Growing Up Wired

by David Wallace Fleming

  “It’s not?” I said. “You’re a member of this House, aren’t you?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Barely, Victor. Barely.”

  “You don’t feel responsible for what happens to the House?”

  “I don’t feel responsible for things I can’t control,” he said. “I wasn’t even here for most of last night. I was at an apartment with some friends.”

  “What friends?”

  “Some guys I knew from the dorms. You know, Victor, you are allowed to have friends outside the House.”

  “I am?” I said.

  “So what happened? What made everyone go crazy?”

  “We got stoned.”

  “Stoned, huh.” Thomas stood and paced the floor. “Was it weed?”

  “It seemed like it was a little of everything. There was some pharming plus people were smoking joints and I think mine was laced with something.”

  “Something like what? Opium?”

  “No, ketamine—”

  “Ketamine! That’s a horrible accompaniment. You guys are going to give recreation drug use a bad name.”

  “It wasn’t like I chose it or anything. They just sort of slipped it in there, while I wasn’t looking.”

  “So, they drugged you.” Thomas nodded. “Good. It’s good we got that established.”

  “Yah, I guess they did. But I’m still responsible for my actions.”

  Thomas leaned forward and looked at me. Then he started laughing. “Oh, that’s priceless. That’s priceless, Victor. I’m glad I let you in and I stopped taking my test to listen to this—”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Victor, what do you think you are? Do you think you’re some magical being that can transcend all physical interactions?” He turned his head askance. “You’re not. You’re a bunch of cells. If some other bunch of cells tricked your bunch of cells into imbibing some—”

  “Imbibing?”

  “Yes, imbibing. If some other bunch of cells tricks your bunch of cells into imbibing some foreign substance that you’ve never experienced before, then you’re not guilty for your actions after that. It’s that simple.”

  “What about the soul?”

  “Nope. Wrong.”

  “I can defeat your line of thinking,” I said.

  “Alright, go for it.”

  “How far is it from you to me? How far is it from me to the edge of infinite space?”

  “Look,” Thomas said, sitting on his desktop, “it’s about five feet between you and me—”

  “A foot?” I said. “What’s a foot? You’re just comparing the distance between us to another thing that you can’t tell me the distance of. A foot is just an idea. You can’t describe that idea without the use of other ideas. So how real is this world if it’s only a bunch of ideas?”

  “Okay, George Berkley,” Thomas said, “you’re not so smart. I took that class too, you know.”

  “All I’m saying is—”

  “Boring.” He sat at his chair and turned back to his computer. “Do you have anything more interesting to talk about, Mr. Idea-Cells?”

  “Well, I got a girl’s number last night.”

  “What was her name?” Thomas said with his back still to me.

  “Emily… I think her last name is Green-Portsmith.”

  Thomas spun around. “Emily Green-Portsmith!”

  “You know her?” I asked.

  “Know her? I’ve got like twenty pictures on my hard drive of her. She’s one of my favorite campus girls. She got her picture in Maxim last year when they threw that party at Handly’s.”

  “So I did good?” I asked.

  “Green-Portsmith,” Thomas ruminated, “I almost forgot that was her last name. It’s a fine last name. A hyphenated last name. Girl’s with hyphenated last names have the sweetest pussies.”

  “They do?”

  “When a wine ferments in a cellar, it changes into a fine wine. When a last name ferments, it grabs up other names. It hyphenates. It becomes a fine last name.”

  “Uh, I guess that’s a good thing, right?” I asked.

  “I’m not really sure if it’s good,” Thomas replied. “It’s sweet though.” He rolled a little toward me, pulling himself with one foot while still sitting in his chair. “Alright, now we’re talking about something. Do you think she’s interested?”

  “Why would she give me her phone number if she wasn’t interested?” I asked.

  “Because it’s easy.”

  “Oh.” I lowered my chin a little. “I guess I don’t know if she’s interested, then.” I grinned. “But—! she walked up to me and rubbed her boobs on my chest!”

