Play Me Backwards

by Adam Selzer

  Whoever made the laws about underage drinking clearly never had to get through a high school Valentine’s Day. I’d rarely had more than a sip or two even in the back room of the Cave, where drinking stuff stronger than vanilla syrup was not exactly unheard of, but on Valentine’s Day eve, alone in my room, I’d broken my own drinking record by a decent margin. And now, at work, I was feeling the results.

  Stan emerged from the back room wearing his apron.

  “Sorry I was late,” he said. “I didn’t think there’d be anything you couldn’t handle alone.”

  “There wasn’t,” I said. “But can you mix me up a glass of that hangover concoction of yours?”

  He smiled. “Rough night last night?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Coming up,” he said.

  And he got to work mixing stuff from the soda machine, the cabinets, and some mysterious Tupperware containers from his backpack.

  Meanwhile, I looked down at my phone to reread the e-mail I’d gotten the night before. Far more than the Valentine’s couples it was the e-mail that had pushed me over the edge and into my dad’s liquor cabinet.

  From: anna.brandenburg236@gmail.com

  To: leon.harris50322@gmail.com

  Subj: Iowa

  Hey, Leon! My parents were talking about coming back to Iowa the other night; maybe even moving. Not definitely, but maybe. It’d be good to see you (and the rest of the “gifted pool” hooligans) again, so I’ll keep you posted. Happy Valentine’s Day.

  Anna B.

  Anna B. Like I’d ever think it was some other Anna. It was the most I’d heard from her in almost three years.

  And it scared the green shit out of me.

  2. AMBITION

  It might seem clever to say that my life started to go to hell when I started hanging out with Satan, but it really started three Valentine’s Days before, when Anna Brandenburg kissed me for the last time before she moved to England with her parents. She took my heart with her. She probably left it in that pouch behind the seat in front of her on the airplane, squished between the airsick bag and a copy of Sky Mall.

  Now, three years later, it was probably out in a landfill someplace. Or one of those garbage vortexes in the ocean.

  On the couch in the back room of the Ice Cave, I gulped down the concoction Stan had prepared for me. It tasted like corn flakes, coffee, and some sort of chemical, and made me feel, for just a split second, like someone was flushing my body down a toilet of fire. But a moment after swallowing the first sip, I felt as good as new. Unbelievable.

  “Hail Satan,” I said.

  Stan sort of nodded, like “yeah, yeah,” then went into psychiatrist mode on a folding chair as I lay down on the couch.

  “So,” he said, “you only actually went out with this girl for, like, two months, right?”

  “It was about a year,” I said. “We were friends since fourth grade and I had a crush on her all through middle school.”

  “Were you thinking of her the first time you whacked it?”

  “Probably,” I said, though the real answer was definitely.

  I sipped up the last of the drink and stared up at the ceiling.

  Back in middle school I was in the “gifted pool,” which is what they called the “smart class.” When a kid on TV gets put in one of those, it’s always a bunch of dorks who tuck their shirts into their underwear and speak in palindromes and shit, but at my school it was a bunch of commies, perverts, and beatniks who just happened to read from the adult section at the library. I was no slouch in those days. In the time I saved by not doing homework, I was watching foreign films, listening to jazz, and getting involved in protest movements and shit. And I liked that stuff. I really did. But it probably never would have occurred to me to do any of it if it hadn’t been for Anna Brandenburg.

  Anna came from a whole different world than I did. Her parents, whom she called by their first names, were both professors. She played the cello better than Stan played video games (which is saying something), and knew the difference between avant-garde and neofuturist art when she was in seventh grade. She sat in on college courses sometimes, including the art class where you draw naked people from live models.

  My parents were just a couple of basic suburban dorks. Like me.

  Even when Anna and I were going out, I never stopped feeling like she was out of my league. And that was three years, about fifty pounds, and billions of brain cells ago.

  Stan lit up a cigarette as I grabbed another handful of Reese’s Pieces from the only barrel I could reach without getting off the couch.

  “How far did you get with her?” he asked.

  “Not very.”

  “Was she in that pool thing with you and Dustin?”

  I nodded. “We were the terrors of middle school.”

  And we were. The teachers feared our names.

  Now most of my teachers probably didn’t even know my name. It was the tail end of my senior year, and I hadn’t taken the SAT or applied to a single college. I was telling my parents I was going to work for a year or so to save money, then get all the required courses out of the way at junior college or something, but I was really just planning to keep on working at the Ice Cave and hanging out in Stan’s basement. I wasn’t even sure I’d be graduating at all; I had to serve a whole lot of hours of detention time that I’d earned skipping gym before I’d qualify.

  But I was generally satisfied with my life as a complete slacker. And why wouldn’t I be? You show me a man who wants more out of life than an easy job that provides unlimited candy, and I’ll show you a greedy bastard.

  But when I got that e-mail, and it suddenly occurred to me that Anna might come back and see me like this, I suddenly felt disgusted with myself.

  The drinks only made me feel worse.

  Now, in the back room, I had this rotten feeling in my stomach. When I tried to visualize it, I imagined a little cartoon monster inside of me, eating away at my innards.

