The Thing I Didn't Know I Didn't Know (Russel Middlebrook: The Futon Years Book 1) (2 page)

And for what? All so I could take a fumbling, frenzied roll on a dusty Ikea futon with some guy I'd never even met before? There had to be more to it all than that. Didn't there? So what the hell was the answer?

"Particle astrophysics," Min said. She was answering my question from before about what she was doing. "Which sounds a thousand times more interesting than it is."              

Min is smart—really smart. She finished her undergrad in two and a half years (with credits from high school) and was now well on her way to her PhD (in physics).

Gunnar looked up from his tablet. "Did you know that every single time they do a deep sea dive into the area below the photic zone, they discover dozens of new species?
Dozens
. Every single time!"

If Min is this huge presence in any room, Gunnar is the kind of guy who tends to blend in. He reminds me of actors who plays the postman in TV commercials. He's the sort of person who gets better-looking the longer you know him.

"And you know how some deep-sea animals grow to gigantic sizes?" Gunnar said. "Giant crabs, giant squid, giant stingrays? No one knows why. Isn't that fantastic? Science still hasn't explained it!"

In other words, Gunnar seems perfectly average, but only until he opens his mouth. He has this tendency to get obsessed about strange things. Once back in high school, he'd started growing mushrooms in the crawlspace of his house, but not hallucinogenic ones like a typical high school kid. No, Gunnar had been obsessed with the normal edible ones, like shiitakes and morels and chanterelles. Remember when I said that Gunnar didn't have to work? This was basically what he did all day instead of a job: just sort of geek out on things he found interesting. But he never stayed obsessed about any one thing for long. After he'd made all that money with his
Singing Dog
app, I'd practically had to beg him to do a follow-up app for Christmas,
Singing Dog: Jingle Bells
(alas, it tanked). Once he was done with one obsession, he just moved on to the next one, which, lately, had been "deep-sea creatures"—those animals (and plants?) that live in the area of the ocean below where light reaches.

As long as I've been friends with Gunnar, people have said that he's off in his own little world, which is absolutely true, except I think this is a good thing while everyone else is totally judging him.

"Oh, hey, I forgot to tell you guys," Min said. "Guess what I heard?"

"What?" I said.

"The she-demons are moving."

This was what we called these two little old ladies who lived across the dock from us—they were sisters. Our falling out with them had started innocently enough. A year or so earlier, I'd made the mistake of shaking out a rug outside our houseboat, right after the two of them had just stained a deck chair. One of them had made a noise that, I swear, sounded like an animal dying.

I'd apologized—
profusely.
I'd even offered to buy them an entirely new deck chair. But it had all gone downhill from there anyway. Soon they were accusing us of stealing their hanging fuchsia, and complaining about the fact that our hose wasn't coiled right. Now every time we passed by their boat, we could feel them glaring at us—and sometimes you could even hear them softly muttering obscenities (no, seriously). The two of them were off in their own little world too, but unlike Gunnar, it was the Land of Crazy-Ass Old Ladies.

"They're really moving?" I said to Min, excited. "Really?"

"They're really moving," she said.

"Oh, my God, let's get turnt up!" I said. Basically, I was saying, "Let's party!" I was probably using the expression wrong. Then again, I'm the least hip twenty-three-year-old of all time.

"Do you know if they're selling or moving?" Gunnar asked Min. Unlike a house, you can literally
move
a houseboat, just by unhooking it from the dock and pushing it out into the water.

"Neither," Min said. "They're going to just open a portal to hell and push their house directly over onto a lake of fire."

She said this so deadpan that it took a second for Gunnar and me to realize that she was joking. But then we got it. We all laughed.

"I bet I know why they're leaving," I said. "Whole Foods stopped carrying eye of newt."

Gunnar snorted. "Yeah, and their broomsticks kept colliding with the seaplanes landing out on the lake."

I laughed again. "They couldn't figure out how to make a houseboat out of gingerbread!"

"They realized they'd already eaten all the neighborhood kids!" Gunnar said. 

