Brief Pose

by Wesley McCraw

  KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK. It's my door!

  I try to return the pills to the bottle, but they scatter like ants.

  “Just a second!”

  I cover the pills with a pillow.

  I open the door. Mindy and Shirin have saved me in the nick of time.

  My room is too small to ask them in.

  “Mindy and I have been thinking.”

  This is what I’ve been waiting for, a sign that they still care.

  “Did you do this?” Mindy holds up the blue bear she gave me. It hangs from a noose. A note pinned to its chest reads, “PLEASE LOVE ME.” I wasn't trying to be subtle.

  “You make the house feel heavy,” she says.

  “Mindy thinks you should move out.”

  “Hey! You do too!”

  “We've talked it over.” Shirin doesn’t want to argue. “Eric, we've been best friends since grade school--”

  “But how much do you want her to put up with? I mean really. We want you out yesterday.”

  I stare at them in numb disbelief.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Maybe a Catalyst

  Point A: Sometimes where you are is so untenable that all you can do is follow a straight line to anywhere else. “Rooms and Shares” had a posting of an apartment walking distance from my work. I don’t tell Shirin and Mindy. By the end of the week, I'm already to Point B.

  Point B: My new studio apartment. A blanket is wrapped around my shoulders as I rummage for my Mermaid Coffee Co. uniform in one of these over-taped moving boxes. Because of the cold, my breath comes out in little white puffs. I've upped my hours so I can afford rent so that I can live alone. It's still dark outside.

  I’m the only person left to love me. That has to be enough. This is the catalyst; this is the act one break that kicks me back out into the world. Goodbye, former best friends. Let us never speak again.

  Between point A and point B is a self-contained drama, a short film, where I became a stranger to myself and to the people I used to love.

  Their rejection didn’t kill me like I expected. After they told me I was kicked out, the depressive hell died a sudden death, and a calm, melancholic nostalgia took over. It turns out I didn’t need their love to survive after all. It was the longing for their love that was killing me.

  In a letter I left on Mindy’s bed, I explained that I understood why she wanted me out (I hadn’t been an ideal roommate) and that moving out was probably for the best. While they avoided the apartment, I tried to win my dignity by washing dishes and cleaning, taking a shower (damn I needed it), and even flossing my teeth. Shirin and Mindy thought getting better overnight was creepy. Long walks, fondly saying goodbye to the neighborhood, helped things sink in. I liked where I lived more than I cared to admit. Not everything had been a living hell. The three of us had some good times watching mindless TV, eating pizza, complaining about the noisy neighbors below us. I once encouraged Mindy to sing at an open mike at a café at the end of our block. I’d been proud of her. True, even with some perspective, during that last month, they’d been purposefully cruel. Whatever. It was over. I could breathe and move on with my life.

  Mindy didn't say anything in response to the letter.

  I packed my stuff into a U-Haul by myself.

  I’m not sure why I cried the whole way to my new place. I’d never cried like that before, even when I was in my grief spiral haunting my foster parents’ foreclosed home. It was scary. I had to pull over and park because I couldn’t see. I felt rejected by my only friends and truly alone, but it was more than that. My body wasn’t mine anymore. My mind was lost. Honestly, I didn’t know what it was besides a force of nature. The whole episode feels like it happened to someone else, like I was possessed or something.

  Now here I am, in my new studio apartment, freezing because I can’t afford the added cost of heating. (My new apartment isn’t really a studio. My landlord is using the bedroom for storage, so I only have access to the main room and the bathroom. That’s why the rent is so cheap. Otherwise, I’d be living with the mole people.)

  “Just get through this week,” I tell myself. New apartments always feel depressing before you get your shit unpacked.

  A primary tenant of screenwriting is that the protagonist must have a goal. Every scene must illustrate that struggle. Now that Mindy and Shirin aren’t my reason to live, I must find something new to live for and fast, before I kill myself. Not exactly uplifting, but at least the stakes are high: life and death.

  Oh. And I need to find my damn uniform! I feel like a crazy hoarder with all these boxes everywhere.

