Friend Is Not a Verb (10 page)

“Hey, why don’t you come over?” Emma said. “My dad’s here. You can ask him about all the exciting opportunities available in the music industry.”

“Uh, no thanks,” I said. “I actually found a job as a dog walker.”

“Really? Cool! Woof, woof. When did that happen?”

“Just a few hours ago.” Truth be told, I didn’t want to run into Emma’s father when I didn’t have to, anyway—and not just because he was a dick. From now on, I only wanted him
to see me in top form: working a crowd onstage, maybe being interviewed on
The Daily Show
or
The Colbert Report
…some scenario where I was impressive and in control. (Not that such a scenario had ever occurred, but it would.) “Hey, do you think if Dawson’s Freak recorded a demo, your dad would listen to it?”

Emma chuckled. “I don’t know. I could ask him. He’s upstairs.” She cupped her hand over the mouthpiece. “Hey, Dad?” she called. “Hen wants to know if you’d listen to his band’s demo.”

The response was muffled, but I’m pretty sure he shouted back, “Only if it makes me dance!”

“You should probably ask him when he hasn’t had nine martinis,” Emma said.

“Wow. That many?”

“He just got home from the airport. He’s a nervous flyer.”

“He did say yes, though, right?”

“Of
course
, Hen,” Emma groaned. “He’d be
thrilled
to hear your demo.”

I frowned again. I was about to ask her how her first day of work at the homeless shelter went, but I was suddenly too exhausted.

“The latest twist in Hen Birnbaum’s strange young life might have pushed lesser talents over the edge,”
Jim Forbes remarked.
“But Hen was too driven to let his sister’s second disappearance stand in the way of success. The next morning, after a good night’s sleep, he composed a song in her honor for bass and voice only, entitled
‘Please Be My Friend.’ It would go on to become Dawson’s Freak’s third biggest hit.”

“I should go to bed,” I mumbled.

“Okay,” Emma said gently. “Good night. Look, I know things are crazy, but don’t worry about Sarah. If she says she’s safe, then she’s safe.”

Like Petra’s father, Glenda Abrahmson also lived in a renovated meat warehouse, only hers was a historic landmark. There was an actual plaque on the wall. The foundation was laid in 1898. Classy.

I arrived at 8:30
A.M
. on the nose. Mrs. Abrahmson buzzed me in without bothering to ask who was there. Then I noticed a video camera above the door. The posh stairwell was carpeted, and there were paintings on the exposed brick walls: little watercolors of flowers. I wondered who owned them. The hall wasn’t part of anyone’s home. It was no-man’s-land. But maybe if you lived in a place like this, you simply got together with your neighbors and said: “Wouldn’t it be terrif if we had watercolors in our stairwell? Yes! Terrif! I’ll pay. No,
I’ll
pay.
No…” Of course, I figured I would have lots of conversations like that, once the “Please Be My Friend” royalties started pouring in. Actually, I might live in this very building. Yes. I could definitely see myself here.

An Asian woman stood at the top of the last flight of steps. She was about thirty, dressed in spandex shorts and a tight-fitting black T-shirt. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She would have been gorgeous if it weren’t for her bulging muscles. She was probably Mrs. Abrahmson’s yoga instructor or something.

“Is that Henry?”

I paused. It was the same husky English accent I’d heard on the phone.

“Mrs. Abrahmson?” I asked.

She laughed. “That’s Glenda to you.”

“I…uh…”

“Who were you expecting? Some old fart?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t—”

“We haven’t much time,” she interrupted. She opened the door. Sunlight flooded the stairwell. “I have Pilates in fifteen minutes.”

I hurried after her. Puh-
what
-eez? I’d heard this word before, and knew that it had something to do with an expensive brand of exercise, but decided not to ask questions. The few rich people I knew (Emma’s dad, chiefly) spoke in code, as if they had some kind of exclusive, mail-order vocabulary list. Not to worry: I’d have it soon myself.

“I ought to warn you,” Mrs. Abrahmson said, stepping in front of me when I crossed the threshold. (I was too intimidated to think of her as Glenda.) She looked me straight in the eye. “I had an affair with the last dog walker. And he wasn’t nearly as cute as you are. My husband had him killed.”

I swallowed.

She laughed again. “Oh, I’m an awful liar. You aren’t a morning person, are you? That’s all right. There’s a coffee shop ’round the corner on Duane Street. Wait here. I’ll fetch Bonzo and Ox.”

She vanished into the apartment.