These may not have been the most brilliant jokes ever, but we were all in the mood to laugh, so we did, a little bit like we were high. And the fact that Min was laughing right along with Gunnar's and my politically incorrect "witch" jokes just shows how truly annoying these two women really were.

"I bet they'll find mummified bodies down in the basement," Min said.

"Absolutely not," I said, mock-soberly. Then I waited a second or two and said, "Because houseboats don't have basements!"

"I think they cut up the bodies and dump them in the middle of Lake Union wrapped in plastic bags," Gunnar said, "like in
Dexter
."

I was laughing so hard now that my face hurt. I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt so good. It was even better than sex with Boston.

But then our laughter sort of tapered off. The boat rocked gently, and Min said, "Well, I hate to break up the party, but I should get to bed."

Gunnar folded up his tablet case. "Yeah, me too."

"Really?" I said, disappointed. I'd just got home, and I didn't want to go to bed yet. It had something to do with that hook-up with Boston—it had left me feeling strange. Lonely. Or maybe it was just the fact that I liked Gunnar and Min so much. As tight as it was on that houseboat, I almost never got sick of them.

"Don't you have to work tomorrow?" Min said.

She was right—I did.

"Great," I said, grimacing. "Now you've torn the paper lantern off the light bulb." This was a Blanche DuBois reference, from that old play
A Streetcar Named Desire
, about how she's always trying to avoid the harsh light of reality by putting colorful paper lanterns over the bare light bulbs. And if there was any doubt before when I said that I'm the least hip twenty-three-year-old of all time, well, there clearly isn't now. (But hey, sometimes I do hook-ups!)

Gunnar and Min just groaned and rolled their eyes. I'd explained the Blanche DuBois reference before, and I said it now mostly to annoy them. But I put up with plenty of
their
quirks, so they could put up with a few of mine.

"Good
night
, Russel," Min said.

"Good night, Min," I said, smiling, as she and Gunnar trotted off to bed.

*   *   *

But I didn't go to bed. I hadn't taken a shower at Boston's, so I took one now (I had no choice: there's no bathtub in Gunnar's houseboat).

And I stood there under the hot water thinking about my life. I don't want to make this sound all maudlin or overly-dramatic. I mean, it's not like I was in tears or anything. Maybe I didn't have specific thoughts at all. It was more just a feeling. But if I had to put it into words, it was the feeling that my life hadn't turned out the way I'd expected.

I'd survived high school (no small accomplishment), and I'd gone to the University of Washington (and graduated magna cum laude with a double major in psychology and political science—also no small accomplishment, but small potatoes compared to surviving high school). But now what? What came next? When it came to my love life, it was pretty much non-existent—except for the five or six online hook-ups I'd done. Which isn't to say that hooking up with guys via iPhone apps had anything to do with "love" anyway.

Speaking of my friends, here was Gunnar owning a houseboat and not having to work, at least for the foreseeable future, just ticking off his fleeting passions, doing whatever the hell he wanted every day. And then there was Min, effortlessly plowing her way through her PhD like an ice-breaker through Arctic seas.

Between Min's unstoppable career drive and Gunnar's passionate aimlessness, they had their lives all figured out. But I still didn't have a clue about mine. I knew I was only twenty-three years old, but still.

So anyway, I'm standing there in that shower, haphazardly soaping myself up, feeling the hot water run off of me. And my nose started to bleed. I've always gotten a lot of nosebleeds—when I was a kid, the doctor had tried cauterizing my nose three times, where they try to burn the blood vessels in your nose (once with heat, twice with chemical cold), but it had never really taken. Now I always carry Kleenex with me wherever I go and just sort of accept that my nose will start bleeding every few weeks. I'd call it my period, except I'm sure that's ridiculously sexist.

Anyway, I know how to stop a nose-bleed. You pinch your nose and just wait for the blood to congeal (don't tip your head back! The blood will run down your throat). It's harder to do in the shower, with the hot steam and water all around you opening up blood vessels, but it always stops eventually.

But this time I didn't pinch my nose. I just let the blood drip down from my nose into the water swirling around the drain—drip, drip, drip. The blood didn't look red in all that water—it was more rust-colored. As soon as one drop would hit the white fiberglass floor, it would quickly wash away, but then another drop would follow right behind. I could taste the blood in my mouth, salty and coppery.

