Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City

by Choire Sicha

  Edward worried that their whole relationship would happen as fast as it already had. That they’d burn through and in a year it’d be done. John didn’t worry at all though, so he said. Don’t worry about it, he always said. Enjoy yourself. Don’t worry about it. It was a wall of “don’t worry.” One day they’d had a little fight over nothing, basically, and Edward explained that he’d made these extrapolations, that like, no, the reason this tiny thing bothers me is that he anticipated being with John a really long time. So Edward was thinking his whole life he’d never get to choose what they were going to watch on TV. And that Edward was thinking that way freaked John out a little bit. At least so Edward thought.

  Edward could wedge himself into a cozy feedback loop, amplifying problems—or nonproblems—by thinking too much. Edward told John to choose just one thing that Edward was interested in and then, going forward, he should pretend to be also interested in it. Because so far if there were two choices of what was on TV, something that Edward would like and anything else, it was always anything else.

  People are just so annoying, was what Edward thought. Even people you love are annoying. The good news is that things could get worked out in sex, even in ways you didn’t realize maybe. Even though Edward realized he’d never have sex as much as he did with his boyfriend his sophomore year of college, when they basically blew off a semester in order to have sex. Though maybe it would help if there was more of a working bed at John’s apartment? Still it was romantic, as they did get a bit huddled up in its broken embrace.

  WHEN JOHN FINALLY returned from overseas to another, nearer country—at this time, it was often cheaper, bizarrely, to fly to multiple destinations in the airplanes than to fly directly from point to point—John found out his phone didn’t work anymore. He’d been putting the phone company off for a long time again, and the phone no longer had service.

  But there was Internet at the airport, so he went online and Jason was there. And Jason wrote, oh my God, I met the hot transit reporter from the local TV news station, he’s so hot. And didn’t even ask about how the trip was.

  So John hadn’t missed anything in a week.

  The bars were amazing overseas. And the museums too. Timothy had warned him in advance to order mixed drinks to save money, but this was incorrect advice. Everyone over there drank Jack Daniels, for some reason, but it was much more expensive than beer. He arrived with 350 dollars, 100 dollars of which was borrowed from Edward, improbably. That came to about 200 units in this other currency. This was gone by the weekend, four days in. Cigarettes were only 2.40 units or so, and pints of beer were 1 unit.

  The first two nights, John and Fred hit the bars pretty hard. On Saturday night, Don’t Look Now, starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, was playing at the local theater at midnight. So they went to the hot bar by Fred’s house and had a couple drinks; then midnight rolled around. There was almost no one in the theater.

  But suddenly there was a man with a microphone. “I know most of you here,” he said, “except for a couple of you, and the theater has very graciously allowed me, on the occasion of my fiftieth birthday, to screen my favorite movie in my favorite theater.” The movie was incredible. The evening was incredible. Half a century! And after, John and Fred breezed back into the bar with their hand stamps, past the huge line, to be with the young men again.

  The big difference that John could see between the City and overseas was that all the bars over there were dance bars, and everyone danced. Fred had gone boy crazy while living there, John found. He had three friends. One was a hot boy from the hinterlands who was basically Fred’s Edward: He’d been in a relationship for nearly five years, and most likely was not available. Or maybe so! And everywhere they went, Fred was like, whipping around, looking at boys. And yes, okay, they were all very attractive, John thought . . . and yet John wasn’t tempted. Nothing happened. The accents were beginning to give him a headache. Well. One particularly aggressive boy threw himself on John and began kissing him vigorously. Still John arrived safe, and unsullied, at home near the City, every penny spent, without even the money to get from the airport to his house.

  THE NEW BOSS fired John’s boss Trixie.

  We need your salary to pay other people more money, is what her boss said.

  John felt, as much as he could still feel about work, bad. He was out of the office when it happened. He and other people in the office exchanged tiny text messages that said things like “yikes.”

  THE YEAR, IT ended. John’s room—John and Edward’s room?—was filthier than ever.

  There were, on his desk, a few notes from the state, about that tax issue from a few years back, before John started working at a real job. They still wanted 417.11 dollars.

  Deeper in the drawer: a phone bill, due October 8, with a total due of 271.19 dollars, with a minimum payment of 151.65.

  A bill from Callen-Lorde health services, regarding a doctor’s visit. The visit cost 200 dollars, but was offset by a sliding scale discount of 130, and he’d paid 25 at the time, so they wanted 45 more.

  There was a letter from I.C. System Inc. of St. Paul–Minneapolis, on behalf of Jason Hudson, DDS, for a dentist bill in the amount of 461.93 dollars.

  There was a letter from NYU Langone Medical Center regarding a doctor’s visit on September 23 with Dr. Lisa Kalik. The visit had cost 250 dollars, but Oxford, John’s health insurance, had paid the majority of it and they now wanted to be paid 30 dollars.

  There was a letter from Cynthia MacKay, MD, an ophthalmologist, from December 28 of the last year, of a bill that was ninety days overdue. The visit had cost 175 dollars, and he owed 10.

