W&S, Maudlin House, Bending Genres, Rejection Letters, and Ellipsis. He was the winner of the 2019 UW-Madison Writers’ Institute Poem or Page Competition in the category of literary fiction, and his unpublished novel, Bridgeport Nowhere, was shortlisted for the 2022 Santa Fe Writers’ Project Literary Award. His debut novel, Breakneck: or, it happened once in America, was published by Anxiety Press in late April 2023. He is also the author of the novelette, All Burn Down, forthcoming in October 2023 from Emerge Press, and his second novel Awful People: a ghost story is coming in early 2024 from Death of Print Books. He holds a GED from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and a BS in English Literature from Edgewood College. He tweets @smitchelmay.