Drip, drip, drip—the blood kept dripping, but I still didn't stop it, didn't pinch my nose. After a while, it seemed to drip even faster. How much blood had fallen out of me already? It seemed like a lot. An eighth of a cup? A quarter cup? What would happen if I just let it keep dripping? Would it drip away forever? Would I bleed to death? Had anyone ever bled to death from a bloody nose? In the history of the world, had anyone ever committed suicide by not pinching off a nose-bleed in the shower?

Again, I don't want to get carried away here or go all goth on your ass. I wasn't really trying to kill myself. My life wasn't even that bad. Privileged white guy, remember? First World problems? And I'd literally just been having a great time with Min and Gunnar out in the front room, laughing so hard about the crazy old ladies next door that I'd almost pissed myself. And hey, I lived in a houseboat on Lake Union.

So before too long, I did finally plug my nose, and then I waited for the blood to congeal. It didn't take long.

But the question I'd had since coming home from Boston's apartment, that didn't stop:
What's the point of it all?

And standing in that tiny on-board shower, in between those cheap fiberglass walls, I realized I didn't have the slightest clue.

CHAPTER TWO

I work two different jobs, about fifty hours a week total. What with student loans and paying rent to Gunnar (thanks, Min!), I don't have a choice. It sucks. It's a little like being the child of divorced parents. I have both jobs pulling at me, asking me to do something and implying that the whole world is going to end if I can't manage to make it work, even if what one is saying totally contradicts what the other is saying. I'm constantly having to choose, and no one is ever really satisfied, least of all me.

My first job is working as a lifeguard at Green Lake, which is this urban lake a couple of miles north of downtown. The whole lake is a surrounded by a park, and the city bans motorized boats on the water, so it's actually this weirdly peaceful little oasis in the middle of the busy metropolis. Most of the year, I work inside, in the indoor pool, but a couple of days before, in early June, the city had officially begun posting lifeguards at the two outdoor swimming areas, one at each end of the lake. And because the lake is this weirdly peaceful little oasis in the middle of the busy metropolis, hordes of people descend on it, especially on a sunny day.

The day after I got the bloody nose in the shower, I was working the swimming area on the west side of the lake. The lifeguard office is inside an old brick bathhouse (which sounds more impressive than it is). It looks out on a grassy sun-bathing area and these broad concrete steps that lead down to the lake itself. There are usually five lifeguards in total on duty, and we rotate every fifteen minutes, spending fifteen minutes at each of the three stations out on the lake and thirty minutes inside the office in the bathhouse, answering swimmers' questions and bullshitting with the other off-duty lifeguard.

It was a sunny day, but it was early in the summer, so the lake was crowded, but not insane. Even so, lifeguarding takes a lot more energy than most people think. You
really
have to pay attention, because if you phone it in, that's sure to be the day some snot-nosed brat hits his head on the dock and drowns.

I had just started one of my thirty-minute stints in the office. The other lifeguard was this guy named Clint—basically a stack of muscles wrapped in a sheath of bronze skin, topped with a tousled mop of brown, sun-highlighted hair.

"Oh, my Gawd!" he said. "I think I just nutted my chinos!"

He was talking about some hot girl out on the lake. How did I know this? Because hot girls out on the lake was all Clint
ever
talked about.

Sure enough, he was standing at the office's open half-door, looking out at the swimmers. "Do you see her? The girl in the yellow tankini?" He gripped his heart. "Oh, man!"

"Ha," I said, surprised that a guy like Clint even knew what a "tankini" was.

Then Clint glanced over at me and remembered for the hundredth time that I was gay. So he looked back out at the swimming area and said, "And what about the twin frat boys? You see
them
?"

I smiled. "Yeah." The truth is, unlike the girl in the yellow tankini, I knew exactly who Clint was talking about. They weren't really twins, but they were close enough.

