Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever (13 page)

She takes his money and turns to pour the coffee. Riot takes the bathroom key from the counter and heads for the back.

Tim and Jana have been silently watching all this go down. Tim’s been trying to decide whether he should get involved: maybe tell Lisa to cool off; maybe tell Riot he can have a dollar if he goes outside. Who knows what Jana thinks of these people and all this? She’s sipping a black coffee. Tim wonders if it’s got sugar at least. He says, “Well, you’re coming to the party, right?”

“Who wants to celebrate death?” Jana says.

A few minutes go by. They sip their drinks without talking. It occurs to Tim that Riot still hasn’t come out of the bathroom. “Hey, Lisa.”

“Was thinking the same thing, hon,” Lisa says. She shouts: “RIOT! TEN SECONDS AND I KICK THE FUCKING DOOR IN.”

Tim laughs and shakes his head. Lisa will
never
last as manager after the place goes bourgeois.

“Four…three…two…OKAY ASSHOLE HERE I COME. YOU BETTER HAVE GODDAMN PANTS ON.” Lisa’s ready to kick, but the door’s not locked. This could be anything.

It isn’t.

What’s in the toilet is gross (Riot didn’t flush) but at least he’s not playing with it. Or shooting up or something. In fact, he seems to have forgotten about what’s in the toilet altogether. He’s got a Sharpie out, is detailing some of his 9/11
theories on the lid of the tank. “People have to know,” he tells Lisa. She grabs him by the jacket, sort of hurls him into the hall, hits the flush with her boot.

“All right, asshole,” she says. “You’re finished. Straight out the door or I’m calling.”

“You’re just a cog in their machine,” Riot says. “Towing the fascist line.”

“You know what?” She reaches for the phone. “You’re right.”

“Fine, okay, shit, Jesus. Put my drink in a to-go cup and I’m out of here.”

Tim’s from somewhere shitty in the Midwest. He was a good student, growing up, then college was a lot to handle (shrooms, mostly) so he wound up dropping out of Colorado State spring semester freshman year, took some time off, then got into the jazz program at The New School and moved to New York. He even graduated, though barely, since after moving to the city he discovered the then-burgeoning freak-folk scene. Tim knows his old band, Flash Pounce, could have gotten big if they’d stuck with it. They had a legendary live show, every venue wanted to book them. They broke up for the usual reasons: artistic differences and a couple of them got way too into speed and then the trumpet/synth player got engaged, decided to move back to Chicago.

Natalie calls Tim on Tuesday night, technically Wednesday morning. It’s about two thirty. He was sleeping, but when
she asks if she woke him up he says she didn’t. He says he just got home, in a way that he hopes somehow implies he was out on a date.

“It’s too bad you’re so far away,” she slurs. “I miss you.”

“I could catch a train, I guess.” There are no cabs in the part of Brooklyn where Tim lives.

“No, it’s so late.”

“Yeah, you’re right. So.”

“Tim. Listen. Listen. Maybe we could…talk?” There’s a weird weight on that word. Talk about what? Them? What’s left to say? Is she going to break up with him again for good measure?

But he says sure, of course, and she starts talking. Saying the filthiest things, actually, first about what they did over the weekend, then made-up stuff. She describes in torrid, exalting detail all the nasty things they’re doing to each other that they’re not doing to each other. At some point he realizes she’s jerking off. So…He should, too—right?

This hand is Natalie’s hand.

This hand is Natalie’s face, etc.

“Oh fu-uck,” she says, and makes some noises in the phone that Tim tries to convince himself he is hearing for the second time this week, though if he’s going to be honest with himself (he’s not) she sounds way more excited right now than she did when they were together in person, though it’s not exactly a revelation that everyone’s their own best lover. Who knows what you want better than you do? (Little joke.) Anyway, he’s been on the verge himself for, say, four
or five minutes now. What’s he holding back for? There’s no etiquette when she’s not really there.

It’s Saturday night. They’re doing 4/30/77, which means no bluesy Pig Pen–era stuff, plus the country tunes are jazzier and slowed way down. A ’71 “Friend of the Devil” is a three-minute up-tempo ramble. A ’77 “Friend of the Devil” is two, three times as long and you sing it like a dirge, as much despair as you’d bring to singing “St. James Hospital” or something. And then “Terrapin Station,” a spacey epic about which the less said the better.

For one last encore they do “Touch of Grey,” the Grateful Dead’s only number-one hit, even though it didn’t get written until 1980-something; officially released in ’87. No matter what show they’re doing, they always do last encore “Touch of Grey.” It’s house policy.

Luckily, the tourist crowd goes back to their hotels early. Maybe they all have matinee tickets for tomorrow. Tim’s out of there by midnight. Pretty nice out, actually. He walks from the one village to the other. He’s almost there when his phone buzzes. Any guesses who this is gonna be?

“Hey, where are you, are you home?”

“No, actually I’m on my way to a party near your place. You want to come meet me?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Tim.”

“Why do you keep saying that? I want to see you. You want to see me.”

“I liked what we did the other night.”

Silence from Tim.

“Didn’t you like that?” she says. “Wasn’t I good?”

How to even begin to approach answering that question? Maybe say,
You
weren’t actually anything.
You
weren’t there,
I
wasn’t there. Or: this is
too weird
. He could say all those things right now. He could say what he really feels and see where it gets him.

“Yeah no I mean yeah you were good. It was good.”

“Call me when you get home, Tim. I mean if you want to.”