  Thomas waved me off. “Meaningless.” He looked past me. “You got anything else? Any real signs of interest?”

  “No,” I said, “The boob thing was pretty much it.”

  “Well, that’s okay, Victor. That just means you still got some work to do.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Are you sure this is really what’s important right now. I mean, I was just involved with vandalizing Ma Red’s suite. I’m pretty sure she’s leaving us for good.”

  He waved me off, again. “That shit will all blow over. Besides, I already told you that you weren’t responsible for all that. Let the fuck-ups who instigated all that shit deal with it. Victor,”—Thomas showed me his open hands—“this sexy, hyphenated girl—that’s what’s important for you right now, trust me.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I asked.

  “Did you call her yet?” Thomas asked.

  “No.”

  “Good, don’t call her. But send her a text message today.” His eyes got big. “Loophole the waiting period. Get in there. Text her again and again. Bombard her consciousness like pop-up ads on the Internet.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I wrote her this poem. It’s about how I felt when I met her.” I dug into the pocket of my sweatpants to pull out a folded piece of paper.

  “Of course,” Thomas said. “Of course The Poet would write a poem.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He looked at me with disbelief. “You really don’t know.” He turned toward his desk and started digging through loose papers. “Here it is.” He handed me a sheet of paper with our House’s most recent phone list.

  It had a vertical column of room numbers with cell and landline numbers matched to humorous nicknames of the roommates. I scanned some of the nicknames: Squirrel-Brain, Lieutenant Dan, Ball-Sack… I found my room number—“The Poet? What? Why am I The Poet?”

  “We’ve been calling you that for like two weeks now,” Thomas said. “Solomon wrote this phone list and I guess he started the nickname for you. After he heard you speak at your trial and after he saw that ‘The Blue’ poem of yours that I posted on the Peer-to-Peer, he couldn’t help himself.”

  “But, if you’ve been calling me that for two weeks, how come this is the first I’ve heard of it?”

  “Victor, come on, stop being so naïve. The Poet isn’t a term of endearment. It’s mocking. We’re mocking you. Like when girls call a rich, spoiled girl ‘Princess’.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “People don’t like to leave their comfort zones. We don’t like it when people talk over our heads. It’s like you think you’re better than everyone.”

  “So I need to dumb things down?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, man. Let me see what you got there.” He snatched the poem away from me. He unfolded it and I watched his eyes move. He was a slow reader. I imagined myself reading the poem three times in the time it took him to read it once. Thomas grinned. “A being—and here we are?”

  “Is it any good?”

  “I don’t know, man. That’s the whole point. I have no idea whether this is the greatest poem ever or if it’s a total piece of crap. And neither will she. It’s just going to make her uncomfortable. You need to take the path most traveled.”

  I slapped my forehead. “He tells me he doesn’t know anything abou
t poetry, then he riffs on Whitman.”

  “Text message; text message. Massage her with the text message. Do it! Do it!”

  “Alright,” I said. “I’ll do it but I have no idea what to write.”

  “Of course you don’t. You’re The Poet. You seek the Anti-Poet.”

  “The Anti-Poet,” I said. “Who’s that?”

  “Chris Dubnicek.”

  “Chris Dubnicek—! I can’t deal with that guy.”

  Thomas pointed to the phone list in my hand. “Read it and weep, Victor.”

  Sure enough, Dubnicek’s nickname was listed as The Anti-Poet.

  “This all seems a little contrived,” I said.

  “That’s because it’s all been arranged. Me and Solomon got together a couple weeks ago and decided that Dubnicek would be a good mentor for you.”

  “How many freaking mentors do I need?”

  Thomas grinned. “It’s a project.” He stood up and looked around his room. “How do you think Dubnicek stole Erin from you—”

  “He didn’t steal her from me!”

