The Truth Is Far From Here

All of the faces on money look sad. I think people are too busy working for it or spending it to notice, but they all seem kind of miserable. Hamilton’s eyes radiate pain, like his dog died or his girlfriend just left him. Lincoln seems weary and disappointed. Washington has this look like he just let out a mournful sigh. Maybe he’s thinking about all of the slaves that he owned.

I never knew that Washington owned slaves until Doug, this guy that I work with, told me. He said that Washington treated them like shit and didn’t free them when he was supposed to. At first I didn’t really believe him, because I’d never heard any of that before, and he’s like thirty and still works in a restaurant. But then I asked Mr. Hanson, my History teacher, and he said that it was a different time and blah blah blah, but at the end of the day, he didn’t say that Doug was wrong. So this big hero who’s on money and carved into rocks and all that was a complete dick, and everyone knows it, but they go along with it, anyway.

Turns out Doug’s right about a lot of other things, too. He hates conservatives, but he doesn’t like Bill Clinton, either. He says Clinton bombed an aspirin factory and killed a bunch of innocent people, and cheated on his wife. When I told my dad about all of this, he said nobody was perfect, and that we voted Democrat, because the alternative was worse, and long story short, Doug was right and my dad votes for a guy who bombs factories and cheats on his wife.

We work at Wings & Things on Belmont Street, in a shopping plaza between a movie theater and a Starbucks. It’s a sports bar that’s as big as a warehouse and is always about ten degrees colder than it needs to be. I work after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays until ten, and on Saturdays from five until midnight. Doug works every night except Sunday, all the way up to closing time. I usually work the wing station or the fryers. Doug’s always on the grill. He has a long goatee and listens to music where the lead singers just scream. During breaks he sits on milk crates out back, smoking and reading science fiction books. He always smells like dishwater and cigarettes.

Tonight’s the last Saturday of the month, which means that the regular manager has the night off, and so Doug is in charge. I like these shifts because he lets me cut corners and usually lets me leave early, which means I get to see ‘Saturday Night Live’ from the beginning. Plus, it’s usually when he tells me about things like Washington’s slaves or how the war on drugs is an excuse to put poor people in jail. When the regular manager is around he laughs at what Doug says and calls him Carl Marks, so he doesn’t talk as much.

‘Minor, I’m ready for three fries and a shroom,’ he says, wiping his brow with his forearm, the burgers on the grill sounding like tires going through a puddle as he flips them. Doug calls me ‘Minor’, but I don’t really mind, because he treats me like more of an adult than anybody. He’ll buy me cigarettes, if I ask him, and tells me about all the things nobody else does. And one time, when I came into the back office, he tossed a condom at me and said ‘Keep your tool cool.’ I know it was just a joke, but he wouldn’t have made it if he thought I was just a kid.

‘Got it,’ I say, lifting up the breaded mushrooms that bobble around the crackling grease pool like misshapen lottery balls. We dart around to the hiss of fryers and the chirp of timers while Ozzy Osbourne sings about going insane. Everyone always talks about kitchen jobs like they’re for idiots, but they can be pretty hard sometimes. Each ticket has a bunch of different things on it, and they all need to be cooked and organized and go out in order, as fast as possible. Sometimes they don’t stop coming in for an hour or two. I bet if all of those people who talk about it like it’s so easy had to do it, they’d screw up every once in a while, too.

My favorite part about Doug being in charge is that he’ll let you make whatever food that you want. Once dinner rush has died down, I always make a Caesar salad with chicken and bring it over to Megan, who works at the movie theater, because I like her and that’s what she orders whenever she comes in. I try to make it perfect, just like it is on the menu photo, and Phil, one of the other cooks, always makes fun of me.

‘Is that for your girlfriend?’ he always says, but he’ll say it in a mean way, as if having a girlfriend or wanting one is supposed to be embarrassing.

‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ I always say, like I’m angry, even though I kind of want her to be.

‘Shut the fuck up, Phil,’ Doug always says. ‘When’s the last time you got any?’ Phil usually stops talking then, just like Doug does when the manager calls him Carl Marks.

I think about Megan all the time, but for some reason I can never quite remember what she looks like, and so it’s always a bit of a surprise when I first see her. At the movie theater, she has to wear this stupid puffy white shirt with a vest and a bowtie and put her hair up, but she still always looks so pretty it makes me feel like I’m going over the crest of a rollercoaster.

‘You have no idea how much I love you right now,’ she says when she sees me carrying the salad, the steam from the chicken frosting the lid. The movie theater is as drafty as Wings & Things, and there’s a big poster of Brad Pitt holding up a bar of soap and staring down at us. ‘If you didn’t bring this, my dinner would’ve been popcorn and gummy bears.’

I don’t say anything, my brain still stuck back in the first part. I know she didn’t really mean it, but she said it, and when a girl you like says those words, even if they’re kidding, it still feels nice. But then she added ‘right now’, which means that she doesn’t at other times, and I keep thinking stuff like that for a while and just smiling like an idiot until she snaps me out of it.

‘Busy tonight?’

‘A little bit’, I say, looking at the teardrop swirls in the maroon and green carpet. ‘But there’s no football or boxing, so I’ll probably get out early. You?’

‘I get out at eleven fifteen, right after the last movie starts.’

‘That’s cool,’ I say, shifting my weight from foot to foot. Whenever I’m around Megan, I suddenly become aware of things I never normally notice, like how I’m standing, or what I’m doing with my hands. ‘I’ll probably just go home and watch ‘Saturday Night Live’. The guy from ‘The X-Files’ is on.’

‘I’ve never seen that show.’

‘’Saturday Night Live’?’

‘No, ‘The X-Files’. Is it scary?’

‘Not really. It’s mostly about the FBI and aliens.’

‘Do you believe in aliens?’

‘I don’t know. Everybody lies about everything else, so probably.’

Just then her boss walks by, and she straightens her back and stops leaning on the counter. He looks at us for a second before walking off.

“Well, thanks for the salad,’ she says.

‘Sure, no problem.’

We’re not very busy for the rest of the night. Doug and Phil play a game where they try to fling onions onto a pair of tongs, and I get most of the dishes done. A little after ten, Doug has me clean all of the boxes out of the cooler and freezer, and together we take all of the trash out back.

