Losers

by Matthue Roth

  “I’ll pummel you,” Bates said nonchalantly.

  He raised a fist up to the level of his face and cracked his knuckles, one by one.

  “No you won’t,” Mr. Goldberg said. His voice wavered with a growing uneasiness. “That’s illegal.”

  Bates leaned forward, plucked Mr. Goldberg’s mouse—one of the only objects to survive his previous assault—right off his desk, and held it up. Then he yanked it up higher. The cord, disconnected, flopped down limply.

  “I know,” said Bates, smiling.

  Mr. Goldberg rolled his chair backward. One hand shot to his phone, slid it off the hook. He cradled the receiver in his hand. With that same hand, he began dialing a number.

  “Young man,” he said to Bates, “who do you honestly think I am? A man doesn’t go into business in that part of town without having associates. Associates who are equipped to deal with all manner of problems. For the more upstanding kinds of problems, as well as the, shall we say, scraps that come along with doing business. And, though I would hesitate to call you upstanding, I need to tell you just one thing.”

  His eyes narrowed.

  “My associates make you look like Strawberry fucking Shortcake. And, at this time of day, they aren’t too far away from my office.” He stopped talking then, and glared at us from his side of the desk. “Do I make myself clear, boys?”

  “Fine,” replied Bates. “Then I’ll do a ritual.”

  Mr. Goldberg stopped dialing mid-number. That had fazed him.

  “A what?” he said.

  Bates smiled.

  “A ritual,” he said again, slowly and patiently. He reached over to the wall, where he’d propped his staff, and picked it up now. He held the staff with both hands, tossed it lightly up and down in his palms for Mr. Goldberg to see.

  “Because,” he continued, “I mean, sure, you could bring your hired goons down on me. And then I would probably call up my boys, and shit would go down, and your guys would probably win. But—and I want you to know, Mr. Goldberg, that this is not a threat—I would really hate to think of what would happen then. I would hate to wake up in my sleep every night in a cold sweat, wondering whether all the limbs of my body had suddenly detached, or if my children’s souls were being snatched from their bodies. I would hate to think twice about opening my refrigerator any time I wanted something to eat, wondering whether maggots and house flies were going to crawl out of my lunch meat. I really don’t know if I could bear that much thinking, Mr. Goldberg. I’m kinda a paranoid person by nature. I’m always…worried…that something’s going to jump out and get me.” He pronounced each word slower and slower, quieter and quieter. By the end his voice had sunk to a whisper, and I realized at that moment that listening to Bates speak in a whisper was a lot more frightening than hearing him speak in a roar.

  The door shot open.

  Crash walked in, seemingly oblivious to the rest of the world. He walked right past Bates and his extended staff; past his father, who held the phone as far away from himself as he could possibly get it, ready to toss it aside the moment a slug crawled out of the receiver. He crossed to the far end of the room, lowered himself down to the carpet, reached into the micro-fridge that sat there, and pulled out a crisp, cold can of orange soda. He stood up, cracked it open, kicked the fridge shut with his heel, and looked up at us. I think that was the first realization he had that we were all in his father’s office.

  “Oh, hi, Bates! Hey, Jupiter. What are you guys doing here?”

  My throat was sticky and dry. I couldn’t speak. Bates, too, was too intent on appearing fearsome and Satanic to reply. At last, Mr. Goldberg was the one who spoke. His voice sounded strange and high-pitched, as though he were half expecting to be demonically possessed himself.

  “These—these boys were just trying to convince me to sell that warehouse on East Diamond,” he said.

  “Huh,” said Crash thoughtfully, taking a long swig. “Well, I know you were gambling on the Yards to turn into the next big development zone when you bought it, but housing prices haven’t gone up there in thirty years, and all the kids at school with rich parents are moving to all those East Liberty developments down by Penn’s Landing. I hate to tell you this, but there’s nothing going on around there. It’s total crap. You really think it’s worth holding on to?”

  “No,” Mr. Goldberg’s voice wobbled, “I guess not.”

