Book Read Free

The Millennial Reincarnations: A Novel

Page 5

by Daniel Mark Harrison


  He’d had it all figured out back then: by his late-twenties, he’d be some already lucky-as-fuck caped crusader descending in regularly from the heights of his Park Avenue penthouse upon the city’s nearby trendsetting parties adorned with beautiful scantily-clad women who he constantly – albeit reluctantly – was obliged to detach from the lapels of one of his many $15,000 Armani suits.

  By his thirties, forget about it … hell, by then, by say, some point after his crazy birthday party in Rangoon, soon he’d own a yacht stacked with fine wines from the early 80’s and maybe that multi-million-dollar airplane he stole from the dictator which could fly New York to Los Angeles– nah, fuck that – New York to Tokyo non-fucking-stop. And still he’d make the LA stop just for kicks anyway whereupon a crowd of glamorous supermodels would be cheering and screaming upon his arrival like a bunch of crazed Catholic schoolgirls. That was the future for which he has always known somewhere deep down was his true destiny. And he’d have it by thirty. He used to count the days down till the end of his teenage years in anticipation sometimes. That’s how sure he was of it all.

  So his thirtieth birthday had felt all-day-long like one of those comedowns Ryan only ever got after a weekend spent awake for 72 hours partying on ecstasy and Charlie and alternately watching porn and jerking off and drinking straight from the bottle and going downstairs to check that he was still alone in the apartment. And to top it off he was a little drunk, but not in a nice way – in the way that makes your head throb and dulls your vision, when all that will rescue you out of it are amphetamines (which he couldn’t afford right now). And … there were no fucking cabs. So much for the plane ride to the Playboy mansion or the Gulfstream to Geisha-heaven: here he was now, work done, the drinking with his boys from work now all done too, and he was trying to get round the chaos of this city, cheeseburger in hand from the Deli round the corner as requested by the girl he’d been banging a little here and there and who he hoped to get maybe at best a quick lackluster hand job later on.

  For a minute Ryan reexamined his life as it was this split-second: he was standing on the curbside with the wrapped steaming hot hamburger bun in hand, swapping it over between left and right hand so it didn’t burn his finger tips. He had gone home first and got dressed before heading on out, so he was in his $99 denim pants and a soaked-through $139.99 Banana Republic sweater that covered an old t-shirt displaying the words D$p$nd$ntly W$althy scrawled across the front chest.

  What is more, Ryan’s 14 month-old Converse sneakers had frayed the back of his denim pants over the past few months, since the pants were a little long but he hadn’t had them taken up. It was the sort of sight that he would have once found satirically hysterical once upon a time when he’d been 15 – a man in his 30s this pathetically unaccomplished and showing it in just about every way possible.

  But alas, what had once been a joke on some other poor schmuck was now a prank life had ended up pulling on his sorry ass. How could it be? Well, he’d had a string of jobs, each of which he’d brought slightly less value to than the last. He hadn’t gone to college like his Dad advised. He lived in one of the most expensive cities in the world. In which case, thought Ryan despondently, the logical question was probably how could it not be any worse than it was already? With his dark wavy hair and green eyes and high cheekbones and gym-worked upper-body he could at least still find a girl to get fall in love with him for a couple days and get a horny fuck, and he could even keep her around a few weeks for a sympathy fuck when they began to just feel sorry for him. He’d have to move on to someone else eventually – once they had moved on to someone else, that is – but it would serve the purpose of fulfilling one of his primary needs in life.

  Suddenly a white bulb dinged on over the top of a yellow car the distance. He strained to follow it, the lonesome free cab careening down the avenue, buried somewhere behind the frantic mid-night traffic. Ryan gesticulated wildly with both arms at the halo of the yellow cab in the distance while the rainfall intensified. He prayed that the last twenty bucks for the month before his paycheck came through tomorrow that was now in his pocket would get him as far as the East Village. Asking her for the cab fare … he didn’t want to think of how that would affect his chances of getting any later on. Asking a girl for money, especially a good-looking one, before you are dating: the surest way to end it there and then. The surest way. Like his life itself, tonight was turning out to be all such a close call between total blowout failure and plain fighting’-to-stay-in-the-game survival. Survive, gotta survive. In a way he was being chased down an alley by a malevolent dictator, just not one he could see, and just into a jet, and definitely not in Rangoon!