I could barely see a thing. The glare was blinding. Everything was made of white marble. My eyes started to water.

“Jules!” she yelled from somewhere far away. “Hi, love. Yeah, the dog walker’s here. I think I gave him a good fright.”

Her voice approached. I could hear something else, too—a horrible snorting sound and the sluggish click-click-click of paws on the floor. I fought to stay composed. But when I saw what rounded the corner, I winced. These two creatures…they were dogs? I’d never seen anything like them: panting, slobbering, wrinkled furballs with crazed globular eyes and stumps for legs. They probably weighed more than I did. Their heads were enormous. Mrs. Abrahmson held them both on leather leashes.

“Right, right,” she jabbered into her iPhone. “I—” She broke off. “Oh, dear! Your eyes are red, Henry. Are you allergic?”

I shook my head and forced a grin. “No. It’s just that the sun is so bright—”

“Thank God. I thought you were a dud.” She sighed. “Good thing you won’t be spending any time indoors.” She handed over the leashes and turned her back on me. “Look, love, he’s late,” she whispered. “Bring Jake up straightaway. I’ve got to run.”

I’m not late
, I felt like saying.
You said 8:30.

I stared at the dogs. They stared back. They didn’t seem particularly friendly. But who knows
what
they were? Hungry? Pissed off? I couldn’t read their faces. They were unable to stop shaking and sniffling, as if they had Parkinson’s disease. Their tongues hung out of their mouths.

Mrs. Abrahmson grabbed a leather purse off a marble table and shoved her iPhone inside it. “Bonzo and Oxie,” she murmured in a singsong voice. She crouched beside them and scratched their heads. They didn’t react. “My two little babies. Yes, yes. You’re such good babies. Yes, you are.”

I cleared my throat. “Um…so, anyway….”

“Right.” She straightened. “Julie will show you the ropes. She lives in the duplex downstairs. She’s the other family in the advert, the one with the Lab. Well, she isn’t a family. Can’t be, right? She’s a person.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Her husband left her for a man, a partner at his firm. Can you imagine? Here she is.”

Something moist slammed into my rear end.

I turned—and the next instant, I was being mauled by a shiny black dog the size of a football player. It tried to lick my face. I staggered backward.

“Down, Jake!” a woman cried. “Down! Down!”

She yanked the dog away.

Again I grinned. It was harder this time. I wiped Jake’s drool from my nose. “Don’t worry,” I said. “That’s okay. I love dogs.”

“Jake!” Mrs. Abrahmson shrieked. “Here, boy! Here!”

“Don’t encourage him,” the woman said. “He’s got to learn discipline.” She was also wearing spandex shorts. She could have been Mrs. Abrahmson’s twin, only she wasn’t Asian. Her face was taut and orangey. She didn’t have an ounce of fat. She handed me her leash without looking in my direction.

The two women exchanged kisses on the cheek.

The three dogs sniffed one another’s butts.

I stood to the side, wishing I’d talked to Emma’s dad last night about the exciting opportunities available in the music industry.

“Sorry about the rush, Jules,” Mrs. Abrahmson apologized. “Just do me a favor and explain everything, all right?”

“Is the food in the usual place?” her friend asked.

“It is,” Mrs. Abrahmson said. She clucked her tongue. “My, my, love. You’re looking a bit worse for wear. Don’t tell me you were with Otto again last night? I thought he was just a Facebook friend.”

“I only have Facebook friends now. And people who follow me on Twitter. It’s easier that way.”

“You think?”

“Absolutely. Real friends need things.”

They giggled.

Hmm
. I wasn’t mad, but was I missing something? Shouldn’t they have acknowledged my presence by now? Shouldn’t Jules or Julie or “love” have introduced herself? Etiquette might even call for an apology over how her dog had just tried to sodomize me. But, no: I was a servant. The help. I was not worthy of being addressed, except indirectly and in the third person. Silly me. Suddenly everything became very clear: These were the kind of women who went through four dog walkers a week while they rambled on and on about their fabulous lives and Puh-
what-
eez and Facebook friends with benefits with names like Otto.

These women were Petra, fifteen years from now.

I wasn’t upset, though. Of course not. I was an adult. That’s what Dad had called me. Anyway, there was something positive to be gained from all this. Oh, yes. I would have my revenge. They would rue the day they ignored me, once Dawson’s Freak made it huge. Because I would buy this building, evict them, and turn all four floors into a massive recording studio/artistic commune/playland à la the Dandy Warhols’s Odditorium. Just like Sarah wanted.