For the record, if you've ever wondered if, behind our dark glasses, the lifeguards at a beach or lake are checking out all the people we're supposedly lifeguarding, we totally are. Staring without consequence at hot young bodies in wet, clinging swimsuits is the one real perk of being a lifeguard.

"Seriously," Clint said. "I'd take a piece of
them
."

Clint always did this, every day we happened to be in the office together. He wouldn't just suddenly remember I was gay and then ask if I thought a particular guy was hot. No, he'd tell me, for my benefit, exactly which guys
he
thought were hot. Not that he'd ever act on it. Clint is what I think of as a Seattle Straight Boy. That means a guy who's fit, liberal, well-groomed—maybe a bit hipster/scruffy. Taken all together, you might assume a Seattle Straight Boy is gay. But he's not. Talk to him for more than two minutes, and it's immediately clear that he's completely, astoundingly straight. My theory is that at some point in the mid-00s, years before the rest of the world suddenly shifted on LGBT issues, word went out from Seattle women to all the straight guys that they were never getting laid again if they were even vaguely homophobic. So they changed. Like, overnight.               Now they're almost
too
pro-gay. In fact, a lot of them like nothing better than flirting with gay guys, which is sort of what Clint was doing with me.

"So," I said. "Got any fun plans?" Talking hot guys with Clint made me uncomfortable, so I always changed the subject.

"Gonna do some kayaking on Lake Sammamish. Gotta head over to R.E.I. after work to pick up some stuff."

R.E.I. is short for Recreational Equipment Incorporated—
the
place to shop in Seattle for anything outdoor-related. It's also ground zero for Seattle Straight Boys.

That's when I remembered: Clint was a kayaker. And a biker. And a slackliner. And a surfer. And a rock-climber. Basically, if it took place outside and you could look butch doing it, Clint was right there.

"What about you?" Clint asked me.

"Me?" I said. Stalling for time, I reached for the sunblock. I have red hair—actually, more auburn—and fair skin. So of course I took a job as a lifeguard. I don't tan, but if I constantly slather on the sunblock, I never actually burn either. And—fringe benefit—all the sun clears up my zits.

"What you got goin' on?" Clint said. "Like, this summer."

We already covered this, right? The night before, when I was standing in that shower watching my life-blood drip away by the pint? I didn't have anything going on in my life, which was almost too pathetic for words.

So I just said, "Nothing big." And I desperately wanted to change the subject again. But this time I couldn't think of anything to say. So I just kept slopping on more sunblock like it was the most important thing in the world.

Before too long, we rotated lifeguard stations. Clint left, and I found myself in the office with Willa—a small, dark-skinned woman with tightly-bound hair. She and I had always been friendly enough. But unlike Clint, who was like a human pinball machine, she was snootier, more uptight.

Right then, she was tapping away on her laptop.

Click, click, click
,
click, click.

"What you working on?" I asked.

"Huh?" she said, not looking up. "Oh, nothing. My startup."

"Startup, huh?" I smiled. "Big plans?"

She looked up and sort of glared at me. "We already have a million dollars in angel investing."

"Wow. Congratulations." But now I was confused. "If you have all that money, why are you still working here?"

She was already back to typing
—click, click, click, click, click
. "I'm maxed out, and the first check doesn't come till September."

"Ah." Then I said, "A few years ago, my best friend made nine hundred thousand dollars on an iPhone app."

Willa looked up at me again, like I'd finally said something interesting. "What about you?"

"What about me?"

"Do you design iPhone apps? Like your friend?"

"Oh. No." And then I started slathering on sunblock again, not because I needed it now, but because I didn't want to answer any more questions. I was incredibly thorough, trying to look so busy that Willa wouldn't possibly interrupt me. And sure enough—
click, click, click
—she didn't.

But that's when it hit me. Min and Gunnar weren't the only two people my age who had a point to their lives. It seemed like everyone I knew did. Sure, it wasn't always big "career" ambition, like Min, working on her PhD at all hours of the night, or Willa, typing away on her startup even during brief office breaks. Sometimes it was like Clint, totally committed to his never-ending kayaking and slacklining adventures, or Gunnar, losing himself in his edible mushrooms or deep-sea creatures.