‘You smoke weed yet, Minor?’ he asks with a cocked eyebrow, lighting the little white twig his lips are clamped around.

‘Yeah,’ I say, though I only did once with my friend Dan and his older sister, and I don’t think I did it right, because I didn’t feel anything. He takes a big puff and hands it to me.

‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he says with a wheeze, glancing around the back lot as he exhales. ‘How’d it go with Caesar Salad Girl?’

‘I dunno. We talked about ‘The X-Files’. She said she got off at eleven fifteen.’

‘Did you ask her out?’

‘No.’

‘You should ask her out.’

‘You think?’ I take too big of a puff and end up coughing and hacking until my eyes water.

‘Maybe not when you’re stoned,’ he says with a laugh, plucking the joint from my fingers. ‘But, yeah. Unless you’re content with just bringing her salads once a month. You just got your paycheck, right? What better way to spend your hard-earned money than on a girl you like?’ He takes a drag and stares off at the lights from the grocery store before starting to toss bags of trash into the dumpster. “Gotta have a reason for doing this shit, right, Minor?’

He lets me go home after we finish up trash. I’m feeling a bit loopy, and miss the first bus because I’m just sort of watching the trees swirl. I don’t get to see the first part of ‘Saturday Night Live’, but they do a ‘Celebrity Jeopardy’ and the guy from ‘The X-Files’ is so funny that I spit up soda through my nose. While the music guest is playing, I lay two week’s pay on my bed in a row, looking at all of the sad faces. My dad says that I should save my hard-earned money. Doug thinks I should spend it on Megan. I know people like my dad or Mr. Hanson probably think that Doug is an idiot, and maybe they’re right, but I think I’m going to go with him on this one.

Seventh grade has been a complete mess. Everyone goes through rough patches, I suppose. Even cool people. Look at Bob Dylan. He’s pretty much the coolest, and even he had that period where he painted his face like a mime. I’ll bet people made fun of him, too, otherwise he probably would’ve just kept on with it forever. I never knew my clothes or hair were stupid until people made fun of me for it. At some point, someone must’ve said to him ‘Hey, Bob, you look like a faggot.’ That’s what Rick Huntington said to me when I wore my dad’s leather jacket.

I was trying to look like Bruce Springsteen on the ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ album cover. He looks tough, and he’s sneering and he seemed like someone Jenny Parker might like. But it turns out she likes guys who wear Abercrombie clothes, like Rick, and he called me a faggot, and I didn’t really feel like Bruce Springsteen on the album cover, so I tossed the jacket back in the storage room and got a job to save up for some Abercrombie clothes.

I wash dishes on the weekends at Mazarra’s near the mall. Mr. Mazarra is a friend of my grandfather’s, and he pays me twenty dollars in cash at the end of every shift. The dish tank is like a hundred degrees, and it makes your skin wrinkled and spongy. There’s usually four of us back there – me, Ramon and Luis, who don’t speak much English, and Monte, who has Down syndrome and only works until seven. There’s another guy, Wayne, but we’re not allowed to work together because he went to prison for touching kids.

It can get kind of boring because there’s no one to talk to. Sometimes Ramon and Luis will teach me dirty words in Spanish, but most of the time I just sing songs in my head. There’s that one R.E.M. song, ‘Stand’ – I like to sing that but change the words to be about what I’m doing, so in my head I’ll go ‘Stand in the place where you work, now clean forks’, and stuff like that. It helps pass the time.

When I’m not in school or at work, I like to sit in the basement and listen to my dad’s records. There are loads of them in the storage room, packed away in wooden crates, all dog-eared and faded. At first I used to play them based on what the covers looked like – I listened to Pink Floyd for the first time because they had the man shaking hands with the other man who was on fire, and the Rolling Stones because they had the real zipper on the cover and Billy Joel because he always looks sad and lonely on all of his album covers, and I feel that way a lot.

I don’t ever remember meeting my dad. Mom says I did, but he left when I was little to live with some other lady in California. I’ve never been to California, but everyone’s always singing about it, so there’s got to be something to it. One day I want to go out there and find him and talk about records. Maybe he could help me sort some of this stuff out. Mom’s great and all, but she’s not really much help. She just sits on the couch after work watching T.V. and sometimes she cries, and if I tell her about any of my problems she tells me how great I am, which I don’t really believe, because no one else seems to think so.

I’m kind of like Simon. He sings a song about how he’s alone and he doesn’t need any friends, and he seems like he’s doing OK, so maybe it will work out. He has his poetry and books, and I’m kind of like that with my dad’s records. He’s also kind of short and puny looking and has a dumb haircut, so we have a lot in common. Except that Simon probably doesn’t get a million boners and zits and I bet his voice doesn’t crack all of the time. And he says he doesn’t have friends, but then what’s Garfunkel? If he ever got too lonely he could always just call up and say ‘Hey, it’s Simon, want to write a song?’ I don’t have anyone like Garfunkel.

Tonight is our school’s Spring Dance. I didn’t want to go, because I went to the winter one and the music was crap and I just stood by the punch bowl the whole time. No one wanted to dance with me, and after a while I just waited outside the gym until my mom came to pick me up. But she says she always had fun at school dances and made friends and that I should go. Plus, I got an Abercrombie shirt last week. It was $60, which adds up to three shifts in the dish tank. Mom said that was ridiculous, and that no one should pay that much for a shirt, but when I told her that the dance was coming up and everybody wore them, she paid for half of it. She told me to save the rest and maybe use some to buy a girl ice cream after the dance. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that girls don’t like me, so I just said that I might. She’s always sad, and it would probably make her sadder to find out that I’m not as handsome as she thinks I am.

After I get out of the shower, I put on my Abercrombie shirt and try to style my hair all sorts of different ways. I make it like Sting’s, all pointy and messy, but I figure that Rick Huntington would make fun of that, so I try Rod Stewart hair, but that ends up looking just like Sting, and so I try to comb it down like the Beatles, but it’s not long enough, and even if it was Rick would probably make fun of that, too. He’s been on my case all year, ever since I wore the leather jacket. Whenever we pass in the hallways he does this thing where he jerks forward like he’s going to lunge at me, but he doesn’t, and when I flinch he laughs and knocks my books on the floor. Sometimes I really wish I was a tough fighter like Elton John or Mick Jagger, so I could just pop him square in the nose and tell him to leave me alone.

