What's Important Is Feeling: Stories (6 page)

“Triple Six is totally lit.”

“Am I?”

We walked across the bridge. A jogging bodybuilder almost knocked me over.

“What a pec-tard,” Squirrel said. These were my people, I thought. They had words for things I’d wanted to name.

Back home, I lay on the couch. Jane and her friend Cressida were doing homework at the table. Cressida had wire-rimmed specs and braces, but she was pretty.

I was staring at her. Cressida didn’t notice, but Jane did.

“Go check on Grandpa,” she said to me.

“He’s fine,” I said. Jane raised her eyebrows, and I went upstairs.

Grandpa lay in bed shirtless, over the blankets, crying. His room smelled like urine, and his pajama pants were soaked through. He kept saying “I,” repeating it, as if attempting to resume agency over his body.

“It’s okay,” I said. I took a hand—I didn’t want to get too close, to invade his space—and held it the way an infant reaches out and acquaints herself with an extended finger. I removed his pants slowly, careful not to touch, to impose on his vulnerability. I took a towel from his bathroom and wiped the damp skin on his legs and on his penis.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s just Sam. Everything will be okay.”

I gave him a fresh set of underwear, covered him with a blanket, crawled in next to him. I wiped the tears from his cheek with my thumb, kissed his unshaven face, ran a finger through his hair.

He looked at me like he didn’t know me but knew he needed my help.

“It’s just Sam,” I said. Grandpa moved toward me and kissed my lips. He didn’t kiss aggressively, assuredly. More like someone going in for a first kiss, without expected result.

I didn’t kiss back. His lips were dry. “Sam,” he said. He rubbed my shoulders, wrapped his arms around my body. He rested his chin on my shoulder, calm now. He put his fingers below the waistband of my boxers. He didn’t rub my penis, just held it in his hand, not for long, just for a moment, as if, by holding it, he were transferring some kind of energy, some kind of thank-you.

Then it was Chanukah. We had a menorah, but no one bothered to plug it in. I was rolling with Squirrel and Deep, sucking down jays, wearing sunglasses. Squirrel played the guitar. He didn’t know how to tune it, but he could make loud fuzz and hold a cigarette between the strings. Mostly they came to my house. We’d hang on the porch and talk shit about the shitheads at school. Jane and Cress were sometimes there. I’d started calling her Cress in my head because I liked the way it sounded, like watercress. Squirrel liked her big lips because they were good for sucking dick.

“Hello, ladies,” Squirrel said. “Care to join us?”

Jane fingered her protractor, turned the page. “Fuck off,” she said. Cress smiled.

It was still warm outside. My mother never came home and busted us. Christmas break was in a week, but first there was the Christmas dance. Squirrel, Deep, and I weren’t going, or we were going to egg it, or we were going to steal vodka from Squirrel’s dad’s liquor cabinet and show up plastered and vomit on jocks. We’d get thrown out of school and sent to public school to be with real people, ones who understood us, girls who liked good music.

Jane was going to the dance. Richie Cohen had asked her. I wasn’t going to act all protective brother. I’d seen him in the halls; his ears were bigger than his face.

“He’s a nice guy” was all Jane said. I’m sure he was a nice guy.

“You going?” Jane asked. It was late night; we were watching
The Late Show
. I wasn’t stoned for the first time in a while, and I was lying there thinking about how much better it was being stoned.

“Whatever,” I said.

“You should go.”

“I said whatever.”

“I know someone who would go with you.”

“Shut up.”

“Though I don’t know why she’d want to, considering how lame you are.”

“I wouldn’t go with any of your friends.”

“Not even Cressida?”

“Whatever,” I said.

Squirrel asked Cressida and she said yes. He borrowed his brother’s Camaro, even though he didn’t have a license. The car barely had a backseat, but four of us managed to squeeze in. Cress was in shotgun, and Deep and I were in back next to Richie Cohen and Jane, who were lap-sitting.

Squirrel sort of knew how to drive. He only stalled at lights, or when it was his turn to hit the joint. Richie held my sister across the waist, and I knew she liked it even though she was terrified.

Jane still talks about that ride like it’s the most dangerous thing she’s ever done. “Fifteen with open containers and narcotics. We’re lucky we didn’t die.” She sounds like an after-school special.