But those were basically the two choices: either Unstoppable Career Drive or Passionate Aimlessness.

Which made total sense when you thought about it. My generation had inherited all these massive, impossible problems: collapsing ecosystems, dysfunctional government, out-of-control corporations, crazed terrorists, slightly less crazed Tea Partiers, insane college tuitions, and the even more insane requirement that you get a college degree or you're totally screwed. So we were all looking at this big fucking mess of the world, and we were responding in one of two ways: eat, drink, and be merry (as much as possible given that climate change and/or Republican assholery was quickly going to destroy us all), or feverishly outwork and outsmart the competition in a desperate
Mad Max
-like battle royale over the last piece of the ever-dwindling pie.

How had I never seen all this before? It suddenly made so much sense that everyone around me was doing exactly what they were doing. What other choice did they have?

Okay, fine, the world sucked, and the way people my age were acting made sense. So now I knew why they were choosing either Unstoppable Career Drive or Passionate Aimlessness. But I still didn't know how they managed to pick between the two. And then, once they'd decided, how did they go about picking a specific career or a particular passion? Did the answer come to them one day from out of a burning bush? Or did they just randomly
pick
something, thinking, "Well, anything is better than nothing"?

I didn't know. Even worse, I had no idea how to go about finding it out. It was like there was some secret to life that everyone else knew, but that no one had ever bothered to tell me.

Was
there? Part of me was tempted to ask Willa then and there, because it seemed like if anyone would know it, she would. On the other hand, then she'd also know I was even more pathetic than she already thought.

No, asking Willa was out. But one way or another, I was determined to figure this thing out.

*   *   *

It's always been hard for me to take my second job seriously. It's at a place called Bake, located in the U Village, which is this trendy shopping mall just north of the University of Washington. It's one of those stupid "gimmick" stores. In this case, it's sort of a bakery, but the idea is you create your own specialized loaf of bread. The store is full of these ceramic bins of things you can put in your bread: ordinary stuff like nuts, raisins, seeds, and dried fruit; quirky, supposed-to-be-good-for-you stuff like wheat germ, quinoa, flaxseeds, oats, and buckwheat; and decadent or truly weird-for-bread stuff like M&Ms, crushed potato chips, gummy worms, and tiny pretzels (oddly popular).

So these are your loaf's "integrants", which is a fancy, high-end word for "ingredients", and which just totally confuses everyone, because they assume you're saying "ingredients" when you're not. The idea is for customers to pick their own "integrants," measuring them out in the recommended amounts with these little tin cups and putting them into their own plastic bin. Then they hand their bin to the guy working behind the counter—usually me—and I blend it up in one of six different pre-made, pre-risen bread doughs and pop it into these super-hot ovens, and ten minutes later, you have a loaf of bread that "you" "made" "yourself".

The whole thing is
just so stupid
. I mean, eight dollars (minimum) for a loaf of bread that you pretend you made? What sort of person
does
that?

Okay, okay, I realize there's nothing more boring than listening to someone bitch about his job. The only thing you really need to know about Bake is that my bosses are a married couple, Jake and Amanda, who also happen to own the store.

And they hate each other with the passion of a thousand suns.

That particular day, they were sniping at each other because of something that had happened before work—something to do with earbuds, like for an iPhone.

"I just don't know why you didn't pick it up," Amanda said. "You said you would."

"Because I forgot to put it on the list, okay?" Jake said. "What difference does it make? I'll do it tomorrow."

"The difference is, you broke yours, and you keep taking mine, and then I can't find it. That's what difference it makes."

"Well, why don't you pick one up then?"

"Why should I? You're the one who broke it."

"Okay,
fine
, I'll do it tonight."

"The Apple store will be closed by the time we close."

"Then what exactly would you like me to do?"

Was it buying and operating Bake that had condemned Jake and Amanda to their hell of a relationship? I didn't know, and I didn't really care. I just desperately wanted out of our daily reenactment of the Sartre play
No Exit
.

"Besides," Jake was saying to Amanda, "why do you keep saying that it was
my
earbud that broke?"

"Because it was! It was the one
you
were using."