Binge

by Douglas Coupland

  He’s gay, and old enough that he lost lots of friends to AIDS. When he arrived, he knew all of the older staffers, who greeted him like Marilyn Monroe about to perform for the troops in Korea.

  “Sweetie,” he said, when he showed up at my door, “you look radiant for someone being written out of the soap opera.”

  We held hands and our eyes began to leak. I told him everything, beer-can dick and all, and nothing surprised him. When Matteo showed up after shift change, Erik greeted him like an old friend, and we all threw our arms around each other.

  “Leah, did you enjoy life on earth?” Erik asked after the hug was over.

  “What a weird question. But yeah. I did.”

  “Matteo, do you love Leah?”

  “I do.”

  “Leah, do you love Matteo?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, in that case, in your own special way, you two crazy kids are now married.”

  Erik discreetly left the room, and I looked at Matteo and realized that, yes, we were.

  17

  Hip Hotels

  I’M SUE. I work for the world’s most chic hotel chain. My job is to travel undercover to each of their many fine hotels and secretly note absolutely everything I see there that’s done incorrectly. Did the concierge wait for more than one ring to pick up the phone? Was that the correct fork with the sole? Everything. And you have no idea how fussy I can be. I may look like your younger sister’s best friend, but I can also be a total dick if you give me any lip—but a stealthy dick. Three weeks after my visit, you’ll be wondering why you’ve been demoted to valet parking manager, never suspecting that it was because of the “guest” who was so unhappy with your service.

  You don’t get much sympathy when you have a job like mine. Oh…woe is me! I’m getting calluses from trying on too many plush white bathrobes. These complimentary sleep masks are chafing the bridge of my nose and have the faint odor of off-gassing plastic. Were they made in China?

  I basically landed in gravy. Sometimes I think of people whose undercover jobs aren’t quite so cushy as mine, like those air marshals who sit incognito on roughly half of all civil aviation flights in the US, especially now. Think about that for a second: imagine having to be a passenger on United Airlines every working day.

  Given my job, I totally identify with that crazy Korean woman who forced a KAL flight attendant to get down on her knees and grovel for mercy for giving her a bag of peanuts instead of a ceramic dish filled with mixed nuts heated to 63 degrees Celsius. “Nut Rage” they called it on CNN. Good. I get nut rage all the time, though I would never lash out so obviously at undertrained morons. It’s why I’m always extra-hard on rating hotel gyms; if I don’t burn off steam, I’ll turn into one big massive stress cold sore. By the way, next time you see that a hotel gym is under renovation, it means they just don’t want to pay to insure the gym. Gyms are lawsuit magnets, like motel diving boards in the 1960s.

  My life is actually pretty lonely. I have to be away from home for weeks at a time, and the country and the season can make it worse, like Germany in winter. However, I have a plan: I’m going to snag a rich guy. Okay, so not the most feminist of goals, but I don’t want to be fifty and still running around ensuring that Keurig coffee labels are arranged with their logos baseline-flush in a neat line in some air-conditioned crypt in Singapore.

  If you’re a guest at one of my chain’s hotels, you’ve got access to dough, but how much of it is really yours and not the company’s? I find that the big spenders are usually on an expense account. The moment they have to actually pay for something themselves—you can’t charge the silk scarf in the hotel gift shop to your room, for instance—their faces crumble. You might even notice a Costco membership card peeking out from behind the Amex Black.

  Fact: genuinely rich guys wear linen, and the more wrinkled it is, the bigger their ski chalet. They also avoid wearing socks whenever possible. Someone once told me smart people like being nudists; I’m telling you rich people hate socks. And mostly, genuinely rich guys try to stay under the radar. See that guy over in the corner of the dining room sending back a bottle of Moët something because it displeases him? He probably makes one-point-three a year for a pharmaceutical company, but he’s low on assets and likely has an ex. See that guy drinking a Diet Coke and reading The Economist on an iPad? Zoing!

