by Adam Wilson
Lawrence is in love with the camera. He’s in love with himself in this moment. He’s waving a middle finger and glugging from the pint of bourbon we bought back in Manhattan after being pink-slipped. He hands me the bottle. I sip and then offer it to our homeless friend, who declines.
“Been straight since summer of ’69,” he says. “I got weepy at the moon landing. It’s been clean living ever since.”
“Tell the world,” Lawrence tells the camera phone. “I’m more sinned against than sinner! Wall Street has taken our salaries, but it will never take our souls!”
The first bar on the other side has a hundred beers on tap and overpriced wings dripping with watery hot sauce.
“The blood of the factory-farmed chicken,” Lawrence says, licks his finger.
He saw some documentary. He’s wearing my button-down, bar appropriate. I’m down to a T-shirt. My arms aren’t muscled like Lawrence’s. They’re bone-thin, sun-sheltered, ghostly white.
“Eat up,” Lawrence says. “Gather strength for the bacchanal. And would it kill you to join a gym?”
“Never had the time,” I say, and finally feel the truth of my new freedom: the onslaught of open hours, days unfolding like an origami fortune-teller.
I’ve always been a workaholic, the product of a siblingless childhood. So many nights spent in midwestern solitude, TV busted and the world half a dream with its sensory feints: the cricket-chirp quiet and grease-burger air, sun over cornfields goldening everything.
But math felt solid, composed of proven truths. I pored over equations, spreadsheet cells, PowerPoint presentations; Xs, Ys, and dollar signs; worked my way through business school and onto Wall Street. I tried to move figures so that everyone would benefit—clients, Lehman, plus the public—as the market shifted and swerved. Now our work’s been exposed as faulty, a mess of fragile systems, theoretically unsound. I feel implicated, even if the orders came from on high.
Tonight’s the result: postponing despair by pounding Jäger bombs and listening to Lawrence rant.
“Fräulein!” Lawrence calls to the waitress.
“Don’t be an asshole,” I say.
“Get over the six million already,” Lawrence says. “Germany is a forward-thinking country. Fräulein!”
He’s standing, waving.
The waitress saunters over, used to types like us. She too is costumed, a facsimile Bavarian wench. Her breasts are pressed between suspenders, barely contained. They hang over her corset like cartoon eye bags.
“My name’s Kim, I’m gay and taken, and the bathroom’s to the left,” she says, anticipating all of Lawrence’s requests.
Kim flashes a ringed finger. It shines blingy in the bar light.
“Conflict diamonds,” says Lawrence. “How many have been killed in Sierra Leone so you can rub your queer lifestyle in our faces?”
“It’s cubic zirconium,” Kim says.
“Chill,” I say to Lawrence, and touch his arm.
Kim walks away smiling, impenetrable. I imagine Kim and her fiancée drinking OJ in a breakfast nook, laughing over egg whites, reading aloud from the Sunday paper.
“I should have gone into commodities,” I say. “The American dream is orange juice.”
“This is a shit restaurant,” Lawrence says. “The Internet lied to me. There were no hot wings in Hitler’s time. Am I the last of the true believers?”
Still, we tip well.
“We’re going to meet some artsy chicks,” Lawrence says. “Commune with them in class solidarity. We can name-drop that kid from high school who went to Wesleyan and plays in that band now.”
“Alec Emmer,” I say. “It’s not a band. It’s a collective.”
“He used to be a faggot,” Lawrence says. “Now he gets more pussy than anyone. There’s a lesson there.”
The lesson involves buying tighter pants than we normally wear.
“Can I help you?” the salesgirl asks.
She’s thin and curveless; confident, Parisian-striped, no older than nineteen. Silver eyeliner’s painted in raccoon streaks that triangulate toward her ears.
“Outfit us,” Lawrence intones. “Armor us in a garb fit for dance halls and bohemian debutantes.”
He adds, “Make us look gay, but not too gay.”
“I can work with that,” the salesgirl says.
The fitting-room mirror makes me look ugly: top-heavy, visibly acne-scarred. Or maybe I was already ugly.
Lawrence grins, flexes. He helps me button the too-tight pants, adjusts my bulge. It tingles. I have an urge to hug his body to my body, not in a sexual way, but out of what feels like purer longing; I want skin on my skin, hot breath up my nostrils, fingers easing the knots in my neck while Lawrence hums Easter hymns and I weep into his bosom.
