Flatscreen (10 page)

On Facebook I found Beth Cahill, a girl I’d hardly noticed in high school: plain, unperfumed, not accentuated with pricey X-carat accessories or XL breasts. Now she was some kind of hooker. FB page linked to a sexual services ad from the
Boston Phoenix
featuring Beth bedecked only in panties and jeweled tiara, offering erotic massage for the moneyed lonely.

Found Alison too (I’d been spelling her name with two L’s instead of one), though, like Alison herself, there wasn’t much to find. No info other than essentials: age, hometown, graduation year. A single picture: she sits upright in the QHS courtyard, framed by trees, staring past the camera, unaware she’s being photographed. Mouth open, gap-teeth too big for her face; she’s joyously unself-conscious. Hair short, highlighted blue, no bangs. Blue on the tips of her hair matches her eyes. Sometimes I’d stare at the picture for minutes, wondering where she was now.

Thought of Alison often, but she’d left me little to think about. Her eyes, smell of her hair, sea-salt feel of her fuck-thrust.
Preferred to think of Jennifer, whose imagined perfection beat Alison’s too-human condition.

Read blogs by young American soldiers, stranded in Iraq, covered in sand and sweat, longing for Big Macs, blond pussy. Searched their monologues for profundity, explanation for bloodlust, what it felt like to watch the life float from a man like fast-escaping gas from a broken propane grill; what it was like to know your body had produced death the way it produces urine or semen; to know your actions had caused reactions. Figured I’d be okay in the army, no choices, following orders, wearing a uniform. Maybe I’d die. Body carried in a plane, flag-draped, celebrated. Mom cries. Benjy touches her hair as the sun sets, pulls it from her eyes. Audience claps, weeps (
American Grunt
, Sony, 2005).

Mostly I looked at Jennifer’s profile, waited for a reply that didn’t seem to be coming. By the time Benjy came home from college for break, I’d given up. I hid in front of my computer, stared hard at the screen in the unrealistic hope that if I stared hard enough Benjy wouldn’t notice me. I was dreading the brotherly talk.

Facebook message from Jennifer: “Party at my house tonight. 2 Kegs. 31 Roadway C.”

No explanation for not writing back. No sorrowful apology. Just an invitation.

“Eli.”

He said it with solidity, as if answering the question “Which slovenly sibling needs a cane to the membrane?”

Benjy was checking my alarm clock against his ultrasonic Hamas-approved underwater watch, or whatever it was.

“Dude,” I said.

“You’re three minutes slow.”

“Times they are a-changing.”

I thought: nothing’s changed. But Benjy slackened his stiff-backed stance, smiled, sat, eyed the nonexistent décor.

“Time is relative.”

The funniest joke he’d ever made.

“Like Uncle Sal?”

“Like Cousin Charlie.”

“You’re losing it,” I said.

Benjy laughed, palmed my shoulder with a sweat-wet hand. Hair on top was beginning to thin, like Dad’s. Looked huskier: eating pizza, packing pounds for winter. We Schwartzes were hibernators. We Schwartzes were hungry.

“This.” Benjy held up his arms, gestured toward the walls.

“This is it, big bro. Not what you expected?”

“Pretty shitty.”

“My thoughts exactly,” I said, shut my laptop, fell backward onto the bed. Still had the cars, trucks, and buses blanket nostalgically spread atop my one-thousand-plus thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Blanket was soft, stained, emblematic of my nonexistent romantic prospects.

“You’re twelve,” Benjy said, stood. “Thirteen at the oldest.”

“Oh, and you’re so mature?”

Thought he might tickle me or fart in my face. A regression to the old sibling roles. Instead he faked a shin-kick, sat back on the floor, opened my laptop, navigated, raised eyebrows at the screen, frowned, closed the laptop.

It always amazed me: the brevity of online interaction, the speed at which a mood could shift.

“Fuck,” Benjy said.

“What?”

“Just fuck, celibate boy.”

“I have a date tonight,” I said. “Might try to fuck, actually.”