  “Fuck!”

  I lose my patience and throw stuff out of the way. The blanket falls off my shoulders and exposes me to the freezing air.

  A box at the bottom of the pile has “Important” scribbled on the side.

  “Finally!”

  Shivering hard, I pull on my over-sized Mermaid Coffee Co. uniform. Clothing, dishes, books, and junk are everywhere now. I’ll figure it out when I get back tonight, after my double shift.

  Now dressed yet still freezing, I lean against my front door so I can get the stubborn dead bolt to turn. I can barely slip out because of the boxes in the way.

  The hall outside smells vaguely of urine and wet dog. Cat hair layers the carpet, though I haven’t seen any cats.

  To lock the door, I have to turn the key hard enough that I’m afraid it will snap off.

  During my short time in the residence halls, I knew everyone on my floor. We often went out to eat together or played Battlefield or planned our short film or, if we were lucky and discreet, had sex. We introduced ourselves the first day. Real life doesn’t work like that. One day I'll pass my neighbors in the hall. I'll nod. They might even nod back. That’s about as far as community goes in an apartment building. Right now I don’t even know if I want friends again, not after what I just went through. I need new skills. I need a good training montage with bad 80s music. I need a rewarding job. I could get back into film. I could intern somewhere. Okay. I’m getting ahead of myself. First step: create a stable home base. That way I don’t have to dread coming home anymore.

  I lucked out on this location, so close to work, but the heart of the city can be impersonal at best. Between towering walls of office buildings, vast expanses of streets and car parks are austere and mostly deserted this early in the morning. Cutting wind chafes my exposed skin. Besides the angry hum of a street cleaner, the city is eerily silent, and besides the occasional dog walker or jogger, the sidewalks are vacant.

  Mermaid Coffee Co. opens before dawn, and I'm not sure how long it takes to walk to work from my new apartment. Hopefully, I won’t have to get up quite this early normally.

  A black and white BILLBOARD depicts cavorting friends playing tag in an Ivy League setting. Most of them are in their underwear. They have perfect bodies and perfect faces, and probably perfect lives. At the bottom, it reads, “BRIEF POSE.”

  I hug myself, shivering.

  The stark gap between me and the scene depicted on the billboard reminds me of another time I felt left out in the cold.

  EXT. HIGH SCHOOL PARKING LOT - DAY

  This is called a scene heading or slug line.

  The EXT. or INT. are abbreviations for exterior or interior. Then there’s the location of the scene: HIGH SCHOOL PARKING LOT. At the end of the scene heading is the time of day. Usually, you don’t use anything more specific than DAY or NIGHT, nothing like morning or, in this case, mid-afternoon. If I wanted, I could have put another dash and added FLASHBACK at the end to tell you that this scene happened a long time ago, back when I was a teenager.

  Under the slug line is the action or the scene directions, or as some call it: the black stuff.

  I sit on the concrete, against a wall, and watch CLASSMATES joke around. Shirin, dressed in her hijab, laughs as if she belongs. An effeminate CUTE BOY, who owns the car they hang around, raises a hand at me: a sort of wave.

  My sneakers are suddenly ver
y interesting. I draw skulls along the side of the tread.

  The boy is obviously gay and yet I’m the outcast, maybe because he's unnaturally confident and I'm an angry brooder. I tend to lash out. I broke a kid's nose once. Maybe Cute Boy wants a dangerous boyfriend.

  Shirin comes to me and tries to get me to join in. I shake my head and focus on my drawings.

  She gives up and runs back to the group.

  I watch their smiles and happiness whenever they’re not looking.

  That's what these Brief Pose advertisements remind me of: happiness viewed from the outside, happiness I'll never have because of my own insecurities. I’m broken. I’ve always been broken. Making friends is hard for me, and the few I’ve had, I’ve lost.

  In a screenplay, unless it’s in voiceover, you never write what the characters are thinking. You can only describe what the audience can see and hear. I’ve fucked that one up, haven’t I? All I do is think.