“Lawrence,” I say, and squeeze his arm. His bicep bubbles under my thumb.
Lawrence ignores whatever it is I’m doing.
“You want it to be horizontal in these pants,” he says. “And semistiff. It’s a visual mating call. Tuck it up there. Show some shaft.”
When the salesgirl sees our new outfits she says, “Oh, no, that doesn’t work at all.”
She points, shakes her head. “Let me see if we have that in a size up,” she says.
“I knew you’d say that,” Lawrence says. “I’m psychic. I bet I can guess the first three digits of your phone number.”
“And if you do?”
“You find a friend and meet us at that place on the corner with the blue awning when you get off work.”
“That’s not for four hours,” she says.
“Seven one eight,” Lawrence snaps.
“Area code doesn’t count,” she says, but Lawrence is already gloating.
He calls her Raccoon Eyes. Does a leprechaun dance, arms flailing, knees akimbo. Sings the first verse of “Rocky Raccoon.”
“You fucker,” the salesgirl says in the way of someone charmed despite herself.
We go to the bar with the blue awning. Sit in a corner booth and pretend the girls are coming. Lawrence texts his dealer. I put my head on the table, feel the oil against my forehead. Wish I’d taken more comp-sci classes in college. Imagine what my office would be like if I worked at Google: pastel walls, bay view, maybe one of those yoga-ball chairs.
“Goddamnit, Alejandro, answer your phone,” says Lawrence. “The revolution can’t be fueled by blood and beer alone.”
Two booths over, our former waitress cozies up to the woman who must be her girlfriend. The girlfriend is tattooed, tiny, terribly pretty, with a half-shaved head that flatters her perfect facial symmetry. Kim’s still in her work costume. They hold hands under the table, lean into each other, nuzzle necks and ears. If this were a movie, I’d buy them a round, wave from a bar stool, whisper, “Men might be scum, but some of us believe in love.”
“Pick up your goddamn phone,” Lawrence says.
It’s five hours later. We’re on Lawrence’s roof, overlooking the promenade. Bridge lit up, and Manhattan just beyond, so close it seems fake, a full-scale model. One of those romantic New York tableaux that only makes you feel alone, partnerless. The stars are out. Lawrence yells, “The stars are out, motherfucker!”
He raises his arms like a football ref signaling touchdown.
His girl laughs. She thinks we’re losers in a cute way. She says, “You guys are such losers.”
The cute part’s implied.
My girl stares at the water, grimaces, exhales, boot-crushes her cigarette, gives me a look like “What?”
I don’t know how or why or when we decided which girl was whose, but Lawrence got the flirtier end of that bargain—Rocky Raccoon.
She’s on his lap, leaning to tap into the ashtray, showing off tiny, braless breasts in her T-shirt’s low V. She’s dressed the same as before, but she’s lipsticked now, a blood shade of red. Big lips stain her cigarette, dwarf it. Lawrence wraps an arm all the way around her waist.
“So you guys know the band Lazy Rat?” he says.
“Lazer Rat,” I correct.
“The collective?” Rocky asks.
“Same thing,” Lawrence says. “Anyway, Alec Emmer from Lazer Cat’s gonna come by in a bit. He’s an old friend of mine.”
I give him a look.
Lawrence adds, “Of ours,” indicating me with a weak nod.
A memory returns: Lawrence spray-painting “Retardo” on Alec Emmer’s car.
“I met Alec Emmer once,” my girl says. It’s the first thing she’s said in an hour. “I gave him a blow job after a show at Brooklyn Bowl. He had the loveliest dick I’ve ever seen. Just perfectly circumcised.”
“Where was I that night?” Rocky asks.
“With your ex,” my girl says. “Remember him?”
“Don’t remind me,” Rocky says, smiles, pats Lawrence’s head.
“Are some dicks imperfectly circumcised?” I ask. I’m actually curious.
“Yeah,” Rocky says. “Uncircumcised ones.”
“Too bad Emmer’s a homo,” Lawrence says, annoyed. “Or you all could have married him.”
He pulls Rocky closer, claiming her.
“Let’s go inside,” Lawrence says.