“Didn’t know you had a social life.”

“And I didn’t know you had a penis. Funny how the world works.”

But Benjy didn’t laugh. Not because he was offended—I’d accused him of genital deficiency enough times that the words had lost all effect—but because whatever he’d seen on the screen had made him suddenly subdued.

“Mom’s shitty, huh?” he said.

“What makes you say that?”

“Just get the sense.”

“No more miserable than she was before.”

“I might stay at Dad’s.”

“Really?”

“I don’t even have a room here, or a bed.”

“Well, the couch is pretty comfortable,” I said in consolation. “I sleep on it a lot. I might sleep out tonight, anyway, if my date goes well.”

Worth it to lose my bed for a night if it meant my brother might think I had a life. He stroked the carpet with his fingers, absently pocketed a piece of lint.

“Okay, Romeo,” Benjy said.

Dan’s car smelled like cheap cologne. He drove a black SUV, bumped Jay-Z, repeated lines under his breath, out of time.

“You know, Jay writes all his raps in his head,” I said. I’d seen a thing on TV. “Doesn’t write them down at all.”

I liked that a brain could be so filled with words, all else pushed to the margins, made irrelevant.

“No doubt,” Dan said, “H to the Izzo…”

Turned my seat warmer full blast, watched the suburbs unfold out my window like a flip-book, houses getting incrementally larger, then smaller again once we got close to Jennifer’s.

Crowd was comprised of high school’s leftovers—dropouts, Head-First kids, CC students—all domed-out on plastic-handle vodka, Busch Light. Wasn’t friends with the Head-First kids during high school, wasn’t
not
friends with them, either. Somewhere in between: too fucked up for the rich kids, too rich for the fucked-up kids. I always thought they were cool, not giving a shit that girls like Sherri Sacks wouldn’t give them the time of day.

Henry Villeva and Jamal Green giggled in a corner,
traded pulls on a nitrous canister. Tried to picture their faces when they’d found Jeremy. Did they go blue like in movies, say, “Oh, shit,” touch his body? If I were hanging, who would find me? Benjy, probably. All scientific, checking for a pulse, methodically dialing 911 on his cell.

Jennifer Estes approached us.

“You made it.”

Not an excited “You made it”—no implied “I’m so glad,” no hello hug. Immediately obvious: she’d invited me purely out of pity, had sent a mass Evite to everyone on her friend list, had zero interest in setting sweet fricticious fires with our prematurely winter-worn bodies. My suspicion was confirmed when a muscled blond bro in a shirt unbuttoned to reveal a recently shaven chest put his arm around Jennifer.

“Stef,” he said, held out a hand in an offer of false solidarity, an offer betrayed by a tooth-sharpening tongue click that said “I’m not worried about you Jew boys, as you have no chance with my señorita. But you better stay away from her just in case, because I’m old-school and wouldn’t blink at kicking the shit out of you.”

“Short for Stephanie?” I said, which was the wrong thing to say.

Stef instinctively flexed.

“Stefan,” he said.

“Keg’s over there,” Jennifer said. Situation defused.

Never has a finger pointed to free alcohol been the cause of such sadness. As if she’d decreed, “Drink away your pathetic sorrows, round man; mourn the speedy decline of your sexual peak.”

Guy next to me in line was a short, slug-like white dude with a wispy attempt at facial hair.

“Yo, yo,” he said. “Big Schwartz! May the Schwartz be with you!”

“Good one,” I said, because it wasn’t a good one. I looked over his shoulder, scoped the par-tay, watched my lost love dance lowdown, lusty butt-to-floor-back-into-big hands (shaven-chest), tickled senseless by her own displayed sexuality, smiling, head-shaking, diva-snapping, spinning like a spiffy globe on the axis of her red-heeled shoes.

“No chance,” the comedian said.

“In sleep perchance to dream?”

“2Pac, right? Or is that Fiddy?”

“I’m too sober for this party.”

“Dude? Bro, you used to be in my gym class! After-school gym. Mr. Zibikis, remember?”