  “Tenth street and first, East Village,” said Ryan, catching a quick chance to climb into the shelter of the cab when it slowed but didn’t ever totally stop. “And please! I know it’s pissing down but hurry – I’m late for my girlfriend.”

  The girl Ryan was maybe, maybe not going steady with and was now finally headed en-route to see was called Alyssa. She was not his girlfriend; she wasn’t even his friend, he suspected. She was the kind of coy and boho-sophisticated beauty from California Ryan never imagined he’d find for himself at all. For a start, she was way too smart for him. But she was hot as hell. In that sense, maybe, they matched, he figured. But soon, like all the others, he knew, she’d figure out he wasn’t up for the intellectual endurance of anything as complex as a relationship. That was usually a matter of 2, maybe 3 months.

  Ryan had met Alyssa in a nightclub about six weeks ago on the Lower East Side, so it was getting freakishly close to the cut-off point now. The signs were showing, he knew it: they still had sex, but not every day any more. But he wasn’t going to let that point of rejection come today, on his thirtieth birthday. If there was one thing he could bring into the present with him from his teenage fantasies then Alyssa was it, no matter what it took – a cheeseburger, a cab ride through the city he couldn’t really afford tonight or even a soaked-though shitty Banana Republic sweater – the fact was that Ryan would pay the price of temporary humiliation for the purpose of having at least some sort of meaningful sense of pride in his existence left over.

  For a moment he recalled the night he had met Alyssa. It was a fond memory; the way every night was when he met a new girl. Nah, there was something more special about Alyssa than the others, but it was still sweet when they had no idea who he was – that was always the best advantage of all in fact.

  There was none of real life to deal with in that moment when they had met, it had just been pure make-believe and total imagination, and just a lot of pretend stuff like it is when you’re a kid. More recently, it had gotten more real between them, which Ryan suspected was going to turn out to be bad but unavoidable, ultimately. But that first night they had gone back to hers, stumbled past her roommate’s door a little too loudly and fallen into her bedroom, opened a bottle of wine and then opened another, and maybe a third – he couldn’t remember now – supplementing the wine with a few stacked lines of coke and a couple pills Ryan’s boy Mike had brought in from Maine that weekend, and then made sweet love high as kites and drunk as loons and loud as cows until one in the afternoon the next day. That night had been one of the best in his life, in fact.

  Ryan figured Alyssa had used him for sex just like he had then. But it was vocational appeal on which you were most often judged by girls in Manhattan, none of which he had to sustain anything longer time, however much he might like to do so. To be picked by such a perfect member of the opposite sex, especially in somewhere as trashy as the nightclub in which they had met, had been remarkable enough. But Alyssa had obviously caught on to their apparent social divides recently – for the last couple weeks, it seemed she was just using him for nothing other than companionship on one of the rare nights she found herself alone.

  Of course, Alyssa was anything but Ryan’s girlfriend – she was barely even his friend. But the truth was that there at one in the morning, tired, drunk, and p
oor on a Thursday night and having been reduced to delivering a cheeseburger like an illegal alien on his own thirtieth birthday just so that he might stand a chance at fucking a chick he had barely made out with in the fortnight since he had screwed her like an animal – to call a girl like Alyssa his girlfriend made him feel less of the surprise failure that he so obviously was.

  Ω

  As soon as he got inside her apartment Alyssa brushed the cheeseburger and fries out of his hand. They split open hard on the floor.

  “Wha’ the –” said Ryan.

  “Happy Birthday, dumbass!” shouted Alyssa, smiling in that impossibly wide and wholesome way that made her high cheekbones rise and teeth sparkle white all at once.

  Ryan looked up to the ceiling. Hanging from the walls of her small living room was every letter of the phrase she uttered aloud, painstakingly painted in multi-colors on the back of separate wooden plaques:

  H-A-P-P-Y B-I-R-T-H-D-A-Y

  D-U-M-B-A-S-S!

