We Can't Be Friends

by Cyndy Etler

  “What, now?” I say, looking around. There’s nobody in here but us, but still.

  “Sure, why not? I close in twenty minutes, and it takes that long for this thing to fill. I’ll lock the door and turn off the lights, and you can have at it. That way Dee Dee and I can go upstairs and get reacquainted.”

  Deanna giggles. Gag me. But I squealed. So gag her too.

  When Glen clicks off the lights, he goes out the door first. Before Deanna follows him, she looks back at me with a smile so big her eyes crinkle.

  “Welll…hey!” she whispers.

  “Welll…hey!” I whisper back. Right now, I’d rate my life a ten.

  It’s not even nerve-wracking, taking off my clothes in view of a giant window, because to see me, someone would have to bend themself in half and get their eyes down to foot level. I know because all I can see through the window are the heels and ankles of the people walking past.

  I slide into the purple-pink-blue hot bubbling water. I’m literally locked in here, safe and alone, watching as the whole world clicks and stomps past. I see them, but they can’t see me. I’ll stay here forever, please.

  • • •

  Glen takes us on the subway to some Chinese food place, the kind where the only menu is the huge plastic one hung over the counter, with the blown-up photos of General Tso’s and egg foo young. I have chicken and broccoli, no rice, but God. Why is food so good in New York? How do New Yorkers stay so skinny when even lame Chinese is the best thing you’ve ever eaten? Glen talks the whole time we’re eating. “Now you’re in Manhattan,” he says, shooting a grain of rice out of his mouth at me. I don’t want to embarrass him, so I leave it sitting there on my boob. “Look out the window. See the diff?” I don’t, but I’m not telling him that.

  Curtis meets us on the street, and we all start walking. Actually, we all stand still while Curtis looks me up and down and nods and says, “hey,” then turns and starts walking with Glen. Deanna follows them, and I follow Deanna.

  Curtis is okay-looking. I guess I expected more from a male model, but whatever. I don’t need to look at some guy when there’s so much else to see. Like the angled wooden crates of fruit, bright red and yellow, arranged in perfect, shining rows, out front of the tiny grocery stores. And the hundreds of bundles of flowers, stacked up like buckets of hope. Like someone’s gonna buy all these flowers before they die? But someone does. Guys and girls, still in their work clothes, are buzzing over them like bees. Like they want a piece of nature in the middle of all this concrete.

  And the faces—the faces! The straight-ahead stares, and the tight-rolled newspapers tucked into armpits, and that New York stride. And the black sheets spread out, right on the sidewalk, with purses and jewelry and old magazines wrapped in plastic. The Jamaican guy with the fanny pack talks to me, to Deanna, to the businesswomen: “Hey, pretty lady, you know you need some sparkle for them ears! Hooold up!”

  Everyone but me pretends to not hear him, but I smile and say, “No thanks.” I love him, I think, for putting old magazines in plastic, for that hope that somebody will buy them.

  I’m so caught up in everything, like a kid at fucking Disney World, I almost step on him. The man on the sidewalk. I hope this doesn’t make me stupid, but I stop. I can’t move. Because he’s sleeping here. How can he fall asleep with thousands of people walking by his face? Where is he, in his mind, that he can fall asleep on a January night on a sidewalk in New York City? Where are we, that we can walk right past him? I can’t. Literally. I don’t know or care where Deanna is; I can’t walk past this man.

  He’s huddled against the wall of one of the tiny grocery stores. So I go in and unfold my one soft five-dollar bill, and I tell the man behind the counter, “There’s a bum sleeping outside your store. Can I buy him this banana? And these bagel chips?”

  The man doesn’t answer me, he just waves his hand over the food like a magician. Or like, Get out of here.

  I can’t say I’m not nervous, putting the banana and the bagel chips by the man. I’m wicked nervous. If he wakes up and some stranger’s right next to him, he’ll freak. So I feel pretty shitty about it, but I put the stuff on the ground and kind of push it toward his face with my foot. I tell him, “I hope this is okay with you. I hope you don’t mind. I thought you were probably hungry.”

  “CYNDY!” If Deanna’s screech didn’t wake him up, maybe he’s more than just sleeping. “What are you—get! Come on!”

