I chuckled.
“What?” he asked. “What, man?”
“It’s just that that description of love you made seems like a near perfect summary of Plato’s Symposium.”
“Oh,” The Snitz said, looking down, “I, I don’t read that shit, man.”
“Come on, Snitz. I think you’ve read The Symposium. I really do.”
“Nope.” He looked up, then winked at me in that moonlit hallway. “Reading ain’t cool no more, Victor. Remember that.”
The bathroom door swung open, flooding the hallway with light. Stanley Jordan rushed out, darting his head about. “Victor,” he called to me—“What’s up, Snitz.”
“What up,” The Snitz retorted.
“Victor, you gotta see what’s going on in there,” Stanley Jordan said.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Just come on.” Stanley Jordan rushed back toward the bathroom door and I followed.
“Aye, Victor,” The Snitz said. “I’ll be in Dubnicek’s room.”
“Cool,” I said. I walked through the door into the bright white bathroom. The four showers in the tiled alcove hissed. Steam rose, enveloping my cheeks, eyes and nose. Inside, Tag, Wilfred and K-Zorro showered with K-Zorro’s girlfriend, Alicia. They all held silver beer cans in their hands and there was a sopping wet cardboard eighteen-pack on the floor of the bathrobe vestibule between us. None of the naked showerers managed to find each others’ eyes. Wet feet slapped and slid with chattery drunk speak dying in the air in second-hand half-lives. K-Zorro raised a beer can over his head as big droplets pelted his hefty, pale body. His girlfriend’s bronze body spun in circles and her pert boobies pulled away from her torso and she was very pleased with herself, making this “whooo-whooo-whooo-whooo,” sound as her wet feet stomped and splashed and stepped over themselves.
Wilfred dropped his empty beer can to the floor as he conversed with the shower’s far corner tiles like they were a person: “It’s always you! Always, Beatrice. That’s right, I called you first name. MOM!”
Alicia wobbled and caught herself with her hands on Tag’s shoulder. Her eyes rolled around and she raised an accusative finger at me like she’d found a Salem witch, “HEY! That fucker’s looking me!” She turned to K-Zorro. “Tony, tell that fucker not look at me.” K-Zorro rushed forward and caught himself from slipping, “Get the fuck out of here, dude, or I’ll kick your ass!” He glanced off, vacantly: “I want pancakes.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
FRAT PARTY, PART 1 OF 3, INFERNO
Our members and guests stood, drinking and bantering in the dim top leg of the hallway. There were so many people there that night; it was like everyone I ever knew decided to drop by.
A girl behind me grabbed my ass and yelled, “Got him!” to the cacklers behind her. They were a sturdy bunch of young women and, as they converged on me, I felt myself blush.
“Hey,” I told her and gave her this one-second once-over. In the dim light a ruffled baby doll shirt adorned a strong, broad shouldered physique—full cheeks and dimples. “I’m not a piece of meat.”
“Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry. I’m Cindy.”
“You’re a smooth operator, Cindy,” I replied, sarcastically, and turned from her to keep walking. They whispered.
“I found the whiskey!” some guy screamed his voice to shreds from inside Room Seven. “I was the one that found it! It was Horatio! Horatio! Always Horatio! Viva Horatio!”
“Yeah!” a girl added, “Whore-ratio’s more like it,”—Ravenous feminine laughter.
Room Eight: “Who woke me up? Who dares stir Lazarus? I’m the Lizard Man. Who poured beer in thine ear? I ain’t Hamlet’s dad, bitches. I want answers.”
Room Nine: “Veronica, lemme bite your ass!” “OKAY!”
“This party’s gonna be kick-ass,” he swept his hand around the hallway, “If this many people snuck past the Poops guarding the stairwell, then there must be ten times as many people in the Pit right now. And it’s only—what?—twenty past eleven… shit.”
“The Poops?” I asked.
“Yah, Poops. The, the,” he shrugged, “the Poops, man. Pledges. What? You don’t call yer pledges poops no more?”
“I don’t know. I just hadn’t heard that before. Nobody called me a poop when I pledged. Our pledges are pretty sensitive about what we call them, nowadays.” A tall flat-topped, seventeen-year-old boy bumped my shoulder in passing.
