And he’s too nice and humble to flaunt the fact that he knows so much, so it’s not like I’m getting it in my face, but sometimes he’ll talk about Politics or Credit or something and I’m like what? I’m just DREADING the day when I have to see his Media friends and they’ll all be talking like that, even the girls. I guess if I went to law school like my mother wants I’d learn to be like that too, but who the hell wants to go to law school? Maybe I should go back to doing Images like I did at Elderbird. Prof Margaux in Assertiveness Class said I had “super talent” and even at Catholic the nuns all freaked out over my “spatial skills.”
It’s weird because things are so nice with Lenny, but a lot of the times I feel like I’m alone. Like I have nothing to say to him and he just thinks I’m an idiot behind my back. He says I’m smart because I learned Italian but that wasn’t really so hard. It’s just memorization and then copying the way Italians act, which is easy to do if you’re from an immigrant family, because when you go to nursery school for the first time and you don’t speak any English it’s all about copying what others do. I know it’s still sweet of Lenny to try to build up my self-esteem by saying I’m smart, but sometimes I just want to get out of his life and move back to Ft. Lee where I belong and try to help my family, so it’s not all just Sally and my mom dealing with that black hole in the living room a.k.a my dad. Oh, and if Lenny mentions meeting my parents ONE MORE TIME I swear I’m going to nunchuk his ass. He just doesn’t get it sometimes. And he doesn’t WANT to get it, which is why I get so angry at him. He thinks we’re both from “difficult families” as he likes to say, which just isn’t true at all. I’ve met his and there’s just no comparison.
So I had lunch and went Real Time Shopping with Sally and now I’m kind of worried for her. She has this like blank stare and everything I talked about she was like “uh-uh.” She has, like, no idea who she is. On the one hand she wants those Saaami nippleless bras and on the other hand she wants me to go to some stupid church group at Barnard. And she gained a lot of weight, not just the freshman fifteen, and she looks sad and dumpy with her weight on, so I told her she better watch what she eats, and she just looked at me like I wasn’t there. The only thing that floats her boat is Politics. She and these other fat girls are all into protesting and talking about Rubenstein and how we’re not a free country anymore. And when I remind her how she’s supposed to be religious not Political she just says that Christianity is an “activist’s creed.” I think I want to meet whoever told her to say that and punch him in the face. I love her so much, Precious Pony, I think next to mom she’s the most important person in my life, and I don’t know how to help her, because it’s not like I’m some great role model myself, right?
Anyway, I went with Sally to this really pretty park in the East Village called Tompkins Square and there are all these Low Net Worth Individuals there and they’re camped out with all their dirty things and they don’t have food or clean water and they have all these really old computers they try to boot up but really they have no Images or streams. So after Sally left I ran home and got all my old äppäräti and I gave them out to a bunch of people in the park, so maybe this way they can look for jobs or contact their families. They were so happy to have my old ghetto stuff that it made me sad because this is what their lives have become and just last year some of them worked in Credit or were engineers. There was this one man who was actually quite handsome, tall and Germanic-looking, but he didn’t have all his teeth. He was in the National Guard and they sent him to Venezuela and when he came home they didn’t pay him his bonus. His name was David. He was really nice and he hugged me and said we were all in this together. And I thought, I wish things were better for you, but we’re not all in this together. Then when I was leaving I saw this old fountain that had like a gazebo with four corners and on each there was a word, “Temperance, Charity, Faith, Hope.” And I don’t know why but something about those words made me think of my dad and how when I was young he used to put bandaids on my knees with those big thick fingers of his and say like he did to his patients who were children “All bettah now, all bettah now,” and I just started to cry like an idiot. And then I thought of Lenny and this elephant we saw in the zoo and how I kissed his big nose and the look on his face. The look on his face, Pony! I don’t know about temperance or faith, but what about charity and hope? Don’t we all need that?
Ugh, why am I always whining to you? Sorry for being so down. When I see you I’m going to give you a big, big kiss right between your little titties, my one and only cum-slut, princess of all that is good and right in the world!
