by Iris Smyles
“I can’t understand it. I have tons of music, but there’s never a thing I want to hear. What is all this stuff?” I said, motioning to the mess of records without their jackets, loose CDs, and tangled tape spilling out from a pile of broken cassettes. I decided on Felix’s Cool Hits Volume IV finally, because it was already in the stereo. Daft Punk’s “One More Time” came on and I sat down, feeling suddenly sedate. It was the song. I’d heard it so many times, always falling for Felix’s reasonable plea. “Come on, just ‘one more time’?” Felix would say when I’d suggest he turn it off.
We sipped our beers and listened to the music in silence. “Would you like to have dinner with me?” The Captain asked.
“I’d love to!” I said, standing.
I went into the bedroom to get dressed. I put on a yellow long-sleeve floor-length evening gown with some kind of bamboo shoot print on it that I like because I think it makes me look like Phyllis Diller, and a pair of fake-diamond clip-on earrings that used to belong to my grandmother.
“How do I look?” I said, coming out of the bedroom.
“You look great,” he responded, lethargic again.
“So do you!” I said excitedly. The Captain was wearing jeans and a blue Friendster T-shirt that his older sister, my friend Caroline, had given him. She’d started working there after she moved back to San Francisco to live with her older brother whom I hadn’t met. “He’s sort of the black sheep of the family,” Caroline told me. “He’s a lawyer.”
We decided to go all the way to the restaurant downstairs, which I like a lot because they let me bring my backgammon board when the place is not too crowded and because, during the winter, I can get really dressed up and don’t have to worry about walking in the cold but just treat their dining room as an extension of my living room.
The restaurant had a two-for-one martini special, which I took as a sign that it wouldn’t be around much longer. In the brief time I’d been living there, three separate restaurants had opened and closed in the same space. This restaurant had an elaborate menu of specialty martinis. We started with two each. Then we ordered a bottle of wine, because one mustn’t drink hard liquor during dinner—it’s coarse—and waited until after dinner to order our second and then third pairs.
We ate and he told me about his current job search and how he was thinking of maybe going to college after all. He was only twenty-two. I’d forgotten. Then he told me all about www.spaghetti-dog.com, a webpage he’d created, which was just a picture of a dog covered in spaghetti that his aunt had sent him. The Captain had shown it to me earlier. “She’s single,” he said, as if that explained it. It was getting thousands of hits every day.
I sipped my wine and told him I was very excited to be dining with such an illustrious figure.
He shrugged. “It’s just for fun. For Christmas I built her a template, so she can upload additional spaghetti-dog photos whenever she wants. She’s decided to start a greeting card company,” he said, perking up so much that he almost looked alive. Then he told me about his erratic sleep habits and how that’s why he’s so pale.
“Like a wampire!” I said, pronouncing wampire with a w a few more times. “Wampire . . . wampire.”
Then he told me about Diane Sawyer coming to see his grandmother’s duplex where he’d been living for the last six months on the Upper West Side. How she might buy it.
The Captain went on about Diane Sawyer’s visit, and my attention went in and out as I tried to gauge whether or not he liked me. We had been seeing an awful lot of each other lately, and he did offer to help me with my website. But then, he’d never really made a move. Or had he? Perhaps he had and I was just too drunk to remember.
We had already slept together a bunch of times, though all we did was sleep. When we arrived back from Atlantic City a few weeks ago and he was too tired to get the train all the way uptown, I let him crash at my place, on my bed, with me. But it had been perfectly chaste. We were still drunk and slept in our clothes on top of the blankets. When we woke up we took off our shoes, ordered food from the diner around the corner, and watched Attack of the Killer Tomatoes on my bedroom TV. I have it on VHS.
I’d been at Lex’s ’80s party with The Captain the night before, and after Lex had finished deejaying, in a fit of old times’ sake we decided to go to Atlantic City. The Captain had never been and taking him seemed a good enough reason to go so we left straight from the club, me riding shotgun in Lex’s 1972 Buick Riviera and The Captain listless as ever in the backseat.