The girls have never seen a banker’s place. Didn’t know bankers even lived in Brooklyn. Rocky has a tiny anarchist’s A tattooed on the back of one elbow. Lawrence’s home is alien, exotic, erotically out of line with her professed values. It has leather furniture, colored lightbulbs in the lamps.
Rocky inspects every inch. Like an amateur anthropologist. Runs a finger along the edge of the flat screen, blows dust from her finger. Opens cabinets, caresses cookware, cuddles the couch pillows.
Lawrence sings, “Rocky Raccoon, came into my room, and proceeded to feel up my trinkets.”
He shows off his collections: samurai swords, gator-gutting knives, fish-gutting knives, bear-gutting knives, machetes, Nazi armbands, a Civil War musket, fraternity paddles used for beating freshman ass in a strictly heterosexual manner.
My girl’s unimpressed. She sits silent, condescending, opening and closing her cell phone, unaware that she’s my girl.
Her name’s Nina. She’s a freshman at Pratt. They both are. Studio art majors. Never heard of Rothko. Lawrence shows them a first-edition monograph, purchased for big chowder at the rare books place on Eighth Avenue.
“I don’t go for that mainstream stuff,” says Rocky. “It’s like, painting is so old-fashioned. All those giant canvases covered in semen. We get it already, you know?”
Lawrence—whom I once saw weep loudly in MoMA at a giant red dreamscape—raises his frat paddle at Rocky in a gesture of half-kidding disapproval.
“Ew, you were in a frat,” Nina accuses. “What a cliché.”
“A communist brotherhood,” Lawrence replies, and unhooks the full-length mirror from the wall, balances it atop the coffee table, lays out fat lines of what I know, from past experience, to be fairly weak cocaine.
Now Nina’s interested. She takes a picture of the coke on her phone. Says she’ll use it for an upcoming mixed-media project that explores the relationship between commerce and chauvinism. Kneels over the mirror, huffs her rail in three phlegmy snorts, stands, wipes her nose, licks her fingers, slicks her bangs back.
It’s the first time all night that I’ve seen Nina’s face. She has high, rouged cheekbones and hardly any nose at all. Maybe the product of Waspy stock—a Greenwich escapee, guiltily funded, brow-pierced and playing at gutter punk. Her green eyes shine under Lawrence’s mood lights. She wears spandex and a loose V-neck that barely covers her butt. The phrase “Kill Me I Love Love” is stenciled on the shirt in Magic Marker. It looks like a nightgown. Her hands are Sharpied in fading Xs.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” Nina says.
Lawrence puts on music, embarrassing music, club trance from his raver phase in high school.
“Are you kidding?” Nina says, but Lawrence isn’t listening. He’s in private concert with himself: head bopping, legs kicking as he makes inadvisable spins and gyrations.
“The beat is my only friend!” Lawrence yells. “The beat is alive in Brooklyn! It’s my heartbeat, in sync with the nation. America, I’ve given you everything, now give me music!”
Rocky’s inspired. She slinks up to Lawrence, circles him, twiddles fingers, bites bottom lip, bends low, slithers. Lawrence pretends he doesn’t notice. Just shakes his head to the beat and yells, “Brooklyn,” again.
Rocky grabs his butt cheeks, presses groin against groin.
“Cigarette?” I say to Nina.
We climb the fire escape to the roof. I go first, then offer my hand from the top of the ladder. Nina ignores my offer. She pulls herself up with some difficulty.
I sit with legs over the edge. They dangle semidangerously, swaying like loose chimes. Brooklyn’s below, a concrete cityscape littered with construction sites. Over in Fort Greene the new buildings are rising, high condominiums that ugly our skyline. I could fall right now, drop three stories from this townhouse roof. It would take only a moment—no real hang time. But in that moment the air would push against me like a set of strong hands.
“I’m sorry I’m no fun,” Nina says.
She sits behind me, cross-legged, safe from the ledge and the reach of my arms. I turn to face her. Her knees buckle out in bony contortion, stretch the fabric of her spandex.
“I’m not really such a bitch,” she says.
“You don’t seem like a bitch,” I say, and it’s true. She just seems young, appropriately guarded, stuck on Rocky’s sleazy date as the air turns cool and the drugs don’t work like they’re supposed to.
Nina shivers. I hand her my new sweatshirt.