GRILLBITCH TO EUNI-TARD:
Dear Precious Panda,
Waka-waka, ass-sucka! Whut-a-happenin? Sorry, I’m a little hungover and depressed myself. I went to a party at Ha Ng’s, that cute Vietnamese girl from Catholic who had her stomach stapled. We got wripped on Mai Tais and this flip girl from UGuangdong-Riverside threw up on herself. NASTY! So why I’m depressed is because I think Gopher is having an affair. And not with Wendy Snatch either, but with this Mexican betch that I saw blowing him in his car at this fish taco place in Echo Park. Yeah, I followed him, and then I figured out his password on Teens (it’s “PORKadobo” in case you want to stream all his shit, ha ha!) and they’ve been sending each other these illeterate love notes for three weeks now. He calls her chuleta and all she can say in English is “Hi, babee.” So I went on this new Teens site called “D-base” where they can digitize you like covered in shit or getting fucked by four guys at once and I sent Gopher all these Images of myself getting fucked by four guys at once. It’s like you said, I’ve got to own my feelings about Gopher and that’s the only way he’s ever going to respect me and not fuck around with some gross illegal immigrant fuck-tard who probably rates 300 on a Credit Pole. I hope they deport her ass soon. Anyway, he came over to my parents house and fucked me in the ass, which I guess is a good sign because we haven’t done that in a while, and then it’s been three hours since he’s responded to that bitch on Teens, so all I’m doing is staring at my äppärät waiting for some more incriminating shit to pop up.
What’s wrong with us, Precious Panda? Why can’t we find guys who are just right for us? At least your Lenny loves you so much he’ll never ever cheat on you. I can’t understand why you’re feeling so insecure about him. So he’s brain-smart. Who cares??? It’s not like he’s some superstar Media guy or VP at LandOLakes. So he REALLY, REALLY READS instead of scans. Big whoop. Maybe you guys can read to each other in bed or something. And then you can sew your own clothes. HA HA HA. Anyway, looking good is the new smart, and I don’t think you should have kids with him because you’ll have really ugly children.
I’m sorry you saw some poor people in the park, my sweet, sensitive panda, but you’re right we’re not all in this together. I think what your sister is doing is cool though. Someone needs to stand up and say something to these dumbasses in charge of everything. You go, Sally! Oh, shit. I gotta subtract. Why does alcohol make you go so much? Is that a scientific thing?
JUNE 26
CHUNG.WON.PARK TO EUNI-TARD:
Eunhee,
Why you no respond to Mommy? Three times I call and right. We have dinner with Uncle Joon I make dolsot bap just like you like with extra crunchy rice from the pot bottom. When I was little girl we didn’t eat rice from bottom because we are from good family and we only give nooroonggi to beggars, but now I know you like it so I always cook dolsot bap too long even when you not here because I miss you so much!! Ha, I try to make unhappy face, but it come out happy, so maybe Jesu telling me something! Be grateful and throw away of yourself because you are blessed in Christ. We are much more happy family now that you are close by and watching on Sally. Daddy love you very much but I have trouble in my heart. I see Joy Lee mother at H-Mart. You say you stay at Joy apartment in Manhattan but Mrs. Lee say it not true. Why you lie to Mommy? I find out everything anyway. Maybe you living now with some meeguk boy in dirty apartment? So shocking
. So shocking. You come back home and live with us. Daddy much better now. Sally need you to be top roll model so you stay away from dirty meeguk boy. I know my english bad but you understand what I write I think.
I love you,
Mommy
Oh, what is 3200-yuan-peg-dollar “miscellaneous charge” on AlliedWasteCVS account?? This in addition to regular finance charge? I try to up-end link to new LSAT Prep Course in Fort Lee which Mrs. Lee say make Joy get best result. 174 and before she had 154. I ask other Mommies at Church what they got and this very good improvement.
EUNI-TARD: Lenny, I thought I asked you to clean the bathtub. This apartment is DISGUSTINGLY DIRTY. I’ve swiffered the kitchen floor and the bathroom floor already and vacuumed the carpet in the foyer too. Do it today! I don’t like living in a pig-sty.
LABRAMOV: Euny, I’m sorry but we have to stay late at work today. There’s a mandatory meeting about the Debt Crisis and the LNWI protest thing in Central Park and D.C. They think the Fed may default on the dollar this year (!) and not all our clients’ money is totally yuan-pegged. I have to pull up like a thousand records by six o’clock. I think Joshie’s going to meet the Chinese Central Banker! Anyway, it’s pretty good for my career that they trust me with this kind of stuff.
