Losers

by Matthue Roth

  Actually, that was a lie. I was curled up in an armchair big enough to hold three of me, leafing through ancient hardcover books and glazing over the words. Sometimes, I would stop on a random complicated word, epistle or catatonic or kumquat, and try to put it into the context of my life. I mouthed the word several times, tasted the way my gums moved. I imagined saying it to Devin Murray, to Bates, and then to Margie.

  I glanced up from the book. The words were blurring together, and the language started looking way too twirly and snakelike—too much like doodles, not enough boxes. In the window, a figure hurried past in a brown-and-white restaurant uniform and a short blond bob cut.

  “Margie?” I called out, forgetting the barrier of glass.

  I hurried out from the store, tried to catch up with the vanishing figure, but she had already turned the corner. Meanwhile, the clerk from the store had called after me, seeing as I was still holding the book that I hadn’t paid for. I sighed. Time to pull the no-speakee-the-English routine and get out of it.

  “It’s called college,” Vadim said to me in school, between classes, when we finally had a chance to meet up. “You go away to college, and you start acting like that. It’s all a side effect of smoking too much pot. People act crazy for a year or two, realize their parents aren’t around to make sure they’re dressing normal and scoring good grades, and then they either get their act together or they flunk out.”

  “Is that how it works?” I said. “Why are you thinking so much about college all of a sudden? I feel like it’s been a year since we hung out.” I checked my class schedule in my head. It was Friday when I’d gone to his house, and now it was Wednesday. Not an eon, but long enough for my life to completely change its essence and purpose.

  “A year? You’re so dramatic, Jupiter. I’ve just been up to my own stuff.” He cracked a hint of a smile. “Hey, what’s up with your voice?”

  “My voice?” I said. I cleared my throat, gurgled my saliva, and said it again. “What’s wrong with my voice?”

  “Your accent,” he said. “You sound like an amoeba with laryngitis. Why you are talking so funny?”

  Vadim’s grammar slip-ups—how did I always notice grammar slip-ups? Was I that paranoid about my own?—were so rare an occurrence that I had to stop talking totally. I realized we were speaking English even though it was just the two of us.

  “It was at the party Friday night,” I said. “I was talking to this girl, and she told me—”

  “You were talking? To a girl?”

  I couldn’t tell whether Vadim was being sarcastic or not.

  “Not like that!” I said. “I mean, I was talking to girls all night, Vadim. I told you—you utterly should have come.”

  “Yeah, right,” Vadim said darkly, as though I had just suggested that he donate a pint of blood to the South Lawn kids.

  “But, listen. The party was nothing—it was just school kids, you know? What you really need to see is the life downtown.”

  It was like I couldn’t stay away. Even though Vadim begged off (there was an Odyssey of the Mind meeting after school, or something like that), I had to plunge back in. Last time, I’d left the coffeehouse well before sunset. But this time, I wanted to stay there. I wanted to watch the hours turn.

  If the night had gone on for twenty years, if the darkness stretched out forever and became the only experience I ever experienced again, it would have been enough for me. I left the coffeehouse long after dark, an eternity after school had let out.

  Once again, I hadn’t spoken to anyone there, other than a brief, self-conscious, spoken-into-my-chest “small house coffee.” I didn’t need to. Just being there, existing in a universe with them, was enough for me—at least for now. I had the rest of my life to overload myself.

  There was a second dusk that only happened downtown, after nightfall, a gradual twinkling of the stars that signified the city’s descent into night. It was the transition between the dinner crowds and the nighttime crowds.

  This was the kind of place where Saturday nights happened every night, where people lived every night as a joyous occasion and a potential party, not just as a time to eat dinner and finish homework and text message your geeky Russian friends. They went out as a matter of principle. Nothing was a spectator sport.

  My shirt was feeling thin in the rapidly cooling air; my hands were full of coffeehouse flyers that advertised events I knew I would never attend.