“Aye, man,” The Snitz said. He stopped walking.
“Yes, Snitz,” I answered as I turned back and stopped.
“That’s ‘The’ Snitz to you, buddy. Aye, man, tell the truth now, you a ghost or what?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, we been hanging out for over a week now and every time I talk to you, you look me in the eye for a second, but it’s like you’re not really here. So, I’ll ask again, ‘you a ghost, man? You a spirit? You floating around some place high up there with someplace better to be?’” He shoved me and I slammed against the plaster with a thud.
A cute girl turned to look at us, quizzically.
“Not now, Snitz,” I sputtered.
“I told ya,” The Snitz said. “It’s ‘The’ Snitz.” He got closer and some people next to us stopped talking. The room behind us turned down their stereo. “You think because you heard a story that you know who this is in front of you? You don’t know what they did to me. What they couldn’t do.”
“Just relax, man.”
“Relax?” he said. “It’s easy for The Spirit to relax.” He shoved me and another girl stepped back out of our way. “He’s not even here. This still ain’t important enough for The Spirit to show up at.” He shoved me and I looked around to the people lowering their drinks.
“Not now, Snitz. Not here.”
“That how you gonna talk to me? After all I taught ya.”
“You—you haven’t taught me all that much, The—The Snitz.”
“I know,” he said. “I haven’t taught you one, real thing yet.” He slammed me against the wall and my head bounced off the plaster.
I bounced back from the recoil and before I knew it I had struck him across the jaw.
His head didn’t move. It did not twitch in the slightest. He didn’t even redden. Not the most imperceptible change as some supernatural pain began to throb throughout my hand.
“No,” he said with slowness. “That was the wrong thing for you to do there. Do I look like Chris Dubnicek to you?”
He was smaller than Dubnicek. But it was in a way that you can’t trust like an escaped monkey from the zoo, capable of awakening an ancient, deadly leverage.
“Wait,” I yelped.
“Oh, it’s too late for that, Spirit. You better fly away. But can ya? Let’s try something.” He put one hand low on my hip and the other higher up and it was just happening to me now. My body lifted off the ground and gawking girls in miniskirts turned upside-down as he turned me end-over-end like a boy twirls an umbrella. “You’re light on your feet. Even for a spirit. You’re not protecting your center of gravity, Spirit.”
My shirt fell up over my head and my fingers clawed helplessly over the ground as the blood rushed to my head. He spun me back to my feet and I turned to walk away but he grabbed my wrist and pulled me back in. “Now listen, Spirit: Women—like these ones here gawking like I was something that could be stopped—they’s got a bad habit of ruining the things they love. They love things to be clean. They love little boys. But, little boy’s bodies can be nasty, dirty things. Little boys are messy. So, sometimes women like to scare little boys out of their bodies. So you know what we gotta do next, Spirit?”
“I understand” I said, defeated. “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”
He spun me around and clasped me around the neck in a sleeper hold. “We gotta scare little boys back inside their bodies.”
“I… can’t…” I gasped.
“Lesson number one,” I heard The Snitz yell in my ear.
“Stay heavy on your heels so you don’t get put on your head. Lesson number two: Watch your breath closely to maintain your power.”
“I… Help!”
“Do something,” a nearby girl said with a pitying look on her face.
“Hey, dude,” a tall, solidly built guy said. “Leave him alone. He’s had enough. Alright?”
“Stand clear,” The Snitz hollered. “I’m a doctor. I got a fresh prescription pad!” He clenched higher around my neck and I raked his forearms with my nails. “Yeah, you want those breaths now, huh Spirit? You don’t want to float off into space no more with your internet boobies, huh? Listen to me—”
“Help me!” I looked out across their worried faces. He was crazy. Why wouldn’t they do anything to help me?
“Listen! Fucking and fighting are two of the same thing. They’re both survival. You wanna win with a woman or a man you gotta stay inside your body. You gotta stay in the here-and-now, stay heavy on your heals; watch each breath like it might be your last. Got it?”
“Y—yes! The—The Snitz.”
