It seems that the ’80s — the decade of my adolescence spent lurching dazed between milking and collecting eggs at my parents’ dairy farm and videogaming after homework — was the last tolerable decade in New York, despite the city going broke, despite the crime: it was Greener, who had eight years on me, who taught me to qualify. For him it was the decade of punk rock, hip hop, rap, graffiti as art, heroin and coke, a scene where everyone became millionaires at their mixed media before dying of AIDS or, as Greener wrote, “wrote excessive books about excess that were never excessively read” (though, he once recommended, the hardcovers’ dustjackets were useful for cutting up lines) — the last decade before the encroachment of the rest of the country, before the suburbs moved into the urbis. All that pseudoculture that Greener hated: the chainstores, the megamalls, the ATMized shopfronts unmanned but anyway lit and heated and airconditioned 24/7/365—he hadn’t been around any of that before it began coming to New York (downtown definitely has all the familiar logos by now), and just when it came he decamped to its source. He came to our state, our city, our cow college town — the world capital of bad depressing homogenous capital. We had — we still have, unupdated, unredone — an airport, then a strip of consumer options, then, up the hill, the College on the Hill and, when he first arrived, his second night with us — arrived unaccompanied at 35, balding and fattened like a species of livestock new to us who knew our livestock, but still recognizable as ready for slaughter — he invited Dem and me out to dinner along with a half dozen fellow students, but not because he wanted to bond.
He said, Don’t think I want to bond, it’s just that your girlfriend’s too pretty, which for him passed for a compliment.
He stood us a round of dollar margaritas.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him, my fiancée (that character still sounded too foreign).
All throughout dinner we were introduced to that hilariously raw style of metro complaint, the perpetual bitching of the provincial Manhattanite: could the food be any worse? could the service be any worse? could the fluorescents be more industrially fierce? which were cornier, the corn tortillas or the restaurant’s muzak and decor (the decorations were stapled sombreros and hefty husks of lacquered maize, a burro mural in dishwater pastels below dishsized speakers blatting juvescent pop top-40)? could the conversation at the surrounding tables be any stupider? could the people tabled around him be any stupider? He was caustic. Could he get a new knife? He’d drunkenly clunked his last to the floor.
The food was nominally Mexican (his request) — did we take him to Taco John’s or Casa Agave? I’m not sure which chains we had then — pre-Chi-Chi’s, ante-Chipotle — Chili’s?
About as Mexican as Hitler, he said, As Mexican as spätzle, he said, then, after the flan, wiped his mouth with the zarape that served as tablecloth and said:
Here’s your first assignment.
And then took a shot of tequila and said, Margarine-flavored tequila.
For our virgin workshop in this burg, I want you to write a story about our dinner tonight, but make me out to be the biggest asshole possible — I want to be fictionalized, hyperfictionalized, let your imagination graze free on the range — have me robbing this joint, have me taking a shit in the rice and beans, out me as this pretentious pinko kikeabilly snob, though still deigning to rape your wives, he looked at Dem then looked at me, winked.
Hand that in, he said, or else.
Or else?
(It was like the entire waitstaff asked that too.)
Bring me anything you want.
Staggering out of the restaurant he was slurring, But I’ll only read a story if it’s finished.
The first story I brought Greener was my own original creation I barely remember save that it involved a young man who went away to war — which war? did I specify which or even have a certain war in mind? who came home with medals bandaging his wounds to find some things different, not drastically different, just slightly different, like his wife has a name that sounds like her old name or what he thought her old name was, or his daughter’s just as beautiful as he’d remembered but instead of having green eyes and blond hair she has blue eyes and brown hair and this destabilizes him, this youthful veteran, who begins behaving differently himself, indulging in violent outbursts he and everyone around him regard as wholly uncharacteristic (unable to give this unrecognizable family affection or hold down a job, he blots his days trying to throttle a motorbike engine) — the reader has to wonder how sane he is and, if he’s not sane, how that loss of sanity will end: with murdering his family? with murdering himself (the vet was based partially on my grandfather, WWII, partially on my father, Vietnam — I’ve never served and that and the double models for the protag were probably why I kept the exact date and location of the conflict vague, though current events conspired to turn a few references Arab)?