EUNI-TARD: So? What does that have to do with the bathtub?
LABRAMOV: Maybe over the weekend we can have a little cleaning party.
EUNI-TARD: It’s mostly your hair in the bathtub, you know. You’re the one who sheds 24/7.
LABRAMOV: I know. I’ve never really cleaned the bathtub before, so maybe next time we can switch chores.
EUNI-TARD: I’ve shown you how to do it three times. You’re brain-smart enough when it comes to dollar defaults or whatever but you can’t clean the bathtub?
LABRAMOV: Maybe you can supervise me while I do it over the weekend.
EUNI-TARD: Never mind. I’ll just do it myself. It’s easier in the end to just do everything myself.
LABRAMOV: No, don’t do it! Wait until I have some free time. I’m sorry it’s so busy at work.
LABRAMOV: Hello! Are you there?
LABRAMOV: Are you mad at me?
LABRAMOV: Eunice!
EUNI-TARD: Ugh.
LABRAMOV: What?
EUNI-TARD: I hate this.
LABRAMOV: What can I do to make you feel better? I’ll clean all weekend, top to bottom.
EUNI-TARD: Nothing. Nothing you can do. I can’t change you. So I guess I just have to take on all these responsibilities myself.
LABRAMOV: That’s not true, Eunice.
LABRAMOV: I AM changing. It just takes time.
LABRAMOV: Let’s have a nice dinner at that Brazilian place in the village. My treat.
EUNI-TARD: Don’t forget to pick up the TWO-PLY toilet paper on the way home.
LABRAMOV: I won’t forget.
EUNI-TARD: You always forget. That’s why you’re a tuna-brain.
LABRAMOV: Ha ha. I’m glad you’re not mad at me.
EUNI-TARD: Don’t count your blessings, nerd.
LABRAMOV: I’m not counting anything.
EUNI-TARD: I just want a nice, clean apartment, Lenny. Don’t you want to come home to a nice, clean apartment too? Don’t you want to be proud of where you live? Isn’t that what being an adult is about? It’s not just about reading Tolsoy and sounding smart. Big whoop.
LABRAMOV: Reading who? Big what?
EUNI-TARD: Forget it. I got to run to the laundry. Who else is going to pick up your undies? By the way, you should wear boxer briefs not just plain old regular briefs. They provide more support. You always complain that your balls hurt after a long walk, well why do you think that is?
LABRAMOV: Because I wear bad underwear.
EUNI-TARD: Who loves you, kokiri?
AMY GREENBERG’S “MUFFINTOP HOUR”:
FROM THE DIARIES OF LENNY ABRAMOV
JUNE 30
Dear Diary,
So, after the huge success with my parents, I asked Eunice to come out with me to Staten Island to meet my friends. I guess my intentions were self-aggrandizing and superficial. I wanted to introduce Eunice to my boys, impress them because she was so young and pretty. And I wanted to impress her because Noah and his girlfriend, Amy, were so Media.
The first part worked—you can’t really meet Eunice without appreciating her youth and her cool, shimmering indifference. The second part not so much.
The night in question was what we called Family Night, when all the boys invited their respective partners to Cervix, the kind of night when I was usually minus girlfriend and feeling like a fifth wheel. But on that night it would be Noah and his emotive girlfriend, Amy Greenberg, Vishnu and Grace, and Eunice and me, the couple-in-progress.
Even on the way to the subway, walking arm in arm, I tried to show my girl off to the denizens of Grand Street, but the selection of Eunice-appreciators was a bit thin that day. A crazy white man brushing his teeth in broad daylight. A retired Jew throwing a plastic cup of Coke at a discarded mattress. A feuding Aztec couple hitting each other over the head with two plastic yellow daisies from within the unremitting brick façade of a housing project.