  And I decided then, at that moment, to come back as often as I could, to walk around and exist downtown as many nights as I could sneak away. It didn’t matter if all the concerts were twenty-one and over, or if the people at the cafés looked straight through me. I just wanted to be a part of their world, to absorb everything I could and find someplace that was more real and more lifelike than the Yards.

  At home, I expected to find a note on my bedroom door, as was my parents’ usual ritual when they were too mad at me to talk. Since I’d already told them they weren’t allowed to speak to me in Russian, letter writing was the most obvious and expected tactic that they had left. I braced myself for their shaky, uneven handwriting on dollar-store Post-it notes.

  Instead there was a letter, typed on an official-looking letterhead, stuck to the rusty nail that protruded from the door.

  I ripped it off my door and, holding it in both hands, scanned it for meat—cutting through the big vocabulary, looking for the words that mattered. The letter was addressed to my parents, from the management company that owned our factory. It was written in thick English, in the impenetrable language of tax forms and immigrant registration documents. But it was still understandable. It said that—good news!—the market for our product was expanding and, hence, the needs of production for our factory was expected to double. They needed to install an additional assembly line, and thus, due to the increased need for space, the family currently residing there, the Glazers, might be asked to vacate their private quarters, and, just in case, they should take an inventory of all personal belongings, gather them together, and start packing up.

  The trouble with being idealistic was that everything that didn’t fulfill my ideals felt like a compromise. Wanting to be a downtown, bohemian, intellectual non-Yards resident was one thing, but once I got there, once I freed myself of the Yards, what was I going to do? I sat for hours in cafés with all these amazing people—I was sure they were amazing—but, beyond knowing there was a bigger destiny out there for me, what was I doing? Being a musical connoisseur and talking about indie punk band concerts was great, but with no money, there was no way I could actually get into a concert. And I kept waiting for that girl to talk to me, that unspeakably cool girl with cellophane eyes, cream-soda skin, and a native fluency in the love clichés of rock song lyrics, but she was really taking her time showing up.

  In the meantime, North Shore was doing its best to keep me distracted.

  Breasts. I was surrounded by breasts.

  Indian summer hit that weekend, and on Monday, girls’ clothes were coming off like old dead skin. Tank tops. Spaghetti straps. Short shorts, bodysuits, tube tops, capris. In town, girls wore all different kinds of clothes. The coffee-shop girls still weren’t talking to me, but each time I walked in, I got more approving nods in my direction. Each shy smile that I flashed at a girl, I got closer and closer to becoming convinced that not only did she see it and understand its meaning, but she was one step away from coming over to talk to me, swap iPod playlists, and take me to the always-deserted downstairs seating section for a heavy, sweaty, full-on make-out session. After all, if high school girls made out all the time at school and parties, then why wouldn’t college girls (at least I assumed they were in college) be into making out at coffeehouses? They dressed differently—less obviously sexily, in washed-out fall colors and loosely hanging T-shirts and cardigans—but wasn’t that just because they were more slyly sexy, because they already knew what they wanted and they knew how to get it? North Shore girls were less experimental, more obvious in t
heir intentions. The other day, Devin said hi to me and I turned in her direction and she was wearing this shirt that was basically a sports bra—you could totally see her belly button, a stomach as tight and taut as a movie screen—and I couldn’t even muster the tongueular skills to say hello back.

  All of this seemed to come at a fast, clashing redirection to the phantoms of intellectuality and artisticness I’d been chasing around. The other day I had spent two hours in a downtown art gallery doing not much but staring at the paintings, treating the place like it was a museum. There was a girl sitting at a desk (tied-back black hair, sleeveless dress) who kept shooting glances at me, as if to say that it wasn’t a place for museumgoers like me. I found a flyer for a concert the weekend after next, this band I’d never heard of. All the flyers were made from linoleum woodcuts, a full round moon and the silhouettes of a werewolf and a country preacher. They looked unbelievably cool.

