Nevada (15 page)

The water boils. She shaves, puts on makeup, and digs out a pair of jeans from her bag, not because she doesn’t feel like wearing a skirt any more but just because she feels tougher in jeans and she’s going to be traveling soon.

The drug deal in Williamsburg is totally uneventful. Dude is right off fucking Bedford Avenue, in this huge, fancy converted loft building where rent probably costs fifteen hundred more dollars a month now than it did fifteen years ago. He has sideburns and a tastefully ripped t-shirt, counts out forty bags, takes the four hundred dollars, and that’s that. They even say thank you.

Her hip creaks when she gets back into the car and she realizes she hasn’t even looked at the cool bruise she’s probably got from when she got doored.

She tucks the drugs into a sock, tucks that sock into another sock, tucks them into the bottom of her bag, and stuffs that bag into the trunk of her car. Then she texts Steph: Please don’t kill me, but can I borrow your car for a couple days? I will owe you forever.

Steph texts back: Whatever.

She’s had her shot and she’s got her drugs. She drives into Manhattan over the bridge she’s ridden her bike over every morning for the last six years. She turns up the volume on the same Fugazi album she’s been listening to since she was sixteen and makes her way to the Holland Tunnel. The sign says Holland Tunnel:
STAY IN LANE
.

Fuck this, she thinks. Fuck this city. Fuck this coast. What if I just go to fuckin California or something.

PART TWO

L
ATE
N
OVEMBER

1.

Star City, Nevada is fucking bullshit.
James grew up in the worst fucking town and he still lives here and he’s probably going to die here. It’s stupid. It was a boomtown in the late 1800s, all beefy cowboys and ladies of the night or whatever and then everybody realized there was no fucking gold here and left for California. Then nothing happened here for a hundred years, it was just a shitty little stream dribbling down between two shitty little mountains until sometime around when he was born, in the mid-nineties, when the Wal-Mart corporation saw an opportunity for brand infiltration and blew a hole in the side of one of the mountains and put a little bridge across the middle of the parking lot so the stream could run through the middle and differentiate the Star City Wal-Mart from every other Wal-Mart in the country that doesn’t have a stupid fucking stream running through it.

He actually kind of likes the stream.

As soon as there was a Wal-Mart in Star City, the people who got jobs at the Wal-Mart needed places to live, so they built these shitty condos down the length of the stream and then when all the waterfront property was taken up they started paving streets away from the stream until they practically almost had a fucking town here. Almost a town, definitely not a city.

There’s a truckstop out toward route 80 and a couple stores that aren’t Wal-Mart (a shitty little florist, a shitty kind of big garage), but mostly since Wal-Mart sells everything every other shitty little store would sell anyway, this town is like: there is a mountain with a Wal-Mart on it. Then there are a bunch of stupid buildings on the hill spread out beneath it. Then there are some more houses around where the ground flattens out. There’s a steep road that goes straight down the hill and a less steep road that swerves around the long way down the hill and last year they put in a GameStop and a Subway and six empty stores in a strip mall between the highway and the Wal-Mart. But mostly what they have is dirt and dust and nothing and majestic boring vistas and bored asshole teenagers and stars. The name of the shitty little town makes it sound like celebrities would vacation here or something, like in a dumb cop show from the seventies or a two-dimensional stage set from an old black and white movie, but really the only reason to name this shitty town Star City is that at night there are so many fucking stars above it.

As long as you’re facing away from the Wal-Mart.

2.

That’s the big picture. That’s Star City from above, the establishing shot, how it looks from the outside—not that James would know. The furthest outside Star City he’s ever been is Reno, like, four times. If you’re from Reno, Star City probably looks like some debris and nothing next to a mountain. But if you grew up here, it’s probably because your parents moved here to work at the new Wal-Mart when it opened because there were no fucking jobs anywhere in Nevada in the mid-nineties. Or something? Unless you wanted to deal blackjack in Reno. But neither of James’s parents wanted to work in a casino. Whatever. Who cares. James grew up here and it is stupid, fuck Star City.