  After that, we removed ourselves from the premises of 499 Fitzpatrick as quickly as possible, and stepped out into a surprisingly cold night. I grabbed the end seams of my three-quarter-length sleeves and tried to stretch them into full-length sleeves. It didn’t really work.

  “Damn.” Bates shivered, running his leather-braceleted wrists over his bare arms. “We need to move. Where you headed?”

  I was about to reply automatically, back home, but something in my brain clicked and I realized, with the dim setting sun, that it had just officially become Friday night.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “There’s this party in Fishtown with a bunch of North Shore kids. But I saw this concert flyer in the record store, and I really wanted to—”

  I felt Bates’s hands grip my neck, a friendly but firm directing power.

  “Show me the concert,” he said.

  We waited in line outside the TLA alongside a bunch of other kids, most of them at least five years older than we were. Someone was holding up the box office, arguing about paying with a charge card. I could feel Bates’s frustration bubbling up, ready to manifest itself all over me.

  “This band better not suck,” he growled. “What are they?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “I’m sure you’ll like them—they didn’t look like they were folk-rock or anything…”

  “I wonder how late the party goes. I wonder if there’s any freshmen there,” Bates mused, his voice held a bizarre combination of wistfulness and bloodlust. “Cause this better not suck.”

  “Hey!” boomed Crash Goldberg, coming between us, grabbing both our shoulders and shaking us. “What’s up? What’s going on? You guys into the band? Or are you just here for the scene?”

  “What scene?” grumbled Bates, his voice the usual shade of pissed-off, but I knew what he was really asking.

  Crash looked around and shrugged. “The kids,” he said nonchalantly, nodding at a crowd of people who were all at least ten years older than us. Then he stepped up to the ticket window, laid down some money, and, once he had his ticket, stepped aside.

  I opened my wallet. There was a single five-dollar bill inside, all that remained of what my parents used to pay me for working after school at the factory. I took a deep breath, imagined myself standing on the edge of a cliff, and handed it over.

  “Wow,” I said. “I can’t believe I’m investing the last of my cash on a single night out, based solely on a cool-looking flyer.”

  I didn’t say it to score a sympathetic look, but from Crash and Bates’s expressions of astonishment, you’d think they were my two biggest patrons.

  “Why don’t you ask your parents for more?” said Crash. I noticed that he’d paid with a twenty, and stuffed the extra money straight into his pocket instead of putting it back into his wallet.

  I fumbled with an answer. Bates jumped to my rescue—not with the answer I would have given, but with the truth.

  “He can’t, ‘cause Jupiter used to work for his parents and then he quit and they hold it against him cause they live in the Yards and they’re probably as broke as your finger is gonna be if you ask him any more about it.”

  From Crash’s response to this—an easy grin and a double-backflip-cartwheel while standing in place—I deduced that, though Bates’s answer might have sounded like a threat to the casual observer (that is, to me), it was actually just how Bates answered questions.

  Fortunately, the box office printer chose that moment to spit my ticket out, and the cashier, a conventional alterna-girl who was watching us with a mixture of confusion and distaste, pushed it t
hrough the glass window toward me.

  I grabbed the ticket tightly in my palm and ran through the door. After a beat, Crash and Bates followed me into the dark portal of the Prowler show.

  “Damn, Crash,” I said, hustling into the crowd. “I really have to thank you. You don’t even know how much this—”

  “Well, don’t tell me, then,” he said, cutting me off. “Spreading chaos and disorder through the universe, that’s my mission. If it helped your state of mind, I assure you it’s entirely coincidental.”

  I stopped talking, not sure if I’d just been insulted. Crash threw his arm around me. His eyes never left the stage, where the band was just walking on.

  I opened my mouth.

  “Don’t ask questions,” he said. “Just embrace the chaos. Treasure it. Love it. Stroke it like a pet rhinoceros and make it your own.”