  I started to rethink Devin’s invitation to watch movies with a bunch of friends Friday night, which I’d just turned down. I started to wonder if the girl of my dreams wasn’t just as likely to be hiding underneath a set of perfectly globular, slightly protrusive breasts, inflated slightly by a mercilessly tight baby-tee, still olive from a lingering August tan, lurking backstage at a concert of a band called Prowler.

  But first I had to get through the week.

  Monday night was spent at home with my parents, the farthest scene from a Prowler concert that I can imagine. I picked at my dinner, not in the mood for it. Not in the mood for any of this.

  “The warehouse it was a crazy-people place today,” said my father. “Two new factory want to order from us, and we are already behind on three factory order. If we say yes, we lose the order we already have. If no, then we may not to get another chance.”

  “Yeah, Dad,” I said, rolling my peas through the spears of a fork. “It’s a conundrum.”

  I used the word even though I was well aware that he probably didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know why he was talking about this, not with me at the table. I mean, my mom already knew all the details, and he had to know that I didn’t care. And it was true; I really didn’t. What was it going to affect me whether we moved to somewhere that was even colder and trashier than this? If there was anywhere in the entire city worse than this place, it was hard to imagine.

  “And the owner he say, if too much business, they may need more space.”

  “Big deal,” I said. “So, they buy another warehouse down here or something. Maybe they’ll have another family move in and be the foremen of that place. Maybe they’ll have a hot daughter or something, and there’ll finally be someone for me to hang out with.”

  Wow. I couldn’t believe I’d said that. The words hot daughter—even if my parents, with their limited English proficiency, interpreted it literally—were dangerous words, a veritable invitation to inquire into the workings of my social life. It would be just about the worst conversation topic ever…except maybe for the subject that we were currently talking about. It was moments like these that turned me into a believer, that had me reaching out with my mind and trying to conjure God. Please, change the conversation topic. Please, change the conversation topic…

  My mother glared sideways at me for a second, but then she put up her hand to keep me quiet. Her gaze was locked on my father.

  “Vaclav, what are you talking about?” she said. “What do you mean?”

  He bowed his head, staring the coleslaw on his plate head-on.

  “I am thinking they will ask us to move,” he said.

  The next morning, I walked down the dirty, aluminum-can-lined block as usual, and waited at the graffiti-encrusted bus shelter. My parents paid next to nothing to the company for renting the warehouse, but they also earned next to nothing. It was a trade-off. They would never have a chance to earn enough to get themselves off their feet, but they would never need to, either.

  The bus came. I dropped my token into the slot and probed my wallet, counting the amount of tokens I had left. Four. Two days before I would have to ask my parents for money to buy another pack. Even at the reduced rate, it was still eleven bucks a week they were paying. For me to get to school. For me to keep on living.

  And, with my new little secret, I was using up bus tokens even faster.

  I saw Margie four more times in the week after my coffeehouse revelation: once at a free They Might Be Giants concert at Penn’s Landing; once at a different coffeehouse, leaving just as I was going in; and twice on the bus home from one of my nights out in Center City. Calling them “nights out” was a bit of an exaggeration, since I had to be home for dinner at seven, but going downtown, even for an hour or two, counted. It was enough of an escape from the Yards to count. My parents weren’t taking the news from the notice well, and were talking to the management on a daily basis to try to work it out. I wanted to be as far from those conversations as possible without crossing state lines.

  I couldn’t be sure that it was actually Margie each time—bumping into her in the café, I’d only seen the back of her hair and caught a faint whiff of a perfume that smelled like something she would wear—but it had to be her at least one of those times. Besides, actually talking to Margie wasn’t what I was after. Right now, having a crush was enough.