These two ditzes were going to be my biggest fans, too. Nineties nostalgia would speak their old-fart language. They were going to brag about me to all their rich friends. But I wouldn’t give them any backstage passes. Nope. They would have to stand in some dank subterranean tunnel at Madison Square Garden, begging a four-hundred-pound bouncer to
let them through the dressing room door, while I would look through the peephole and say, “Ha-ha-ha.”

That was the plus side.

The minus side was that I probably wouldn’t be playing Mrs. Abrahmson’s Steinway grand anytime soon.

Funny how Emma had insisted that I needed a routine this summer. Because now I had one. It was jam-packed, too. Hooray for me!

9:00
A.M
.
Wake up late. Panic. Take a cab into Manhattan, which eats up about $15.00, half my daily pay.

9:30
A.M
.
Feed the dogs in the hall outside Mrs. Abrahmson’s apartment. (I am forbidden to enter, even when she is home.) Walk the dogs—a process best described as a combination of tug-of-war, screaming (“Don’t eat that chicken bone!”), and public shame. Drop the dogs back at 180 Thomas Street.

10:30
A.M
.
Report to Gabriel’s East Village crash pad for a daily bass lesson. The only “curriculum” we’re able to stick to is that we do, in fact, meet daily. Argue until it becomes clear
(again) that he won’t give me the dirt on his and Sarah’s disappearance, and then argue about the best rap rock bands of the nineties. (His top three: Limp Bizkit, Korn, and P.O.D. My top three: Beck, Kid Rock, and the Bloodhound Gang.) Privately affirm that his taste sucks.

Noon.
Drag the dogs to the Warren Street dog run: a grim blacktop covered with feces and surrounded by a chain-link fence.

1
P.M
.
Have lunch with Emma on the lone bench at the dog run. (Conveniently, the homeless shelter is two blocks away.) Try to ignore the smell.

2 to 4
P.M
.
Rehearse at Sonic in preparation for the big gig. Play “Oedipus Wrecks” on average six to eight times in a row. Feel strange rush of confidence.

5
P.M
.
Feed the dogs dinner in the hall outside Mrs. Abrahmson’s apartment, then lock them back inside.

6 to 7
P.M
.
Watch
Behind the Music
reruns on TiVo at Emma’s. In my head, substitute the future story of Dawson’s Freak with that of whatever band, phenomenon, or solo artist is being profiled.

7
P.M
.
Have dinner with Mom and Dad. Allow Jim Forbes to drown out any conversation.

8 to 11
P.M
.
Privately stress about Sarah. Hang out online in hopes of receiving a new Facebook message. Sink into depression.

11
P.M
.
Fall asleep without remembering to set the alarm clock.

Lunch with Emma at the dog run was by far the high point. Rehearsal wasn’t bad, either, but Petra and Bartholomew Savage annoyed me. Neither of them had jobs. Nobody my age had a job besides Emma. (Nobody I knew, anyway. Even George Monroe was living it up in Europe.) Emma’s job wasn’t very helpful, either—at least not in terms of getting to the bottom of the Sarah mystery. The people at New Beginnings were just as shocked as we were that she’d vanished again. They hadn’t seen the first disappearance coming, either. According to them, at least how Emma told it, Sarah never talked about her personal life at work other than to say, “Parents are a drag.” But they were never sure if she’d been talking about her own parents or parents in general.

Not that it mattered, whichever way she meant. Those four words aren’t exactly a window into a person’s soul.

“You know, you’re really amazing,” Emma said one afternoon.

We were sitting on the bench at the dog run, munching on cheddar cheese sandwiches. (My mom always packed a lunch big enough for the both of us.) Jake, Bonzo, and Ox sniffed our laps. The cheese nearly fell out of my mouth. Emma wasn’t being sarcastic. At least I was pretty sure she wasn’t because of a mildly annoying trait she shared with half the planet: she brushed her hair behind her ears and said, “Umm…” in a dramatic voice. Not this time. I had no idea what she was talking about.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s just that you stopped getting depressed,” she said. She
smiled, gazing over the sunbaked, poop-littered asphalt. “I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, but your life sucks right now, worse than ever. You’re still not sure if you’re officially back in Petra’s band. You still have no idea what happened to Sarah. You walk dogs for these bitchy women. But you manage to stay totally up.”

“I do?”

She nodded. “Yeah. I’m kind of jealous.”