For Jane it was a one-timer: reckless youth, laughed over now. I won’t say it’s because Grandpa never touched her that she turned out normal and I didn’t. That’s what my therapist says, but she’s wrong.

I think, mostly, the problem was my parents and their shitty DNA. Sometimes, people with absent parents are forced to grow up too fast. I was the opposite; I stayed a child. Jane grew up for me; that’s what twins are for.

In that backseat we were reunited. Jane hit a joint for the first time, and Squirrel ran over a squirrel.

The dance was in the cafeteria, which had been made to look like the future. Everything was silver foil, and the nerds were dressed in expensive-looking
Star Trek
costumes. The DJ played cheesy techno, and Squirrel kissed Cress from the get-go, off in the corner, hands clutching her butt. Deep and I walked circles complaining about the music. Sis and Richie danced slow, arms extended and parallel.

At the center of the dance floor was Celia, alight in gold tights and Princess Leia double-buns. She danced the way she interacted with her friends—not
with
, but
about
—orbiting, distracted, rhythmically aligned to the offbeat, the drummer’s spaces. The rat-a-tat-tat-ness came from inside her, as if her body’s movements controlled the music and not the other way around.

I watched from a distance, standing still, forgetting the other people, and that I was no longer allowed to stare. She danced alone, no boys in sight. I watched her dip between people, spinning like a slo-mo top, pirouette perfect as a windup doll’s. “Stop staring at her,” Deep said.

There was a party after. We weren’t supposed to know about it, but someone told someone and Squirrel had a car. Jose’s parents were out of town.

There was a white felt pool table in the living room. Out back it was like every movie about high school. Girls swam in bras, splashing, giggling. Deep and I played our roles. We sat in the corner with a small plastic bong. Squirrel and Cress had gone upstairs. There were empty rooms upstairs: guest rooms, the maid’s room. I wondered where Celia was. I hoped she wasn’t upstairs. I imagined her upstairs.

Richie had walked Jane to the door of our house, and we’d made smooching sounds and laughed.

The party was boring because no one talked to Deep and me, and we acted like we didn’t want anyone to talk to us. We stole graham crackers and set up shop in the treehouse, smoking cigarettes and taking slugs from the unboxed silver foil bag of red wine that Squirrel’s brother had given us with the advice, “If you give her enough of this shit, she’ll at least let you finger her.”

Deep wasn’t much of a talker. “Fuck this shit,” he said, and I said, “Yeah, fuck this shit,” and we continued saying things like that, or variations: I’d fuck the shit out of these bitches, if these bitches want to fuck with me I’ll fuck them up, maybe that fuckin’ bitch will want to lick my shit and then fuck that shit, fuckin’ A, fuck double fuck.

The sun came up. Celia woke in a deck chair. She stood and stretched, unaware of being watched. She reached for a pack of cigarettes on the table and pulled one to her lip. She fumbled for a lighter, looked around, and saw me.

I reached into my pocket, held up my lighter. Celia nodded.

I walked toward her, dancing off-balance around the empty beers and sleeping bodies. Celia shivered and wrapped her arms around her chest. I lit her cigarette and lit one for myself.

We didn’t say anything, just watched the sunlight move across the yard, illuminating the sleeping bodies as if they were casualties of war, sinking into the dew. I thought of my grandfather, of his body, its spots and abscesses, its whiteness.

Celia exhaled. The smoke was so visible in the wet air that it looked like a cartoon speech-bubble coming from her mouth. I wanted to fill it with words.

“Hi,” I said.

“Are you okay?” she said in a timid voice, as if she didn’t want to disrupt the morning’s calm.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “About . . .”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I knew that if there was ever a moment to kiss her, it was now. I also knew that now was not the moment to kiss her, and that there never would be one.

Grandpa died that summer. First he shat himself often, forgot I was Sam or that anyone was anyone, became incoherent, repeated phrases like “No one’s waiting” and “This body is not this body.”

December Boys Got It Bad

L
awrence and I have lost our jobs. We walk the bridge toward Brooklyn, where it’s cool to be poor. We don’t call our mothers. It’s warm for September, and we strip in the sunlight. Lawrence tosses his sport coat over the rail. The wind doesn’t take it; no fluttering kitelike, symbolic and cinematic. It sinks into traffic, under tires, another piece of highway trash. I hesitate before tossing mine.

“Blow winds and crack your cheek!” Lawrence cries. “Rage! Blow! Spout ’til you have wet my codpiece! I give my garments of oppression to the open sea!”

