by Choire Sicha
One of the women there had gone to professional school with Fred and John, but somehow she and John had never met. Everyone was talking about ordering food for delivery, in a lazy, slightly drunken yet definitely hungry way, and Chad got fed up with it and walked off to find a restaurant. Jason showed up.
After a really long time, Chad reappeared with his own food. Chad’s burrito was disappearing down his gullet in huge, horrifying gulps.
“Oh my God, have you never seen Chad eat?” John asked the table.
A guy named Matt walked into the bar. He was a comedian, which meant that Matt performed in front of other people, for money, as often as was possible, in order to make them laugh. “I hate that guy so fucking much,” Chad said. Disgusted, they watched Matt flirt with Tyler in the middle of the alley-patio.
“How a guy who studies baroque architecture”—for that is apparently what interested Tyler—“can talk to a guy who can only come up with skits about early onset diabetes is beyond me,” Chad said, taking a break from his burrito.
“Let her rip!” John said. Chad was, in fact, just getting started. This weird thing happened where, instead of becoming exhausted by the onslaught of the burrito, something scary happened with his blood sugar and he got more and more manic.
Meanwhile, Matt and Tyler were deep in it. “I’ve never actually had sex like that!” Chad said. “It’s like his penis is coming out the back of his head.”
Fine, John thought. He was disillusioned, after Edward’s refusal to be present, sort of angry, and to his mind relationships had become perhaps more transactional.
“You know what?” he said. “You’re going to see the comeback of the century. I feel like Hillary in New Hampshire right now.”
“Your direct mail campaign is unparalleled,” Chad said. “You’re a long-term strategist. Hours? Days? No. It is months.”
Diego showed up. Chad had gotten him a burrito too. Diego looked on sort of blankly while John was getting revved up to go steal Tyler away from Matt.
“You’re the Neil Armstrong to his Christa McAuliffe,” Chad said.
“I’m the Chamberlain to his Churchill,” John said.
“Too soon!” Chad said.
Fred stumbled by, adorably. “Thank you for coming to my party!” he said. “Oh, I’m a little drunk!”
The party was full; it was unclear where it stopped and started and where the regular attendees of the bar began. A man showed up and took a seat at the edge of the picnic table where John and Chad were scheming. He had gotten a beer and now was reading an exceedingly obscure and storied intellectual journal. Some inexplicable sort of awkward moment happened that involved a recent arrival to the party: some boy who John had gone on one date with, who was now someone’s paramour, and both Chad and John were expecting some drama, some awkwardness.
“And nothing cuts through awkward like John,” Chad said.
“Like a hot knife through cheese!” John said.
“Like a hot knife through roast beef,” Chad said. “Like a hot knife through Tyler Flowers.”
“Hey, you want to see what a long-term strategy looks like?” John said, and then he got up and went to greet the recent arrival, who was just then talking to, yes, Tyler Flowers.
So he hugged the guy, who had a bunch of money in his hands. The guy looked awkward. “Oh hey, how are you,” said the guy. Then John and the guy and Tyler Flowers were in a little conversational triangle.
“He is wading into a situation that one would normally avoid at all costs and that is his audacity,” Chad said.
Chad sat and watched this all going on like it was on TV.
Then Matt, the sketch comic, came up and sidled into the triangle—right between John and Tyler.
John was telling a story. “Look at him, he looks like Rumsfeld in those meetings,” said Chad.
There was incredible body language going on. For instance, John’s body was ejecting the sketch comic from the group, by keeping a shoulder somewhat in front of the sketch comic and by turning directly toward Tyler.
“He has to deal with three people while subtly destroying two of them,” Chad narrated.
Tyler was clutching a beer. The sketch comic now had one leg bent, using the knee next to John to form a barrier between John and Tyler Flowers.
John was talking, and the sketch comic was pressing his own pint glass viciously against his own face, in a strange and angry gesture. It was sharp-toothed animals in a tank. Then a fifth person entered the group, and polite introductions were made, and the tension evaporated and John saw that he was done. He rejoined Chad at the table.
“Ya gotta give ’em a break!” he said. Then: “Smokesies!” he said, mocking Jason.
Chad and John watched Tyler, apparently delighted by some new arrival. The sun had begun to set. Everyone had had more than a few. “You know what the problem is? He’s too easy,” John said, watching Tyler. “It’s like Russian roulette. He could go home with him or him or him. I’m rather disappointed.”
There was a young guy in some sort of soccer shirt and white, white pants, very flash and sporty. “You know who that guy is? A coin dealer,” Chad said. “He just bought three million—in coins! He’s like the owner of John’s company, an ‘independent real estate operator.’ All on his own!” He said that sarcastically, meaning the opposite. At this time, the number-one predictor of future wealth was current wealth and, therefore, inherited wealth.
It was by now eight thirty p.m. The twenty-year-old NYU student that Fred was sleeping with showed up. Trevor was redheaded and pimply and dressed in what could only be described as a costume. Little tiny shorts and boots and a gray shirt with black pocket linings and sleeves and collar. He looked ridiculous yet brave.
