Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever (12 page)

R
iot’s moseying down East Fourth Street, past the KGB Bar, eating a burrito he found wrapped in tin foil in a garbage can at the corner of Third Avenue. He’s filthy and thin. The burrito’s beef so he doesn’t want to be seen with it, because even though he’s personally freegan the crowd at the benches in Tompkins Square includes several hardcore vegans who will all give him shit, and frankly he isn’t in the mood. So he’s dawdling. Not like he’s in some hurry.

Riot wears an eye patch and a grungy white leather jacket he found in a giveaway box at the Bowery Mission and subsequently augmented—in Sharpie, it should go without saying—so his favorite bands (Black Flag, Choking Victim, etc.) are represented up and down the sleeves. The whole back of the thing is given over to one single statement: 9/11
WAS A
REICHSTAG
, a subject that he is prepared to talk about for as long as you are prepared to listen, and then some. Actually, it’s pretty convincing until he gets into this tired shit about the International Jewish Conspiracy. Yeah man, we know
all
about the Israel connection.

Now he’s at the southwest corner of East Fourth and First. He finishes the burrito, balls the foil up in his palm, tosses the ball into a green metal garbage can identical to the can he pulled the meal out of mere minutes ago, crosses First against the light, causing several cab drivers and one tricked-out SUV to honk at him. At these receding vehicles he flips birds—one after another until each is accounted for. The light changes, he crosses north on Fourth against
that
light, and then starts east again. When he hits Avenue A he turns back north and when he gets to St. Mark’s Place he decides that maybe he still doesn’t really want to go hang out with the kids in the park. What he really wants—check that,
needs
—is a bathroom.

Is it possible that the burrito, so recently regarded as a godsend, is in fact to blame?

“Hey bro,” he says to an older woman leading a wheezing pug. “Could you help me out real quick? I’m trying to take the train out to the island and see my grandma, but I’m a little short.” The woman walks on without regarding him. Now his insides are clenching. He feels sweat form on his brow. The street is bereft of pedestrians, save a few people who look too much like himself to be worth approaching.

Wait.

There’s one pocket he didn’t check. The little one where he sometimes…yes! It’s paper. A fiver, in fact. Well glory be.

Tim, thirty-one, was just starting a relationship with Kim, when his long-time friend Natalie, twenty-nine, told him she was maybe finally ready to give him and her the real chance they’d both always sort of known he secretly believed they had. So even though the Kim thing looked promising, he broke it off. He is questioning this decision now, because after about six weeks with Natalie it’s becoming clear that there was a lot more emphasis on that “maybe” than he had counted on. In fact, if he’s not mistaken, he’s actually being broken up with by her right now. She’s in the middle of a long monologue about how they never should have risked something so precious and rare as the true connection they’ve always had, and how some things are better than sex, even if it isn’t “cool” to say so, and what they need to do now is start figuring out how to get back to the way things were before. Let’s be adults about this.

They’re in her bed; it’s Saturday morning—about ten thirty. Her apartment is on East Ninth Street between C and D.

Tim’s nodding his head like he agrees with her. He doesn’t. He thinks they actually meant what they said while they were having sex last night: an unexpected call and response of I Love You and I Love You, Too.

Tim can’t remember who said it first and who replied. If
he could only know that, he’s certain he’d have the key to the whole situation. At the very least he’d like to talk about the fact that it
was
said, but he can’t take the chance of saying “we” and then being told it was he who went first and that she was merely caught up in the moment, or worse, being nice. On the other hand if it was Natalie who said it first then maybe she’s waiting—secretly begging—for him to hold her to her words and save them both. Natalie, you are scared and that’s okay. Natalie, stop sabotaging the best thing that’s ever happened to either of us.

Tim: “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” and related platitudes.

God, he’s as bad as she is. Natalie can tell. In the larger karmic whatever sense, they totally deserve each other, or they would if they didn’t each deserve abject loneliness even more. Everyone gets what they’ve got coming, and when they don’t that just means that the injustice of undeserved suffering is in fact the very thing that’s deserved. Christ. This meta-analytical shit chatters away in Natalie’s head all day. She’s so smart that it’s actually disturbing—or else makes perfect sense—that she doesn’t have health insurance because she won’t stay at any job long enough to qualify. Or that she gets into these situations with guys like Tim. Oh,
here
we go, start ripping on him. All he ever did was whatever you wanted.