  As I walk to work, my thoughts never take a break. They don’t even take a breath. How do people make friends after college? I should make peace with being a loner and live a solitary life. Or I could surprise the audience and throw a housewarming party and invite my whole floor. I should invite Mindy and Shirin. What a joke! There was a time when I thought me and Shirin would get married! Mindy cried on my shoulder about her stalled music career. I was rooting for her. The three of us were going to be best friends forever, no matter what. It seemed a safe promise at the time. My faith in their love almost killed me.

  I almost died.

  I walk through a dark, monochromatic part of the city, my thoughts going around in concentric, darkening circles. Sexy and/or happy advertisements are everywhere. Besides architecture and graffiti, advertisements are the city's most dominant art form.

  My mood continues to drop.

  My feet drag. My shoulders and arms are heavy. I've never walked through this part of the city before, but in the end, I’ll reach the same place.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Tale of Two Businesses

  3.0

  Pick a street corner. Everywhere you go, Mermaid Coffee Co. You should be able to picture the heavily color-coordinated decor without much effort: an urban-harbor feel with the added twist of techy modernism. Our mostly affluent clientele see our signage and know what to expect. That’s the idea anyway. They gather here to meet up with friends or coworkers or to be anonymous in a comforting public space. People love our coffee, can’t live without it. My unrefined taste buds read it as high quality but unremarkable. Calorie dense pastries line the display case. Our wraps could be worse. At closing, we trash food I wish we gave away. It’s all about what you would expect. While too big to not have an adverse impact, we maintain greener business practices than the average global Corporation, presumably to boost our public image. As far as evil corporations go, we’re probably somewhere in the middle. While far from proud, I’m not ashamed of where I work. And while I may be depressive, and Mermaid Coffee Co. doesn’t necessarily deserve my full effort, I don’t half-ass at work. My self-esteem hinges on making damn good lattes at the world’s most ubiquitous coffee chain, and I craft every order with skill and precision.

  All that said, my particular location is different from the rest thanks to LOOLA ABERNETHY, a talented city native who goes by Loo and could pass for sixteen though she just turned twenty-one. She has worked here for a few years, and all that time she has been making alterations. From what I hear, the changes began her first day: She added a spoon with a handle that resembled squid tentacles to the rest of the ordinary spoons. There was no going back after that. With rapidity, she traded out normality with her own creations and flea market finds. Picture a petite girl--dark pin-straight hair, dark eyeliner, black fingernails--trading out a boring fishing boat photo with a painting of a giant squid attacking a ghost pirate ship. Don’t let her Goth tendencies fool you, though; she can be a ball of positive energy when she gets worked up about her art. Here is her stroke of genius: When you walk in, nothing looks amiss. Only on closer inspection do you find morbid Edwardian poetry running along the window frames, fishing nets covering the undersides of the tables, and apparitions hiding in the backgrounds of photographs. Taxidermied sea creatures, some fantastical, glare down from the upper shelves, but you have to look up to see them. Her favorite themes are Lovecraft, pirates, and hauntings. While she has been here for much longer than me--I’ve been here what? A year and a half--I got the assistant manager position, I assume because I’m the senior white guy, and no one realizes I’m queer.

  Oh. Should I put up a title card?

  Yep, it’s been almost a whole year since Mindy and Shirin kicked me out of their spare closet. I had high hopes, didn’t I? At first, I went to film club meetings, but work kept getting in the way. Living alone is expensive. I made a dating profile but never went on any dates. Months slipped by without much resistance. When all you do is work, time blends together and the urgency to better yourself fades. Depression, the comforting water in which I swim, is a convenient excuse not to care about anything. I go home and throw myself into bed, too exhausted to have a life, and the next day I get up and go to work, confident everything will be the same as the day before. I imagine how I’ll make my films but no longer believe I’ll ever make them. If I make it through one day, I can make it through them all. As the assistant manager, I’m not likely to be replaced. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and after that is the second anniversary of my foster parents’ death, Christmas, New Years, and the miserable months of January and February. It will be rough, but it can’t be any worse than last year. Fuck Shirin and Mindy. This year, I’m dead inside, so I’ll make it through just fine.