  “Dee, I couldn’t leave him there!”

  “Well, I almost left you, stupid! Let’s go.”

  She grabs my hand and drags me up the street and away from the man. When I look back, I can still see the red-and-white bagel chip bag, untouched. Then we turn the corner.

  • • •

  “You guys have to go first,” Curtis says, pushing me and Deanna in front of him and Glen. “Don’t smile. And stick your tits out. We’ll be back here. It just can’t look like you have guys with you. Now go.” He pushes a finger in my spine like it’s a gun.

  I glance at Deanna, but she doesn’t look back at me. She shakes her head and says, “Aerosmith video.”

  And I get it. It works. I’m a different person; I’m that girl with the open lips, the hair flounce, the strut. Deanna is too. We tits-out-no-smile step right past all the hair-sprayed, purple-makeupped, black-outfitted people in line trying to get into the club. We Aerosmith-chick right up to the guy guarding the door.

  “Ay! Ayyy!” we hear from the pissed off line of suckers behind us. But Aerosmith girls don’t give a fuck. We just shake out our hair and reset our shoulders.

  “Yeah, we’re on the list,” Deanna says, looking at the guy and snapping her gum.

  “Oh yeah?” he says. His upper arms are the size of honey hams. They pop around as he lifts up his clipboard.

  “Ohhh yeah,” Deanna says. She puts her arm around my middle, pushing our hips toward him. “Me and my girlfriend. We’re riiggghhht…there.” She points a red talon at a spot on his clipboard.

  The guy looks from his clipboard to her lips to my boobs. I force myself to not cave them inward.

  “C’mon,” he says, unhooking the velvet rope. “The two a ya.”

  It’s Deanna who squeals this time. “Thank you!” She goes up on tiptoe and kisses him on the cheek, then leans past his bulldozer belly to tell Curtis and Glen, “We’re in!”

  We fly past the door guy and into the club before he can change his mind, and then Curtis and Glen are behind us, slapping each other five. “We biffed the line at the Roxy, man!” Curtis says. Or rather, he yells. It’s frigging loud in here.

  It’s a good thing I got to practice being a video girl outside, because when we push open the doors from the black-lit hallway into the actual club, we are in a video. Swear to God. The disco ball is spinning, and the spotlight is swooping, and the electrocuted skdd-dit!dit!dit! of “I’ve Got the Power” clicks on, like it had been waiting for us.

  The woman yells the refrain, and the drum comes up from under my feet with a round sound, as if it’s getting hit inside a big metal bowl. The cowbells are circular too—they end on the up, like a question mark—and I’m possessed. I’m drugged by the voodoo of the music. I don’t know, don’t care, forget about Deanna as I float into the edges and get swallowed by the crowd.

  The singer’s kind of moaning now, and all of us soar and swim on her words, then pound like jackbooted Germans when the skdd-dit!dit!dit! comes back. Nothing matters—not how we look or who we’re with or what our little sister told our mother about Jacque. It doesn’t matter. It’s all gone. We’re in this trance, this music, this other perfect place.

  And then the air is cracked in half by “Everybody dance, now!” and everybody does. We’re not at Club 12. We’re in Manhattan, where people know how to fucking dance. I’m kicked in the shin by a black guy doing the Running Man, and when I turn to watch him, there�
�s Deanna, right next to me, moving her arms in shapes up over her head, like an updated version of the YMCA.

  I grab her and pull her back as three guys in baggy pantsuits do midair splits when the song says to jump. These dudes are tearing. It. Up. The spotlight spins over to them as we all clear a circle to kind of keep dancing, but mostly to watch these fucking masters at work. We’re trying not to stroke out from happiness, because we are the party people in the house, and who knew it could feel this good?

  Then, from every speaker, we hear this Martian’s voice telling us, “Jam!” The beat kicks in like rubber balls, like drumsticks on upside-down plastic buckets. My heart shatters in a million tiny valentines because this song, this club, it feels like frigging nirvana, like we’re dancing on frigging Sesame Street. Everyone’s black and white and brown and happy, and everyone’s like, “Damn, you look good!”