A man standing near us says, “That nigga’s crazy.”

He’s about five two, with a port-wine stain that covers most of his face and neck. Teeth misaligned and T-shirt too small—tight over ribs, holes under armpits.

“He saw Lear in the park,” I say.

“That must make you the Fool,” the man says, and laughs a mucus-loosening laugh.

Lawrence is shirtless now, showing off the tattoo he got one two a.m. in the East Village while half blacked out and impressing a girl. It’s a Native American dream catcher, in rainbow colors, wrapped around his rib cage.

“Fellow proletarian,” Lawrence addresses the man, “we are brothers, huddled on this bridge among the masses of the unemployed. We’re America’s castoffs. They said bring us your hungry, and they lied. They meant bring them to Brooklyn, let them suffer in slums. We’re nature’s toilets now.”

“You live in a townhouse,” I say, but Lawrence isn’t listening.

Our new friend, however, is.

“What you call me, white boy? I ain’t your brother, motherfucker. I ain’t no proletarian.”

“Do you wear Brooks Brothers?” I say, and hand the man my garment of oppression.

It’s four sizes too big. In it, he’s a child, someone’s younger brother. He rolls up the cuffs and pretends there’s a mirror.

“Not typically my style,” the man says.

“You can get it tailored,” I say, and push Lawrence forward.

We’re accosted by a roaming documentarian. He waves a smartphone in our faces, narrates: “Here we have the junior investment banker, Latin name
Douchebagius ecco homophobe
. An endangered species and a rare sight en route to the outer boroughs.”

Lawrence is in love with the camera. He’s in love with himself in this moment. He’s waving a middle finger and glugging from the pint of bourbon we bought back in Manhattan after being pink-slipped. He hands me the bottle. I sip and then offer it to our homeless friend, who declines.

“Been straight since summer of ’69,” he says. “I got weepy at the moon landing. It’s been clean living ever since.”

“Tell the world,” Lawrence tells the camera phone. “I’m more sinned against than sinner! Wall Street has taken our salaries, but it will never take our souls!”

The first bar on the other side has a hundred beers on tap and overpriced wings dripping with watery hot sauce.

“The blood of the factory-farmed chicken,” Lawrence says, licks his finger.

He saw some documentary. He’s wearing my button-down, bar appropriate. I’m down to a T-shirt. My arms aren’t muscled like Lawrence’s. They’re bone-thin, sun-sheltered, ghostly white.

“Eat up,” Lawrence says. “Gather strength for the bacchanal. And would it kill you to join a gym?”

“Never had the time,” I say, and finally feel the truth of my new freedom: the onslaught of open hours, days unfolding like an origami fortune-teller.

I’ve always been a workaholic, the product of a siblingless childhood. So many nights spent in midwestern solitude, TV busted and the world half a dream with its sensory feints: the cricket-chirp quiet and grease-burger air, sun over cornfields goldening everything.

But math felt solid, composed of proven truths. I pored over equations, spreadsheet cells, PowerPoint presentations; Xs, Ys, and dollar signs; worked my way through business school and onto Wall Street. I tried to move figures so that everyone would benefit—clients, Lehman, plus the public—as the market shifted and swerved. Now our work’s been exposed as faulty, a mess of fragile systems, theoretically unsound. I feel implicated, even if the orders came from on high.

Tonight’s the result: postponing despair by pounding Jäger bombs and listening to Lawrence rant.

“Fräulein!” Lawrence calls to the waitress.

“Don’t be an asshole,” I say.

“Get over the six million already,” Lawrence says. “Germany is a forward-thinking country. Fräulein!”

He’s standing, waving.

The waitress saunters over, used to types like us. She too is costumed, a facsimile Bavarian wench. Her breasts are pressed between suspenders, barely contained. They hang over her corset like cartoon eye bags.

“My name’s Kim, I’m gay and taken, and the bathroom’s to the left,” she says, anticipating all of Lawrence’s requests.

Kim flashes a ringed finger. It shines blingy in the bar light.

“Conflict diamonds,” says Lawrence. “How many have been killed in Sierra Leone so you can rub your queer lifestyle in our faces?”

“It’s cubic zirconium,” Kim says.

“Chill,” I say to Lawrence, and touch his arm.