I end up doing my hair like I always do, and my mom says that I look really handsome. On the way there she asks me if there’s any girls I was thinking of dancing with, and I say maybe Jenny Parker, because the idea of me dancing with a girl seems to make her happy. She says that if Jenny and I wanted to get ice cream after the dance she could take us and even wait out in the car until we were done. I know she’s just trying to be a good mom, but it makes me want to cry because the idea seems so nice, and it will never happen in a million years.

Little circles of light bounce around the dark gym, and there are a few green and white streamers taped up in the doorway. A few girls are out in front of the DJ booth that’s set up under the basketball hoop, but they’re just kind of swaying, not really dancing. Everyone else is leaning against the walls or standing near the refreshments table.

I don’t really know what to do or who to talk to, so I duck into the bathroom for a minute, even though I don’t need to go. After that, I sort of take a lap and wind up at the DJ booth. The guy has big hoop earrings and when I ask him to play Fleetwood Mac he laughs a little. He says junior high kids don’t want to dance to Fleetwood Mac, but I tell him that I’m a junior high kid, and I dance to them all the time. He laughs again and says he’ll see what he can do. I head over to get some punch, where I run into Jenny. She has on a blueberry dress and heels with straps and her hair is swooped up. She looks really pretty.

‘How are you?’ she asks with the same chirpy sing-song voice she uses when she cheers at the football games.

‘I’m fine. You?’

‘Glad not to be in science class,’ she says, emphasizing the word ‘science’ as if it were our little secret.

‘Yeah,’ I say, and then it gets quiet for a minute.

‘I really love Third Eye Blind,’ she says, pointing towards the ceiling.

‘They’re great,’ I say, though I don’t know who Third Eye Blind is. It gets quiet again, and I start to think about the idea of dancing and ice cream and how happy my mom would be. ‘Hey, um, I asked the DJ to play a song, and he said that he would if I got people to dance to it, so maybe you could help me get some people?’

‘Sure. What song?’

‘Yeah, what song?’ Rick says as he bumps his shoulder into mine from behind.

‘Rick,’ she says with gritted teeth, stamping her foot and narrowing her eyes.

‘What? I’m just playin’, he says with a smirk, putting his arm around her shoulder. I start to walk away but Jenny follows me and grabs my wrist.

‘We’ll dance to your song, OK? Just tell me when it comes on and we’ll get people out there.’

It takes about four or five more songs, but when I hear the first few piano bars, I signal to her, and she grabs two of her friends’ hands and a bunch of others follow. At first when the song kicks up, everyone is jumping around and hollering, but when it starts to settle in people just kind of sway a little and don’t seem so excited anymore.

‘What the fuck is this?’ Rick asks with a crinkled face.

‘Fleetwood Mac.’

‘Who?’

‘Fleetwood Mac,” I say again, this time looking at the floor, a film of heat covering my face.

‘More like Fagwood Mac,’ he says with a laugh. ‘You can’t dance to this shit.’

He walks off and most everyone follows him. Jenny stands around for a second, and it looks like she might say something, but her friend pulls her away. After a minute or so the DJ changes to a different song and looks at me with a shrug. I get another cup of punch, and Mr. Michaels, my English teacher, says that he likes Fleetwood Mac, so we talk for a minute. He tells me I should listen to them before they had Stevie Nicks. I tell him I will, though I don’t know which one Stevie Nicks is. I hope he’s not the singer, as I like him, and the girl, Lindsey. They sound nice together.

The next song is a slow dance one – Janet Jackson, I think – and when it starts the bouncing lights settle into a steady carousel around the room. Everyone partners up except for a few of us, but I’m the only one who doesn’t have friends around they can pretend to talk to. Jenny dances with Rick, and puts her head on his shoulder while I stand against the wall, wishing that I hadn’t spent so much on a stupid shirt.

I wait until the dance is over before leaving, wanting my mom to think that I had a good time. As I’m walking past the line of idling cars Jenny calls out to me from behind, wobbling in her heels as she tries to catch up to me.

‘I’m really sorry,’ she says with a frown. ‘Rick is a jerk, and that was mean. I should’ve danced with you.’

‘It’s OK.’

‘I like that song,’ she says, swiping a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘They played it when the president got elected. He played saxophone.’

‘Yeah, he did.’

‘Seriously, though, I’m really sorry. I promise to make it up to you some time.’

‘Well, um, if you want, we could go get ice cream? My mom can take us. She’ll wait in the car. I can pay for it.’

‘Oh,’ she says, her eyes falling to the sidewalk. ‘I, um, we’re actually going to hang out in Rick’s friend’s basement. He lives down the street.’

‘Oh, yeah, no, that’s OK.’

‘Maybe another time?’ she asks, returning to her cheerleader voice but still frowning.

‘Yeah, sure. I’d like that.’ She kisses me on the cheek and my guts stretch and twist like boiling silly putty. She smells like green soap and perfume. I feel a little like Bruce Springsteen.

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

‘Was that Jenny Parker?’ my mom asks when I get into the car. I can’t remember the last time I saw her smile so wide, her cheeks bunching against her eyelids.

‘Yeah.’

‘Does she want to go for ice cream?’

‘She can’t. Her mom says she has to go home. But we might go, another time.’ She puts a hand on my knee, shaking it a little. ‘Can we please just go home?’

I’m not daft enough to think that the kiss meant anything. I know she’s into guys like Rick who play football, and she just felt bad for me. But it made me feel nice, and maybe she could end up like a Garfunkel, and that would be a good start.

When we get back my mom turns on the T.V., curling up on the couch, and I head down to the basement and listen to songs about California.

Ernest Hemingway sucks. People talk about how great he is, but I bet they’re just saying it ’cause that’s what they were taught. We had to read The Sun Also Rises in Mr. Hartley’s English class, and it’s boring as hell – the guy is depressed and he just drinks and never says anything about it. If I wanted that, I’d go talk to my asshole dad. The guy in the book is miserable because he’s in love with some slut but he can’t get it up after getting shot in Vietnam. I mean, that could be an interesting story, right? But the guy never says anything. What’s the point of writing a book about being sad if you never talk about being sad? I don’t get it.