At the party, two guys Tim recognizes but doesn’t know by name are talking music. The one with the beard is saying to the one in the fedora that the proof of Will Oldham being the new Bob Dylan is in the way he adapts his own songs for live performance.

“Listen to
Summer in the Southeast
and compare that version of ‘I Send My Love to You’ to the one on
Days in the Wake
. Then go listen to the
Blood on the Tracks
‘Shelter from the Storm’ and compare it to the live version on
Hard Rain
.”

“Yeah, and what am I supposed to be seeing when I do that?”

“When you see it you won’t need me to tell you.”

“You know,” Tim cuts in, “who Dylan says is the best interpreter of his songs?”

Fedora: “Who?”

Tim: “No guesses?”

Beard: “Hendrix?”

Tim: “Jerry Garcia.”

One of them: “You’re fucking joking.”

The other one: “And it’s not funny.”

Tim, smiling—it’s the stone truth—plucks a beer from the cooler planted next to the register, then he wanders out back.

Surprise, surprise.

“Oh so what?” Jana says to him. “I was bored.”

“Hey, nobody said anything,” Tim says. “Have you been here long?”

Now they’re getting to know each other, and isn’t this nice? No spark, exactly. This isn’t going to be like one of those things where the one girl breaks your heart and then you meet this other one and realize it was all meant to be: good things to those who wait, etc. Actually, Jana’s kind of a bitch. He’s telling her about Summer of Love and she’s practically doubled over laughing at him.

“I think I’ll head in for another drink,” Tim says, hoping she takes his implied meaning, which is, I am
so
done talking to you. But then for some reason he says, “Want me to grab you one?” and she says “Yeah, that’d be great, thanks.” First he’s thinking, Jesus what did I say that for? But then he starts thinking how if she took him up on the offer she maybe isn’t having such a bad time with him, and if she’s not having a bad time maybe he isn’t either.

Jana actually isn’t thinking about Tim one way or the other. All she wanted was another beer and another cigarette, and you can’t smoke inside, so. But fuck it, this party sucks anyway. She crushes out her smoke, goes in, sees him talking to somebody over by the booze, doesn’t bother to say good-bye. She goes out the front door and turns north on Avenue A. About half a block up from Harry Smith she runs into Riot, who is curled up like a child, bawling, in front of some new boutique store. The chain gate is down—it’s closed for the night—but you can make out what’s in the window. He smells sour. Shitty malt liquor, she bets, not that there’s another kind.

Riot: “fuhuhuhuck.”

Jana: “Hey, man, are you okay?” He says nothing, points straight up at the window. It’s the cover of
Stations of the Crass
silk-screened onto the front of a black pre-stressed designer tee shirt. Nothing so gauche as an advertised price but Jana figures, what—$120? She thinks of herself in middle school, standing in line at the Hot Topic at the mall in a suburb outside Philly, buying a red shirt emblazoned with Che’s face. They commodified her emotions, sold her own rebellion back to her before she even knew it for what it was. Is that better or worse than the post-ironic self-aware sellout-sophisticate garb on display here? Fuck it, it’s all one big Disneyland, and this is a fallen world. No place to hide your faith for safekeeping.

Or maybe the lesson is that faith is a perishable good, cannot be saved for later, is nothing if it is not action in the
world. That sounds like a protest sign, or a long-winded bumper sticker.

But is it
true
?

“Come on,” she says to Riot. “Buck up, and let’s go scrounging.”

After Tim realizes Jana’s gone he pounds the beer that was hers. He means to pound the second one too, but gives himself the hiccups with the first one and has to stand there and wait it out. Then he joins some conversation already in progress. A guy with a compass rose tattoo on his right hand is saying, “That’s actually one of my favorite things about tattoos—that they make the body seem less sacred. The body
isn’t
sacred. People should see things for what they are.”

Some drunk asshole calls the room to order and makes a toast Tim wishes he’d thought to make, then a bottle of Jack gets passed around and Tim has a big swig of that and then he feels sort of sick so he goes back outside—to the front this time—to have a smoke and calm his stomach. Jana and Riot walk past, carrying a metal post like stop signs are mounted on. “We found it in a Dumpster on Second,” she says to Tim as they pass by. Avenue or street? he wonders. Not that it matters. How long ago did he hang up with Natalie? Either half as long or twice as long as it feels like, so figure an hour. He lurches across the street, almost gets nailed by a cab in the process, doesn’t even turn when he hears the rebuke of the horn. He walks through Tompkins Square Park, sits down on Natalie’s stoop, digs his phone out of his pocket and
calls. The door of the building is painted metal, cold against his forehead when he leans.

Just when he thinks she’s not going to answer.

Natalie: “Oh, hey.”

“Hey, are you still awake? I’m home.”

I wish to extend my gratitude to the editors of the magazines, journals, Web sites, and anthologies in which several of these stories were first published and/or reprinted.

The following people have been and are my teachers, editors, first-readers, confidants, employers, family members, and friends. I hope you all know how grateful I am for the vital roles you play in my life, to say nothing of the life of this book.

THANK YOU: Danielle Benveniste, Blake Butler, Dennis Cooper, Elliott David, Mark Doten, David Gates, Fran Gordon, Bill Hayward, Gordon Lish, Peter Masiak, Amy McDaniel, Charles McNair, Amanda Peters, Robert Polito, Jeremy Schmall, Michael Signorelli, Eva Talmadge, Maggie Tuttle; my parents, and my sister, Melanie; the Taylor, Starkman, and Goldner families.

Cover design by Adam Johnson

Cover painting: Nature’s Harmony by Edwin Lamasure/courtesy of the Library of Congress