Kim walks away smiling, impenetrable. I imagine Kim and her fiancée drinking OJ in a breakfast nook, laughing over egg whites, reading aloud from the Sunday paper.

“I should have gone into commodities,” I say. “The American dream is orange juice.”

“This is a shit restaurant,” Lawrence says. “The Internet lied to me. There were no hot wings in Hitler’s time. Am I the last of the true believers?”

Still, we tip well.

“We’re going to meet some artsy chicks,” Lawrence says. “Commune with them in class solidarity. We can name-drop that kid from high school who went to Wesleyan and plays in that band now.”

“Alec Emmer,” I say. “It’s not a band. It’s a collective.”

“He used to be a faggot,” Lawrence says. “Now he gets more pussy than anyone. There’s a lesson there.”

The lesson involves buying tighter pants than we normally wear.

“Can I help you?” the salesgirl asks.

She’s thin and curveless; confident, Parisian-striped, no older than nineteen. Silver eyeliner’s painted in raccoon streaks that triangulate toward her ears.

“Outfit us,” Lawrence intones. “Armor us in a garb fit for dance halls and bohemian debutantes.”

He adds, “Make us look gay, but not too gay.”

“I can work with that,” the salesgirl says.

The fitting-room mirror makes me look ugly: top-heavy, visibly acne-scarred. Or maybe I was already ugly.

Lawrence grins, flexes. He helps me button the too-tight pants, adjusts my bulge. It tingles. I have an urge to hug his body to my body, not in a sexual way, but out of what feels like purer longing; I want skin on my skin, hot breath up my nostrils, fingers easing the knots in my neck while Lawrence hums Easter hymns and I weep into his bosom.

“Lawrence,” I say, and squeeze his arm. His bicep bubbles under my thumb.

Lawrence ignores whatever it is I’m doing.

“You want it to be horizontal in these pants,” he says. “And semistiff. It’s a visual mating call. Tuck it up there. Show some shaft.”

When the salesgirl sees our new outfits she says, “Oh, no, that doesn’t work at all.”

She points, shakes her head. “Let me see if we have that in a size up,” she says.

“I knew you’d say that,” Lawrence says. “I’m psychic. I bet I can guess the first three digits of your phone number.”

“And if you do?”

“You find a friend and meet us at that place on the corner with the blue awning when you get off work.”

“That’s not for four hours,” she says.

“Seven one eight,” Lawrence snaps.

“Area code doesn’t count,” she says, but Lawrence is already gloating.

He calls her Raccoon Eyes. Does a leprechaun dance, arms flailing, knees akimbo. Sings the first verse of “Rocky Raccoon.”

“You fucker,” the salesgirl says in the way of someone charmed despite herself.

We go to the bar with the blue awning. Sit in a corner booth and pretend the girls are coming. Lawrence texts his dealer. I put my head on the table, feel the oil against my forehead. Wish I’d taken more comp-sci classes in college. Imagine what my office would be like if I worked at Google: pastel walls, bay view, maybe one of those yoga-ball chairs.

“Goddamnit, Alejandro, answer your phone,” says Lawrence. “The revolution can’t be fueled by blood and beer alone.”

Two booths over, our former waitress cozies up to the woman who must be her girlfriend. The girlfriend is tattooed, tiny, terribly pretty, with a half-shaved head that flatters her perfect facial symmetry. Kim’s still in her work costume. They hold hands under the table, lean into each other, nuzzle necks and ears. If this were a movie, I’d buy them a round, wave from a bar stool, whisper, “Men might be scum, but some of us believe in love.”

“Pick up your goddamn phone,” Lawrence says.

It’s five hours later. We’re on Lawrence’s roof, overlooking the promenade. Bridge lit up, and Manhattan just beyond, so close it seems fake, a full-scale model. One of those romantic New York tableaux that only makes you feel alone, partnerless. The stars are out. Lawrence yells, “The stars are out, motherfucker!”

He raises his arms like a football ref signaling touchdown.

His girl laughs. She thinks we’re losers in a cute way. She says, “You guys are such losers.”

The cute part’s implied.

My girl stares at the water, grimaces, exhales, boot-crushes her cigarette, gives me a look like “
What?
”

I don’t know how or why or when we decided which girl was whose, but Lawrence got the flirtier end of that bargain—Rocky Raccoon.