  “Whatever. The point is that it’s been the anti-poetry of Dubnicek’s text messages that have gotten him every girlfriend he’s had for the past two semesters. He’s become a master of the form. If you want to succeed with this Emily Green-Portsmith, you’re going to have to beat out a lot of more socially adept guys. You’re going to need the help of The Anti-Poet and his anti-poetry.” He rushed over and slapped me on my shoulder. “It’s great isn’t it? It’s a great plan.”

  “I hate you,” I said. “But I can’t deny that you’re right.”

  Thomas sat back down. “Cool,” he strummed fingers together like a contemplative villain. “Now get outta here. Go make friends with The Anti-Poet. Go!”

  “Alright, I’m out,” I said, getting up from his recliner. Before I left his room I said, “This is a good idea, I think. This is probably a good idea, right?”

  Thomas pointed, “Go!”

  Back in Dubnicek’s room, Rex was still gone but Drake, Wilfred and Dubnicek were still in there arguing about Ma Red.

  I grabbed a seat on the desktop close to the door. Dubnicek paced the floor, arguing the pro position of why we needed a House Mother against Drake and Wilfred as they sat on his couch. Wilfred was interspersing their arguments with lyrics from the Star Spangled Banner while wrapping and unwrapping his wrist with a dirty Ace bandage.

  It was a boring discussion, especially so, in light of how Thomas Clark had framed my responsibilities to myself. I sat there and waited.

  In the corner of the room, beneath one of those full page carbon copy oil change receipts was a yellow and red flowery bikini. I guessed it must have been Erin’s. They couldn’t have gone swimming together. It was the middle of winter. Dubnicek must have just asked her to bring it over to model it for him. His ability to persuade people agitated me as much as it mystified me.

  After about ten minutes, however, Dubnicek ran out of persuasive material. I seized on the opening, “Dubnicek, I need your advice on something.”

  He looked me full in the face, glanced to Wilfred and Drake and walked out the door.

  “What was that all about?” I asked them.

  “I think he wants you to follow him,” Wilfred said.

  Following him was the obvious choice but this was a chess game. If I let him toy with me, there was no telling where it would stop. “I’m in his room,” I said. “He has to come back in here, eventually.” I was counting on his impatience.

  Wilfred and Drake talked between themselves as I counted the minutes on an alarm clock. After six minutes, Dubnicek strolled in. “You’re still here,” he said to me.

  “Yes. I am. I need your advice on something.”

  He spun and swung his cast at me, hovering his blue plastered knuckles inches from me face. Our eyes met and he grinned. “You need some advice, huh.”

  I tried to make sense out of him hitting me with his broken hand. “Yes, I do. I need some advice on how to text message a girl.”

  He strutted halfway between me and his audience on the couch. “He needs some help to text message a girl. Mr. Perfect. Mr. Perfect needs advice.” He looked to Wilfred and Drake. “And why should we help you?”

  “Because, Thomas Clark says that you’re the best text messager in the House.”

  Dubnicek uncrossed his left arm and tapped his finger against his lower lip. “That doesn’t explain why we should help you.”

  I looked at Erin’s bikini lying crumpled across the room, buried beneath random junk like something so taken for granted. My jealousy flared. In the subtext of his words, he asked for more than I had planned to give. “Because you’re normal and I’m jealous of you. I started using NetNanny to be more like you.”

  "NetNanny?" Dubnicek scratched his head. “That’s a weird confession, Victor.” He looked to Wilfred and Drake. “Should we help him?”

  “Sure,” Wilfred said. “Why not?”

  “What’s the name of this girl?” Dubnicek asked.

  “Emily Green-Portsmith.”

  “Never heard of her,” he said. “Hyphenated name, though. Could be a tough nut to crack.”

  “Did you say Emily Green-Portsmith?” Wilfred asked.

  “Yah,” I said.

  “Dubnicek,” Wilfred said, “Go to your computer and connect to my hard drive.”

  Dubnicek pulled his chair over to his computer and sat down. He clicked his mouse a few times. “What node are you?”

  “347-20,” Wilfred said, “Now go to my My Pictures file and open up the Emily Green-Portsmith Folder.”

