What a good guy I am.
What a good guy he is.
I understand now why the counter is rising.
Yes.
Yes this makes sense.
What doesn’t make sense is how the counter on the screen isn’t exploding.
Like, I’m surprised it doesn’t just begin to ascend rapidly and then melt.
“I think he just winked at me,” I say.
“What.”
She turns over a little.
“The old man winked at me,” I say. “And it’s because we’re friends.”
She looks at the tv and scratches her nose with the knuckle of her forefinger.
“There’s no way they’re selling that many necklaces,” she says. She turns back to me and she says, “Hey remember that magician we saw the other day on tv. He was so good. It makes me think like, maybe some of his stuff is real.”
We are quiet.
We watch the tv.
This is magic.
The counter continues to rise and the old man continues to smile, holding necklaces.
And I realize I have never once actually been happy in my life.
And also never felt any kind of care that didn’t threaten to give up when challenged.
“Man, I just remembered when I was in like, kindergarten,” I say. “Me and a bunch of other kids were in the plastic playhouse thing during inside recess. We were reading a book. I was always the guy who read for some reason.”
“That’s funny,” she says.
I swallow and cough.
Then I continue.
“My best friend in class, he was this black kid named Ernest. And while I was reading, I stopped at one of the pictures and pointed at the black kid in the picture. I said, ‘Hey look there’s a little nigger one in here.’ And like, I didn’t even know what it meant. I just knew I’d heard other people say it. So it didn’t make sense to me, but then when I looked at my friend Ernest, he looked so hurt. Like he already knew what that meant. Like, I didn’t even realize it, but then I did. The look on his face was — he looked like he was mad at himself for being my friend. It felt stupid and terrible. Man. It’s fucking shitty I think. I feel really stupid and bad when I think about myself in situations like that.”
When I’m done talking I just want to keep talking so there is no quiet.
But I don’t.
She gets on her elbow again and looks at the tv.
I can see part of her nipple down her shirt.
The word “sex” scrolls through my headhole in big neon letters.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe they’ve sold that many. They could’ve sold that many. How many people buy necklaces at night though.”
I stare at the ceiling, on my back.
“Shit,” I say. “In that same class I had my first sexual experience. I was like, standing in line to get my homework checked and Ernest elbowed my arm and when I looked up I saw the teacher bending over. I could see her tits pretty good. The feeling was like, ‘I’m alive.’ That was a pretty significant class for me now that I think about it. I learned a lot then.”
She turns to me like I have just happened.
She says, “Huh I remember my kindergarten teacher used to tell us about how he worked at like, some industrial job once and how he’d have black crust in his nose at the end of the day and then he’d have to scrape it out with his fingers every night. I remember that scared me — when I’d think about him doing that.”
I watch the number rise on the counter.
And imagine the same counter for me, but it goes into the negatives.
Win.
The old man holds the necklaces in his hand, still talking, still smiling.
“He amazes me,” I say.
We both watch.
We are not touching or communicating.
I like it.
It feels real to me.
It feels like practice.
26 (Other Version of 25)
We sleep on the pullout bed tonight because her room is too cold.
The building is always very cold.
We lie on the pullout bed together and we do not touch or communicate, watching a shopping channel on mute.
She looks at the tv and she says, “I will agree that he is a cute old-man.”
I lean over the edge of the bed and reach to the floor.
“See,” I say. “He is absolutely adorable and he is tremendous.”
“Why tremendous.”
“I don’t know.”
I take my phone off the floor and I alternate between the tv screen and my phone, dialing.
Someone answers.
I focus.
“Hi,” I say. “Hi, is this the necklace channel. Ok. I was wondering if I could talk to the beautiful old man who is looking at me right now with a necklace in his hand. Ok. Sure.”
I push a button on my phone and put the phone back down on the ground by my pants.
“Think I’m going to shut off the tv I’m tired now,” she says.
She shuts off the tv and lies down against me.
“Goodnight,” she says.
“I don’t give a shit about you at all,” I say.
We both laugh and it feels good.
It feels like practice.
“Good night,” I say.
27
I have agreed to go to a birthday party tonight for someone I don’t know, because my roommate wants to have sex with the birthday girl and he is too afraid and awkward to go to the birthday party by himself.
(And also because I am a humanitarian.)
The birthday girl lives in an apartment building across the parking lot from our apartment building.
On the walk over, my roommate tells me she refused to have sex with him before because, “He didn’t have abs.”
He kicks a rock.
“And she’s fat too,” he says. “So what the fuck.”
I say, “If she wants abs, she will gets abs, and you fail. You have to be ok with that. Don’t make it her fault.”
We manage to kick the same rock across the parking lot, over ice and some areas of snow too.
And we manage because we try.
At the birthday party, there are people all around me and it feels un-good.
Like heat, somehow.
No I don’t know.
I sit on the couch looking straight ahead.
This is my etiquette.
I am proud of how good I have become at calmly not participating in things.
The birthday girl comes up to me and introduces herself and then she starts rubbing my shaved-head, stopping only for a second to fix her birthday hat.
“Can I do this,” she says.
“It feels terrible to me,” I say. “But happy birthday.”
“Thanks, can I do this.”
She keeps rubbing my head.
It feels bad at first yes but then I notice that I’m getting a dangerously fast hardness in my dick area.
Magnet fast.
Dangerous!
Her boyfriend comes over and they walk away together, him looking at me.
He probably wanted to rub my head.
Later on, when I’d really accomplished a good feet-stare, this girl starts falling all over the apartment, yelling about how she is Korean.
She falls over to a person and yells in his face, “I’m Korean!”
Then she does it again with another person.
The apartment is small enough that everyone heard it the first time I think.
I’m pretty sure she accomplished her communication with the first try.
But she keeps telling more people.
She walks all over the apartment yelling that she is Korean.
And for a finale, she falls over behind my back onto the couch, into immediate sleep.
There’s another person sitting next to me on the couch.
He is someone I don’t know and he is rolling a cigarette and he is looking at it.
He laughs.