We picked up a six-pack on the way out of the city but it wasn’t enough and by the time we got there, my drunkenness had plateaued. I sat with Lex at the roulette table the way I like to, let the scantily dressed waitresses bring me screwdrivers, and tried to recharge. I was having a great time until one of the guards poked me on the shoulder and said I couldn’t sleep at the table. Apparently, I’d dozed off.
The Captain was hanging out by the slot machines, so after dozing off a few more times and being poked awake, I made my way over to him. The Captain sat me on the chair beside him and put my hand on the slot machine lever to steady me before I nodded off again and got yelled at again.
We decided we should go for a walk in order to oxygenate my blood, while Lex finished his banking. I called the casino Lex’s bank because he routinely returns to either withdraw money or deposit his most recent earnings.
The Captain and I swam through the ringing bells and flashing lights, the sounds of our footsteps absorbed by the carpeted floor. “I love casinos!” I said excitedly, awake again. I know it must seem like I’m always saying things excitedly, but the fact is, excitement is the emotion I experience most frequently. Excitement and shame.
“Can you smell that?” I said, inhaling deeply. “The smell of failed romance, of desperation, the city that never was!” I said, looking around and quoting from that Burt Lancaster film. “I love Burt Lancaster. He has the weirdest ears.”
We exited the gambling area and began walking through a large atrium with a great fountain in the center. We took seats along the ledge and were talking about something or other when I fell down. The Captain started to laugh. “I lost my balance,” I explained from the floor.
“But you weren’t even moving. You were sitting down!”
“The rotation of the Earth,” I said, getting up. “It caught me off guard.” I resettled myself, then fell again. “Damn! You didn’t feel that?”
Driving back from Atlantic City, Lex hugged the large wheel of his Buick, The Captain slept in the backseat, and I played with the stereo, searching among Lex’s cassettes for Christopher Croft. The sun kept rising higher and higher, and then we stopped at Burger King for breakfast.
Lex was tired but in a good mood because he’d won. Being with him when he lost was much different, and I was grateful for his good fortune. Lex dropped us both off at my place, now just a few doors down from his, before checking his car in a parking garage.
The Captain and I piled onto my bed with all our clothes still on and slept through the afternoon. It was hot, the start of summer, and my apartment was blazing. When we woke up, we watched the movie—the tomatoes rolling devilishly toward their prey, cars exploding, helicopters crashing, sauce.... The Captain complained of the heat, and I suggested we strip down to our underwear. I wouldn’t look at him if he didn’t look at me, I promised, and then I got some ice trays from the freezer and emptied them over him.
“What are you doing!”
“It’s only water! Don’t be such a baby! It will evaporate after it melts.” Then I lay down beside him, and we floated on top of the bed of ice like fresh lobsters until the end of the movie.
“Do you think your sister would be upset if she knew how much we’ve been hanging out?” I asked over our after-dinner martinis.
“I don’t know,” he said and shrugged lethargically.
“You have a way with words,” I said, taking another sip.
The Captain never says much. A life at
sea humbles you, I suppose. That’s what I was thinking, but then I remembered he’d never been to sea, that I’d only started calling him The Captain because he wore a captain’s hat during a game of gin rummy at his grandmother’s apartment one time while she was out of town. And also, because when I invited him to this Halloween party I was throwing on Reggie’s roof and asked him what he would come dressed as, he said, “a yachtsman.”
It was a barbeque and the night was cold and windy though still pretty warm for October 31st. May was in town for the week and we were exhausted, having gone out every night since she’d arrived, and in full costume the last three. On Friday I was Angela Bower from TV’s Who’s the Boss; May was my mother Mona. Saturday, I was Hamlet alongside my friend Jacob who was Ophelia; May was a sexy hoagie. And then Sunday, the big finish: May and I half-heartedly got into our Cheech and Chong costumes while really wanting only to go to sleep.