He released me and I dropped to the floor, heaving with my hands around my throat. His walk seemed to break into a swagger as he left and I turned to stand but lost my balance and a girl caught me.
“Jerk!” the girl called out at him.
“Life ain’t so pretty,” he fired back.
I hung out in some of the other rooms and thought about what The Snitz had said. He was right but his rightness made me unsettled like my heart was about to explode or I wanted to get out of my skin. It was the fear of death like a part of me was going to have to die.
Eventually, I found The Snitz again in Drake's room. He was arguing. He took a few assertive steps toward the room’s center. “It’s cool. We’re gonna put a wet towel under the door and blow the smoke into a weed silencer”:—(this was traditionally a forty-ounce Gatorade jug with a dryer sheet rubber-banded over its mouth).
Drake applied peach flourishes to the Civil War figurine clasped in the multi-articulated jaws of his utility tweezers. “It’s not cool. Did I come up here from kindergarten and tell you what to do in your room?”
“What?” The Snitz asked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Snitz,” I said, “Forget about Drake, man, he’s—”
“No. If little buddy’s got something to say, why don’t he say it.”
“Get out of my room. There’s not going to be any more pot smoking in this room. Makes my clothes stink.”
“First of all, dude, this ain’t your room. This ain’t your room now any more than it was The Megster’s room back in ’98—”
“’98—?” Drake and I said. If he graduated in ’98, that could make him as old as thirty.
“Whatever,” The Snitz said. “This ain’t your room, dude. This is a room and you’re in it.”
Drake tossed his brush into a Dixie cup of water. “Does it look like—?”
The door opened and Robinson walked in. This small young man with short blonde hair and a green, grey and orange bayadere striped T-shirt tossed his empty beer bottle over the desktop where it toppled and rolled against the TV. “Hey, roomie,” he said to Drake. “We’re going to smoke in here.”
“No, you’re not,” Drake said.
“What?” Robinson asked.
“You’re not going to smoke in here.”
Robinson’s shoulders hunched. “It’s my room, dude. I can do what I want.”
“No, it’s not. It’s a room.” Drake looked to The Snitz. “We’re socialists.”
“You’re a pain in the ass, dude,” Robinson said.
And, somehow, the three of them managed to continue on bickering just like this for maybe five more minutes. Then Solomon came in, without knocking, reeking of weed, barefoot, in a robin’s egg blue silk robe of Asian styling. With his uncharacteristically stern face, his afro and his robe, he looked like a short, white Kareem Abdul Jabar making his cameo in Game of Death. He aided Robinson and The Snitz’s side of the argument, citing court cases that he was obviously fabricating from Tom & Jerry cartoons.
Maybe it had something to do with me being the youngest of three siblings but I couldn’t stand to see people get aggravated over this petty stuff. Plus, why were we upstairs arguing when I could hear and almost feel the party growing downstairs? “Time out!” I put up my hands to make the ‘T’ sign. “Time out!” I stood up. “I don’t want to spend the whole night arguing about Tom & Jerry and weed and Civil War figurine painting. Snitz, is that what you want me to do? Man, let’s get out of this room.”
“I came here to smoke,” The Snitz said. “I’m smoking.”
“Well,” I said. “I’m outta here.” I headed for the door.
“Wait!” Drake called to me. He riffled over his desk and picked up one of those all-in-one palmtops: the Motorola Q. “Here. Take this with you. It’s wifi connected to the peer-to-peer. You can text message every computer in the house.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I want to get as many people’s text messages recorded during the party as I can.”
“Man, I don’t need that. I already got a cell phone.”
“Let me see it,” Drake said.
I displayed my silver, flip-phone for them.
“Man, you can’t use that,” Drake said. “That phone’s like five years old. It’ll make you look poor. The Q works as a cell phone too. Leave your phone here and use this.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “They practically give away the new phones so they can lasso you into service plans. How could a new phone be a—”
The Snitz snatched the Q from Drake’s hand and handed it to me, meeting my eyes. “That old phone’s gonna make you look poor.”
The other two nodded, mollified in their agreement.
“Fine,” I said. I walked over to Drake’s desk drawers and put my phone inside the top drawer. “Alright, I’m going. Who’s with me?”
