The Deep Whatsis (10 page)

After hanging up
I wander into the Starbucks on Thirtieth about a block from my office and sit down and wait for Seth to swing by in his Range Rover, which he has agreed to sell me for a yet-to-be-determined price. I came in here because I thought I was going to throw up again, and ended up sitting in the bathroom for a good forty-five minutes just waiting. Then I felt guilty using their bathroom for so long, and so I bought a green tea and sat down and called Seth and told him I wouldn’t be coming to Brooklyn, that he should bring the car to me.

“What am I, homes, like your freakin’ delivery bitch?” he says at me with a laugh but I can tell he isn’t happy about it.

“I’ll add a c-note to the price for your trouble,” I tell him and he says OK.

An hour later he pulls up and honks outside. I clean up my spot at the table, throw the remains of my tea away in the
hole in the counter where the half-and-half is, and go outside. I am the one who replaces the will to survive with the need to consume, I tell Seth. He asks me if I am OK and then we drive downtown.

“Without me there would be nothing but the pure anguish of being alive, which is too difficult to bear, so I am providing a pubic service.” I use the word “pubic” as a joke and as a means of telling Seth that we are friends for the time being.

“Dig it,” Seth says, and turns up the Odd Future track that he is playing via his iPod in the car’s music system. “We be bangin’!” he says as the music shakes the vehicle’s chassis. I roll up the passenger-side window lest Earl’s lyrics offend someone on the street, I’m very sensitive to the feelings of strangers. Then Seth says something about where he got the system, how it was custom or something, a significant feature that you can’t get off the lot, and if I want it it’s an add-on, an extra One Large, because it’s removable and imminently salable, but I don’t even listen to him. We drive down Eighth and he turns the music off and when we stop at a light he looks over at me.

“Are you OK?” he asks again.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing, just, you don’t look so hot, man.”

“I almost puked in the Starbucks if that’s what you mean.”

“Just now?” he asks.

“Yep,” I say, “ten minutes ago.”

“Cool,” he says. “Why?”

I don’t answer and he says I need to get laid more is my fucking problem. I need to use my bone more. I needs to be
bangin’ my hos more. Of course he doesn’t know anything about Intern and so I don’t bring her up. I let him tell me a lame story about how he’s been seeing this girl that lives in his building, she sells macramé unicorns on Etsy or something, she came over one night and asked him to turn his music down, and he invited her in for a drink, and she said no, but the next night he turned his music up again really loud and she came back, this time with a joint, and they smoked it and drank some beer and then they had sex.

“That’s awesome,” I say. “You are totally my hero.”

We pull over around Union Square and change places in the car and I drive. The Range Rover cruises quite smoothly and has plenty of pickup, which you would expect from an $85,000 automobile. I’ve already decided to buy it so this isn’t in any way a test outing. For fun I pretend that I haven’t driven in so long I can barely remember how; I screech to a stop a couple of times just inches from whatever car or person happens to be in front of me, forcing Seth to put his hand against the dashboard.

“Easy, dog,” he says. “Easy on the brakes, they’re Brembo and they’re drilled.”

Crossing east along Delancey and over the Williamsburg Bridge into my hood I suggest to Seth that we get a cocktail at the Hotel del Homo, on Berry Street on the North Side. It isn’t a gay bar, but that’s what I call it, because the cocktails are ridiculously bespoke.

“I’ll pay,” I say in response to Seth’s scrunching up his face, because I know the place is not cheap. When we get to the bar it’s the middle of the afternoon and so almost no one is inside,
just a couple of pose-afarians writing in Middle English in their Moleskine notebooks with fountain pens. I order a bottle of a champagnelike drink to celebrate our big car-purchasing JV, and a couple of glasses into it I take out my checkbook and write Seth a check for thirty grand, which is the amount we decided on, plus the one-hundred-dollar delivery fee, less the cocktails. I don’t bargain at all with him, that was the price I had floated out there initially, and if I change my mind I can always stop payment on the check, as at that point I will have his car ensconced in my building’s garage and he would have nothing but a worthless piece of paper in his henna-wrought hand. It was probably quite dumb of Seth to sell me a basically new car at such a discount, but he so badly wanted to be my friend, and I don’t know yet if I really want the car so we’ll see. I’m thinking of it like a car I would acquire in Second Life, it doesn’t really matter one way or the other, it’s like a quantum cat particle at this point, poised and shimmering between being real and not having ever existed, even in jest. As we are drinking our second bottle of Cava I bring up the idea of his getting into the advertising business, which I know is the moment he’s been waiting for. I can really see him salivate now, he’s like a puppy and I have a fake bone that I am dangling in front of him, and he is playing it cool because he’s seen me dangle it and then withdraw it before.