  I took another sip from the cup Stan had given me. It was empty now, but I wanted to look busy and distracted.

  “When’s she coming back?” asked Stan.

  “She might not be.”

  “So don’t worry about it. Have some more Reese’s Pieces.”

  “She isn’t even going to recognize me anymore if she does,” I said. “Five minutes with me and she’ll be on the first plane back to London.”

  Stan exhaled, reached for his can of Cheez Whiz, and sprayed some directly into his mouth.

  The bell rang, meaning customers had come in the front door, and I got up from the couch to go deal with them.

  It turned out to be Paige Becwar, one of the girls who circulated around the football team, and Joey Brickman. They were holding hands.

  A couple. Fuck.

  “Hey, man,” I said to Joey.

  “Whaddup?” he said.

  Joey Brickman was the coolest kid in the world when I was in kindergarten, but he had sort of peaked by first grade. Now he was just another guy on the football team who thought that saying “whaddup” and wearing a sideways baseball cap made him look cool.

  “What’ll it be, guys?” I asked.

  “I just want a banana split,” said Paige.

  “I’ll give you a banana in your split,” said Joey.

  Paige laughed and socked him in the arm.

  “Pretty witty,” I said.

  Sometimes I look at my class, the people I’ve known since kindergarten, and reflect on the fact that we all grew up to be dumbasses. Some school system we’ve got around here.

  I made them a banana split, then watched them sit in a booth and eat it like a couple on a date in some TV show from the 1950s. I couldn’t help but wonder if I would have been doing stuff like that with Anna for Valentine’s Day if she’d never moved. Most of my “dates” now, if you could call them that, consisted of going to a couch in Stan’s parents’ basement with a girl I didn’t really like, and who probably didn’t really li
ke me, to make out. I never did the whole formal “dinner and a movie” thing with anyone.

  I probably wouldn’t have with Anna, either. I imagined us out doing more interesting things. Art gallery openings. Amnesty International meetings. Trips to Chicago to go to jazz clubs. Knocking on doors for some presidential candidate during caucus season. Stuff like that.

  When Joey and Paige left, I retreated to the back room, where Stan had lit a fresh cigarette. The first one was still smoldering in the ashtray, sending a plume of smoke into the air and obscuring his face.

  “So let me get this all straight,” he said. “Your ninth-grade girlfriend is coming back to the States, and you’re afraid she won’t like you anymore now that you aren’t listening to opera.”

  I wondered how he even knew that her family went to the opera. I hadn’t mentioned that.

  “Pretty much,” I said. “I mean, she’s spent three years being all British and shit, and I’ve pretty much built my life around scratching my balls back here.”

  “Well, let me ask you something,” said Stan. “What are we listening to right now?”

  He pointed his cigarette over at the little stereo.

  “Mayhem, right?” I asked. “True Norwegian black metal.”

  And I made the devil sign, as one does whenever one utters the phrase “true Norwegian black metal.” Most of the metal bands who sang about worshipping Satan in the 1980s weren’t really Satanists any more than Michael Jackson was really a zombie, but some of the bands in Norway actually went around burning churches, killing each other, and eating bits of one another’s brains in stews, like they didn’t realize they were just supposed to pretend they did shit like that to sell records.

  “And what language is it in?” asked Stan.

  I shrugged. “Norwegian, I assume.”

  “Right. It’s not in English. And can you possibly tell me that the first chair violinist of the Oslo Philharmonic plays violin better than this guy plays guitar?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said.

  “I would,” said Stan. “Guys in black metal bands start playing scales six hours a day at the age of seven. They can play circles around some orchestra putz. How is listening to a bunch of virtuoso psychopaths singing about worshipping me in Norwegian any different from listening to sad clowns singing about stabbing people in Italian?”

  I thought about this. “I guess it’s not much less intellectual in, like, a pure sense,” I said.

  “Nope,” said Stan. “People used to think operas were evil too, back in the day. Half of them are about weirdos who sell their souls to me and burn people alive out of spite. And the guys in bands don’t get laid any more than the composers did.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I’ll bet the composers got a higher class of groupies.”

  “What, you think they got, like, courtesans because the King of Prussia signed their paychecks?”

  I shrugged. “The King of Prussia never commissioned a black metal album.”

  “Well, of course not,” Stan said. “There hasn’t been a fucking King of Prussia since World War I, and that ended a good fifty years before the first Black Sabbath album came out. But you’re missing the point. You’re not as far from being a snotty wenis as you think you are just because you’re a total bum with no direction in life.”

  The bell on the front door rang again.

  “Your turn,” I said.

  Stan stepped out to deal with the customers in the “front of the house” while I sat in the back and stared up at the ceiling, wondering what in the hell I should do.

  I remembered the day I went over to Anna’s house to watch Un Chien Andalou, the movie Salvadore Dalí made. It’s got a scene with an eyeball getting cut open. Stan was right. The fact that that was in a movie by a famous artist didn’t make it more intellectual than a vintage Megadeth video or whatever.

