“On the Cartoon channel?” Mrs. Schneider asks.
“It was about cartoons,” gingerly.
“You've been drinking a lot I see,” Mr. Schneider supposes with a mortician's smile. “You know, it's a damn shame that there aren't any jobs out there for an En Why You graduate.”
I try to think of a witty retort, but the only thing that comes to mind is nausea. I'm trying my best to suppress it, but the spinning room, the heat, and that tenement building scent of protracted decay make this a fairly difficult test in endurance. I reach for the glass of water sitting on the coffee table.
“It's eleven thirty,” Mrs. Schneider adds with less-than-passive aggression. “Don't you have anywhere to be?”
“It's Saturday, mom.”
“Still….” she begins as Jeff escorts the two in the direction of his bedroom. I don't hear the rest of the conversation, but I can imagine the gist of it.
I close my eyes again.
9.1
“James Aberdeen and Tomas fucking Bennington?” he asks incredulously. “And you're seriously pursuing Coprolalia?” It's an odd state of envy that includes a countervailing disdain. That's Jeff, though. He worships his pedagogue of a father, regards himself as a licensed therapist, and never fails to play the part of the dissenter in any situation that requires he step beyond the narrow views on life he has established after so many years in Greenwich — not Village, of course. Some would call him aristocratic or patronizing. He would call himself cultured.
While inquisitive by nature, he is also very complacent with routine and never one to seek out anything new unless it has been tried and tested by either his father or one of his friends. Most of the latter live by Columbia. A few of them live in either western Bushwick or (East) Williamsburg. Eddie, his best friend, somehow managed to drag him all the way out here, into the deepest regions of the neighborhood; I don't really know how.
Jeff held what amounted to auditions for a new roommate after Eddie got engaged and decided to move out. This was at the end of January. Around the same time, the university had decided to throw me out of housing due to what I have come to call The Marijuana-Related Event. They were not about to expel me, nor did they see any reason to cut my scholarship. They just didn't want me corrupting the coke dealer down the hall in the single; or the three compulsive gamblers next door to her; or their roommate, who peddled ten milligram Aderols for five bucks a pop; or the idiot next door to them, who was adamantly anti-condom, not celibate, and proud of it; or his roommate, who was just a total dick; or the guy next door to them, who smuggled cigarettes into the City from Virginia and sold them out of his room; or his roommate, who was into some type of bizarre pornography that saw the actresses chloroformed, groped, and…well, actually that was it; or the other roommate in the suite, who was in business school; or the girl across the hall from those three, who cut herself because she believed it to be the only way for her to feel anything besides the imperious torpor of whatever her shrink pumped her full of; or her condign roommate, Denise, who could drink anyone in the dorm under the table even though she weighed no more than a buck-fifteen, and typically passed out in the hallway whenever she forgot her keys, which happened often. Ah, yes, Denise, who will probably have “Quit being such a fucking pussy” as her epitaph, as this was the phrase she frequently employed in order to goad men into doing things that were stupid, illegal, or potentially fatal (and, silly us, it always worked).
My parents were obviously upset by the incident, especially since the only portion of my education that was not funded by scholarships was my room and board. They footed half of the bill; the other half was paid for by student loans. They didn't especially care about the fact that their son had fallen under the spell of Lady Mary Jane. Their grievances had nothing to do with shame; they were pissed that I'd been stupid enough to be caught, and even more upset about the fact that Big Purple had a strict policy of not refunding checks.
My father and I came to an agreement filled with loose conditions and ‘I'll tan your ass if’s. In the end, it was decided that he would give me six hundred and fifty dollars a month for housing, which was not so much a display of mercy as much as a desire to not let the neighbors see that their son had come back home disgraced.
I was given a week to clear the premises.
It only took me two days to find Jeff's ad for a roommate. The rent for the room was seven hundred bucks a month. Luckily, I had a job at the time, so I was able to cover the extra fifty bucks, plus the additional costs of cable, gas, and electricity without much of a problem. We didn't exactly hit it off, but, as he has told me several times, most of the people who came to see the place were either “hipster assholes” or deadbeats. Chances are, he would have waited for a better fit that me, but the female and male components of the situation needed to come together with haste. In that sense, we clicked.
By the time finals came along, I had quit my job and my parents had calmed down some. They told me that they would pay my way until I found another job, which they expected would pay a good deal more than the small sum afforded to me by the good people at Java Express, my employer as of a few weeks ago. Thinking that they would only be supporting me a few months, we struck a deaclass="underline" they would deposit fifteen hundred dollars into my checking account at the beginning of every month until either I found a job or September came along, though this latter condition was neither taken nor given entirely in earnest. This left me in a pretty good spot, as (at the time of graduation) I had a little over a grand in my checking account thanks to my previous job and several marijuana-related incidents prior to The Marijuana-Related Event. This was information that I did not feel the need to impart.
“Can I bum a cigarette,” I don't really ask because the pack is open; my thumb is already stroking one of the receded filters. “Thanks,” I add before he has time to object or accede. St. Germain can be heard coming from Jeff's room. I don't know the name of the song, but the central instrument is the flute. It's unlike Jeff to listen to such things; it is also unlike him to stare to me with such an admonishing expression unless I have forgotten to take out the garbage.
“You look like utter shit, man,” he says incidentally.
“Thanks,” I respond between plumes of smoke. “I didn't realize you and your parents were going to come back today. I would have slept in my room had I known.”
“It is a shame that we interrupted your convalescence.”
“Look, I know I made a bad impression. I'm sorry.”
“Well, it's a good thing that we woke you when we did,” he replies coolly. “Have you been greeting every day at the ripe old hour of noon?”
“I had a long night.”
“I see. And wherein lay the difficulty?”
“I'm not looking for pity, Jeff. I'm just explaining myself. It's not like I've been regularly getting up at this time every day,” I embellish (lie). I proceed to recount the entire night to him: Midas, Pepper, Aberdeen, Tomas, the triplets, Jane. The twenty-two was a mistake, I concede. Still, there's barely any left in the can. The air is hot now, as are all of the surfaces in the apartment — especially the Pleather couch on which I slept. My hair is pasted to my head and my body extols a viscous substance that smells like gin-breath and slightly putrefied beef. “I don't know how we're going to sleep in this fucking place without air conditioning,” I add.
Jeff ignores the final remark; he has decided to scrutinize the more inferential aspects of my behavior for the past two weeks with his cunning intellect.