I had to write a profile piece for an english class earlier this year. I liked it, here it is, hope you'll get something from it.
http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/w4m/1698559815.html
Blue
We were walking around New York City streets at any time between midnight and two in the morning. The people around us were winding up and winding down, and there was a hint of oppression the air, which added weight to our steps and deflated our postures. I was with Pierce and a few other friends on a Friday night in SoHo, drained from the nights’ activities, waiting on call from my mother. Everyone felt like I did; no one said anything.
We passed trash bags piled on the corners of streets, watching the occasional rat scurry into a pile of trash, or out the door of its’ studio loft. In one of the piles of garbage lay a computer chair; one of those computer chairs that all of us had seen telemarketers sitting on while they called us during dinnertime, with three wheels and a mesh seat. One of the three wheels was missing, and as a result the chair sat on its stump with the other two wheels locked in place. I walked past the chair and the trash, through the green light across the street, and paused when I heard a yell and turned around. “WOHOAH!” Pierce grabbed hold of the chair for a second, looked around with hopeful eyes and a determined swiftness of motion, and located the entrance to a garage. The entrance was massive, with the ramp extending upward so far that I could not see the top of it from across the street. He picked the chair up, ran towards the entrance, and I let out an elderly sigh. We all did. “Come on Pierce…”
We moved towards him in the garage, there was nothing that could be done to stop him. We all sat on the park bench, watching our child play in the sandbox, biting our nails feverishly hoping that our boy wouldn’t fall off the swing and scrape his knee. He ran up the ramp with the chair dragging behind him, it’s stump scratching against the cement as it bounced on and off the ground, creating sparks of friction between drops. He reached the top, standing long-legged in the skinniest raw APC Jeans one could buy. He was wearing his new Nike sneakers, and was smiling from cheek to cheek, which revealed his teeth and the brightness of his undisturbed youth. He could see us watching nervously, annoyed even, and it made it all the more enjoyable for him, this harvesting of our worries. He laughed and threw the chair in front of himself, planting his left knee into the seat with his right foot kicking at the ground as he flew down the ramp. Every time it looked as if he might fall, he simply let out an excited yell followed by an exaggerated and put-on display of nervousness and caught himself. He reached the bottom of the hill, hitting the curb and jumping off the chair—letting it fly into the street with a crash. He started running, so we followed to keep up—laughing at the awkwardness of his thick, down, multicolored vest bouncing up and down in contrast to his oppressively skinny jeans.
“My motives, (laughs)…well…yeah I was hyper. I mean it was a slow night we weren’t doing anything, we were just walking around. And so—I—just took that chair and I thought it was a good opportunity to ride it. And so I found the most dangerous thing I could do with it—you know, besides getting hit by a car or something—and rode it down that huge ramp. Just to do something fun and outrageous.”
Pierce gives reasons for these sort of things if you ask him, but you don’t really need to. You can see the desire to do something, or to go somewhere in his disposition, and he’ll always do it even if you don’t feel like it.
He grew up in a household in Flatbush Brooklyn as an only child with two parents and an abundance of pets. His father is the head of a veterinary hospital and his mother does a fair amount of volunteering and holds part-time jobs. As an early child he lived in a stable household, and went to Poly Prep Lower School. Chubby, and formally dressed in outfits of his mother’s choice, he spent his days in checkered turtleneck sweaters and khaki pants.
I met him in 7th grade, after a year of being at Poly. I came to school one day to find the front of my off-white locker covered in Coca-Cola; I had been the victim of a prank. I asked a few friends and learned that Pierce had done it. He didn’t know it was my locker, or who I was, he was just flying down the ramp and I got in his way. We started playing guitar through $5 portable amps in the boy’s middle-school locker room until the late bus, talking about music and our aspirations. His home life became messier between his parents, as did mine, and we both looked to music to foster our independence so that we wouldn’t have to depend on anyone at home.
When it comes to talking—not speaking—important talking, there are few better than Pierce. He looks at you with vulnerable blue eyes, his bottom lip pursed neatly under his upper lip, and watches you, waiting for you to say something no one has said before. It makes you feel like you’re going to be someone when you’re in his presence, the admiration he has for you gives a gift of confidence.
Even five years later, without the rounded face from baby fat, he still carries this innocent effect. It attracts men and women, this aura of benevolence. On people in general he said,
“I like people who ask questions, who have interesting things to say. The girls I like; beyond physicality, they understand the feeling. Like even if they don’t listen to some band, I can show them, and they understand it. They can express a feeling that they get, or like an imagery, like if you listen to a song and say, ‘oh, I feel like I’m falling,’ that’s very interesting to me. It’s beyond an emotional thing.