“No worries, but that would be so awesome,” he says. “Don’t I need a portfolio or something?”

“No, dude, chill, I’ll get you in there,” I say, speaking his language at long last. “But here’s the thing, dog, you have to do me a favor first.”

“Talk to me,” he says, leaning forward.

“I’m in this kind of situation and I need some help getting out of it.”

“Shoot, son, anything at all, I’m there for you, you know that,” says the Seth. And then I tell him the story of Intern, how she was stalking me, black-hatting my e-mail, hitting on me when I was drunk and defenseless, causing herself to have a black eye and telling everyone I was the one who did it to her, while also implying that her father’s attorney would be lobbing a call into the firm’s general counsel, whose name is Barry, who is a walking one-man reason why feminism was invented.

“What do you want me to do?” he asks, big-eyed.

“I want you and your two friends, Titmouse and Pain, or whatever their names are, to go and pay her a visit, nothing too scary, just tell her that if she doesn’t recant this black eye bullshit there will be some real, actual trouble in her vicinity.”

Seth sits there and looks at me for a long time and then he says, “Dude, I dunno.” He doesn’t yet get that I am only fucking with him, and so I say, “What don’t you know?”

“Well, I don’t know if that’s cool is all.”

“What, you think it’s cool for her to stalk me and try to get me wrapped up in some kind of human resources nightmare? Do you? You think it’s cool that she gets me fired just as I’m about to bring you on board?” My voice has enough edge that now he backs off, sets his fluted flute down as if to say, I ain’t drinking your booze no more, yo.

“Are you fucking with me, Eric?”

For a moment I consider laughing and slapping him on the back, filling up his glass and ordering another bottle and then the real friendship can begin, he and I, close enough to kid each other in a serious manner about something of no importance. But I want to keep the whole game alive.

“I just bought your piece of shit automobile for more than the Blue Book, asshole, and I offered you a fucking job even though the only sentences you’re capable of writing are all cribbed from Peter Handke,” I say now, pausing to give him time to be impressed with my highbrow lit references before continuing, “so why would I fuck with you? Why? You’re like my best friend.”

He melts at this, a little bit, but I can see he still has some second thoughts. “I dunno, man,” he says again.

“I’m not saying you do anything illegal,” I say, “I’m saying you just make certain things clear to her.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you, why not? Those two hip-hop poseurs aren’t going to do it. They’re pussies.”

“Like what do you want me to do?”

“Like I dunno you have an affadavit with you that says she caused the black eye herself and that I never touched her except in the act of sexual congress, something like that, and you get her to sign it. And Titmouse and P-Dog are your friends who come along for the ride, they provide a presence.”

“And what if she refuses to sign?”

“She’ll get the general drift. And if things get rough, make sure you shoot everything with your phone so there’s evidence.”

He says nothing. Then: “Where does she live?”

I tell him I don’t know but I can get it from the office. “Cool,” he says. “You don’t even know her name?”

“Not really,” I say. “We just hang out from time to time.”

“Sweet,” he says.

By this time we are finishing our third bottle, a Sardinian prosecco now, and then a minute later I’m migrating us to shots of tequila, and the place is filling up with an early evening crowd; anywhere else I’d call it a postwork crowd but not around here, the scribbling of a few lines of poetry and a half-baked idea for a Kickstarter hardly qualifying as work. A couple of young girls, pretty, excruciatingly so, are sitting in the banquette next to ours and looking at photos in their mobile devices; the one with the straight hair I think may have been in this band Au Revoir Simone, who I saw play once at Secret Monster Island Robot Basement back before it became a Whole Foods, back when it was “kewl.” I can tell Seth likes them because he keeps looking over at them longingly, and he wants to impress them so I start talking, a little too loudly, about Seth’s exploits as an avant garde theater director, about the piece he did in the bra factory in Long Island City, which referenced the history of Times Square topless bars, and the awesomeness of breasts, but I don’t think they give a shit.