  Below that, on the table, was a two-tiered ice-cream cake with a large dollar sign in icing on top, and beside the cake a card was leant against a just-opened bottle of wine and two still-empty glasses. There was a neatly packed couple ounces of coke besides the wine. By his estimation, all this must have taken at least half a day’s preparation and definitely cost more change than he had in his checking account right now.

  So much for his theory that this was somehow a case of her using him …

  “Ally, what the fuck?” was all he could manage.

  Tears of laughter began to form in her eyes. “You seriously thought that on your birthday I’d insist you bring me a cheeseburger … and not just that, you actually bought it too –”

  Alyssa was so pretty when she laughed, he thought. And right now she was laughing harder than he’s ever seen someone laugh.

  “ – And you b-brought it here! Ryan, where the hell part of the world do you come from?”

  “Umm, outside Chicago, I guess –”

  Alyssa wiped a small tear from her eye, which had formed in between cracking up. “C’mon, let’s have some wine and coke, shall we. I told Lauren to stay-the-fuck away tonight. Or else she might hear me screaming again …” Alyssa gave him a wink over the back of her shoulder as she walked to the table to unwrap the coke.

  “I-I … guess. I guess I was wrong then,” Ryan said slowly. “I figured we’d kind of drifted apart the last couple of weeks, that was all.” In truth, he was still recovering from the shock of seeing how much work Alyssa had put into preparing something for his birthday. It kind of moved him in a way. He couldn’t remember anyone ever making such a big deal out of birthday since he was five.

  Alyssa steadied her laughter and looked at him directly in the eyes. Her hands cupped his cheeks lightly. “You boys, you think just ’cause a girl ain’t fuckin’ you all the time. That everything is all over, or that I wasn’t interested, or whatever it was your dumbass brain concocted. But I could care less about fucking, Ryan. I mean, it’s nice … when I’m horny. And I hope we get to fuck a lot more – now we know each other better. But it’s been fun this month, you know … just hanging out. I mean, I …” Alyssa straightened up, and pushed him lightly against his chest.

  “I’ve really got to meet you and know you and like you and stuff and it’s been cool. You’re cool. Even if your job sounds like … hopelessly boring. And if you’re not Gordon Gekko. Hey look – I wanna tell you something. Something about what happened to me, well – nearly to me. To the sister who had my name before I did, if we are being honest here.

  “My Dad used to be a crazy alcoholic. He would drink all the time – I guess that is where I get it from.” Alyssa went quiet for a second. “Anyway, about the time I was just tiny my parents called me Leiticia. That was gonna be my name.

  “But they – my Dad and my sister that is – and her friend, who was just fifteen or so at the time, they all got in a car crash. She didn’t make it that day, but her name did. That’s why I got it.

  “So that’s why I am Alyssa now, even though I’m more like … Leiticia. OK? I don’t wanna talk about this anyway more, and especially not about my father right this minute. I just wanted you to know something important about the person I am.” With that, Alyssa kissed Ryan softly over the crown of his forehead.

  Ω

  For Ryan, who only moments ago had imagined the distinctly unappetizing fate of attempting to arouse a bloated, sexually disinterested twenty-two year old with cheeseburger breath, the sight of this young nymph in her tight jeans and pink and white blouse declaring him cool and enunciating her intentions to let him sleep with her more often from here onwards was like an unimaginable stroke of luck striking him like a bolt of radioactive lightening that he was sure was about to knock him unconscious unless someone filled him up with half a g of coke soon.

  “This. This really means allot to me, y’know,” said Ryan.

  She raised her eyebrows mockingly at him. “Yeah? So that’s why you were out with your Wall Street buddies all night shooting kamikazes and tequilas?”

  He had been out with friends, but it wasn’t quite the wild fiesta he’d made it out to be. It had been shots, sure, but down at PJ Clarke's, and anyway, it had been with Dave and Brad who he went with for some form of alcoholic ending to the day every other night.

  Ryan looked at Alyssa’s maroon-glossy lips and sharp, pointed features. She was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen in his life; he was sure of it.

  “Seriously. It’s more than anyone’s done for me in a long time. I honestly can’t remember the last time anyone did anything like this.”