  I looked at Crash, who was grinning crazily, swaying back and forth in anticipation of the music. No residual thoughts of saving my house remained—no thoughts of the afternoon at all, probably. Crash had the most disconnected, stream-of-consciousness mind in the world. As soon as something new interested him, he threw the old idea out the window of the moving car of his brain and never looked back.

  “Hey,” I said to him, “at least let me buy you a drink. A soda or something.”

  “How?” he said. “You got any money?”

  “Well,” I fumbled, “it doesn’t have to be today. I’ll owe you.”

  “You don’t need to.”

  “I know,” I said. “I want to.”

  “Okay,” said Crash, the corners of his mouth spiraling deeper into that crazy, unhinged grin that, for the first time, seemed to indicate that he recognized me on some level as a kindred spirit. “You’re on.”

  And he pricked a cool fifty out of his wallet, held it up in the air, and disappeared, making his way into the packed crowd in the direction of the bar.

  The concert, in and of itself, was amazing. You know how sometimes you can go to a concert and it’s just a party in disguise, where the audience is the real act, and other times your eyes never leave the stage and it’s like a big great dramatic performance? Well, this was both. The band, Prowler, were like music geeks who’d been hypnotized into thinking they were a Motown rhythm and blues soul-rock band from the ‘60s. They were skinny white kids in loose-fitting jeans who tinkered with computers in the corner to make a beat, then whipped up their guitars and basses and started laying down a fat, grooving funk track over it. They got down like Prince and James Brown and Christopher Walken all at once. They jumped all over the stage, skidding on the floor, crashing into the amps. They pogoed to their own beats. The lead singer ripped his shirt off and tossed it to the crowd and promised the audience that, if any girl wanted to rip his shirt off, he’d go and find it and put it back on for her.

  We danced. Crash was his usual Gumby self, hopping and twisting and somersaulting through the crowd. He picked girls’ hands out of the air like they were apples and it was the first day of the harvest, twirling the girls around like trees on wheels. How did he make friends—or crushes—so quickly? I resolved to keep following him around until I figured it out.

  Even Bates was having fun, moshing up against guys who were every inch as big as he was, throwing their bodies around and then having them throw around his body. At first I thought it was totally sly of him, getting a sexual charge out of it when none of the other guys would even realize it, and then, in the middle of working up my own dance-crazed sweat, I realized that it wasn’t sexual for him. It was pre-sexual, the charge of adrenaline and energy and our carnivorous nature. It was the thrill of dancing itself.

  I threw my body into the tantrum of the music, felt it wrestling with my protesting muscles, twisting my feet and forcing my hips out of their sockets. I shook my arms and I shook my head and I shook my long, curly hair, each thick strand dancing with its own cadence and groove. The most beautiful girl in the world, her hair a tapestry of black that glowed like stars under the lights, flowing behind her, danced up to me and, facing away from the stage, facing me, waved her hands in slow motion between our faces, spiraling them like an Arabian princess would. It took me a minute to realize she was the girl from the record store.

  She swayed back and forth in a slow, boatlike rhythm, undulating like a Hasidic Jew lost in prayer. For a single, beatific second, she made eye contact with me, moved in, and wrapped her arms around my neck. She smiled at me—comradely, vigilant—like we were the first two people in the world to have discovered this band, Prowler, like really discovered them, and this moment was the moment that our true ultimate secret was being bequeathed to the world.

  The next thing I knew, she was on the other side of the dance floor, kicking it up with a bunch of girls, one of which I knew was probably her girlfriend. And the others were probably all gay, too, girls who shared her life experiences, of being different than everyone around you, of hiding the world’s biggest secret in your chest and of being afraid to tell anyone.

  I knew, too, that on some level, I had more in common with her than any of those girls. And at the same time, she had those girls siphoned off to a corner of her thoughts that I would never have access to, where she would never even deign to think of me.