The small picture, the tight shot, the closeup, is that James is stoned as hell, reclined in the flimsy plastic tub with the black grout or whatever the fuck it is called, the moldy stuff that seals the tub to the floor and the wall. He is hotboxing the bathroom of his apartment halfway down the hill from the Wal-Mart. Right now he is too stoned to tell if the water is hot or cold: it is probably lukewarm. Who knows. He sits up and looks at the mirror and can’t see anything because there’s so much smoke in here and also because that shit is all fogged up from how hot the bathwater was, some impossible-to-know amount of time ago. He’s thinking about how much he hates Star City and why it produces such apathetic and useless fucks: figure 1: James, figure 2: Nicole. But mostly he’s just stoned and spacing out.

He keeps coming back to how cheap this bathroom feels. This town sprung up out of nowhere and they built these shitty apartments out of bullshit but it’s weird how even though he feels numb about pretty much everything else in his life he can’t quite get accustomed to his shitty apartment. The material of the tub against his bony ass feels like you could get up and punch through it. Brittle plastic, brittle bones.

James smokes weed specifically so he can think about his ass against his bathtub and not about the fact that his girlfriend Nicole left an hour ago, stormed out in an angry huff. He’s in the bathtub because on some level he knew that if he hadn’t given himself a project, immediately, he would have followed her out of the apartment, out into the parking lot, and made amends. Apologized, patched things up. But she’s right to be mad: there is something wrong with him. He has no idea what the fuck it is, but he does need to figure it out if he’s ever going to have a normal human relationship. So he was like, Well, I’ll hotbox my bathroom and think about it. He’s working on it. He gave himself a job.

He left his phone on the bed, went into the bathroom, and blocked the crack at the bottom of the door with a towel, an old habit from getting high at his mom’s house when he was fourteen that he didn’t even realize he didn’t need to do any more. He made sure he hadn’t at some point accidentally put the batteries back into the smoke detector, ran a bath, and blazed the shit out of ten or twenty dollars worth of weed. He even used the bong, not one of the pipes. Smoked the buds, no shake. The plan was to smoke until there was no air left in the bathroom. To smoke until he could see through time. To smoke until he figured his shit out.

And he is figuring his shit out. Everybody knows that smoking weed is hardly the path to self-knowledge or anything. It’s probably the path away from self-knowledge, unless self-knowledge is, like, thinking about establishing shots in Stanley Kubrick movies. It is not. But this shit is seriously better for figuring out his shit than sitting on the couch with Nicole, again, watching some dumb movie she wants to watch because all the movies James likes are ‘creepy’ or ‘gross’ or ‘impenetrable’ or whatever.

He should’ve brought his iPod speakers in here or something. Even with smoke instead of air in here it feels shitty to think about this stuff. Fuck feelings.

3.

Eventually you have to come out of the bathroom. Eventually the water goes cold again and he’s already topped it off with hot water twice. Hot water is included in the rent so there’s no reason not to just keep doing this until he falls asleep or dies, but also James is legitimately bored and stewing and he imagines getting out of the tub, stoked to open the door, hurry out of the bathroom, and watch all the smoke billow out of the bathroom like the van in
Fast Times At Ridgemont High
or a Cheech and Chong movie. He sits in the tub while it drains though. Now he’s legitimately cold. He gets up, wraps a worn-out towel around himself, throws the door open, and rushes out.

The smoke pouring out of the bathroom is a disappointment. There’s smoke, and it sort of rolls out of the bathroom, but it’s not that thick and it doesn’t really seem to be in a hurry. It’s like when you’re smoking and you imagine you’re in a rap video and all this thick smoke is seeping out of your mouth all slow, but then you see yourself in the mirror and you just have a stupid expression on your face and look like an idiot who can’t even fucking smoke right. That kind of smoke. That kind of feeling. Suddenly the subject has changed from this shitty town and its mountain to this scrawny naked boy in this shitty little apartment with overhead lights glaring down and a towel around his shoulders.

Time is coming in gasps a little, which is cool, but it’s a harsh differential, coming out of the humid and smoky bathroom into the cold dry room with the clear air. Like, his lungs feel relieved and stuff but it feels kind of bad in his brain, in his eyes.