Maybe I should have been an actor. “Up” was about the last thing I felt. In no particular order, my top three emotions could be listed as rage, self-pity, and bewilderment.
Everything
made me depressed. My life
did
suck. And whenever I managed to forget about it, Jim Forbes popped into my head to remind me just how much of a loser I was.
“Hen Birnbaum had hit rap rock bottom. One day he would be famous. But for now, he drowned his pain in a daily frenzy of vibrant, shameful fantasy.”

“You just have this incredible faith that everything is going to turn out for the best,” she added. “I don’t know how that happened, but it’s nice.”

“I don’t know if that’s true,” I said.

“It must be hard. I mean, Sarah’s gone again.”

“Yeah. And I don’t know if accepting her as a friend on Facebook was such a great idea.” I wolfed down some more cheese. “I’m starting to have these weird, ultraviolent daydreams. Like Sarah and I are in some postapocalyptic battleground, and I’m hunting her down in a souped-up old truck that I turned into a tank.”

“Come on, Hen,” she said. “You love Sarah.”

“More than life itself.”

“I mean it.”

I stopped chewing. “Can we not talk about Sarah?”

“She’ll come home again soon,” Emma said. “I know it. She’s a good sister in her own way. She’s generous.”

“She is?” I asked.

“Do you know why New Beginnings let me be a volunteer? They don’t take just anybody. But Sarah wrote me a recommendation. Well, she forged it, actually. She said she was my guidance counselor and wrote this glowing letter about how I volunteer all the time at a soup kitchen in Brooklyn and how I do all sorts of extracredit work and how I take it upon myself to help other students. For total BS, it was beautifully written.”

“Really?” I frowned. “She didn’t tell me that.”

“It’s true.”

“When did she have the time?” I wondered out loud. “The whole time she was back home, she was working in our garden.”

“She probably didn’t want you to know,” Emma said.

I believed her actually—because Sarah had done a random favor like that for me once, too. Freshman year, when I was incapacitated with food poisoning after a bad batch of Indian takeout, she offered to write a three-page paper in my name for Intro to Religion. The topic was the Almohades (pronounced ahl-mo-HAH-deez): a medieval Islamic sect famous for their vicious persecution of Jews. Sarah didn’t bother doing any
research. Instead she wrote about how Franklin stank at teaching religion. She argued that anybody could learn about the Almohades just by googling them; the lesson to be drawn from this assignment—and from high school education in general, which Franklin didn’t seem to get—was that historical incidents weren’t isolated. Writing about the Almohades wouldn’t serve any purpose unless I saw their story “in a broad context, both as progenitors of the modern terrorist Islamic fringe and as part of a trend of murderous anti-Semitism dating back to Babylonia and continuing through the Holocaust.” (Her words. Not too shabby, eh?) Only
then
would I actually learn something. Sarah earned me an A-plus with that crap: my first and only. My teacher said I should join the debate team. And Sarah’d never told anybody about
that
, either. At least, not that I knew of.

“I guess she is generous,” I said, “but only if she can lie or prove how smart she is or get some kind of twisted pleasure out of breaking the rules while she’s doing it.”

Emma nodded. “You know, you’re right. I’ve always been glad you’re not like that.”

I shrugged. “Me, too.”

“You still love her, though,” she said.

“I’m working on it.”

In a way, the dog run was therapy. Emma was preparing for her newfound life’s work as a social worker, and I was happy to be her guinea pig.

Sometimes we talked about our love lives (the pathetic lack
thereof). Sometimes we talked about our parents (the horror, the horror). Sometimes we took bets on how long Sarah would be AWOL this time around. (Emma was somehow convinced she’d be back in time for the gig.) But two days after the “you’re really amazing” conversation, Emma asked me
why
I suddenly wanted to be a rock star. I couldn’t tell if she was putting me on, but I decided to run with it. It was kind of enjoyable—like introducing myself to her all over again…or flirting, almost. Besides, I could make myself up as I went along.

“Because I want to bring back Satan,” I said, after thinking for a minute. For some reason, Gabriel’s diary had popped into my mind. “There’s nothing
supernatural
about rock stars anymore. There’s no evil Unseen Hand. So after Dawson’s Freak is done bringing back the nineties, I’m gonna go solo and make it all about the seventies.”

“Great idea. You can grow a mustache.”