  “C’mon,” said Alyssa. “Let’s stop standing around getting all mushy and let’s just drink, smoke, sniff and fuck …”

  Ω

  Two hours later, lying in bed, his penis sore from ejaculating in her three times already as her pussy had contracted in bursts and spasms of semi-squirted female cum, Ryan suddenly realized that even the actualization of all the fantasies he had once had of being a big-shot womanizer in a five-figure designer suit wouldn’t ever come close to this because what he felt right now was the closest he had ever come to loving anybody. Alyssa laid her head on his chest and breathed in hard. He in turn sniffed that flower-fragrant brown hair and kissed her forehead. Somewhere inside, he was still painfully aware of the essential divide between him and his newfound love. She had a college degree – no, two college degrees – while he was a ten-year-ago dropout.

  Lying there high on weed and coke and exhausted but still physically aroused by the wetness of her leaking pussy on the sheets underneath them, it occurred to him that if only he had stayed the course and not greedily devoured the excesses of Wall Street so young, that he might have had a girl as classy and educated as Alyssa sooner. Beyond that, he was terrified of the day that he was sure would come when, like all others of Alyssa's educated class, she would suggest, ever so hesitantly but all the more persuasively, that he abandon his unremarkable career trying to make it rich quick on the Street and go back to college. He began to contemplate his answer to this question seriously, and all the various excuses he might invent, when Alyssa jumped up and pulled her laptop over the covers from down beside the bed.

  “Shit! Sorry, baby, I said I’d send in this thing on Apple to Streeter before the morning.” Her eyes focused on the page in front of her as her delicate fingers click-clicked. Streeter.com was the Wall Street news site Alyssa worked for as an Associate Editor. It was about five months old already and it was staffed full of bright, hungry kids like her, some of whom had even turned down offers from prestigious companies such as the Wall Street Journal and Forbes just so they could break stories that moved markets that ordinary folk at home actually read and get loads of personal air time on national network stations such as CNN and CNBC as guest speakers.

  Ω

  Somewhere in the middle of typing, Alyssa stopped and glanced at Ryan. Oh shit, he thought, the Coke making him all the more paranoid: here
comes the college lecture. But instead, she went back to clicking on her keypad.

  “What is it?” he asked her. He could feel the coke thumping around now, and his mind was the more alert. He had seen it in her eyes there. It was something …

  “Nothing,” said Alyssa, her stare focused on the screen while her fingers and their painted nails tap-danced over her MacBook’s illuminated keypad in the dark of the room like twirling anorexic Russian ballerinas. There was almost a metronome-precision to the rhythmic pounding that produced the sentences that rolled across the screen and alternately lit up her pretty face in glowing shadows that pirouetted round her cute button nose.

  “Gina, babe – c’mon.” Just get the conversation out the way now, he figured. Shit, he had known there would be some catch tonight.

  “Nah, forget it,” she said.

  Now he was certain it was college. Ryan’s heart dropped and he sighed inaudibly. Better to get this conversation over with now, he supposed, than leave it for another time. At least it was his birthday; given that Alyssa had gone to such painstaking detail into making it something of a once-in-a-lifetime event, perhaps he’d get some slack. Fuck. How many times did Ryan have to say it to everyone: he didn’t want to go back to college … ever! He had hated Illinois State and he was almost certain that CUNY – if he’d even get in – would get the same reaction out of him. Anyway, college cost a fuckin’ fortune today. He would make it, maybe not today, but one day. He would become a Master of the Universe, he told himself, the coke pumping up his false sense of confidence.

  “Is this about how I should go to college and stop what I’m doing? I know; I’m a lousy stockbroker, so far. I only earn fifty grand a year and I’m thirty. I know – pathetic! Hell, I’ll probably only be at this firm for another ten months or so anyway, since I’ve already worked at five others and I’m only thirty. I know that too. But I did good at this once, back when the tech markets were booming and all. You don’t remember that, cause you’re just twenty-two still, and that was ninety-nine, but I was making big money then, like ten, fifteen grand a month, and I was just nineteen. Imagine that baby, nineteen and close to a fifth of a million dollars already … I am good at this. It’s just that the market has been dead the last few years, and before that. Well, it wasn’t the same kind of market I was good in. You got to work on the Street to know it, baby.”

 

‹ Prev