Taking on so many roles can really do it to you. Though May gets tired all the time and has been known to take naps right in the middle of conversation, sometimes with a drink still in her hand, I’ve only been tired a few times in my life. Like I said, mostly I’m excited. But this was one of those few times. I was so burnt out that on our walk over to Reggie’s—the two of us, bearded and mustachioed—I wondered aloud if we shouldn’t just turn around, just not show up to the party at all.
“We have to go,” May reminded me, “Reggie doesn’t know any of your guests.”
I sighed. It would be too cruel to ditch the party after I’d insisted he let me throw it. “I know, I know. . . . ”
Trying to rally, I sucked down a beer and smoked some weed as soon as we arrived. Despite my valiant efforts, however, I was soon overtaken by sleep. After a mini-nap in Reggie’s living room I did finally make it up to the roof, to the party, which was then in full swing.
Reggie, dressed as Lou Diamond Phillips in Stand and Deliver, was manning the grill. May was off in the corner talking to a guy named Terrence who was dressed as Roy of Siegfried & Roy, post-attack. He had a stuffed white tiger attached to him and blood everywhere.
I caught sight of The Captain standing by himself at the northeast corner of the roof, looking off into the distance as if he were standing at the prow. He was wearing a turtleneck shirt and his captain’s hat. And his face was steeled against the wind as he stared out, eyeing icebergs presumably. I went over and told him about my favorite part of Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, when the spoiled George Amberson says he wants to be a yachtsman when he grows up.
The Captain nodded stoically and said, “Arggh.” He’d been considering a career move, he explained. “I think I might enjoy plundering.” He’d recently gotten pretty big into pirate culture, and for the last few weeks, instead of regular chips, had been eating only cheese puffs, buying one brand in particular called Pirate’s Booty. He preferred chips, he said, but had made the switch out of loyalty to his brethren. He also bought a plastic hook from a novelty shop, which, for now, he was using mainly at home.
I met The Captain in my last year of college. He was seventeen or eighteen and in from California to visit his older sister Caroline. She’d called and asked if I’d take her brother out for the evening because she had a date, said he’d come by my apartment to pick me up. Naturally it was a Thursday. It’s almost always Thursday, I find. Every one out of the seven days, at least.
I don’t remember what we spoke about while at my place. I probably did most of the talking. I often do, especially when I’m nervous, flitting from one topic to the next, pausing occasionally for one of my dance demonstrations—“I call this ‘the slow-motion electrocution.’ Watch!” We drank a sufficient amount, and then I took him downtown to Lex’s ’80s party.
I saw The Captain again a few more times after that, whenever he was in town to visit Caroline. And then Caroline decided to move back to California and The Captain decided to move to New York.
For the last year now, The Captain’s been living with his grandmother in a duplex on the Upper West Side, Sixty-third Street near Central Park. It’s just until he finds a job or goes to college or figures out which of these things he wants to do. He didn’t go to college because he got a well-paying tech job while still in high school, right before the dot-com bubble burst, and so he figured there was no reason to. He could always go to college later, he figured, and so, now, later, he’s been figuring again.
It’s ironic that both The Captain and Caroline have such a weak regard for higher education considering their family’s history. Their parents are both professors. Well, their dad’s an art history professor with a focus on outsider art, and their mom went to school with their dad, but dropped out before completing her dissertation to become an artist herself—“She paints objects that don’t exist,” Caroline explained to me. “Like surrealist type stuff?” “No, like, she’ll go to a house that doesn’t actually exist and film herself painting it.”
Also, their grandfather, with whom The Captain briefly lived on Sixty-third Street, founded Fruitlands School, a small progressive school in upstate New York where the students farm the land instead of playing team sports, a school Caroline briefly attended—she majored in math and cultivated gourds—before getting expelled for drug use. I met Caroline in Manhattan shortly after her release from her second and final stint at rehab. From the first, she’d escaped by window.