“Only four and a half hours late,” John said.
The kid came up and sort of mumbled at Chad, who was aggressively, rudely polite to him, and the kid mumbled something unintelligible, and then picked up a chair from the table and carried it over to where Fred was sitting.
It was now fully dark. Over by Chad, Matt the sketch comic was down on the ground, putting himself in the yoga posture called “side crow,” balancing on both hands, elbows bent ninety degrees, his face toward the ground, his knees twisted to the side and supported on one elbow.
“God!” Chad shouted in disgust.
LATER THAT NIGHT, they went to Sugarland. Somehow, John started dancing with the little twenty-year-old, the one who was seeing Fred. It got very flirty, for no good reason. He was drunk. Well, they were all drunk.
And then that weekend John and Fred were in the park and John had gone to show some picture on his mobile phone to Fred, but the phone was open to Facebook, and there was a friend request from the twenty-year-old.
“What’s that?” Fred asked. “Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know, that’s so weird!” John said.
IT WAS EASIER to not have a home in the summer than to not have a home in the winter, due almost entirely to the weather. Not having a place to live wasn’t “bad” in itself. But people wanted to know why, and then they could say, “That is why you have no home, because you did that thing”—went to jail, or hurt someone, or became addicted to drugs, or went crazy—and then they could think that reason was why such a thing would never happen to them.
JOHN HAD A week of vacation. This was rare for him. As an employee, he was guaranteed a certain allotment of vacation days, something like ten of them a year. But it was pretty common practice for employers to discourage workers from actually using them. An employee would put in a request to use them on certain dates, and sometimes the boss or owner would tell the employee that they couldn’t be spared then. It was also common for these earned vacation days to expire: that if you didn’t use them within a certain amount of time, like within the calendar year, they were no longer available.
There was also an arcane process through which, when employees worked on extra days, such as weekends or holidays, they were to accrue “comp time,” and then they could use this to not work on workdays. In practice, this rarely happened. In any event, with the tension of the last two months, John hadn’t had a vacation in ages, and Timothy did not deny him.
Instead of going somewhere out of the City, as was the usual practice, John stayed at home. Kevin took a night off from staying home to come out—he and Fred and John went to see an orchestra play for free in a park, and this night proved so much fun that they went to the Phoenix after.
At the bar they got beers, and Fred was flirting with some guy from overseas, and then Fred came over and whispered in John’s ear: Tyler Flowers is here, with some guy. So John grabbed Kevin and threw him in the corner, and they started kissing urgently. I think Tyler saw us, Fred whispered into their joined faces. All night they ignored Tyler, and later, from home, John sent Tyler a message. Do you wanna get together? Yeah, that sounds like fun, what day works for you? Tyler asked. And then John realized he had no money to go out on a date and didn’t even write him back.
In fact, John had run out of money quite completely. But he finally wrote back and told Tyler he was going to watch a tennis event on TV, at Sally’s, with Rex and maybe some other people from work. It would be a “Wimbledon party.” It wasn’t so much a Wimbledon party as just them sitting there watching the Wimbledon men’s finals on TV. Wimbledon was a prestigious annual tennis tournament held in another country, in which two very rich players would face off for a trophy and two checks: one big, for the winner, and one less big, for the loser. The winner got more than a million dollars. And Tyler said that sounded good. So the night before, Saturday night, John got a Facebook message from Tyler, and it said, I don’t know if you were pulling my chain, but I’d really love to see you again and to go to your Wimbledon party. By then John had forgotten all about it. So John made up some excuse, saying he had to watch his nephew or something. But he texted Tyler afterward, saying, wow, amazing match, what did you think? He got no response.
It was thirteen days before payday. “I think I’ll be able to get myself out of the woods soon,” he told people. The secret? “Not eating, not drinking, smoking less, not going out and cooking at home. It’s a very miserable life, but I know how to do it.” That was the plan, but it wasn’t really going to happen. He spent most of the week with people buying him beers, sinking into a pleasant summery haze, out all night, a little green in the morning, feeling all thin and empty.
JASON FILLED AN awkward place in Edward’s absence, and John was studiously pretending Jason hadn’t made a confession of affection. They’d get over it, right? Time would pass! One night Jason and Fred and John went out. And Jason was talking to some stranger, and something about Edward’s boyfriend came up, and John said, oh, wait, you know Aric? And this guy was like, oh yeah, Aric, he’s doing this and that now.
Aric! That was his name. I had no idea that Edward’s boyfriend was three-dimensional, John thought. People never brought him up. Edward never talked about him. John had always thought he was kind of imaginary. He’d seen his Facebook and found him on the Internet’s burgeoning if simplistic repository of all searchable public images. So he’d seen the face but nothing else. He’s the enemy of my life and I don’t even know who he is, he thought.
WHEN NEW BUILDINGS would create public outdoor seating, or the City itself would put benches in parks, this furniture would be designed in such a manner that its structural elements would prevent people from using it for reclining fully. These elements were not such radical interventions that one couldn’t sit down and rest or eat a lunch! But they would include crosspieces and armrests or what have you, or even more obvious decorative elements, regularly repeating, dramatic and intrusive enough. The value then was that it was more important that benches weren’t taken up with sleeping people than that people without homes might come across somewhere in public to sleep.