I had almost made it to the subway without incident. But by the razor-wire-surrounded lot next to the RiteAid, where our neighborhood’s resident shitter would squat in the middle of the day, I noticed a curious thing. A new billboard had gone up, courtesy of my employer, the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation. It depicted a familiar latticework of glass and pomposity, a series of three-story apartments crashing into one another at odd angles like a bunch of half-melted ice cubes in a stirred drink. “HABITATS EAST,” the sign proclaimed, beside the flags of the United Arab Emirates, China-Worldwide, and the European Union.
AN EXCLUSIVE TRIPLEX COMMUNITY FOR NON–U.S. NATIONALS
By Staatling Property
Seven TRIPLEX Living Units priced to move from 20,000,000 northern euros / 33,000,000 yuan
“Twenty million euros!” I said to Eunice. “That’s fifty years of my salary. Even foreigners don’t have that kind of money anymore!”
“Isn’t this the place where that guy shits all the time?” Euny said nonchalantly, evidently inured to the vagaries of my quartier. I continued to read:
ATTENTION FOREIGN RESIDENTS!
BUY A TRIPLEX LIVING UNIT TODAY AND RECEIVE
Exemption from American Restoration Authority (ARA) Cavity, Data & Property Searches
Prize-winning security by Wapachung Contingency
EXCLUSIVE Immortality Assistance from our Post-Human Services Division
Free parking for first 6 months
Credit ranking of 1500+ only please
This Area COMPLETELY Zoned for Harm Reduction
“EXCLUSIVE Immortality Assistance”? Beg pardon? You had to prove you were worthy of cheating death at Post-Human Services. Like I said, only 18 percent of our applicants qualified for our Product. That’s how Joshie intended it. Hence the Intakes I was supposed to perform. Hence the Language Cognition tests and the essays on outliving your children. Hence—the whole philosophy. Now they were going to bestow immortality on a bunch of fat, glossy Dubai billionaires who bought a Staatling Property “TRIPLEX Living Unit”?
I was about to start a healthy diatribe on the Subject of Everything (I think Eunice likes it when I teach her new stuff) when I noticed a familiar squiggle on the corner of the sign.
In a stenciled, bleeding-edge style that had been cool at the turn of the century, I saw—no, it couldn’t be!—an arty reproduction of Jeffrey Otter, my inquisitor at the U.S. Embassy in Rome, in his stupid red-white-and-blue bandana, a smudge of what could have been a cold sore on his hairy upper lip. “Oh,” I said, and actually backed away.
“Kokiri?” Eunice asked. “What’s up, nerd-face?”
I made a breathing sound. “Panic attack?” she asked. I put up my hand to indicate a “time-out.” My eyes ran up and down the graffito as if I were trying to scrub it into a different dimension. The otter st
ared back at me: curved, oddly sexual, pregnant with life, the fur smoothed into little charcoal mounds clearly warm and soft to the touch. It reminded me of Fabrizia. My betrayal. What had I done to her? What had they done to her? Who had drawn this? What were they trying to tell me? I looked at Eunice. She was using my forty-second pause to bury her head into her äppärät. What was I even doing with this sleek digital creature? I felt, for the first time since her arrival in my life, truly mistaken.
But the day wasn’t finished with me yet.
When we got to the Cervix, my friend Grace was the one to object.
“She’s too young for you,” she whispered to me after Eunice had turned away from us and started AssLuxury shopping. There wasn’t anything particularly antisocial about this—the boys were watching Chinese Central Banker Wangsheng Li’s visit to Washington on their own äppäräti, and Noah’s girl, Amy, was setting up hand lotions and other sponsored products for a live stream of the “Amy Greenberg Muffintop Hour.”
For a second I thought Grace was jealous of Eunice, and that was more than fine with me, because, to be honest, I’ve always had a crush on Grace. She wasn’t particularly pretty, the eyes too widely set apart, her bottom teeth like an interstate pile-up, and she was, if it’s at all possible, too thin from the waist up, to the point where she looked bird-like doing any activity, even walking up the stairs or passing a plate of Brie. But she was kind—so kind and forthright, and so well educated and serious about life, that when I thought I was in love with Fabrizia in Rome, all I had to do was think of Grace talking about her complex wintry childhood in the farthest reaches of Wisconsin State or the German artist Joseph Beuys, her passion, to know that everything about my relationship with poor, doomed Fabrizia was transitory and a lie.
Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel Page 16
