What I'm Looking for in a Friend

What am I looking for in a friend? I suppose I'm looking for someone like the actor David Duchovny.

Goethe once said: "In the end, every idea is just a fart." I suppose great minds run along the same paths. Everything is just a collection of body functions. As David Duchovny once said about acting: "The human part of acting is all about basic body functions. Basically, the less complicated you are, the more primary your motivation is, the better actor you are. You take it down to the basics: eating, pissing, shitting, fucking. Those are the kinds of emotions that read. They're strong and good. They come across."

I guess, in the end, I'm looking for an intellectual relationship. A friendship with an intellectual guy, -- maybe Ivy, like David Duchovny -- someone with whom I can discuss abstract intellectual ideas. You know Duchovny got his B.A. in English from Princeton and was working on his Ph.D. at Yale when he went into acting. His dissertation at Yale was going to be titled: "Magic and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction and Poetry." Now that's what I'm looking for in a friend. A healthy taste for the intellectual and abstract.

Not that there's not another side to Dave: a homely, earthy, bawdy, Holmesean side. A world of eggplant and penises. Here's a description of David Duchovny eating lunch during a break in filming a movie, back in 1999: He's wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He is relaxed, affable even, playing a guy shooting the shit with a friend in a corner booth of a diner. He probes the contents of a Styrofoam container, the daily special from his favorite vegetarian restaurant, driven by special courier to the set, near a national park in Calabasas, an hour northwest of Hollywood. "Oh, my God," he says with mock horror, poking at a large eggplant, skinned, in a viscous brown sauce. "I think I've found John Holmes's penis!" That's John Holmes, the porn star -- not Oliver Wendell, although exactly how covert Justice Holmes's private side was remains a mystery. He might have done some porn in his day, though not videos, of course.

Duchovny's humor is your typical elevated Ivy humor -- Princeton, Yale, Skull and Bones humor -- wry, abstract, witty and urbane. A typical Duchovny joke: "I don't want to brag about the size of my cock, but I just got a sex change and a guy was fucking me the other day and he said: You have the biggest pussy I have ever fucked!" That's real Captain Vagina, Columbia University humor.Yes, that's what I'm looking for in a friendship. Wry, urbane, witty asides offered up amid intellectual abstractions concerning eggplant and penises. It's just so hard for me to find friends I can commune with on my level. Besides, eggplant is out of season right now.