Iris Has Free Time. Iris Smyles

things, too. After he’s gone I’ll discover a pair of fresh socks he’s stuffed discreetly between the wall and the sofa; a T-shirt stuck in with my books, folded up small between The House of Mirth and Martin Eden; or some very expensive volumizing hair conditioner that one of his girlfriends gave him hidden beneath the sink, behind the toilet-bowl cleanser. “She works for a cosmetics company,” he explained when I asked him about it. “She suggests I play up my curls.”

      It’s not an uneven trade either, lest you think he’s taking advantage of me. We have a lot of fun together for one thing. And for another, if I get drunk and pass out somewhere, he’ll wake me up, help me home, and then in the morning take care of breakfast. Felix can make a meal out of anything—a lonely onion, a packet of mustard, salad croutons. . . . This is partially how he earns his keep. He’ll tell high-spirited jokes to ameliorate your hangover while finally putting to use that two-year-old can of olives you thought you’d never eat, that weird jar of pickled mushrooms that came with the apartment, and an unopened container of paprika.

      Since the host wherever Felix is staying is usually too much crippled by the excruciating hangover that almost always results from a night out with Felix to prepare any food himself, Felix’s bizarre meals come as a sweet relief. Only very rarely are his dishes inedible. Once, for example, he made these deviled eggs using chocolate syrup, and another time he made tuna salad with cocktail olives and some other odd ingredients I wasn’t able to identify.

      Inspired after one of his better breakfasts, Felix and I came up with an idea for a TV show. We’d call it, The Wandering Chef, and it would follow Felix as he wakes up on strangers’ couches and makes breakfast out of whatever they happen to have in their kitchen. The first segment would show him coming to in a room where a party was recently held:

      Felix sits up, yawns, stretches and then, delighted to find a roach lying in a nearby ashtray, pulls a lighter from his pocket. Relighting the joint, he inhales deeply until there is nothing left but air between his fingertips. After a moment, the person whose home he passed out in wanders through and, surprised to find Felix (with a whole camera crew) on his couch, awkwardly says, “Hey, man. I didn’t know anybody was still here.” Whereupon, groggily but cheerfully, Felix replies, “Mind if I cook up some breakfast?”

      “Nah,” the host answers, “but my kitchen’s completely empty.” To which Felix responds, “I’ll just have a look.” He opens one cupboard after another before, wild-eyed, he cries out, “Waddya mean ‘empty,’ you got baking soda and dried parsley! Let me see what I can do.”

      Cut to twenty minutes later, and we see Felix serving what he calls “an egg substitute.” The host digs in, “Hmmmmm,” and shakes his head. “How did he do it?” the host asks the camera now. Cut back to the kitchen twenty minutes earlier, and the audience gets to watch Felix create his meal from scratch and cook along with him at home.

      The credits roll as the host and Felix enjoy their breakfast. “Just like Pellegrino!” the host exclaims, following a sip of his Alka-Seltzer water. Then Felix takes a sip of his own glass filled with watered-down ketchup. “Hmmm, just like tomato juice!” he says, raising his glass for a toast.

      We have lots of ideas, Felix and I. Since he’s around so often, we get to talking and come up with all sorts of stuff. I try to write down the ideas as they come to us, in order that we return to them once we’ve finished the joint, that round of backgammon, or “The Hokey Pokey” (I have it on record; mostly I play it at parties, but one time Felix decided we should get some exercise). We’ve got some pretty good ideas for screenplays, too. My favorite right now is City Squirrels!, in which New York City in the not-so-distant future is overrun by vindictive squirrels. It’s like The Birds meets Escape from New York but with squirrels instead of birds.

      I’m more of a scheduler than Felix is, so I’ll say, “Felix, here’s what we’re gonna do. At 1:00, we’re gonna work on City Squirrels! Then at 2:00, we’ll have a fifteen-minute dance break. Then we’ll do an hour’s worth of revision on whatever we’ve come up with.” We’ve never actually gotten to the revision stage though. Usually, we get stuck arguing over details. For example, Felix thinks the squirrels should be noticeably demonic looking with extra-red eyes, while I think it would be much scarier if the squirrels looked completely normal.

      “It begins in Tompkins Square Park, where the squirrels have gotten into some hypodermic needles left over from the ’80s when the park was overrun with junkies, which causes them to mutate and become extra aggressive,” he says.

      “No way! No one should know why it’s happening. It should be an existential apocalypse, a scourge open to interpretation!”

      We’re never able to resolve these disputes so usually after arguing awhile, we’ll just move on to a different project. I’ll get out my crayons and coals and suggest we clear our heads by drawing and return to the script later. I have a drawing table in my apartment, so friends are always making things when they come over. I usually draw The Naked Woman—the heroine of my comic book, which is on sale at St. Mark’s right now; I’ve sold three copies. I’d started out trying to draw classical da Vinci–style nudes, but my nudes tended to look more cartoonish than Vitruvian, so I figured why not go with it, and gave her a drink and cigarette and began adding speech bubbles.

      Felix likes to make drawings of hungry monsters eating their spectacles and the spectacles of others, or hungry spectacles eating monsters. He’s very creative. All of our friends are aware of how creative and talented Felix is—though he’s primarily an actor/comedian, he also paints and draws—which is one of the reasons we let him stay on our couches. We’re like patrons of the arts, sponsoring him, until he makes it. The other reason, I think, is loneliness. Sometimes it’s just nicer to wake up to Felix’s antics than to the terrible sadness that tends to come on huge after a night of furious drinking. Felix will tell jokes and goof around, and you’ll just be too busy laughing or trying not to laugh to review your own foolishness from the night before. Breakfasting with Felix allows you to put off that moment of reckoning, at least for a little while. Though lately I’ve been putting mine off for too long.

      Felix has been here nearly a week. He’s on the couch right now trying to assemble four roaches into a pinner, while I’m at my computer with my feet up on my desk, ready to write but feeling overwhelmingly, unidentifiably sad. How can I write with Felix here? I type out an idea, something I decide I’ll have to get back to later because I can’t concentrate now what with Felix around. I close the document and update the “about me” section of my Friendster profile. I delete what I had before and type, “60% cotton, 40% acrylic.” Save.

      I don’t share all of my ideas with Felix. Sometimes I won’t say anything but just write it down and make a note to implement the idea later, after Felix leaves. For example, the idea I just had is to create adult coloring books. Why not color in some porn or some scenes of East Village squatters sharing needles? Or romantic restaurant dinners between two consenting French adulterers feeding their dogs at the table directly from their spoons? Or scenes of coworkers gossiping around the watercooler about the intern’s terrible behavior at the holiday party, or a panel of you getting high with your college roommate in your parents’ backyard before Thanksgiving dinner, or a scene of you introducing your boyfriend to your parents, him awkwardly shaking your father’s hand in the garage, or a scene of the two of you at a diner two years later, you crying into your ice cream after deciding it’s best to split up, another of you in bed that night, trying to hide your tears from the man you just had sex with, whom you only just met and don’t love, or another of you cyber-stalking your ex on Friendster—a light blue crayon could fill in the light reflected off your face as you stare at the picture you’ve been cropped out of, the one he’s now using as his profile photo. Color it pink, where it says “single.”

      Oh, I come up with lots of ideas and I start to wish Felix would leave in order that I get to them. And then I start to worry that he might leave and that I might have to get to them, and then I just get quiet and overwhelmingly, unidentifiably sad.

      Usually Felix can sense these moments and he’ll rush to tell me a joke so as to curb me