  That guy’s name is Orazio, which is Italian for Horace, so you’d think he’s Euromoney, but he’s actually from central California, where they grow broccoli and olives and marshmallows or whatever else comes from there. He’s two years older than me and single but not gay. I know all these things because I tipped the desk clerk a bottle of white wine to tell me his name (forget cash: hotel staff love treats) and then visited LinkedIn—the SkyWest Airlines of websites—and I got the job done.

  So how did Horace get rich? By patenting a shit-ton of GMO- and Roundup-friendly agricultural products. His high school buddies on LinkedIn all send him fist bumps and high fives, but guaranteed, their souls are corroding as though basting in battery acid.

  I just noticed that the waiter didn’t put a coaster beneath Horace’s Diet Coke. That’s a demerit point. Two, actually, because it was a flat-out clueless error.

  Q: Why is a very rich man like Horace having a Diet Coke by himself at 4:45 in the afternoon?

  A: Because he’s rich enough that he can.

  * * *

  —

  “I’m only a guest here,” I say to Horace, “but let me give you a coaster.”

  “What? Oh—that’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not. They also gave you a slice, not a wedge, of lime. That’s not right.”

  “I love limes. I actually grow them.”

  “You must live somewhere sunny. Let me guess…Fresno?”

  “Wha—!!! How did you…?”

  “Wait—seriously? You’re from Fresno? OMG, I just pulled that out of a hat. I always thought Fresno was where they grew marshmallows and Halloween candy.”

  He chuckles. “I wish it was that interesting. Sit down. Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Well…okay. Why not.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Sue.”

  “Hello, Sue. My friends call me Orazio.”

  18

  23andMe

  IN THE EARLY 1980s a gang from college, eight of us, would have our annual party weekend at a cabin owned by the family of my friend Dean. The year we had what turned out to be our final party, none of us were yet married, but we’d stopped being YOLO and were at that point in our lives when we’d started believing in all that find-yourself BS.

  Dean had gotten fired from his job because he was smoking too much weed—this was back when weed meant prison time. He might have been okay except he’d gotten paranoid at work one time too many, something along the lines of “Who ate my celery sticks? Someone in this office ate my celery sticks and nobody leaves until someone owns up to it.” Anyway, Dean’s dark side was emerging, and our annual weekends had grown more creepy than fun. Once he had us in his power up there, it was either Dean’s way or the highway. For example, we’d always played drinking games, and Dean had always been in charge of them, but his punishments became bizarre. If you couldn’t down a yard-long beer, you’d have to eat/drink a gas station sandwich that had been run through a blender and fortified with two shots of tequila. If you refused to do that, he’d say stuff about your sister that was…disturbing.

  This was long before the internet and smartphones, but if we had owned smartphones, on the way home we would have all been texting each other: I don’t think I’ll be going to Dean’s again next year. We were too old for lost weekends.

  So Dean dropped away from us.

  The following summer I ran into Dean’s brother at a bar, and he told me Dean was now living alone in the cabin and that none of the family really saw him. I was to
o wrapped up in my own life to take this on board, and soon forgot about it.

  The next December Dean phoned me to ask what weekend in January we wanted to come up. I was caught off guard and fumbled my way through a pathetic mass excuse for the whole bunch of us. I could imagine Dean’s irises doing that reptilian flare they did as I spoke. I felt so guilty that when I was getting off the phone, I offered to drive up for an overnight visit on my own the next weekend. His response was a hmmm. Uh-oh.

  The visit was a disaster. The house stank of ganja. The moment I showed up, Dean laid into me about what phonies we all were, especially me. “I’ve never trusted you,” he said. “And it looks like I was right.” He was dressed like he was living out of a car, not in the cabin, and he smelled like it too.

  Then I got mad myself. I didn’t need this shit. I ended up running out to my car and tearing away, with him chasing me down his lane and onto the gravel road, shouting “Phony!” and throwing stones at my car.