“And muttonchop sideburns. You know how many rumors there used to be about rock stars back in the seventies? Satan was all over the place. He was practically a member of Led Zeppelin. He was Ozzy’s best friend. People used to be
scared
of Ozzy. They thought he bit the head off a bat in concert. Well, he did, but they also believed that he sacrificed a goat.”

“And hung a midget,” Emma said. “Don’t forget that.”

“Right. And then there was the one about how Gene Simmons—”

“Who?”

“The guy from KISS? They thought he worshipped Satan,
too. Anyway, the rumor was that he tossed a bucket into the audience and asked everyone to spit in it. Then he drank it. And it was common knowledge that he cut out his own tongue and had a cow’s tongue sewed in its place. But look at him now. He copied Ozzy and has a wholesome family show. What happened to these guys? Where’s the love for Satan?”

“I wish I knew,” Emma said. “Prince of Darkness, where art thou?”

I took a deep breath. “The point is, I want to get the rumor mill churning again. ‘Hey, did you hear what Hen Birnbaum did on tour in Belgium? He shot a puppy onstage and then used his evil powers to bring it back to life—and now it has rabies.’ Everything’s too sugarcoated now. Even Marilyn Manson’s a wuss. He’s a yuppie. He wrote a book.”

“Are you serious?” Emma asked.

“Mm-hmm.”

She shook her head. “That’s so lame,” she said earnestly. “Marilyn Manson should stick to movie cameos. Who’s gonna write a book next? That Wiccan guy from Godsmack? Can he even spell?”

“Who knows? Satan isn’t gonna help him, though.”

“You got that right,” Emma agreed.

“It’s sad, really.” I shook my head, too. When you’d hit rap rock bottom, it was nice to share life’s little disappointments.

“Hen, how come you’ve never, ever tried to make a move on me?”

It was Friday. The noon sun was broiling hot. There was a breeze, but it didn’t do much for the stale dog run smell. We were sitting on the bench eating my mom’s homemade falafel. I rolled my eyes. This was a question Emma usually asked me after watching an especially gooey romantic comedy or sitcom. Thankfully, enough time had passed since my latest dream about making out with her that I could shrug it off.

“Because I like little boys,” I said.

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. You’ve seen our drummer.”

“No, really,” she insisted, “just tell me again. I’m bored.”

“Emma,” I moaned.

“Come on. Chicks need to hear these things. It’s good for our self-esteem.”

I sighed. “Fine. I know that if we ever fooled around, things would get really weird and tense between us. And I would never want that. Especially now.” Suddenly I felt as if I were reading a cue card for a terribly written soap opera. It was pukeworthy. I could do a lot better. “On second thought, maybe we should just go ahead and hook up. We’re both still virgins. It’s not healthy. My dad says I’m an adult.” I shoved the rest of the falafel in my mouth and grinned. “What do you think?”

“No way,” she said. She looked very pleased with herself. “It would be too weird and tense.”

“Why?” I asked, suddenly interested in the conversation and half wishing Gabriel were here to overhear it. “What
would
be weird and tense about it, anyway? I mean, everybody says: Fooling around with certain friends is weird. But I think that’s just an old wives’ tale—you know, like how playing with yourself will make you go blind.”

“Have you ever hooked up with a friend before, Hen?”

“Wait. Who said that? I can’t see you!”

She laughed. “Seriously.”

“Does Petra count? Aside from her, I don’t really have that many female friends.”

“Well, trust me. Hooking up with a friend is always bad news.” She paused for a long moment. There was a strange lilt in her voice I’d never heard before. “There’s no such thing as friends with benefits.
That’s
an old wives’ tale.”

I stared at her. She turned to Bonzo and Ox. She seemed to be waiting for something. Her chest rose and fell in an even rhythm under her T-shirt. All at once, the smelly, stagnant air of the dog run felt charged; atoms were whirling faster, humming with energy. But, no, I was imagining things. She wasn’t suggesting that she
wanted
me to make a move. Of course she wasn’t. Not now, after an eternity, out of the blue. Not with falafel on my breath, and the sun beating down, and midday traffic honking on the street. We were in public, for God’s sake. Besides, she had to go back to work. She was teasing me, rattling me, trying to throw a wrench in our monotonous little summer routine. So she created a little phony lunchtime innuendo. Like she said, she was bored.

She stood up. “I shouldn’t eat your mom’s falafel in the
middle of the day. It’s awesome, but it makes me all logy. I’ll see you later, Hen.”

“Wait. When have you ever hooked up with a friend?”

She smiled at me. “Are you kidding?”

“So you were messing with my head.”