I remembered. Failed gym freshman year because Sammel’s brother let me ride with him during his lunch break. We’d loop the school’s surrounding streets, bumping eighties hip-hop I pretended to like ironically, but secretly envied for its uncomplicated exuberance. Rap’s prepubescence: before peeps got gats, got grillz, got serious. Thus, after-school gym.

“Oh, yeah.”

“That shit sucked!”

Only memory of the class was that after school they’d let geese shit on the field as a method of fertilizing the grass. One time Mr. Zibikis, an aging alcoholic who’d been demoted from football coach to after-school gym teacher, let us throw javelins at the geese, told us whoever hit one could go home. No one did, but I remember chasing geese around the girls’ softball field, chucking spears like we were Roman soldiers in the heart of Caesar’s army (
Rome
, HBO, 2005–2007).

“Remember that time he let us throw javelins at the geese?” I said.

“Yeah. Yeah, that was ill. So what you up to these days?”

Not sure why I was so afraid of this question. Maybe because I was supposed to have gone to college, and we were supposed to have a conversation where I said I was in college, he said he wasn’t, we were both proud of our positions, and though we each looked down slightly on the other’s, our hearts still could be united by drugs, booze, girls, and one beautiful memory of attempted winged-animal assassination.

“Not much. Living at home with my mom.”

“You didn’t go to school?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Just didn’t work out.”

“Why not?”

“Smoked too much weed … fucked up in high school.”

“Your family pissed?”

“Yeah.”

“So what you doing now, working?”

“No.”

“So what the fuck you doing with yourself, kid?”

“Nothing, really. TV, Internet…”

“Must be sweet, man.”

“It’s not that sweet. Actually, it’s pretty boring.”

“I’ll take boring over working any day.”

“I’m not really rich anymore. We moved over by the highway.”

“Where at?”

“Elm Condos.”

“Elm Condos? Damn. Those shits ain’t bad. Compared to this neighborhood, anyway.”

True. Our apartment was small, antiseptic, but double the price of a duplex like this one. I was still a bourgeois
stoner with a rich daddy. No personal allowance, but he put food on the table, high thread-count sheets on my pillow-top Tempur-Pedic. A common and confusing situation for fuckups like me: cash poor, well insured, unmotivated.

“What about you?”

“Pepsi factory.”

“How’s that?”

“It’s a Pepsi factory.”

“What do people do in Pepsi factories?”

I’d seen TV docs about labor laws, sweatshops, the factory strike of 1909. Understood labor as concept, couldn’t picture the specifics. Was the Pepsi mixed in giant tubs by elves? Was there a guy whose only job was to add the sugar? I entertained a romantic notion that I too could bottle Pepsi. But it wasn’t feasible. Unlike Dad, I was all thumbs, no knack for mechanical contraptions outside the kitchen. Nothing manly about me.

“We just bottle it. It’s pretty easy, actually. Boring, but easy. It’s union, though, so the money’s okay.”

Felt like I was in a John Hughes movie, only I was playing the wrong role, not the trodden romantic lead but the rich asshole or the comic-relief stoner. Filled the guy’s beer in consolation for the fact that his life was probably shittier than mine.

Dan was talking to Nikki, the Whole Foods cashier with green eyes, chemical-red hair. I’d brought Dan a beer, but he already had one. Chugged his beer, took the one I’d brought, chugged it too. Nikki looked on impressed, the way younger girls sometimes look at older guys who were cool in high school, regardless of their current status.

“This is Nikki.”

Never formally met, but I’d seen her name tag, watched her scan bell peppers with amorously unloving slacker imprecision.

“You work at Whole Foods.”

“I know where I work.”

“I go there a lot.”

“I know,” she said, raised an eyebrow. “A lot.”

“I find it peaceful.”

“I don’t. All those privileged assholes. You should hear how people talk to me. So what are you, a cook or something?”

Nose ring exaggerated the movement of her nostrils. It sparkled, spelled trouble in a good way.