  3.1

  Loo precariously balances on a chair stacked on an uneven table made out of a ship’s steering wheel. Skull patches distinguish her uniform from the rest. Her leather boots creak. The chair’s impractical legs resemble octopus tentacles.

  With a rag with Cthulhu embroidered on the corner, I clean the espresso machine and try not to watch her recklessness. Her character definitely needs a stunt double for this scene.

  She exchanges an ordinary LED light bulb with one that has a more antique design. She thinks she can change the system from the inside. With this one coffee shop, she has succeeded, but what does one coffee shop matter in a chain of a thousand, a hundred thousand?

  With a measured pace to hide my anxiety, I say, “You know, they don't have statistics for falling while replacing a light bulb.”

  From outside, JUANCARLOS GÓMEZ-MONTEJANO, a Sociology student who also works here, BANGS on the front door.

  The noise causes Loo to falter.

  I gasp.

  She quickly regains her balance.

  “How long have we known each other?” she says.

  “Could you focus, please? You’re gonna break your neck.”

  “Accident statistics. That's all you talk about.”

  Finished with tightening the bulb, she climbs down onto the table.

  JuanCarlos, impatient, KNOCKS harder.

  We ignore him.

  She takes the chair off the table and places it on the floor with a CLACK. “There's more to life than death.” That’s funny coming from her. She once showed me a human skull she found at the waterfront. She eventually turned it into the police, but I had to convince her.

  “Promise me you'll stop by my exhibit,” she says.

  I focus on cleaning. Part of me wants to go, but I don't want her to think we're something we're not.

  “It's at The Wharf. We’re opening on Black Friday. It's my ode to heartbreak and consumerism. Promise me you'll show. It would mean a lot.”

  I still don't respond. I’m uncomfortable seeing her outside of work.

  “Eric, you're an ass.” She lets JuanCarlos in. “See the new blight across the street?”

  As he gets his apron, he gives me a dirty look for not opening the door. So he had to wait a minute. So fucking what? He often does this half-smi
le thing that gets him better tips. On him, our uniform looks trendy instead of repressive. On rare moments I feel an attraction, and then I remember I kind of sort of hate him and the feeling passes.

  Loo continues, “The founder of BP, Matthew Weber, he’s like this plastic surgery addict. He's almost seventy and tries to pass himself off as a frat boy. He’s insane. Total creep, and a complete control freak.”

  JuanCarlos ties his apron. “This whole neighborhood is being gentrified.”

  “They used to hire only white collegiate types. Then there was this massive class action lawsuit. You should use them for one of your classes. Hey, Eric, you were a sociology major too, right?”

  I thought she knew I was specializing in documentary film. I guess I only mentioned it a few times, probably at least a year ago by now. I’d be hurt if we were actually friends.

  “Did you even make it through a whole term?” JuanCarlos says.

  I ignore him.

  “Matthew Weber dropped out too, but he hides it from everyone. That's probably why he fetishizes college. Have you seen their ads? Apparently, only naked white dudes attend college. Homoeroticism doesn’t even cover it. If he weren't a billionaire, he'd be tragic.”

  “He's using sex to sell. Everybody does it. It's marketing 101.”

  “Oh, JuanCarlos, it's not just sex; he's a self-confessed lifestyle engineer. He has this vision of an ideal America from an imaginary 1950s: Perfect white male bodies. White privilege. Affluence free of the riffraff. There was an article about him in Rolling Stone a few years back. Thankfully the company has been tanking. I think people are finally over the elite-cool-kid thing.”

  “Yet they’re expanding.”

  “What’s your opinion, Eric? Talk to us.”

  “What are you two bitching about?” I say, pretending I wasn’t listening. “We need to open soon.”

  “Brief Pose,” she says. “Didn't you see?” She looks outside.

  Across the street, black and white POSTERS fill Brief Pose’s windows. A male and a female model stare back at me. How did I miss them this morning? I've been curious to check out Brief Pose for a long time. Now they’ve come to me.