She’s on his lap, leaning to tap into the ashtray, showing off tiny, braless breasts in her T-shirt’s low V. She’s dressed the same as before, but she’s lipsticked now, a blood shade of red. Big lips stain her cigarette, dwarf it. Lawrence wraps an arm all the way around her waist.

“So you guys know the band Lazy Rat?” he says.

“Lazer Rat,” I correct.

“The collective?” Rocky asks.

“Same thing,” Lawrence says. “Anyway, Alec Emmer from Lazer Cat’s gonna come by in a bit. He’s an old friend of mine.”

I give him a look.

Lawrence adds, “Of ours,” indicating me with a weak nod.

A memory returns: Lawrence spray-painting “Retardo” on Alec Emmer’s car.

“I met Alec Emmer once,” my girl says. It’s the first thing she’s said in an hour. “I gave him a blow job after a show at Brooklyn Bowl. He had the loveliest dick I’ve ever seen. Just perfectly circumcised.”

“Where was I that night?” Rocky asks.

“With your ex,” my girl says. “Remember him?”

“Don’t remind me,” Rocky says, smiles, pats Lawrence’s head.

“Are some dicks
im
perfectly circumcised?” I ask. I’m actually curious.

“Yeah,” Rocky says. “Uncircumcised ones.”

“Too bad Emmer’s a homo,” Lawrence says, annoyed. “Or you all could have married him.”

He pulls Rocky closer, claiming her.

“Let’s go inside,” Lawrence says.

The girls have never seen a banker’s place. Didn’t know bankers even
lived
in Brooklyn. Rocky has a tiny anarchist’s
A
tattooed on the back of one elbow. Lawrence’s home is alien, exotic, erotically out of line with her professed values. It has leather furniture, colored lightbulbs in the lamps.

Rocky inspects every inch. Like an amateur anthropologist. Runs a finger along the edge of the flat screen, blows dust from her finger. Opens cabinets, caresses cookware, cuddles the couch pillows.

Lawrence sings, “
Rocky Raccoon, came into my room, and proceeded to feel up my trinkets.
”

He shows off his collections: samurai swords, gator-gutting knives, fish-gutting knives, bear-gutting knives, machetes, Nazi armbands, a Civil War musket, fraternity paddles used for beating freshman ass in a strictly heterosexual manner.

My girl’s unimpressed. She sits silent, condescending, opening and closing her cell phone, unaware that she’s my girl.

Her name’s Nina. She’s a freshman at Pratt. They both are. Studio art majors. Never heard of Rothko. Lawrence shows them a first-edition monograph, purchased for big chowder at the rare books place on Eighth Avenue.

“I don’t go for that mainstream stuff,” says Rocky. “It’s like, painting is so old-fashioned. All those giant canvases covered in semen. We get it already, you know?”

Lawrence—whom I once saw weep loudly in MoMA at a giant red dreamscape—raises his frat paddle at Rocky in a gesture of half-kidding disapproval.

“Ew, you were in a frat,” Nina accuses. “What a cliché.”

“A communist brotherhood,” Lawrence replies, and unhooks the full-length mirror from the wall, balances it atop the coffee table, lays out fat lines of what I know, from past experience, to be fairly weak cocaine.

Now Nina’s interested. She takes a picture of the coke on her phone. Says she’ll use it for an upcoming mixed-media project that explores the relationship between commerce and chauvinism. Kneels over the mirror, huffs her rail in three phlegmy snorts, stands, wipes her nose, licks her fingers, slicks her bangs back.

It’s the first time all night that I’ve seen Nina’s face. She has high, rouged cheekbones and hardly any nose at all. Maybe the product of Waspy stock—a Greenwich escapee, guiltily funded, brow-pierced and playing at gutter punk. Her green eyes shine under Lawrence’s mood lights. She wears spandex and a loose V-neck that barely covers her butt. The phrase “Kill Me I Love Love” is stenciled on the shirt in Magic Marker. It looks like a nightgown. Her hands are Sharpied in fading
X
s.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” Nina says.

Lawrence puts on music, embarrassing music, club trance from his raver phase in high school.

“Are you kidding?” Nina says, but Lawrence isn’t listening. He’s in private concert with himself: head bopping, legs kicking as he makes inadvisable spins and gyrations.

“The beat is my only friend!” Lawrence yells. “The beat is alive in Brooklyn! It’s my heartbeat, in sync with the nation. America, I’ve given you everything, now give me music!”