  Come the next June, I had a new girlfriend, Casey, who wanted to be a therapist. I told her about all my friends, including Dean. She listened closely, then looked at me with big, sincere eyes and asked, didn’t I think Dean needed a true friend, someone who’d take the bad with the good? Yeah, sure, whatever.

  In September, Casey went away for a week to her cousin’s bachelorette at the same time I had scheduled a week’s holiday, and suddenly I had time on my hands. One night around sundown, I was drinking some beers alone, and I got sentimental and thought, You know what? Casey’s probably right. Dean just needs a friend. I’m going to go see him right now.

  I arrived in the dead of night. The streets of the cottage town were deserted. This was long before mountain biking and winter sports stuff: when Labor Day came, the place shut down.

  As I drove to the cabin along the unlit gravel road, I was unsure if this was such a hot idea. Listen to me—now it sounds like I’m telling a horror story, which I am.

  At Dean’s cabin, one outside light was on, surrounded by a halo of insects. The front door was open by maybe a hand’s width. I called through the crack, “Dean? Are you there, man?” and poked my head in. The stench made me gag and pull the door shut.

  I took a deep breath of fresh air, plugged my nose, opened the door with my elbow and flipped on the light. The place looked like a homeless encampment and smelled like rotting flesh. I assumed Dean had died, and went into Boy Scout mode, turning on the lights as I walked through the place, so familiar from our old parties, looking for the worst.

  The worst turned out to be the cabin’s bulk freezer, which was filled with hundreds of frozen meals made by Dean’s mother and for some reason was now unplugged. When I lifted the lid, the tubs and bags were filled with maggots. How do they even get into something covered in plastic?

  Gagging, I turned around and there was Dean, so close to my face I could feel his breath.

  “Ah. So the phony returns,” he said, and stabbed me in the armpit with a hunting knife.

  “What the fuck!” I yelled, and pushed him off me. His head hit the corner of the kitchen counter and he went down like a dead fish, twitched a bit and died. It had been sixty seconds since I’d opened the cabin door.

  I ripped off my sweatshirt and stuck it in my armpit to stop the bleeding. I staggered around wiping down everything I’d touched, and decided there was nothing I could do about the blood. At least nobody knew I’d been here, and I’d left no fingerprints. I turned out all the cabin lights, got into my car and drove away.

  This was before security cams. This was before CSI. I couldn’t have killed Dean more easily if I’d planned it. I got away with it and lived more than twenty-one years with the crime still unsolved, at which point my brother announced he’d sent a sample of his saliva to 23andMe.

  19

  Sharpies

  THE GUY WAS SITTING on the sidewalk outside the liquor store, panhandling. He was maybe a bit younger than me, holding a cardboard sign that said EVERY LITTLE BIT HELPS and, below that, HAVE AN AWESOME DAY. When I walked past him, he said, in sarcastic mumble voice, “Yeah, you have a good day too. Have a real good day.” I glanced back at him and noticed he had a big gash above his knee. If his entire tableau could speak, it would say one word: “drugs.”

  It’s not like I’m some big angel in the drug department, so who am I to judge? I went into the store and looked around for a bottle of a chilled unoaked white with a screw top, not a cork, but not because cork trees are becoming endangered with global warming and all. I just wanted to be able to open the bottle on the bus. Oh, did I mention it was raining? It was, and it was dark, too—that darkness you get every fall when the days grow shorter.

  The liquor store was lit like a surgery theater, which flattered none of the customers’ complexions. Dear Liquor Store Owner: Why on earth would you light your store so brightly? We all come out of it looking bad. At the till, a woman my age in a raincoat was rummaging through an almost comically oversized black cloth purse for money.