  But right then I didn’t care. It didn’t bother me that she would never have a crush on me, that she would never feel about me the way I felt about her, and that in all likelihood she’d never truly realize the way I felt about her or the thoughts I was thinking or the fact that she’d probably never get to see inside my head, to have that real and true exchange of thoughts that never stopped that I utterly, desperately wanted to share with a girl.

  Right then, I was dancing. And I was smiling. And I was perfectly fine to stay in that moment and not move at all, not to wish for anything else.

  I felt like the total opposite of a loser. I didn’t care what I was doing or who was around to watch me. I just wanted to be exactly where I was, doing exactly what I was doing.

  11. JUST LIKE HEAVEN

  “Oh, man,” I said, my head going wild on a sugar buzz. “I have no idea how I’m gonna get home. Can I just tell you guys, it’s eleven o’clock and my parents have probably already issued a police bulletin on my ass?”

  Bates lay sprawled out on the concrete outside the theater. Both his face and his massive, solid stomach stared up at the sky. His lungs rose and fell like the tide, taking in deep, unrestrained breaths to replace all the air he’d lost in the pit.

  “Relax,” he said. “I’m going back to the Northeast, too. The El runs till midnight. We’ll take it to the end of the line, and we can split a cab from there.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “With whose inheritance?”

  “With mine,” said Bates, sounding more distant and on-his-own-planet than ever. “Don’t worry about it. Just luxuriate for a minute with me, Jupiter. Live in the moment.”

  I took another glance down at him on the ground, lying there and making time with the cobblestones. Crash stood around the corner, trying to bum cigarettes off of straight-edge kids who kept threatening to beat him up for asking. Live in the moment. One day I really would be able to do that. For now, though, I had to content myself with the first step: channeling my neuroticism into watching the only person in the world who really mattered—who was two hundred pounds and frequently threatened to pound me into a pancake and top me with blueberry syrup—as he lay drunkenly on the sidewalk, swinging his fists at the stars.

  Behind us, hordes of people poured out of the concert hall doors, singing the lyrics to the band’s final encore. A few of them stopped to gape at Bates, earning little more than the shake of a fist in their direction and a warning grimace. “Did he have anything to drink?” I whispered in Crash’s ear.

  Crash shook his head. “Nada, man,” he whispered back. “I swear, sometimes I think that, compared to him, I’m almost normal.”

  Almost normal. Succumbing to a sudden realization, I wondered if this wa
s the first time I’d ever heard the word normal used pejoratively. Growing up in the Yards, normal had never been a bad thing. I wished I could talk normal, act normal, be normal. Even at that fateful first party, I’d spent the whole night wishing I could fit in, and holding my breath out of fear that I didn’t. Now I was standing downtown with the star of that party, watching our mutual acquaintance attract the attention of a whole crowd of onlookers.

  Suddenly, Bates stopped muttering under his breath. He jumped up, right onto his feet, and started walking away.

  “What the hell are you waiting for?” he called over his shoulder. “You want me to take you home or not?”

  At the subway, Bates slipped two coins in, one for him and one for me. Crash ducked under the turnstile when no one was looking. They both lived in East Falls, on the other side of the city, but Crash said they’d ride the El to the end of the line with me and then get on the last subway of the night back in the other direction. Neither of us knew what to say, but neither of us felt like ending the night quite yet. Two stories below Market Street, we could still hear thudding, thumping trance music coming from the clubs above us.

  A couple sat on a bench in the station, making out with a passion and furiousness that blocked out the rest of the world for them. Crash stood right next to them and watched. Two old women with grocery carts were talking in Russian. Bates elbowed me and I translated. I said they were listing the narcotics they’d bought and where they were going to sell them.

  The train didn’t take long in coming. We got on a few cars down from the old ladies. The couple didn’t even notice that the train had showed at all, and Crash barely did. He raced across the platform just as the doors were closing, got his left foot caught in the door, and yanked it out just as the conductor was yelling at him over the speaker system.

  “Yaaaargh,” moaned Crash, nestling his bruised ankle as he writhed on the floor.

  “Friggin’ klutz,” said Bates as he swung into his own seat.