Shuck (7 page)

I suppose it matters less how you fall asleep on the train than where you end up.

The city was bass-ackwards when I woke up in Brooklyn. It was morning. I must've gotten my nod on, sleepwalked a switch from the L train to the D, and ran the forty-one station line a couple of times, end to end.

The white sand on the elevated subway platform crunched under my shoes. The sun swelled my hangover to a full skull ache, and the salt in the air made me lick my lips. I gazed out at a body of water that didn't end, just got hazier. Below, the waves were rumbling like blue Pontiacs over the beach, a beach that stretched your eyes for miles in both directions, past the rusty metal skeletons of amusement park rides under lockdown.

If there was an ocean in Brooklyn, wouldn't someone have tipped me off?

I wasn't going to spend time making sense of Coney Island that day, not before I had slept properly or had at least gotten a cup of coffee. I turned to wait for the D train to take me back to Manhattan, but since it was the end of the line, the train was still there and the doors were still open.

Initials carved into a tree scheduled to be chopped down, lucky pennies dropped into sidewalk cement at construction sites, undiscovered
suicide pacts, lost manuscripts, perfectly imagined gold medal attempts, cracks in wine glasses that spell your name after you throw them out, walkie-talkies with nobody on the other end.

When I got home, Derek was leaning over the TraceBox™, scrubbing Wink's shell with a toothbrush.

“Hey,” I said.

“Good morning.”

I fixed myself a breakfast of Red Bull, bagels, and wasabi cream cheese. I looked around for paint smudges, smeared palettes, a full ashtray—any kind of evidence that Derek was being creative, and that I was being a good muse and delivering my half of the deal. Instead, I saw the piles of magazines that he had apparently begun to sort by title.

Hmmm.

“Maybe I forgot to tell you that you could sleep here as well,” Derek said, polishing Nod with a squirt of Colgate.

“I got a modeling job last night at the club.”

“Good for you.”

He was scrubbing like they teach you, in little circles.

“Derek, you told me to go there,” I said.

“I know.”

He turned and smiled at me.

“I'm happy for you. I was wondering when you'd move up in the food chain.”

Even if he was being sincere, the rest of my bagel and cream cheese tasted like paper and mud. There are some things you just don't say.

“What did you think of Jason?” he said.

“You fucking set us up?”

“Please don't swear so much. I wanted you to get a good gig, but—”

“I can't
believe
you.”

“—but I was expecting you to come home last night. That's all.”

Because graffiti is among the most expensive art forms, because art matters, because movies aren't called movies, they're called films, because the rats underground are bigger than most dogs on Central Park West, because you can fall asleep on a Brooklyn-bound D train and wake up at the ocean.

I wasn't surprised when I walked into alt.coffee and saw Chase screaming on the floor, re-enacting his famous scene for an audience staring indifferently over their cappuccino foam.

“Aaaaaaaggghhhh! Just gimme back my legs so I can walk to school!”

A rush of keyboard clicks from the counter. Forest was surfing the Internet, proving that being earthcore didn't exclude you from the wonders of 90s technology.

“Listen to this,” she said. “According to this fansite, when you feed Chase's scream into an oscillograph—”

“Aaaaaaaggghhhh! I promise I'll
run
to school!”

“—and turn it into a sound wave, it has the exact same sonic peaks
as an earthquake after fall equinox.”

She turned to Chase and melted. “Baby, you're like, totally seasonal.”

“No, I'm not. I'm Hollywood. Hey, mister writer.”

I helped him up.

“How's the novel?” he said.

That diamond-cut smile. I could tell he was trying.

“It was a short story, and it got rejected.”

“Was it a form letter?”

“It got pretty personal.”

“That's fantastic.”

“Don't humiliate him,” Forest said.

“I'm being serious,” Chase said. “It wasn't a form letter, so it means they love him, sort of.”

“They like you,” Forest said to me. “Almost.”

Chase clapped his hand on my shoulder.

“You're one step closer to making a movie. Isn't that why you write, so they'll make a movie out of it?”

As Chase carefully repositioned a strand of hair, I drank the bitter grinds of my coffee and wondered why I hung out with these two. They were like the residual flashes that followed a lightning storm—in your face, but superfluous.

Forest was being quiet and weird. She glanced at my crotch, gave me a smirk, then tilted the computer screen so she could be alone with it.

Something was up.

I suddenly felt like I was back in the Williamsburg elevator—light and unreal.

“Show it to me,” I said.

She turned the screen that changed my day from mediocre to rotten:

I recognized the La-Z-Boy, the Lego coffee table, my kink of pubic hair. Images, frames. Everything was backwards. Someone had rearranged time, shifting events around like they were Post-it notes.

I piss in a glass.

I drink the liquid.

I give the world my saddest face.

The website was called
Forced to Guzzle
.

Holy tit-clamping Mother of God.

“Dude,” Chase said, “if you're into drinking your own piss, then you
have
to make a movie.”

And suddenly there was a photographer out there I wanted to murder. I think his name was Brent. Or maybe Raoul. And Derek was going to get it, too.

I got another envelope today.

The return address was
Zoetrope All-Story
magazine, the brainchild of Francis Ford Coppola, a fifty-pager that made careers. Getting published in
Zoetrope
supposedly made you famous and got you catered luncheons where the wine had a cork, not a screw top.

The envelope was crisp and done up in Helvetica letterhead. I didn't open it right away, wanting to savor the letter before it could hurt me.

But I was feeling pretty confident about the latest submission.
I had taken my time to flesh it out, then deconstruct it and put it back together, checking to see if the character was strong enough to rematerialize intact. I spent many afternoons in Barnes and Noble (yeah,
now
they let me in) poring over writing guides, learning what malapropisms will get you rejected at first glance, what kind of dialogue will make a character sound hollow, the importance of interior monologue, and how to avoid pulling punches that need to hit hard.

I tightened my grammar, plotted my story arcs for effective buildup and release, and memorized successful query letters word-forword. I did my homework.

Oh, but that was not enough.

You cannot lay genius to paper, page fifty-two of
The UnFrustrated Writer
says, if you are not in a suitably controlled environment.

Tompkins Square Park in the East Village was ideal, specifically because of the maze-like layout that disoriented me just enough to get me lost in the story, and because I had to hop a fence and disobey a Parks Department sign to get to the shady patches of grass.

You cannot write heroically if you live a take-no-chances, conventional life, page thirty-nine says.

I found solidarity in watching other writers disappear into their notebooks. We kept each other in check, stopped each other from floating away to the distractions of spring.

I wrote my story.

The kid was sick of being force-fed Ritalin, coerced with pills into moods that overwhelmed him and followed him around like cloud cover. Nobody had the right to control his interior weather like that.

He decided to strike back.

He learned how to fake taking his pills, and built up a secret stash that he gradually introduced into his parents' food supply. Noodles were the perfect camouflage for pills because he could noodle them in, and so was hot soup because they melted. The kid now cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner for his parents, and did it with pleasure.

While they floated through the world in a forced state of being “with it,” the kid got back to the business of living. He discovered other ways of focusing, treatments that the adult world didn't recognize. He found that by sneaking close to his sleeping father and palming one of his huge testicles, turning it around and documenting its shape, color, texture, and smell, he could plug into the realities of life.