  Downtown life itself was fabulous. I was learning more and more about how to be an eccentric college student each day, and I hadn’t even passed ninth grade. Every afternoon after school let out, I sat in one of the coffee shops or diners that lined South Street, eavesdropping on conversations to learn the language and cadence, making my single cup of coffee last for hours. I would go into the music stores, run-down independent places, their walls and windows plastered with concert posters for bands I knew nothing about, and listen to the strange music that the clerks played when nobody else was in the store. I would set myself up in one of the anonymous and dusty aisles in the back—bluegrass and old radio shows were my favorites—and sit there for hours, my eyes closed, absorbing the songs. At first it was about the lyrics, those half-swallowed, half-mumbled words of the language I was trying to learn, but the more I got into it, the more it became about the music. Every so often, I would stick my head out, walk up to the front desk, and ask one of the unspeakably knowledgeable clerks (who looked tortured and introverted so that I both identified with and lived in fear of them) the name of the band that was playing.

  “Oh,” they’d say casually, “it’s the Dead Milkmen.”

  “Oh, it’s Sui Generis.”

  “Oh, it’s Flossie and the Unicorn. Why, what do you think of them?”

  That last part—the question part—they never said, except in my head. It was my one wish, above everything else, that I wasn’t the only human being ever to have this bonding experience with music, that someone else was just as lonely as I was, sitting one aisle over in the Cajun/zydeco section, and one day we’d meet. I’d say the first line of a Sui Generis song. Then she (it was always a she) would reply with the call-and-response next line, and we’d never stop talking for the rest of our lives.

  But every time I made my mind to get up and look in the next aisle over, it was empty.

  In school, I sang songs between classes, walking from one class to another. I felt cool and eccentric, batty in that way that I was so cool that I could do anything I wanted. I got stares. But, for the most part, they were we-think-you’re-alright stares. I didn’t really care about anyone who stared at me in another way.

  Of course, there were the South Lawners like Bates and his cronies, who skipped classes like stones, who looked at me askew no matter what I did. I knew Bates was angry about my escape from him and his staff, but he was biding his time for a rematch, I was sure. I was lying low. I tried not to let him or the rest of them get to me. Along with most of the rest of the average kids, I walked past them as quick as I could, pretending they didn’t exist. I sang the words a little softer until I was whispering, and then I whispered a little softer until I wasn’t d
oing anything.

  The whole time, I was hoping, kind of in the back of my mind, that somebody would recognize the words. No shit! they’d say. Is that a Dead Milkmen song? Man, I love the Dead Milkmen. I can’t believe somebody else knows—

  The only problem was, nobody else ever did.

  7. INBETWEEN DAYS

  “Dude,” Vadim said to me one day after school, “you will not believe these guys.”

  “These guys” were his geek posse. Since I’d been escaping downtown, I hadn’t really gotten an update from Vadim and his new life for a while. Now he was giving me the full-blast catch-up. It was his only real acknowledgment that it had been a while since he’d seen me on the bus home.

  “Between them, it’s, what do you say, a whole cavalcade of knowledge. They’re, like, a superhero team. This one girl, she does freelance work for the CIA because she is an insanely good hacker. They don’t even know she’s too young. All she had to do was give herself a Social Security number for cashing her checks. Another girl is plotting the entire surface of Mars using fractal geometry. It’s a whole culture of nerds. And it doesn’t even matter that I don’t speak good English. This guy Felix, he came over from Brazil three and a half years ago, and still doesn’t speak a word of English. But his math skills are so phenomenal that the administration doesn’t kick him out, they just let him take six periods a day of math. Everyone’s like that. They’re all like that. And they’re tough, too. When Freshman Day comes, the South Lawn won’t touch these guys at all. Now I officially have a free ticket out of getting beat up when everyone else is getting beat up. So what do you think? Isn’t that amazing?”

  Vadim sat on the edge of the swivel chair in his room, expectant, his mouth hanging open, waiting for me to respond.

  “Did you call me dude?” I said.

  “Jupiter, did you listen at all to me?”