My band, Anal Skull Fuckers, Inc., we say what we feel. We have a song called ‘Fuck George Bush’ and we come right out with it – we say that he sucks and he makes us mad. If Hemingway wrote a book called ‘Fuck George Bush’ it would probably be all about how the beer was cold or the sun was hot or how he had a headache. All of our songs are under two minutes, so we get straight to the point. And people really like us. Last summer we played a show in Pittsburgh and like a hundred kids showed up. The owner thought we were so good that he invited us back to play this summer, and we also booked a show in Buffalo and another in Cincinnati, so we lined them all up together and called it the Three Holes Tour (get it?).

Anyway, at the end of the year we had to write a paper on Hemingway, and so I told Mr. Hartley what’s what. I said that the book was stupid, and that Hemingway was a pussy who was too afraid to say anything, even when he blew his brains out. We had to cite other works, so I said that the book was as lame as his other one, The Old Man in the Sea, which we had to read the year before in Mrs. Donnelly’s class. I also said that Henry Rollins was much better than Ernest Hemingway, and we should read him instead, because he knew the world was shit, too, but he had the balls to say it.

I got an F, which meant that I failed the class and had to go to summer school, which meant I couldn’t go on the Three Holes Tour. If it were up to me I would’ve just quit school and gone on the tour, because the band was what I’m going to do for a living, anyway, but my mom said I had to stay in school until I was at least 18, which didn’t happen until August. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the band replaced me. They said it wasn’t fair to cancel the tour just because I was stuck in summer school, so they got this kid from the skate park, Stinkfinger Steve, to replace me. Me! The one who booked the shows in the first place! The one who wrote ‘Fuck George Bush’!

So I had to wake up early every morning and sit in a hot classroom that smelled like disinfectant while everyone else got drunk at the skate park and my band went on tour without me. All the English teachers must have had enough sense to go on vacation, because the class was taught by one of the gym teachers, Mr. Jensen. He favored the jocks, and was always showing off his college championship ring, even though he was only a punter. He called me ‘Johnny Rotten’ all the  time, but it wasn’t in a complimentary way.

‘How do you get through metal detectors at the airport, Rotten?’ he’d ask with a smirk and all of the jocks would laugh.

One night I got a call from Tom, and he said that someone from Morbid Records was at the Buffalo show, and offered to print a seven inch for us. But not for us. For them and Stinkfinger Steve.  He said that they’d been writing some songs while they were on the road, and were thinking of changing the band’s name to Satan’s Foreskin. I could hear a bunch of people in the background yelling and laughing. They sounded drunk. I just hung up the phone. If Ernest Hemingway’s band ditched him, he’d probably just sit in a cafe and talk about wine.

I went to the skate park. Roland was there, drinking tall cans of Steel Reserve under the ring of the spotlight. He was skinny and weird looking and only had seven fingers, ’cause his mom drank a bunch when she was pregnant. He had lots of squiggly homemade Nazi tattoos and could always score beer or pot or coke. I told him about the band, and about summer school, and he took me back to his mom’s place, which was above the bar that she worked at. It smelled like cat poop and garbage and everything was covered in cigarette ash. He gave me a tall can and pinched some coke from his mom’s room and said it would make me feel better.

It did, for awhile, but then I started to get panicky and my insides pulsed like a Joy Division bass line. I couldn’t stop smoking cigarettes, even though they were making me nauseous, and Roland wouldn’t stop talking about how much he hated Jews and blacks. The rabbit ears on his TV were wrapped in foil, and the horror movie we were watching came in fuzzy. I drank one more beer and went home.

The front door was locked, and my mom was out at the bar, so I had to crawl in through the kitchen window. I took my songwriting notebook and ripped it to shreds and threw away all of the tapes we’d recorded and hurled my bass out the window. Then I stole my mom’s wine and took all of the pills in the bathroom. Probably about seventy or eighty of them.

I woke up in the hospital. They made me drink black sludge and I threw up for a few hours, and once I was feeling better they moved me to another wing on a different floor, where the crazy people are. I’ve been here two weeks now. Doctors ask me questions all day, but I really don’t want to talk about the band, because if I talk about it, I think about it, and nothing hurts more than having to think about it here, where bug eyed crazies shuffle around and drool all over their green gowns. So I just shrug and say that the world is shit.

Fuck Ernest Hemingway.

I don’t like her as much on Friday nights. She dresses fancier, and puts on too much makeup, and laughs too hard at things I know she doesn’t think are funny. Her hair is puffier and her voice is tuned up an octave, as if she were reading the news or selling something on a shopping network. She dances to songs I know she thinks are terrible, slinking her body around to imply a sexuality I know she doesn’t possess, walking a constant plank in shoes I know she’s not comfortable in. She’s nice to people I know she doesn’t like, and ignores people that I know she likes, and performs for an audience that I know she abhors.

I like her more on nights like last Monday. We sat in the corner booth at Mac’s, the half dozen other patrons lined up at the bar, necks craned, hypnotized by the game. Her hair was pulled back into a simple ponytail, no doubt tied shortly before leaving to meet me with the absent minded swiftness all women had, a simple act that always seemed to catch my eye, their fingers working like a guitarist during a solo. She wore a gray hooded sweatshirt, the sleeves bunched up at her elbows, and apologized in the event that she smelled (she hadn’t showered after the gym).

We filled glasses from a scuffed plastic pitcher of Natural Light and she played Billy Joel on the jukebox. The cracks that had begun to spread prematurely under her eyes weren’t caulked with makeup, and her lashes were like pencil lines, void of the goop that made them look like spider legs. She made self-deprecating jokes, but not the ones she makes on Fridays, the put-on kind that made her sound cool in a backhanded way, and somewhere during her third beer she started talking about exes, but not in the weary, jaded way she does on Fridays. Her stories and recollections informed a little on how the pigtailed third grader with braces had come to be in front of me, no less bewildered and afraid. On Fridays she acts as if she were born into the world as a 24-year old seen-it-all sexpot beyond the silliness of love, gin and tonic in hand.

When I went to the bathroom she had written me a note on my drink napkin, capping it off with a crude cartoon heart, an act that her Friday counterpart would react to with an eye roll and a fabricated gag, a finger pointed in her mouth.