GROWING UP, JOHN had only really been to one beach. His family never went to the beaches near them but drove through the City and out to its beaches beyond that, where rich people lived. That’s when the family was doing very well. They were rich, or close to it, before his parents died and all the money went with them. They had a beautiful big house.
So his beach experience was specific. You would go there, you read, you relaxed. The adults would have a few beers.
Then the remaining family didn’t do that anymore.
Toward the end of his vacation week, John was invited out to a beach house by some older friends—guys who were coupled up, who didn’t go out to the bars much. The house was on a long skinny sand bar, basically, that ran much of the length of the seaside of a larger island, which itself jutted out into the ocean from the City. Sally was coming too. John left the train station on Friday at nine a.m., and he got in a little bus shuttle from the train station to the ferry. All of the passengers were men. He thought they were mostly old, and not attractive.
Then he got to the boat to the island—actually, two boats, for two separate towns. One line was for slick-haired young people, mostly men, and the other was for older people and women. The other ferry full of pretty guys was not going where he was going, and he was with the older people who were not wearing nice clothes. And so he got on his boat and was a little sad. The boats left right next to each other from a little harbor, and as they went out in the bay on their twenty-minute voyage, they got farther and farther apart. John was calculating the walking time between the boat’s destinations in his head. He pegged it at about thirty minutes. He sat in the back of the boat, out in the air, as they skimmed out over the shallow blue bay.
His hosts, the couple, greeted him at the dock. It was just a little walk to their house. There were no cars on the island; it was too small. The house was a two-story wood shingle thing, little, with lots of glass, set down in a little forest. It cost twenty-six thousand dollars to rent for the season, which was fairly cheap for the island. In the house they were fussing, cleaning the pool, weeding around the tomatoes in the backyard, talking about the brunch menu for the next day. John had a few beers. One of the hosts, David, took John on a bike ride, down the barrier island but away from the town with all the nicely dressed men, on a hilly, twisty little wooden boardwalk through a dark and green and gray forest, and John fell off his bike and David kept riding, off into the curvy woods. They were barefoot, and John was a little bloody when he got back to the house.
They decided to take naps and then go over to the town where the rich and pretty people lived. At five thirty, John woke up his hosts; they were snoring on the couches.
They set out and walked and walked; the roads were thin at first, maybe four or five feet wide, and made of brown wood. Then they stopped, suddenly, in a little field of tall grass, phragmites. In some parts of the world, the tall thin reed was used for roofing. Here it just blew in the wind and at the top it gave off seeds, like a wheaty flower, and its rhizomes branched and crawled down to the bay and drowned. Beyond the reeds, there was a holly forest and some scrubby pines—originally from all the way around the world—and bramble and impassable areas, hiding stomped-down hutches where deer slept in the day.
John saw some good-looking guys, and he said hey, and they said hey.
They twisted and turned through the forest in the sand, and they came to the next town, where the houses were bigger and the people were younger. It was well still light when they showed up at the center of town, which was built around a little harbor. There was a bar there called the Blue Whale, and John thought everyone there was very old. He had a gimlet. And then he thought maybe the guys weren’t so bad. Maybe, he thought, he would have sex with an old guy, something he never did.
“Never talk to anyone with a backpack,” David said. “A person with a backpack is a loser.” The presence of luggage meant, he explained, that they didn�
��t have a house on the island and were merely passing through. There were all these rules that his hosts imparted to him, about who to talk to and who not to talk to and why. There were more gimlets. And then younger guys showed up. But the long summer day had ended and it was almost dark, and then they all went to the grocery store and got steaks and shrimp, and then it was dark and they were walking, stumbling really, all the way back through the winding woods. It was ten at night and darker than it ever was in the City, and everyone was starving but the dinner was fantastic.
So what am I going to do tonight? John asked. One of his hosts threw a copy of a glossy little magazine at him. It had event listings. The DJ for the party at the club in town that night was Daniel, of DList infamy, who threw parties in the City that John went to all the time. It was to be an “underwear party.”
David gave John some advice. Look, John, here’s the deal, he said. Everyone comes here every weekend, starting in May. Now we’re a few months in. Everyone from the rich town is going to come over here; this is the night they decide, hey, let’s go over to the poor dumpy town for once.
A little after midnight, John set out alone for the club. It was very near the house. This bar was sort of perched on stilts and up a steep wooden stair. There was a line outside, and at the front of the line, each person was stripping and throwing his clothes in garbage bags.
When you stripped down to your underwear, you didn’t have any pockets. So John took six cigarettes, some cash and a lighter and stuffed them in his underwear and entered the bar.
That was when he realized that he thought every party should be an underwear party. It gave him this feeling of: This is who I am. But also: This is what I’ve got. He felt like the bodies were a kind of currency, which heightened tension between people, but at the same time it fostered a sense of relaxation, with all that mystery eliminated.