Yeah, well who says you can’t hold
that
against someone?

In case you can’t tell, Natalie’s having a little episode, but in her head of course. Real-life Natalie is sitting quietly in
bed, speech long finished, sheet pulled up to her neck and naked beneath it, weirding Tim out with her silence, though it’s safe to say he wouldn’t be any less weirded out if he could somehow know what she’s thinking.

Tim’s dressed now, standing at the door. Natalie’s in a robe. It looks soft, well worn: comfort clothes. They have a quick, awkward good-bye kiss. It should feel like the end of something. It doesn’t, but it’s not exactly a beginning either. It just is, and then a second later it just was. Now Tim’s on the street. He should probably go home and get some work done, but fuck it.

Tim does freelance web design and plays in a cover band at a tourist trap in the West Village, an overpriced bar-restaurant his friend Ted owns. He’s not saving at all, but he’s been making rent every month and doing okay, which is more than he could have said not too long ago.

At Summer of Love, it’s always 1969, even though everyone knows the Summer of Love was ’67. Or, more to the point: precisely because nobody knows. Tim is a great guitar player, which is why he gets to play lead on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights, when Summer of Love has the Grateful Dead on the main stage, i.e., the dining room. They play two sets a night, like the real band used to, and they use authentic vintage set lists—except for dressing up, they make every attempt to re-create the original show. Of course Tim usually wears ruddy corduroys and a black tee shirt, so he actually
is
dressed up like Garcia, albeit nine
ties Garcia, but when people think Grateful Dead they think tie-dye so nobody gets the reference, or if anyone does it’s just like,
Okay, so?

Tim’s favorite coffee shop is at the corner of Ninth and Avenue A. It’s called Harry Smith, and if that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the place odds are it isn’t for you, though try explaining
that
to the recent influx of yuppies. You can always tell an outsider because they call it Harry Smith
’s
, as in, “Hey do you want to come meet me? Where are you? I’m like a block off St. Mark’s at Harry Smith’s, yeah, it’s like a coffee place. It’s a little smelly but I think they’ll let you plug in your laptop.”

That’s what Tim hears a girl saying into her cell phone as he opens the door and steps in.

They used to have a strict no-phone policy here. Whoever was working would walk up to you and ask nicely, once. If you gave them any shit it was the boot. Those were back in the days when a cell phone was considered a rude luxury, an ostentatious marker of caste. The no-phone sign is still up, but the rule hasn’t been enforced in years. The future is whatever you submit to. Someone should write
that
on a wall.

The shop’s heritage is scribbled on its walls in Sharpie, that latter-day chisel, that soot-tipped stick. Above the front door, where in Dante there’s that warning about abandoned hope, some prophet—alias unknown—has scribbled
PUNX NOT DEAD ITS SLEEPING
. And underneath that, in smaller letters, black Sharpie again, but clearly the work of a different
hand:
EVERYTHING HERE IS THE BEST THING EVER
. Tim, passing beneath it, thinks the same thing he thinks every time he enters here:
Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.

Is that a prayer or a joke? He isn’t sure. It doesn’t matter. By the time he stopped knowing what he believed, and later stopped believing in belief, he had been coming here so long there was no question of ever stopping coming here, because it’s a place that he knows and where he is known. Tim even worked here for a stretch, in ’02, when things got really
really
bad.

A heart-shaped funeral wreath—it’s giant—on a stand in the middle of the room. A white sash like a beauty queen’s cutting across it. The sash reads:
R.I.P
.
HARRY SMITH
.

“The fuck?” he says to Lisa, who started sometime after he quit but has now been here longer than he’s ever seen anyone stay. He thinks they even made her manager, though it isn’t the kind of place you’d think of as
having
a manager. Tim sizes her up, as if for the first time, as if he isn’t in here four, five times a week for the last like eight years. Lisa is a thickset twenty-something with streaks of bright pink in her chopped-at-the-ears hair and a pair of seriously inviting green eyes.