“Thanks,” she says, and pulls the strings so the hood closes over her eyes.
I toss a bottle. It breaks in the street below. I stand, pace in circles, pinch my forehead, reseat myself. Nina opens a beer but doesn’t sip.
“That coke is weak as fuck,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s why he buys so much of it. Eventually it’ll get you high.”
“If we’re ever allowed back inside,” she says, and cracks a smile of annoyed camaraderie.
I’m used to the situation: Lawrence boning with abandon; me outside, forcing banter. Maybe Nina’s used to it too.
Without prompt I picture Alec Emmer hovering above her, dick dripping semen on her unblemished face. It’s a vulgar image, received from pornography, the international symbol of dénouement.
“Did you really hook up with Alec Emmer?”
“Nah. I was just fucking with you guys. I’ve never even heard of him.”
“Serves Lawrence right,” I say, and inch toward Nina.
I’m close enough to put a hand on the small of her back. This is the last thing I should do. She’s not even twenty. Coke sex is always sad. I probably couldn’t get it up.
“It’s my fault,” I say, unsure what exactly I’m referring to.
“What’s your fault?” she says.
“Everything,” I say.
I want her to say no, no it’s not, it’s not your fault, baby, nothing is your fault.
We make eye contact. Or maybe I force eye contact. Maybe my hand moves just a tiny bit toward her. Maybe there’s a ripple in the front of my jeans, an odor of longing coming off me, a lip lick, some giveaway tic, evidence that I’m about to lean in.
Nina scoots in the other direction.
I start to say something about life, the way things change and the past gets pushed aside, yet still, yet still, we’re haunted. And we fight through the sludge, and we fail, keep failing, just keep fucking failing.
But I sound like an asshole.
Nina stares at the bridge. Cars squeal and honk. She says, “Speak for yourself.”
Lawrence and Rocky emerge from the fire escape. They’re in matching, monogrammed bathrobes. An old Christmas gift from Lawrence’s ex, Inez, the only girl who ever got his jokes.
Rocky’s face is red, colored from exertion. She smiles,
sucks a cigarette, squeezes Lawrence’s hand.
“What have you two been up to?” she asks conspiratorially, as if we’re the ones who’ve been sexing.
Nina and I say nothing.
“What happens on the roof stays on the roof,” Lawrence says. No one laughs.
The sky’s gone cloudy, stars under cover. We’re heading toward sunrise, but the night hasn’t lightened; no pinks yet or earthy coppers. I’m cold in my T-shirt. A couple of wet drops touch my neck.
Rocky leaves Lawrence, hooks elbows with Nina, ushers her across the roof for closed cabal. Lawrence walks to where I’m standing. He puts his hands on my shoulders like he’s asking to slow dance. He says, “Let your horrible pleasure fall.”
Some Nights We Tase Each Other
In college I read Karl Marx and snorted cocaine. The Marx I didn’t much understand. The cocaine contextualized.
I lived with four other guys. We weren’t a classless household. Some were subsidized: parentally, governmentally. Others worked campus jobs. This one roommate—Spine, we called him, because he didn’t have one—was from that town in Connecticut where the mansions come pre-equipped with bowling alleys.
Spine was our procurer, doled to the rest as he saw fit. He took payment in the form of term papers. I was caught in an ouroboros of needing drugs to complete Spine’s papers, and writing papers to pay for drugs. Spine was getting Cs across the board but didn’t care. He had a gig lined up after grad, at a cushy desk selling commercial real estate for some blueblood uncle.
One night I’m battling a twenty-pager on labor theory when I hear this noise downstairs—breaking glass. It’s about two a.m.
Spine bursts into the hall holding a baseball bat. He’s wearing boxers and a bathrobe. Through his open door I can see two girls tangled, loose limbs dangling. One girl has toenails painted in rainbow. The other has an ankle tattoo of an ankh. Neither girl is Spine’s girlfriend. It’s another injustice, though I’m not sure for whom. As far as I could tell, Marx wanted women to be passed around, shared among workers.
“The fuck was that?” Spine says, tightens his grip on the bat. The others emerge. Mike F. brandishes the police Taser he bought on eBay. Some nights we Tase each other. Donny fans his butterfly knife. Mike C. cracks his knuckles. More noise from the living room, a loud scurrying.