“OK,” she had said towards the tail end of our second pitcher, clasping my wrist, trying for the second time to recompose herself from the type of laughter that induces voluntary face twitches. “You can’t tell anyone…so growing up, Melanie’s dad had this camcorder, one of those, like, heavy, clunky ones. And we used to decorate her basement with all of these gold streamers and strip lighting we’d found, and then we’d record ourselves lip syncing to ABBA songs.”

“That’s awesome!”

“No, it’s not,” she said, her voice muffled by the cotton sleeve she’d buried her face in. She sat there motionless for a moment before breaking back out into fits of laughter. When she raised her head she was sniffling and had to wipe her eyes with her sleeves. “We couldn’t sing, and we’d put on her mom’s makeup … we bought one of those, like, rhinestone applicator things and just covered a bunch of t-shirts. It was an unfinished basement … there was choreography … I need to go home and burn those tapes.” She laughed again, but this time more in control, putting a hand to her chin and shaking her head. It looked as if she was figuring something out about herself.

On our way back to her place, we locked arms, skipping and high kicking in near-unison down the street, oblivious to passersby as we belted out Scandinavian pop songs with all we could muster.

“WATERLOO! COULDN’T ESCAPE IF I WANTED TO! WATERLOO!”

Lying in bed that night, the beer-soaked breeze from her nostrils rustling my chest hair, I felt like I knew her, and we slipped our fingers together, and when I kissed her forehead it didn’t taste like makeup. On Fridays, I find myself licking my lips trying to get the chalky taste out of my mouth, and I’m not so sure.

On Fridays, amongst the crowd, she swats my hand away when I try to hold hers.

You sent your kid here to get an education, and, boy, are they ever getting one. Your daughters are learning about laxative cycles, how to time them right so the body doesn’t become immune to them, and to drink lots of water with their meal – it fills the stomach up faster, makes the food easier to get up and not taste so much like bile. Your sons are learning just how much grain alcohol to put in the punch to get the girls incapacitated but keep them from the emergency room, what to say in order to linger after carrying her mumbling, lifeless bodies into her room, how much is costs t0 have Planned Parenthood tidy up the aftermath.

Many will walk out with an uncredited minor in pharmacology. If your family physician hasn’t already slapped them with a prescription back in middle school at the first site of restlessness, they’re learning about Addies. First as a study aid, then as a party aid. After awhile, they’re learning to empty the RX capsules and crush the little wax pellets to get around the time release. Dextroamphetamine, amphetamine, hydrocodone, oxycodone, benzodiazepine – they’ll know the going street rates and how much you can drink on them before blacking out by the time they’re sophomores.

They learn quickly which bars serve unders, which sorority is the easiest, which fraternities have been slipping GHB into drinks, who’s got the best coke. They figure out a few tricks – washing the X’s off their hands, carrying a flask, memorizing the astrological signs on their fake I.D.’s, how to spot herpes, what to say to the doctors to get bumped up to fifteen milligrams, which gas station caffeine pill gets you through when the script runs out early. When funds begins to dwindle near the end of the semester, they’ll learn to fleece their books for alcohol money, like junkies at a scrapyard. And like junkies, they learn every which way to make it hit a little harder – beer bongs and gravity bongs and keys carved into beer cans. The odds are staggeringly high they will learn all too well about the interest rates not mentioned by the loan sharks offering pizza and t-shirts, or about what withdrawl feels like, or the pullout method as a form of birth control, or the habits of the crab louse, or which HPV types cause warts, or that no doesn’t always mean no.

Your daughters will be taught that they were asking for it – what with the short skirt and the drinking. Your sons will be reassured of the same, told that bitches do this sort of thing all the time, make up lies to cover up their indiscretions, offered up a steady stream of alibis to refute the girl’s story. They’ll all become more comfortable with its inevitability, slowly but surely, until it reaches various degrees of acceptance. There are rules here, after all — if she doesn’t have the capacity to slur a protestation loudly or forcefully enough, then it wasn’t rape rape.

Thursdays kick off the weekend in this town, but Friday still holds it’s traditional place as the steam whistle to signal freedom and abandon, where the real learning takes place. The bustle begins a little after dinner — trips to the liquor store, across the state line to pick up kegs and moonshine, to the apartments of grass dealers slinging Kermit green chronic for fifty an eighth (seventy-five to unwitting freshmen), to dorm pharmacies to get a slice of Adderall re-ups and dentist office Vicodin. They’ll return home to shower and get ready, everyone chatting about frat parties, house parties, their buddy’s bands playing, while they have a few drinks and put together song mixes for the pregame, where they will get themselves drunk and stoned enough to go out and get drunk and stoned.

By the time the carnival spills out into the streets and up the hill to the bars, most of them have drank away the better part of their common sense, what remains easily talked out of by slurring sycophants. Your credit card pays for their shots and five-liquor concoctions, served in plastic, as none of them appear to have learned how to handle glassware. They have learned how to play the game, live within the tribe, and they do it well. Your daughters know that your sons want vacant, seductive promiscuity, and they deliver, their Friday night banter more hollow than a porno, their bodies toned and tanned and on display. They need but sixty seconds of flirtation to get your sons to put it on your tab. Your sons see this willingness to appease, and the game is played, liquoring them up on your dime, every word not a line of communication, but an angle or a pitch, just waiting for a chance to strike. Sons use daughters, daughters use sons. Everyone has an ulterior motive out here, and everybody knows it.

Come closing time, the main drag of red brick is littered with trash and vomit and broken bottles as police lights flicker everywhere, tending to bloodied fight victims, freshmen passed out in the bushes, acts of mindless vandalism. Glassy-eyed drunks, separated from their pack, rendered incapable of rational thought by Jagermeister, lurch through the dark alleyways like vacant zombies, driven only by a search for food, alcohol, sex and sleeping arrangements. Girls sit slumped against trees in sundresses, holding their shoes, weeping aloud with no regard to the public as their carefully applied make-up streams down their face. Couples engage in white-hot screaming arguments that ring out across blocks. It’s as noisy and messy and drug-fueled as any forgotten ghetto. And you pay five figures a year to send them here.

“I don’t think I believe in any of this anymore,” I say, looking out the window, as we pass a cluster of three fast food restaurants, an oil change place, a check cashing center, a grocery store and a Wal-Mart.