  The baggy-pants dancers are still doing their thing, and if this is what heaven feels like, I want to die right now. The song is carnival piano, the Martian telling us “J-jam!” and the horns going dum-dum-didee, making sure that we all do.

  Until Curtis and Glen put a stop to this nonsense.

  “Let’s go,” I hear, kidnapper-close to my ear.

  Suddenly we’re back in the black-lit hallway, heading the wrong direction, and Glen’s saying something about “colored people music.” I can’t decide if I want to punch him or cry or suicide dive back into the dancing crowd. Man. Deanna has really bad taste in boyfriends.

  • • •

  Curtis didn’t eat dinner, so we leave heaven to go to a greasy spoon. All I’m allowed is black coffee with Sweet’N Low, so that’s what I’m having. The guys have brown-edged grilled cheese and Deanna is eating Glen’s fries.

  “How the fuck did you do that?” Glen asks. He looks at Deanna, then me.

  “Easy,” Dee says. “We just pretended we were doing an Aerosmith video.”

  Glen spits out his Coke laughing, and Curtis goes, “Yeah!” so hard it almost sounds like “Jam!” Then Curtis leans over and high-fives me, like I’m part of the win.

  “Oh, you guys like Aerosmith?” I ask, because this is my great opportunity. I have something unbelievable to share, something nobody else has. “So, listen: Steven Tyler, right?”

  “Duh,” Glen says, but I can tell he’s a little bit interested.

  “He spoke at my rehab.” The diner goes silent, as if even the cook wants to hear my story. “Seriously! This was after they moved me from the Virginia Straight to the Boston Straight. They wanted us to get comfortable with AA, so they started holding AA meetings Saturday nights at the building. Even non-Straightlings could come. Of course, only third-, fourth-, and fifth-phasers could go, because what, they’re gonna carry newcomers in by the belt loop in front of outsiders? Not!”

  Not a single fork is clinking; not a single coffee cup is rattling. It’s like that time I told group how my mother’s husband beat me: every single person is interested. In me.

  “So this one fifth-phaser had been going to Boston meetings, right? And so was Steven Tyler. Dude met Steven Tyler. At an AA meeting. And asked him if he’d come speak. So fucking Steven Tyler, of Aerosmith, comes in to Straight Boston and tells his story. To all the third-, fourth-, and fifth-phasers, and all the AA outsiders and everybody. Except me.”

  A knife clang-a-clang-a-clangs to the floor.

  “That was the weekend, after fourteen months in the building, that they let me go back to my mother’s house in Connecticut. I was there, flipping out about my druggie fucking high school, while Steven fucking Tyler was speaking to the Boston Straightlings.”

  “Fourteen months?” Curtis says.

  “Well, sixteen months, actually. But it took me fourteen to get to fifth phase. And you can’t go home until you’re on fifth, if you’re an out-of-towner.”

  “Huh?” Curtis says.

  “How old were you?” Glen asks.

  “When Steven Tyler spoke? Fifteen,” I say.

  “And you’d already been in rehab for fourteen months?” Glen asks.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  There’s a long silence, like after someone farts in the bathroom stall at school.

  “God,” Curtis says finally. “What were you, shooting smack in the bassinet?”

  Glen and Curtis laugh at that, and the diner comes back to life. Deanna’s digging through her bag, not looking at me, and I’m sitting here feeling extra-stupid. Not only did I say something weird and wrong, but I don’t even know what it was. I guess I shouldn’t talk about Straight to outsiders? This is what I get for breaking Straight’s most important rule: What you see here, what you hear here, what you do here remains here.

  After the diner, out on the sidewalk, Curtis goes, “Let’s take a walk.”

  “Where?” Deanna asks. “I mean, I’ve got these heels on…”

  “Suck it up, crybaby,” he says back. “We’re going to Central Park.”

  “Now?!” That’s me. “Isn’t it midnight?”

  Nobody answers because some dude’s getting out of a cab at the curb and Glen’s yelling, “Ours! Taxi!”

  We all smash in the back, and Deanna and me are rolling ’cause the taxi driver’s hauling ass like bee-beeeeeeep and running red lights, and we’re probably gonna die, but we’ll die laughing. The guys are paying for everything and really, when you think about it, Central Park at midnight sounds pretty fucking cool.