  And paystubs. At the end of the year John had received what they called “gross” pay in the amount of 43,317.43 dollars.

  There was a deduction in that pay in the amount of 2,428.39 dollars, which was John’s share of his partially employer-paid health insurance.

  There was a deduction in the amount of 999.75 dollars for transportation—for the subway fare cards provided through his job. These unlimited ride cards cost 89 dollars a month. This discounted group version reduced his cost to 83.31 dollars a month.

  So John’s total income that was reported to the government for the year past was, after all this, 39,889.29 dollars.

  In this, he was way ahead of a great percentage of the world at that time.

  There were, speaking very roughly, 3.2 billion people with jobs in the whole world. Looking at the total world population at the time and the amount of money earned by countries all over the world, without setting aside government money, the average yearly per-person income might have been something between 6,000 and 10,000 dollars a month. The average person in the whole country, meanwhile, made something near 32,000 dollars a year, although most of those people lived in places that were far less expensive than the City.

  Of that 39,889.29 dollars, John had to give some of that away. There was also some money kept back from him for paying into the country’s Social Security program, which provided a modest monthly income for the disabled and the elderly.

  So they set aside, throughout this year, 2,473.14 dollars for Social Security, and also an estimated federal tax payment of 3,692.48 dollars, and a payment to Medicare, which provided health services to the poor, of 578.39 dollars, and also local taxes were withheld in the amount of 1,113.08 dollars.

  After all that, he was down to 74 percent of his total pay: 32
,032.20 dollars, or 2,669.35 a month.

  THE MAYOR, AS required, filed his final reports for the year. It turned out he had spent 108 million dollars of his own money on his third-term reelection campaign.

  His challenger had been able to get only about 10 million dollars together to spend, and even so had come up short by only 50,597 votes.

  The Mayor wouldn’t miss the money. Or so it was easy to think. A funny thing about money was that, even when you had a lot, even when the perspective skewed so wildly that you could purchase in cash things that cost millions of dollars, when you could walk into a building and write a check for the building itself, or walk into an art gallery or a car showroom and take anything or everything you wanted, or spend 20 million dollars on a renovation of one of your secondary homes, it was often true that the feeling of parting with money was just the same for everyone, rich or poor.

  CHAD AND DIEGO hadn’t seen each other in a couple of nights. Chad was out a lot. Diego said to Chad finally, “You know you’re not single anymore, right?”

  AT WORK, THEY weren’t necessarily lying when they’d told Trixie that they needed her salary for other uses. John was getting a raise. It didn’t mean they had to fire her, but still.

  Each of John’s paychecks would go up 230 dollars, for a total of 460 more dollars a month. So he’d be making 2,700 a month.

  It wasn’t going to change everything, exactly, but John thought he could live like, he said, a human being. Like he could do things now. If he wanted to buy socks, he could. And he would get haircuts.

  And he thought Edward would be getting a paycheck soon too, maybe, from somewhere. Their first line item was to get a new bed.

  The big picture of the raise, it’s incredible, John thought. And he would start paying off his other government debts again. Maybe 150 a month. He could, and he wanted to, do 150 dollars.

  He was actually excited.

  So say that was 675 each week. So, after he paid his basic monthly agreements of about 1,315 dollars, for almost exactly half his income, he’d be left with between 44 and 46 each day to spend on other things.

  That would make all the difference.

  John’s cousin was applying to professional schools. He had gotten into a very fancy one that was far from the City. So he’d be leaving pretty soon, most likely. John fantasized about keeping his little apartment with Edward. And they’d have one room for sleeping, and then the public room for cooking and eating and watching TV and socializing, and then a third room, which had been his cousin’s, for working or reading or thinking. Edward would be able to afford half of the rent himself soon, John thought. Maybe!

  Meanwhile Edward was looking at getting some cheap deal on some squatted apartment in the City, which John didn’t like, and it sounded all kinds of dubious. Honestly, this was probably just another thing that Edward talked about. He talked about a lot of things, and few of them happened. John thought if he just got a nicer bed, Edward would just stay put, finally, for once.

  Problem was, John thought he’d have gotten his raise in his last check but he hadn’t, and blammo, he’d run out of money for five days.

  In the week before the raise, Sally and another friend at work had bought him lunch, and then a friend had bought him dinner. Then on Friday, John planned to spend fifteen dollars and get a haircut.

  John called Edward to say hi.

  Edward was all comfortable at his parents’, eating a pizza with Gruyère, a pricey cheese. He had a glass of wine, a Chardonnay.

  John was hungry and tired and maybe a little bit drunk.

  People lived to suit their means. They expanded; money would make their costs grow. If you had a lot of money, it found things to do and it kept you busy, and when you stopped to pull back and look at it all, suddenly you were spending nearly all your money and you didn’t know why.

  What’s the first thing you’re going to buy when you get your check on Friday? Edward asked.