“Don’t believe in what?” she asks, effortlessly shifting into second. Back when I used to find things sexy, the ability to drive stick was right up there with protruding ears or knee-high socks.

“Any of it. I don’t want to be a part of our society anymore. I’d rather go insane living outside of it than go insane living in it…look at them…they all look so miserable.”

“Maybe you’re just miserable. You sound like a teenager.”

“Good…that’s about when it started going downhill, anyway. I didn’t want to be a so-called ‘responsible member of society’ then and I sure as hell don’t want to now.”

“So what do you want?”

This empire to meet it’s fate and collapse on itself, weighed down by it’s decadence and false idols, like the Egyptians and Romans before us. To go backwards, so far back that we’re operating under a barter system and waiting weeks and months to hear back from drifting lovers, so far devolved and detached that our society actually fosters the discovery of the self, if that’s possible. To run off into the woods before their jaws get any more of my soul’s marrow. Everyone to strip naked in the streets and fuck indiscriminately like the dogs that we are. To fall in love every single day with someone new who will eventually fade into oblivion, a myth passed down from lie to lie, selected pieces of their fabled soul swirling with my own for the rest of whatever existence I envision next. Something enduring.

“A slice and a beer sounds good right about now.”

“This place hasn’t changed since high school,” she says, shaking cheese onto her sweating golden pizza. The slick tablecloths are checkered red-and-white. The same short-haired Italian woman wearing an apron looks on from behind the counter, smiling whenever our eyes meet. “So you never answered my question.”

“What’s that?”

“What do you want to do…in life?”

“I told you…living the dream as we speak.” I hoist up my limping slice and flash a smile.

“Be serious for just one second.”

“I don’t know…does it really matter?”

“Listen to yourself.”

“Seriously…what happens when your tits start to sag? What if the Fed went broke tomorrow and money became nothing but kindling and toilet paper? Who would you be and what would you want then?”

“That’s a cop out.”

“So is letting the world make a whore out of me,” I say, tipping back the last foamy remnants, twirling the empty and looking at her through it with one eye, her face warped and green through its lens.

I want to kick back my chair and run. Run from everything — her, the old Italian woman, the banks, the cops, the phone lines, the houses, the cars, the shopping plazas, the corporations, the mom-and pop shops, the debts, the credits, the network news, the clothes, the make-up, the perfume, the bad acting, the good acting, the notions of romance and lust, the cartoon hearts, the aspirations to be sitcom characters, the adjective ‘hot’, the office parks, the penthouses, the crack dens, the cannibalism, the greed, the envy, the hatred, the whole fucking charade. I’ll take my chances out in the wild, thank you very much. At least out there they flash their teeth and growl before they jump for the throat. Run, Dan, run.

Instead, I slide my only wrinkled dollar into the jukebox and play Katrina & The Waves, like I used to back in high school, and coax her into dancing about the empty place, gyrating and and leaping around as if we felt like Katrina sang, as if the Italian woman weren’t rolling her eyes, as if we were in love, as if nothing else mattered but right here, in this very moment. As if everything we knew about the world could end right now, and it would be alright.

As the manic song tails off, she draws herself so close that I can taste her breath, butting her forehead to mine.

“Don’t let them do this to you.”

I awake to a combination of nausea and hunger in a room that appears to have been cultivated not from time or character, but rather from the single swipe of a credit card – a mash of silver and black sleekness prepacked to give one an aura of sophisticated adulthood. This has become a sacred moment for me, this initial groggy amnesia that prevents me from knowing exactly who or where I am and how I got there. Searching for evidence of the previous night, I only find the wrinkled clothes still on my body; there are no condom wrappers on the nightstand, no lifeless stranger next to me. I examine the black frames on the walls that encase what appear to be old college roommates, photos that will eventually find their way into a dusty tomb of a storage closet in a few years, provided that life works out. I barely recognize one of them, the one who appears in almost all of them, who I conclude must be the one watching the television I can faintly hear from outside the room.

She has chin length chestnut hair, framing a Roman nose studded with a zirconia most likely garnered on a whim. Two tattoos mark her creamy skin, a tired tribal armband on her left bicep and what appears to be an eagle/falcon on the other. I’d bet money I don’t have that there’s another one somewhere else, probably the first ink she got done, well hidden from authority. Things begin to return to me – Cleveland, Jack, whiskey, his ‘tasty redhead thing’ and her roommate, the one who languidly runs a finger through a river of hair as she sits on the couch before me.

“Where’s Jack?”

“He had to run,” she says, eyes fixed on Regis Philbin’s manic yet folksy ramblings, her elbow resting on an angled knee. “I told him I could give you a lift.”

“Wonderful.”

“Coffee’s next to the fridge, cream and sugar in the skinny cabinet above it,” she says with a droning familiarity. “Also…Jack wanted me to tell you to ‘keep your tool cool’.”

“Sounds about right,” I mutter as she gets up and trudges over to the kitchen table.

“Do you remember my name?”

“No,” I say, taking the first sip that singes my upper lip. “Sorry.”

“Julie. You drink your coffee black…impressive.”

“What the hell is so impressive about it outside of superficial indicators?”

“I dunno,” she says. There is something morbidly appealing about taking these sorts of women down a peg, the faux-punk type that pretend to be bitchy and carefree and something every man aspires to be with. I want to shake the false confidence out of the world around me. No one is buying your act. They’re merely keeping quiet to be polite.

“So…did we…”

“Noooo,” she says, darting her eyes to the floor and leaving her lips puckering in the pronouncement of the elongated ‘o’. “You didn’t seem particularly up to it.”

“Like lack of an erection or apathy?”

“We never got to the erection part…so I’d say the latter.”

“Right,” I say, nodding my head. “So…would we have?” She erupts in cackling laughter.

“You wish.”

“No, I don’t, really…I mean not that you’re…just curious. I’ve been baffled lately as to why any self-respecting woman would take a drunken mess like me home…reinforces my beliefs on sex.”

“Which are?”

“We should either fuck everyone we see or fuck next to no one.”

“Nice belief system.” She curls her knees under her chin and rest her head on them. “I don’t think love and fucking should mix.”

“Why? Because someone broke your heart?”