James probably hates his apartment. Like the bathtub was a warm safe womb and now he’s suddenly in this horrific bright world. He doesn’t scream like a baby taking its first breath, though. He mopes around like the teenager he was until three months ago. The plates next to his computer with pizza bones and toast crumbs on them are depressing. So are the high white walls with nothing on them and the blue futon with the navy blue sheets tangled in a corner. He doesn’t make the bed. He rarely even really untangles the sheets before sleeping in them. He lives in a one-room apartment where the kitchen corner is so small that you can’t even fit a plate in the sink to leave it there to soak. He doesn’t even have a lamp. The whole thing is lit like a cubicle, just the stupid overhead light with the fancy eco lightbulb that was here when he moved in.

James has never actually seen a cubicle except in movies.

He pulls a pair of boxers from the dresser he’s had since he was a little kid, this blocky wooden thing that he moved out of his mom’s house when he graduated high school and moved into his own place. It looks awkward against the wall in the corner. There are all these burn marks where he’s set down pipes or let joints burn out on it. After the first couple times he burned it he decided, Fuck it, part of my childhood or not this piece of furniture is not going to have any real resale value, and if I start thinking about sentimental value I’m just going to lose my shit about everything everywhere anyway so I might as well just not give a fuck and keep burning it. So any more, like, he will just put a joint on it without an ashtray or anything. What’s one more burn mark. It’s not like this giant block of wood is going to catch on fire.

He thinks about brushing his hair. He thinks about Marsha Brady, Rachel from friends, Zooey Deschanel, but he doesn’t even know where the brush is and he probably didn’t even wash his hair.

Dave Grohl. Robert Plant.

He doesn’t need to put on any more clothes. It’s late and it’s warm enough not to need a shirt. He catches a glimpse of himself in the smallish mirror on the wall and tries to imagine that he has abs instead of a Shaggy from
Scooby-Doo
scrawny fucking stoner non-abdomen, but it doesn’t work. He has no idea what he looks like.

If he goes to sleep now with wet hair he’ll wake up with a snake’s nest of curly fucked up tangles and weird waves. Plus it’s not even midnight yet. It doesn’t matter that he has to work at eight in the morning, he can never get to sleep before one or two, so he sits down at the computer. He pushes aside the box from the pizza he ate with Nicole tonight and sits in the computer chair, another hand-me-down from his mom’s house. It’s a round-backed nice wooden thing that clearly looks like it should be at a respectable kitchen table, all scrollwork or whatever, and it looks pretty out of place in this shitty bachelor apartment that’s laid out so spartanly for a computer, movies, and sleeping.

He wakes up his computer and types in his password. As if this shitty night was ever going to end any other way.

4.

Nicole is aware that her boyfriend is kind of strange. Not even strange exactly, but distant, or not all the way present, or something. Obviously part of that is how much weed he smokes. James has a literal subscription to High Times. But it seems like it goes deeper than that, like it’s just who he is even underneath the dazed stoner facade.

He’s always been a space cadet like that, even when they were little. Nicole has been with James for a long time now, but they certainly did not have a childhood lifelong love affair. She had crushes when she was little, signs that she’d grow up to be the sex maniac she’s grown up to be, but never, ever one on little James Hanson. He was the weird, dirty kid playing by himself at the edge of the playground while the other kids played sports and house. The joke about James in third grade was that he ate his own boogers. The joke in fifth grade—kind of weird, in retrospect—was that he slept in a bed
made
out of his own boogers.

She didn’t ask him out because he’d changed. He’s still exactly the same little kid he always was, drinking by himself at a party, inspiring rumors that he’s gay. Nicole started dating him because she changed. When she was fourteen or fifteen she bought a copy of Bitch magazine at Thanks Books at the base of the mountain on the east side and it was all downhill: classic feminist awakening stuff. Dots started connecting. The righteous fury about having to wear a dress to church when she was little and not being allowed to climb trees with the boys came back with the fury of a thousand suns. Turned out she was right to be mad about the way every grown man in town looked at her starting when she was twelve.