  Socks, John said. I really need socks.

  He was actually a little annoyed.

  Later that week Edward planned to get John some dinner sent through the Internet, and he’d pay for it with his mother’s credit card.

  It was maybe going to be John’s last broke Thursday, maybe.

  The next day John was really nice to Edward when they talked.

  ON FRIDAY NIGHT, right before Edward came back, John went out with Ralph, his old friend from college, on a massive bar tour. They hadn’t seen each other in ages! They stopped here and there, Eastern Bloc, the Boiler Room, ending at the Cock.

  All these bars were right by Jordan’s apartment, and they met up with Jason and Jeff. Jordan and Jeff had just broken up, so John kept texting Jordan to tell him not to come to whatever bar they were in at the moment.

  Everyone thought that Jeff and Jordan were more fun to go out with now that they were broken up. Jeff and Jordan, when they were together, would always get jealous, like, are you looking at that guy? What, no, I’m not!

  It got late and pretty much everyone was wasted. Every once in a while, Jason was like, “Who wants a Tic Tac?”

  They breezed past the doorwoman at the Cock. Eventually John went down to the basement to pee, and it was wall-to-wall guys down there. One guy having sex locked eyes with John as John squeezed by.

  John went back upstairs and grabbed Ralph, all wild-eyed. “We have to get out of here,” he said. Ralph was happy to. To see John so devoted to someone again, after all these years of not believing it was possible, Ralph thought it was wonderful. He came back home with John, instead of going way uptown where he lived. Ralph slept in the broken-down twin bed and John slept on the floor. At around four thirty a.m., John called Edward, who sensibly didn’t answer.

  In the morning John’s cousin got up and went to the bathroom through the living room, passing what he assumed was Edward on the computer. When he came out of the bathroom, he realized it was Ralph. Ralph was busy meeting a guy on Adam4Adam, yet another place people met online. The guy came over and got him and drove him—in his car!—all the way uptown.

  John woke up and Ralph was gone, and he opened the window into the cold hard morning and smoked a cigarette out the window. Eventually he got bundled up and went to the little coffee shop directly across the street.

  He sat outside on the bench with a cup of coffee and lit a cigarette. His phone buzzed in his pants. It was Edward calling back. He was so happy to talk to him.

  “You know how much snow we have here? Zero. . . . There’s salt all over the ground. There’s salt. I mean it was flirting with snowing last night, we were like, oh, the snow’s coming. Then it just never came. . . . Um, we had quite the night last night. Well, Ralph and I started at G, then we went to get dinner at that La Lunchonette on Tenth Avenue, it was so good. Then we went to the porn shop to get lube. Then we went to Gym Bar. . . . No! That’s why I was laughing. Like I don’t need this shit anymore. It’s really expensive. Oh my God. I mean he bought like a jug of it for forty dollars. Then we went to Gym Bar. . . . A giant jug of lube in his pocket. But they wrapped it like, you know, like a nice French bread or something. They did a very nice job of wrapping it. . . . Then we went to Eastern Cock, where we met up with Jason and Patrick and Jeff. . . . And Patrick was so nice last night! Yeah, I was shocked. He was the nicest guy ever last night. . . . No, completely. He must be on meds. So we were at Eastern Cock, then we went to Boiler Room, wh
ere we ran into Bryan and Sam and Steve or whatever his name is. He’s a total bitch. Ugh, such a bitch. Then we went to the Cock, L. O. L. Mmm-hmm. It was kind of insane. I ran out, like, terrified. I mean it was just vintage Cock. I stayed in the front and was dancing and then I had to go to the bathroom and it was too scary so I made Ralph leave and we just walked out and Jeff and Jason stayed behind. . . . And then Ralph slept over last night and I’m unbelievably hungover. . . . Yeah. I’ll call you back. Okay? Okay. I’ll call you. Alright, bye.”

  The wind was coming down from the north and it was very cold. The landlord’s son who ran the real estate business downstairs from John’s apartment came and opened up the shop. They waved. John finished up his coffee and went back inside his building and up the stairs.

  That night, John was going over to dinner at Kevin’s. He was looking forward to a home-cooked meal. They could be married homebodies together! They were survivors, or something.

  AND THEN IN the very harshest dead of winter it was Jason’s birthday. Jason was thirty years old now and that meant he was all grown up. Well, he guessed. What would change? Nothing? Jason felt like he had turned thirty ten years ago. Especially since he’d been married—at eighteen!—and all that stuff. Maybe I’m turning something less than thirty, he thought. If he’d learned anything from the writer Armistead Maupin, he thought, the one thing he’d learned is that you can’t have a hot job, a hot man and a hot apartment all at the same time. He really did believe that. He felt like he’d had combinations of those three things for almost all of his life, and now the pieces were shifting but he still didn’t have all of those. Maybe, thinking about it, maybe he had none of those? Although he kind of liked his apartment. And he, alone among his friends, liked his job most days! But he definitely did not have a hot boyfriend.