“My heart can’t be broken…love is bullshit.” She says it sharply, the nerve having been properly hit.

I don’t want to be here, watching this poor, unsure stranger attempt to project her fantasy-self. There was a time when I would feel this way due to a desire to be in the presence of a different, more familiar stranger, one from the past or my mind, but now it just saddens me, because while I don’t want to be here, I can’t think of anywhere else I want to be.

“Get real with yourself,” I say with a nose laugh. “We’re conditioned to want to believe otherwise. We pretend like we don’t because we want to give the illusion that we’re free and to shore ourselves up for failure.”

“You are just like Jack,” she says with a laugh. The comparison jolts me, and the thought occurs that perhaps I’m taking it out on her because I see myself.

“I’m just saying…no one who truly believes that love is bullshit watches Regis.”

“Coming from the unemployed guy who threw up on my walkway last night, I’ll take that as gospel.”

“Believe it, sister.” I raise my eyebrows and crack a smile. Dance, monkey, dance.

“You’re a lot wittier when you’re sober.”

“Direct result of being much more afraid.”

There’s all sorts of ways for our type to express biting and sarcastic views on our sorrow, and we often pat ourselves on the back for the clever but cowardly cat-and-mouse dialogue we construct. But right now I feel like I’d rather just cry into my coffee. That would seem much less sad than this.

“Would you like some breakfast?”

“I left the door with twenty bucks last night and I’m afraid it ended up on your walkway.”

“I can make it here.” She looks like the type who eats out constantly – hungover breakfasts, lunch plans and sushi dinners with suitors, gay friends, girlfriends, etc. I imagine the venture would probably end in porous smoke and burnt eggs, something that I would’ve found deliriously endearing four years ago.

“Think I’m going to have to pass,” I say, dumping the dregs of my coffeecup down the drain. “Thank you, though.”

“Well, do you have plans? We could see a movie or wander around.” This is heartbreaking.

“Uh…to be honest I think I’ll just take you up on the ride home. It has nothing to do with you…I actually enjoy our conversation, and appreciate your hospitality. I just, uh…I’m not going to pretend that I have plans. I’m just in a place where I’d prefer being alone. I’m kind of a wreck.”

“Fair enough.” I’m not sure if her nodding is a sign of understanding or a concurrence that I’m likely insane. “Give me a few minutes to change and we can go.”

The ride home is mostly silent, and I want to apologize for who I am, but I merely nod my head with the beat of the music.

Bartending is essentially watching different manifestations of sadness. Perhaps that’s just a projection of some sort, but it’s all I see. There’s the obvious examples – the old, surly drunk locals that come in at open on a Sunday or the occasional sullen jilted lover. And then there’s the ones you have to study – the drunken strangers hooking up at night’s end, the dolled-up girls trying too hard, the meticulously gelled hair, the drunken explosions of emotion, the desire to escape or to meet someone new to start a spark or fuck or reveal a sliver of yourself to, the need to be drunk and seen and desired and accepted – all of it reeks of lonely desperation.

None of them are saying anything. They talk about how drunk they are or were or are going to be. They argue whether or not it was a blocking foul. They talk about the reasons behind their disgust of tequila. Religion and politics are not to be discussed, nor is doubt or fear. When asked what’s on their mind they often say ‘nothing’. When they are asked how they are doing, they all say ‘good’. I don’t think the world around me shares my disposition, but there is no way that even half of this room is doing good.

Having approached the lull at the end of the night that occurs just before last call, I wipe down the Jagermeister syrup that pools at the bottom of the machine and listen to the conversation behind me. The girl is a bottle blonde who drank three Long Island Iced Teas and two draft beers on her father’s credit card. She came in around ten-thirty with a group of six, and spent most of the early evening flirting with a boy in their group who had eventually left with another girl from said group. Her current companion has been buying her shots for the last hour or so. He came in with a friend around eight to watch the basketball game, and has had a half dozen drafts to go with a half dozen shots. This is his fourth attempt to chat a girl up. Neither tip well.

“I think you’re a really cool chick,” he slurs as I yank the spouts off of the empty bottles. I roll my eyes, but the truth is ‘I think you’re a really cool chick’ and all of its variations actually works. Because it doesn’t really matter what they say. Even the more sophisticated advances – the mutual appreciation of classic literature or the same views on a professor – are still mere formalities. They are no more hollow than this frat guy’s slurring, stock attempt to put his dick in something warm before he passes out or this sorority girl’s desire to right the absence of her father’s attention.

Seth comes downstairs to confirm that we have pot at home, which we don’t, so I pick out a shaggy-haired dimwit at the other end of the bar and give him a round of shots in exchange for a promise to get us high at shift’s end. On nights we work together, Seth and I often find ourselves in the residences of stumbling, barely coherent possessors of soft-core narcotics in the wee hours, shooting knowing glances and smiles at each other as they ramble aimlessly about our bartending skills and the Dutch guys they partied with while studying abroad.

The couple from earlier is making out near the jukebox when I turn up the lights, which always draws all of the patrons towards the bar like insects. I sell to-go beer to people who clearly don’t need it and close out the tabs of those too drunk to remember them and begin spraying down the bar when, like clockwork, Devin appears from the swarm of the patio and sits at the end of the bar. She’s had a habit lately of accompanying me in these last few minutes of the shift, and it always seems to make the bitter taste left by the inanity of the evening disappear. She usually doesn’t say much, being far too intoxicated, but rather just sits while I wipe down the bar. I often lose my train of thought, wiping the rag repeatedly a circular motion over the same spot as we stare into each others eyes and talk  about our days.

“We’re having a late night if you’d like to come over,” she offers, resting her elbow on the bar and leaning her head against her forearm. There’s something lovely about her upper arms. I can’t put my finger on it but they’re slightly bigger than the rest of her frame and freckly – imperfect in a perfect way that makes me smile.

“I think Seth and I are going over to some friends,” I reply, flicking off twenties into piles of five. I would much rather spend time with Devin – even an innocuously inebriated Devin – than with some yuppie stoner I’m using to get high. She has a vibrant soul, the kind one must hide away or have beaten out of them; the sort of teeming, manic max of excitement and confusion that has sadly been disparaged into a diagnosis. It’s often muffled by layers and layers of premeditated demeanors and words and actions, sometimes lost in the shuffle of acting how she feels she must or should, but it’s there, and if one spends enough time with her, it’s easy for the trained eye to see her earnest passion.