“I guess I’m with ya, dawg,” The Snitz said.
“Victor,” Drake called to me as I walked through his doorway. I turned back. “The Party-Sex Entropy factor’s real high tonight. Like fish in a barrel.” I didn’t know what to say to that so I just turned and opened the door.
I walked out of Drake’s room, catching this perky fifteen-year-old girl by her shoulders mid fall. She wore purple jelly shoes and white hot pants. I said, “Hey, watch—”
“Thanks.” She smiled and continued to run from some fat guy that chased her.
The Snitz and I headed into the stairwell, stalling the flow of seven UNL Alphas as they marched upstairs for beers. Sure, they each had beers in their hands. They were getting more: “That green skirt one’s mine!” “I told you Pearson can’t talk when he trashed.” “No you didn’t! You never said anything about fantasy football. That was last bet. Where are we? I’m telling him that.” This guy in a pink V-neck T hadn’t shaved: “I’m not saying she was the only one with whale-tail,” he said, climbing stairs, swigging off his beer bottle, thumb-texting on his silver bar phone by feel.
Just outside the stairwell, someone had spilled beer on the beige tiles of the main floor and the varied soles that trod it spread this wet, sticky artwork. No one noticed because this was a bottleneck point of the trudging, bleary-eyed, bulky coat-stripping, alcohol-breathed and sweet perfume-wafting partiers.
Bottlenecks formed everywhere that night. Of course, there had been one at the top of the stairwell where it opened to the second floor. There was one at the opening of the stairwell to the basement’s hallway, which led into the Pit.
In the basement hallway, there was only enough room to take a half step before running into someone. And it was hot down there. Sweaty foreheads gleamed from the light of the fluorescents and the glow of pop machines. It looked like the mix was about forty percent girls which wasn’t bad.
“You got beer tickets?” The Snitz asked. Beer tickets were these credit card sized slips of paper with Xeroxed tags that you could te
ar off in exchange for beers.
“Yah,” I said. I pulled a wristband out of my pocket and put it around my wrist to give the indication that I was over twenty-one.
“These beer lines are a pain in the ass,” he said. “They’re all slow and shit. I’m just glad I got my pre-partying done before I got here.”
“I probably should have got some drinking done before the party started,” I said, regretful of my laziness.
“What? You’re sober, Victor! Man, big mistake, rookie.”
“I know. I might head up to my room to get my refreshments a little faster—” the crowd:
Bluetooths looped behind ears, thumbs pawed qwertys, cells affixed to cheeks, cell screens glowed; waved like concert lighters among beers. They discoursed through high school, college and work friends; their flicker/snuff acquaintances… their estranged families. They texted and thumb-scrolled through pictures; swapped emails, voicemails, jpegs, videos: boyfriend blackmail, ex-girlfriend cyberbullying, emails—mass-texted, second-to-second anecdotes. Hyperlinks spread. People talked between themselves and their cells, losing it to inebriation, to DJ requests of the unknown bands they’d just heard.
We made our way into the mouth of the Pit. It was an ocean of bodies in there and I could feel the heat and the bass in the dark, strobe flashing dank.
Near the TV room entrance, the bronze skin of a young, dancing woman in a pink camisole glowed with her sweat. Her jade-studded hemp choker had darkened from her slick neck and her pink-laced pony tail bounced. I calculated that if she’d let me run my fingers along the sweat of her neck as strobe flashes captured her bronze skin in its bloom of youth, it’d be enough to save me for two lifetimes. She smushed and rubbed her shapely, designer-jean ass into the denim crotch of a frat-tastic, spike-haired man with a heroic face, who, in turn, tilted his raised Nat Light to the rap beat in a protracted hail. He ‘whooo-ed’. His eyes basked. Next to them a black haired girl in a wife-beater wrapped her fair slender arms, with their magic marker scribbles, around her man. She pretended to slow dance with her burly, Imperial bearded man but they were a single wall of flesh—going nowhere and oblivious. Scattered around them, a mix of people kept the beat. They yammered. They grinded crotches together in standing, clothed missionary positions.
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