  But, shit. She was probably off getting ready to study at some prestigious university and thinking of going into Parliament. Or making six figures as a photographer already or something. There was no way to sugarcoat the fact that I was about two steps away from having a beer belly, a receding hairline, and a car propped up on cinder blocks in the vacant lot down the road from some rickety apartment complex.

  Anna and I had never officially broken up, exactly—I guess you don’t have to when you’re in ninth grade and one of you moves overseas. It’s just, like, implied. Outside of a few long e-mails the first couple of months, we’d barely spoken since she moved. For the first year or so she was pretty steadily posting GIFs from movies and stuff on various social media sites, and now and then one of them would be romantic and I’d freak out wondering if she was thinking of me or had found someone else or what. But then she pretty much stopped posting things, or showing up online much at all, and for the last year she’d just been like a ghost. There was no trace of her, nothing to tell me what she was up to.

  It wasn’t like I had taken a vow of celibacy or expected her to wait for me or anything. I made out and fooled around with plenty of girls at Stan’s parties and in the back at the Ice Cave. I even slept with two them. But every time I made out with a girl, I couldn’t help but imagine I was making out with Anna. I always felt like I was cheating on her. I was only over her if I didn’t have to see her or think about her.

  I sniffed at the glass, trying to guess what Stan could possibly have put in that concoction. I thought I detected a hint of parsley.

  The walk-in freezer hummed.

  It went hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

  When Stan returned to the back room a minute later, he picked his cigarette up and relit it.

  “Leon,” he said, “you’ve been a fine minion, and I want to help you. I think I can help you feel so much better that you’ll end up wanting to let me have your soul for free as a thank-you gift.”

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  “Keep an eye on the front for a while, okay? I’ll be back in a few.”

  I went up to the front and sat on the counter, and Stan went out to his car and drove away. I hoped he wasn’t using all this as an excuse to ditch me at work or something, but that wasn’t really his style. And there wasn’t any work to leave me with, exactly; there was nothing for me to do around the store but defrost the front-of-the-house freezer with a screwdriver and try to keep my mind off Anna by wondering how the hell an ice cream place came to smell like the inside of a pizza box. Which it did.

  Twenty minutes later Stan came back with an armload of CDs.

  “Where did you go?” I asked.

  “Library.” He walked up and dropped the CDs on the counter.

  “What the hell is all this?” I asked.

  “It’s the Moby-Dick audiobook,” he said. “Unabridged on nineteen CDs. Start listening to it.”

  I stared at the pile of jewel cases. “You think listening to a classic novel is going to make me seem all intellectual or something?”

  “It won’t make you any dumber,” said Stan. “But that’s not the point. Drive around tonight and listen to it.“

  I took the stack of CDs to my locker in the back and wondered what in the fresh, green hell Stan was thinking.

  “You’ll thank me later,” he said when I came back out. “You’ll see. Thus begins the Resurrection of Leon.”

  The walk-in cooler kept on humming, and I arranged three gummy worms from the mix-in tubs into an A for Anna.

  Sometimes, you just have to trust that the dark lord knows what he’s doing.

  3. FISH

  All through the rest of my shift, as the sun set over Venture Street and a round of fresh, wet, gloopy snow began to fall, I wondered what Stan’s angle was in giving me an audiobook about hunting for a whale. Maybe he figured that with so many CDs, the answer to all my problems had to be in there someplace. Or maybe he thought it would keep me occupied for a really long time so he wouldn’t have to hear me whining about Anna.

  Or maybe he thought listening to a book about a whale would motivate me to finally sel
l Willy the Whale, the whale-shaped ice cream cake that had been sitting in the front-of-the-house freezer for ages. We’d found it buried in the walk-in in the back, and since it was way too old to be safe to eat, we put it on sale priced as an antique. Willy-shaped cakes had been off the market for years, so it may have been a one-of-a-kind collectible now.

  And, of course, there was the very real possibility that he just thought listening to Moby-Dick would somehow get me laid because it had the word “dick” in the title.

  When my shift ended, I cruised around town for a couple of hours listening to the first two CDs. In that amount of time you can drive from one end of the Des Moines metro area to the other several times; I drove past George the Chili King, the state capitol, the three or four skyscrapers we had, all four malls, the sculpture garden, and just about everything else we had that we could possibly count as a landmark. Twice, in some cases. All the while, Ishmael, the narrator, rambled on through my shitty car speakers about how he came to sign up for a voyage on a whaling ship. I’d never read Moby-Dick before—honestly, I hadn’t read anything all the way through in a long time—but I did read a Classics Illustrated version of it when I was about ten, and I was pretty sure that I remembered it ending with everyone except Ishmael dying.

  Okay, so . . . Ishmael. Now here we have a talker. The man goes to church and repeats the entire fucking sermon. And the words to all the hymns. And the inscriptions on the gravestones of everyone in the churchyard who got killed by a whale. I wondered if he really remembered it at all, or if he was just making it up. He had to be making at least part of it up.

  In fact, when he opens the book by saying, “Call me Ishmael,” he’s not exactly saying, “My name is Ishmael.” He’s just telling you to call him that. It isn’t exactly the same thing, if you think about it. Fucker’s real name was probably Bernie or something.