“Can I ask you guys a question?” I finally say.

“Um, OK, sorry?” the curly headed one says. She’s wearing what looks like an Alexander McQueen jacket, she’s well brought up and I’m willing to guess by her overall look, a lack of youthfulness in someone so young, and her expensive taste, that she was raised on the Upper East Side, went to Dalton or possibly Brearley, college at Sarah Lawrence or Smith, and now
judging by the Triple Canopy totebag she works for some kind of an art-related foundation like Dia, or Soros, she doles out tidbits of money to people who make documentaries about how bad things are in faraway lands made worse by Goldman Sachs, where her dad spent twenty-five years raking it in.

“See that vehicle out there?” I ask her, pointing out of the lightly frosted glass faux-French café window to Seth’s Range Rover. “I’m thinking of buying it from my friend here and, what I want to know is, just looking at him, an overall first impression, would you buy a used car from this man?”

Now the girls are with me because an actual purchase is taking place, there’s shopping going on at a high level, but also this is a quick little nothing that has no consequences, it’s like the conversational equivalent of an app. Seth is eating up the attention, too, they’re looking him up and down now, and he’s trying his best to look trustworthy, but the thing is he dresses like a fucking homeless person from the ’90s, he’s all worn-out hoodie and baggy jeans, what century is this, and he has his dreadlocks pulled back and a scarf on top. Both the girls shake their heads and say, “No, I don’t think I would!” kind of as a joke, but also because they mean it, and then I tell them that it’s too late I already wrote the check. They make some kind of comment about how I could always SMS my bank and have them cancel it, and no they don’t want to go for a drive with us to the Lower East Side, or down to Dressler for the
moules frites
, they are meeting some friends later, that’s so sweet but thanks.

For the rest of the night Seth and I drink, eat chorizo on a slab of old knotty wood, do a line or two in the bathroom,
and as Tote Bag and her friend leave I watch while the Yoga Doctor hits on pretty much every remaining chick in the place to no avail. He really has no style at all, or rather, his style is pure old school, part white-boy rapper and part tree-hugging stoner; it’s really revolting to have to watch him, looking like some refugee from a rained-out Burning Man, so I sit there and do shit on my phone, and watch the carnage pile up, as one girl after another politely turns away from him after a few moments of conversation. Finally I can’t take the heartache anymore, it’s too depressing, and I tell him we have to go, I have to put an end to this misery, this misery around me, the misery of perfectly turned-out young women living off their globalized daddies’ fake credit boon, the misery of not seeing this as misery at all, of thinking misery exists only elsewhere,
ailleurs
as Baudelaire would say if he were here and in a way he is, always; I wonder if he looks down on his creation, this fake bohemia, with pride or contempt, and if they pay him royalties.

We get out to the street and I say I am far too wasted to drive at this point, and it’s true, although I’ve driven in worse shape before. Seth thinks we should leave the car where we parked it and take a cab and get it in the morning. I convince him that this is a bad idea because of alternate-side parking, and he’ll be fine just driving me home, it’s not far, don’t be a fag. We get in the car and Seth is having a hard time getting the key fob into the orifice because he’s even drunker than I am. I pretend to be pissed at him, and get out of the car and start walking south on Wythe. I hear the car start up and when I look over, he has pulled up next to me.

“Get in,” he says, “you’re my bitch now,” which doesn’t even make sense. I get in without comment and he manages to get me down to Krave in one piece, it’s a straight shot with red lights, we do no talking, he drives at a crawl and pulls up in front and turns off the car.

“What are you doing?” I ask him.

“It’s your car now,” he says, “don’t you want to park it here?”

“No,” I say.

“Why not? I’ll get you the title tomorrow.”

“Because I don’t want your fucking car,” I say, playing pissed off at him for about the third time tonight, as I open the door. “I drove it and it’s a piece of shit vehicle.”