  “There’s just one picture in here,” Dubnicek said. “It’s labeled Emily27.”

  We huddled around the computer as Dubnicek clicked on the JPEG file. It was a shot of Emily lying on her back on a lavender bed in a white string bikini with her back arched a little. It was one of those pre-coitus, first-person photos with the lens hovered over her ready body and I wished that I had been holding that camera.

  “Damn!” Drake said, “I think I recognize her.”

  “I know I recognize her,” Wilfred said. “We worked together at a bar in Nebraska this past summer. She was doing some teaching internship during the day. I scammed all summer to try to get with her. No luck.”

  “Emily27,” I said. “That means there’s at least twenty-seven of these things floating around out there.”

  “You don’t know that,” Dubnicek said. “It could be twenty-seven of a thousand for all you know.”

  “Right-click the JPEG,” I said. “When was it created?”

  Dubnicek closed the file and right-clicked the icon. He studied the properties dialog box that popped up. “This picture is two weeks old.”

  “So she’s still courting an audience,” I said. “Damn. I don’t care. I’m going for her anyway.”

  “You have to,” Drake agreed. “You can’t just back down just because everyone else wants her too.”

  We moved away from the computer.

  “Exactly,” Dubnicek said. “That’s exactly what you have to do.” He looked to the others. “Go get your phone, Victor. Let’s text message!”

  “I think I left it in Drake’s room. I have to transfer her phone number.”

  “Just go get the Q I lent you,” Drake said. “You can borrow it for a while.”

  I came back with the Q in my hand.

  “Now,” Dubnicek said. “How long did you talk to this girl for? How close was she standing to you?”

  “We talked for about ten minutes,” I said. “She was standing around two or three feet from me.”

  “Perfect! And what types of things did you guys talk about? Standard stuff: what’s your major, what do you do for fun, who do you hang out with—or did you slip her some philosophical mumbo jumbo?”

  “It was about half and half, I think.”

  Dubnicek scratched his head and he looked around at the ceiling’s corners. “Well, that’s going to make it more difficult. Wait—how
tall is she? How attractive would you say she is on a scale of one to ten?”

  “She’s the same height as me. I’d say she’s a ten if I’ve ever seen a ten.”

  “Aha! Now,” he nodded, “now I’m getting a better picture of you two together. What kind of phone did she have?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask to see her phone.”

  “Big mistake,” he said.

  “You should always ask to see the phone,” Wilfred said. “The trendier and more complicated the phone, the more numbers she has stored in it, the harder it is to get a hold of her.”

  “When she talked to you,” Dubnicek began, “did she use long or short sentences.”

  “A little of both,” I said.

  “I see,” he rubbed his chin. “That’s more complicated. Did she use big words?”

  “Not really.”

  “Did she touch you a lot or touch her hair a lot?” Dubnicek asked.

  “No,” I said. “She did rub her boobs on my chest.”

  “Meaningless,” Dubnicek and Wilfred said.

  “Well,” Dubnicek said, “We’re going to have to do the best with what we got to work with.” He sat down at his desk and pulled out a piece of paper and a pencil. He began writing down two word combinations and then erasing them. His eyes narrowed as he stared at the words and then crossed them out.

  I grew nervous. Before, I had though that maybe they had been putting me on but he was very intent on his task. He bit his lip, then slipped the pencil into his mouth to chew on it. Finally, he scribbled something and threw his pencil across the desktop: “There it is!” He held the paper triumphantly up for my appraisal to reveal the following double-underlined message:

  ‘Yo its Victor From LASt night Whats good’

  “This doesn’t sound like me,” I said.

  “It’s not supposed to sound like you,” Drake said. “It’s supposed to work.”

  “Why’s the word ‘last’ capitalized all funny?”

  “Because you don’t give a fuck,” Dubnicek retorted.

  “Oh.” I raised the Q. “I guess I’ll try it.” I punched in the message to her number.

  We waited. Wilfred tried to start up another conversation about Ma Red but it died. The question of whether she would respond hung in the air.