  When we get out of the cab, I want to stop and talk to the horses standing around with their carriages. But I can tell it’s not time for that. Deanna and Glen are already up ahead, walking in a snuggle like a Judy Blume dream couple. And Curtis is putting his arm around me like he wants to snuggle-walk too.

  “Are they nice to the horses?” I ask him.

  “Of course. Otherwise, the horses would quit working for them.”

  “No, I’m serious. It’s got to hurt, walking around on pavement all day. Do they get to be someplace grassy sometimes?”

  “They do. I promise. The city has rules the drivers have to follow. The horses get a certain number of hours on soft ground a day.”

  This might be stupid, but when he says that, I get tears in my eyes. Maybe because I’m so happy for the horses. Or maybe because I’m so happy he took my question seriously.

  If we keep talking about the horses I’ll start bawling, so I go, “Where’s Deanna?”

  “Up ahead. We’re going to meet them at the pond. Trust me,” he says. And we walk.

  I don’t know why everyone acts like Central Park is the boogeyman’s turf, because we see nobody, not even a bum on a park bench. Nobody, only trees and bushes and rocks and the winding, paved path. All I have to do is ask Curtis one question—“You’re really a model?”—and he talks and talks about department stores and shoots and portfolios and angles and lighting. Then, right before I can say, “Wait, you put on makeup?” we’re at this little lake. Deanna and Glen are already there, unsmooshing from each other.

  “Cyndy!” Glen yells. “You want to go out?” He thumbs at a bunch of rowboats stacked against a hut.

  I look at Deanna. She goes, “Welll…” and I go “…hey!”

  And we’re laughing and laughing because where the fuck are we and whose life is this, and we’re gonna get rowed around a little lake by suitors, like some painting from 1910.

  The guys are laughing too. They’re heaving a rowboat off the stack and twisting oars out of the bundle and coffin-carrying the boat to the edge of the water.

  “Get in!” Glen says.

  Deanna steps into the pointy end, high heels and all. The boat’s rocking around a little, since Glen pushed it into the water, so Curtis holds my hand to help me in. I’m getting my butt balanced on the middle bench when the boat makes this rocky-scrapey sound. It’s moving. Out into the water.

  I twist around and the guy
s are behind me, at the back, bending their arms to do a big final push. “Come on, get in!” I say. “You’re gonna get your pants wet!”

  They’re laughing like Dee and I were a minute ago, their faces squinched with the effort of the shove. The oars are still over by the hut.

  “Come on!” I semi-scream as the boat slips forward.

  “Oars!” Deanna yells as the rowboat keeps moving. I turn forward—we’re almost at the middle of the pond—and whip back to see the guys run off into the dark of the trees. Fucking, fuck.

  • • •

  Now I know how New Yorkers stay so slim with all this killer food everywhere. They live whole lifetimes in a single frigging night. It’s 3:00 a.m., and tonight I rode two hours into the city, hunted down a parking space, took a bath in a golden tub, ate killer Chinese, jumped the line at a club, danced with fucking pros, humiliated myself at a diner, paraded through Central Park, and got stranded in a lake with my best-best friend. In ten New York hours, I had more fun than in all the combined hours of the past eighteen years.

  Deanna and Glen took a taxi back to Glen’s place, and Curtis and I took a taxi back to his. I tried to tell Dee we should just head home, but Glen yanked her into a hug before I could get a word out.

  So now I’m at Curtis’s place, and I’m pretty tired. I’d like to sleep. Curtis is pretty awake. He’d like to not sleep.

  As soon as we get in his apartment, he starts kissing me. Which is kind of okay. I mean, male model, right? But then he’s trying to do more, which is kind of not okay. After a minute he starts moving his hands from my middle toward my bra. I’m like, Whoa, Nelly, so I catch his hands with mine and lean back away from him, like we’re square dancing. He’s game enough—he keeps his feet toe-to-toe with mine, so I can swing back and forth on our arms—but I can tell by his expression he won’t play this game for long.

  “Let me ask you a question,” I say.

  “Only if I can ask you a question,” he says.

  “You first,” I say.

  “How long have you been out of rehab?” he asks.