The sophistication of our conversations doesn’t lie in their intellectual subject matter, but rather in their depth and immediacy and passion. There is something achingly endearing about watching her grow and find herself, and not necessarily being so smooth at it. I’m not certain if these things are charming because of their reminder of my own past and present, or their resemblance to the human condition itself. Devin is an individual in an increasingly individual-less world, but it seems lately she’s begun to lose her footing.

Uniqueness has begun to fade into the uniform. Only when we’re alone do I get to see the girl I’ve grown to love; in public her opinions have changed, as have her words, tone, inflection, mannerisms. She drinks much more now, tries harder to fit in with the circus, and seems to have grown a thin skin for indications of who she is. I’ve been in this town long enough to know that eventually that person I’m with when I’m alone is going to get swallowed whole. If she ever manages to break out of her cage and fly free, I probably will be long gone. Timing is responsible for a great deal of the heartache in the world.

All of this certainly draws me nearer to her. There is a sense of urgency, a laughable notion that I’m not privy to the same traps or that I can somehow convince her otherwise. The perceived futility of the situation has certainly stoked the fire of my passions, but it also makes me take a knowing step backward. Like her, I can’t allow my soul to bleed into matters of society. My affection feels boundless, but the offer she has just made is not to earnestly enjoy each others company, but rather an invitation to strut and peacock amongst the other suitors she has lined up to vie for her attention.

Her desire to be seen as a sexual being has escalated from calculated innuendo to frank declarations of promiscuity to anyone who has a few beers with her. Even the rest of the staff, who gleefully giggle like seventh graders at the mere mention of sex, have begun to roll their eyes, which is both embarrassing and hypocritical. They are guilty of the same sexually repressed act; Devin’s just more green and dramatic about it. Their state is no different than mine during the early explorations of sex and popularity. I can clearly recall the rehearsed lines meant to let friends casually know that I’d gotten laid the night before, the boisterous, amplified make out sessions and the pronounced exits, knowing all eyes were on the situation. I wince when I think of it all now, the kind of memory that makes you shudder and snap into the nearest thought your mind can find.

I want to grab her by the shoulders, and shout that none of this means anything, and the further you play along with them, the harder it is to break the molds that set in. Soon you’re trapped in the system, well aware of it’s illogical perils but still a slave to it’s mechanisms. The further you stay in, the harder it becomes to justify throwing in the towel, and you will find yourself forced to stand inside the ring and take blow after soul-crushing blow until you’re left a stupefied and punch-drunk shell of your former self.

I want to shake her like I want to shake my former self, like I want to shake the whole world, and scream ‘snap out of it!’ Everything around you is a distraction from the fact that we’re all hiding from each other, communicating uniformly through the system that was built for us. Drinking to the point of sickness and memory loss, fucking soullessly, shrugging off deeper contemplation, feeding not off love but attention, futile attempts to act perpetually cool and calculated and in control - this is what you all want? You’re all happy to be a part of this? And why do you have to take her with you?

But I remember that she and I are no different. I am as caught up in their web as she is, so I merely accept her invented disposition as well as her invitation for coffee in the morning and head off to smoke grass with a pack of uninteresting, shitfaced cogs, where I will sit in the discomfort of a lime green beanbag chair, saying nothing as I stare at a Pink Floyd poster and wonder if she finds the conversations she is having to be as meaningless and performative as the ones I’m sitting through.

I think I am at my most alone, confused, disgusted and afraid when I find myself in the living quarters of women when I am the sole male presence. It’s normally occurred in college, watching reality television and drinking cheap wine amongst brightly colored walls and posters of purple wine bottles crossing over each other in front of a yellow background, obscuring grapes with sweeping cursive French overhead; faux tourism prints purchased at Target and all sorts of photos and knick-knacks promoting an appreciation of wine, sex, excessive drinking, etc.

Glossy magazines litter the coffeetable, all of them plastered with promises of tips on how to be thin and beautiful and fake a way into someone’s affection. This is where it all happens, where they lay around in sweats rubbing lotion on their legs and warping each others minds by further reinforcing all of the manufactured wants and desires. This is where the little pigtailed girls who are missing a tooth in faded family photos go to die. I gaze off at a Marilyn Monroe poster and wonder if they’ve ever stopped to think they’re idolizing the beauty of a woman who killed herself because she was only idolized for her beauty.

We watch the lives of others on T.V. – dating shows, entertainment news shows, Friends – and I can’t help but think that the entire design of the apartment, every decoration, everything about the way these girls talk to each other and present themselves to each other, is an attempt to represent a lifestyle that they don’t possess. When I am alone with them, none of them speak the way they do here in the living room. They are putting on a show for their friends, for the people they live with. One can be truly content with themselves and their lives, so long as they don’t have to gaze at other people’s.

They take turns in the bathroom, preparing their warpaint for the evening’s battle, flicking their hair gently with their fingertips and staring at themselves far more intently and deeply than they ever will at the one they’re trying to look nice for. Text messages are sent to the friends they want to see, the ones they don’t want to see, the boys they want to meet at night’s end, the back-ups, the ones they don’t want to run into, their thumbs pecking away like the beak of a pigeon.

It always seems one of them has a pressing issue with a flavor-of-the-month tryst, and they talk about it coldly, candidly, as if they are in charge. The ‘boy’ in question is static – he merely wants to sleep with her. He plays flirtation games and makes comments to acted disinterested as he slowly reels her in. No more and no less. The complications she is asserting are in her own mind, created because we can only be passionate about that which we don’t possess. She is passionate about something inside of her, not the well-built boy who makes lame jokes.

As purses are collected and we gulp down the last drinks needed to get out there and take the stage, I can’t help but be impatient to escape from the madness of the living room and the bar. I want to get past the shows that tell us who we should want to be, the anticipation of something that isn’t coming because we won’t allow it, the yelling over the crowd, the flirtations, the lights being turned up at last call, the stop at the late night bagel joint and the idle chatter with the vanilla fraternity member one of her roommates has brought back while they chat in the bathroom. I want the comfort of her bedroom, where I can count her eyelashes as she sleeps and wonder if that was really her out there.