“Tell me everything,” he says. “Make this okay.”

“It sort of is. I don’t know. I mean business has been all right, like the numbers and stuff. Lionel and Sadie aren’t selling or anything, they’re just sort of—tired, of this, I guess, business model. They’re going to sort of re-do it like a family place. Like where they could bring their own kids, you
know? But they’re keeping on everyone who wants to stay, or I think they are. I mean, I’m staying. I don’t know, we’ll see how it goes, I guess.”

Tim has known Lionel and Sadie a long time. Actually, Tim knew Sadie before she even met Lionel, though they never talk about
those
days anymore. He remembers when their first kid was born, the boy, and then the girl came along. He was happy for them, settling down, getting the things they wanted out of life, but it never occurred to him that their lives might ever impact his own. (Of course, their livelihood is his second home and they also employed him, but as far as he’s concerned that’s a whole other thing.) Tim doesn’t like to think of Harry Smith as having had an initial business model, much less a new one. It’s always felt more like a public resource—a state park, say—than a business.

Again, this is coming from someone who
worked
here.

Lisa hands Tim the iced chai soy latte that became his new drink two years ago when his trademark double red eyes started leaving him too shaky and heart-palpitated to read the alt weeklies.

Lisa again: “Hey, there’s a line forming behind you and they’re not regulars, so they don’t think this is cute, but listen: we’re having a closing party a week from tonight. For just the staff and the, uh, friends of the store or whatever. You should come.”

Well that’s something, anyway. A party. Tim takes his drink over to the brown couch, where there’s a spot open next to Jana, whose name is pronounced as if it started with
a Y. She’s olive-skinned with a cute nose that goes out just a smidge too far to be as cute as it could be, and a dark pixie haircut that’s either brushed to look unkempt or actually is. She wears dark tank tops that favor her smallish breasts without being too showy about it, and black jeans with one of those belts with the double row of metal pyramid studs. They’ve been friendly with each other for however long she’s been coming to Harry Smith. Tim can’t remember the first time he saw her but he knows he’s got seniority, patron-wise, which makes sense because at thirty-one he’s probably what—five, six years older than she is? They’re about on opposite ends of a long trip to college. That’s another way of saying she was still in high school the year he thought he was going to get famous, and probably she was taking The Bible as Literature for a funky junior elective while he was working here.

“So what do you think of all this?” Tim says to Jana, gesturing at the wreath. He wonders who ordered it, if it was Lionel and Sadie or one of the other regulars. (Every regular secretly believes he is
the
regular, most cherished and beloved, so if someone else was told about this before him, who and why?)

“What’s to think?” Jana says. “Everyone sells out, apparently. This city is a dead fucking husk.”

Riot opens the front door. Figure he’s about Tim’s age, might even be older. With homeless people it’s hard to tell. He holds the door for a bottle blond in end-of-season-sale designer wear. A case in point for Jana if there ever was one.

“After you, miss,” Riot says with an exaggerated courtesy that is really leering. It’s amazing the girl doesn’t bolt, she’s so obviously icked out by him. Time was, Tim thinks, a girl like that wouldn’t set foot in a place like this. These days, she probably lives around the corner, pays four figures for a fifth-floor walkup, and when the deliveryman brings the Thai food she tips him $2 instead of $3 because she always remembers what Daddy said about a penny saved and a penny earned.

Lisa sees Riot and the first thing she says is “No.”

“Hey c’mon man c’mon,” he says, “I got money today. I just gotta use the john first.”

“No way.”

The girl Riot held the door for has found her friend. Not surprisingly, it’s the girl who was on the cell phone when Tim walked in.

“All right all right,” Riot says. He orders a coffee and throws his five on the counter.

Lisa isn’t sure what to do. What she’d like to do is throw Riot out on his ass. He’s been banned for life from this place more times than anyone can count, but here’s the thing: if she throws him out he’ll stand in the street and scream about fascism and panhandle passersby and generally make a scene until somebody—probably Lisa—calls the cops and then they’ll show up and then there’ll be
that
scene going down out front. What she’s thinking is that maybe if she just serves him, he’ll be cool. Who knows? Stranger things have happened at this place, though not many.