I don’t remember exactly how we met, only that it was a Wednesday and I was at my weekly karaoke party. I’d just ordered another scotch and was watching the stage where the lead singer of the B-52s was taking the microphone from some guy belting out “Love Shack,” when I pinked-out—what I call blackouts, because I’m a girl.
The following week Caroline approached me early in the night while I was still relatively sober, and filled me in on our having made friends the week before.
“I’m sorry, I don’t remember,” I said, playing aloof, as if my forgetting were a consequence of fame as opposed to rampant pink-outs.
“I complimented you on your song.”
“What did I sing?”
“I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” she said, and began laughing. “But instead of satisfaction, you sang ‘cock.’ You stretched it out. ‘Coooock,’ you said.”
“Really?” I shrugged. “That’s weird.”
I confess: I’m pretty shy when I’m not unconscious, so this method of meeting people I’ve already met really works for me. While we’re on the subject, that’s why I sleep around. I don’t actually have sex, mind you, I just sort of pick a guy I like and then try and pass out next to him. It’s so much less awkward having your first kiss in the morning, after you wake up next to a guy, than having to go through all that awful leaning-in stuff while you’re still standing, nerve-wracked and fully aware of the vast distance between your mouths. Because your face is already right next to his on the pillow, and because your brain is too much crippled by a mind-numbing hangover to register any anxiety, everything flows pretty naturally. Lying like that in someone’s arms, it would be much more awkward not to kiss.
And so it was with Caroline and me. Seeing as we had made friends already, all I had to do was continue to be. This was a good thing because I liked Caroline a lot. She was smart and funny and sportingly depressed. We’d lie on the bed of her East Village studio, watch one-hour teen dramas, and during the commercials try to one-up each other with our despair. “I tried to slit my wrists with a sketchpad yesterday,” she’d say flatly. “I’m pretty sure my mom thinks I’m a loser,” I’d counter.
It was hard to believe that just a few months earlier she’d been living in a halfway house. To me she seemed so together, so mature in certain ways—she had a job working as a personal assistant to a music executive—but then immature in others—she spent almost all her free time at a record store where she’d fallen in love with a clerk whom she’d never spoken to.
“Which one is he?” I asked, peaking through the window. We were standing in the cold outside th
e shop one night in January.
“The tall, skinny guy with all the piercings. He’s 6’7”,” she said, lighting up. “He’s a monster!”
It was strange to remember that I was actually older than Caroline. When we met she was twenty and I was twenty-one, which is a pretty big difference when you’re that age, a year being a full five percent of your life. It was strange because my addictions were only then coming into bloom, while hers had already been clipped.
During the quieter times that came later, I asked her what her drug of choice had been.
“Spanish Fly,” she told me with a straight face. And then later, “heroin,” she confessed.
Because Caroline was always sober while I was always drunk, most of our friends were baffled by our affinity—“You have nothing in common!” May said, standing very close to us. If you looked at us from far away though, it was clear that our only real difference was time; though Caroline and I were roughly the same age, we were moving through it quite differently and so had found ourselves, if temporarily, on opposite ends of the same continuum. I was before and she was after.
But I’m rather prone to this kind of long-view. Alas, seeing the big picture is sort of my tragic flaw. I mean, if you’re really in the moment, you shouldn’t be able to see life so clearly the way I do. Which brings me to what I like most about drinking. It makes you a little blind. And action requires a certain amount of blindness after all. Take Oedipus. Blind to his very identity, he was welcomed to Thebes as a hero, hailed “a man of action,” and named king because of it. Sure, his blindness was the cause of his subsequent downfall, led to the whole kingdom falling under plague, and resulted in the accidental killing-his-father-having-sex-with-his-mother situation, but his blindness was also the source of his strength.