“People give off smells, or so I’ve read. People give off smells that you can’t actually smell, but it’s like a scent. It’s like animals, it’s like this animalistic thing that people still have. You can just smell something and, I don’t know, you want it.”
This animalistic style of life is what Pierce has adopted. It is not animalistic in it’s primal ways, but in its impulsive and natural manner. He believes in people and in things in a time where all most can foster is skepticism. Under this amiable innocence though, lies a serious figure, devoted to a career involved in what fostered his independence, his music. This figure makes its appearance in his band, The Revelry, which he has been a part of for years now. His eyes contain the same blue when this figure of independence is revealed, but there is a stern confidence in how he speaks. He does not act cocky or all-knowing, he says interesting and knowledgeable things and gives no opportunity to be analyzed, only to be heard. What feels right is right, and what looks right is right. His perspective is that of a pallet of vibrant colors, visceral and distinct.
I showed up at 9:30 PM to The Revelry’s most recent and most anticipated gig at Don Hills on Spring street, fifteen minutes before they got on stage. I’d planned to show up early to catch a few songs from the warm-up band because of the notoriously terrible reputation they had built up, but I ended up coming too early even for this and suffered through nearly half a set. Standing with a few friends of mine, Pierce, and the rest of The Revelry, I was almost sure that I wouldn’t be able to foster any energy from his show because of the horrible state of mind that this band had put the entire room in. This is all necessary to know because the crippled state of mind that the crowd was in before The Revelry went on was unsalvageable by even the greatest of bands. In the tens of times I have been to Don Hills, there has never been a more restless crowd of youth—all looking for blood.
The band sets up on stage and the warmth of familiarity spreads throughout the audience, people like these faces, they have seen them incrementally for years and have watched them evolve physically and musically, as if they were their offspring. Everyone is immediately screaming, cheering, and chanting. It’s a sports event. The collective audience experiences a catharsis of anger, and within a minute of the first song mosh-pits and violence develop. The music is barely there, it only provides a rhythm for the brutally primal audience. What is most interesting is the effect this has on Pierce and the band. They play louder, better, cleaner, and with more energy. Pierce hops back and forth with his guitar—all motions are exaggerated, just as they are in the audience. There is a living organism taking and giving energy between the audience and the band, battling for supremacy. With a guitar and a microphone in The Revelry’s hands, there is a small revolution being held and no one knows it, they just feel violently ecstatic.
It was here that it became clear to me where the roots of Pierce’s amiability come from, as I was pushing and being pushed back and forth, covered in sweat, teetering in and out of consciousness. I entered a state of numbness in which I could only describe sound as muted. I looked at Pierce singing for the first time ever in the band while I sat down, recovering from my crowd participation, and I was crippled by the image of it. I could not think of anything, my entire head was filled and overwhelmed with this open-mouthed image. The root of this amiability came from the ability to sense energy, to sense emotion, and to feed off of it and to replicate it for the pleasure of those around him. This sort of aesthetic beauty is seldom found in characters, beauty that goes beyond analytics and symbolism. It can only be described as nature, or natural, and though I could not say whether I was the only one in the audience who felt it, I knew Pierce was feeling it as well.
So where does that take us, the idea that Pierce’s amiability lies in the ability to tap into natural beauty. Ironically it can’t be analyzed, where it comes from, or what it’s purpose is. To do either of these things would be to change the very meaning of what it is, and that is all it is—it. The only way to describe it is to look at the sky on a semi-cloudy morning and watch chaos play out beautifully and uncontrollably without any explanation of order, and to feel overwhelmed and overjoyed by it for a reason that doesn’t exist in words. It is simply blue.
“I’m a huge blue guy. I can’t get enough of it. Depending on the shade its kind of a moody color, but also, you can think of it in a bunch of, I mean, you could, depending on your perspective of blue, it could be a sad color or a very happy color, you know”
“It makes me feel like a wave.”
“It just makes me feel like a wave, I don’t know. I feel like blue is a very honest color. I feel like red is very flamboyant and then black, black is like maturity, I think, and then red is very…I don’t know–I just have a feeling. Maybe it’s just what I’ve connected it to. Like I’ve seen mature people wear black. But I don’t know. Red is a very flamboyant color. Cause, I mean, scientifically with like rays and things it’s just the first color you see always if you look around. If you look in one spot it’s the first thing you see. Everyone is flamboyant, and you want people to see you. Blue blends in. But it can stand out. Once you see it, it can stand out a lot. “