  The guy at the till asked her if she minded if he rang through other customers until she found the money. (She was buying a twelve-ounce bottle of rum. Hard-core.) She nodded. I stepped ahead of her and paid for my discount bottle of Pinot Grigio and went back out on the street. The rain had stopped and the world felt calmer, like when they lower the music volume in a noisy restaurant. I went over to the Sneery McSneerface panhandler and crouched down to speak with him.

  “What do you want?” he hissed.

  I said, “Two things. First, what’s your name?”

  After some hesitation he said, “Isaac. What’s the second thing?”

  I said, “Isaac, I want to give you twenty dollars.”

  Isaac looked at me like I was trying to lure him into a hobo fight in the back alley. “Why do you want to give me twenty dollars? What’s your game?”

  I said, “No game, Isaac. Consider the twenty bucks a kind of investment in your business.”

  He said, “This is freaking me out. And why did you ask me my name? That’s just weird.”

  “I asked you your name because people can reach a point in life where days can go by and nobody ever calls them by their name.”

  Isaac went quiet.

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s discuss your location here, Isaac. You’re on the curb outside the entrance. Why on earth would you set up shop here? Move that way twenty feet and you’re right by the exit. People leave the store in a better mood than when they went in, and they usually have change.”

  Isaac said, “That’s actually a good idea. Thank you.”

  “Next, let’s look at your cardboard sign.”

  I picked it up and we looked at it like he was a student in a drawing class.

  “You’ve used two different colored Sharpies on this sign. The top part is sans serif, and the bottom is a serif. Not only that, but you felt-penned the edges with the blue.”

  Isaac said, “It makes it look a bit nicer.”

  I said, “Yes, it does. Well done. And finally, let’s discuss your overall attitude, Isaac.”

  “My attitude?”

  “Yes, your attitude. I heard your snotty comment as I walked into the store, and here’s the thing: if you’re smart enough to use middle-class guilt as a marketing tool and to invent two new fonts from scratch and make a great-looking sign, then you’re basically too smart to be out here doing this.”

  Isaac said, “I know, but it’s just not that easy.”

  From behind me, a woman spoke, startling both Isaac and me. “Ask me my name. Please. Ask me.”

  Huh? I turned and there was Rumwoman.

  “Sure,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Julie.”

  Together Isaac and I said, “Hi, Julie,” and she started to cry.

  Isaac gestured for her to join him on his cardboard floor, and she sat down, still crying.


  Isaac said, “Don’t cry, Julie. Things will be okay.”

  “Did you hear all of what we were saying?” I asked.

  She said, “Yes, I did. I couldn’t find any money in my bag, and I came out of the store right after you.”

  I sat down too, and asked Julie if she’d like a sip of Pinot Grigio.

  “Please,” she said, wiping her cheeks.

  So I unscrewed the wine bottle and handed it to her.

  After scanning for cops, she took a swig. “Man, when you’re in my universe, this shit’s like Kool-Aid,” she said, and offered the bottle to Isaac, who waved it away.

  “No thanks. I don’t drink.”

  We shared a quiet moment, and then Julie said, “So, what happens next?”

  I said, “What happens next is the three of us walk to Emergency and get the gash in Isaac’s leg fixed.”

  20

  Romcom

  I REALLY DON’T KNOW why I’m alive. I mean that in a general sense that has nothing to do with self-pity or fishing for sympathy. I’m just being practical. I’m past child-bearing age. I have little family and no friends, just a few acquaintances. I work a disposable job at a chain restaurant. I contribute zilch to society. I could evaporate tomorrow and not a ripple would pass through the world. I have a bit of money saved for retirement, but retirement from what? Nothingness?

  I guess my aging body will eventually generate more revenue for hospitals and the medical system. It’s the dirty little truth about the system: healthy people are bad for capitalism. Fat, sick, broken people are the engine of our economy.

  I find it ironic that, in spite of my generalized uselessness, if you killed me, you’d still be sent to jail for murder. I sometimes wonder if serial killers are disappointed with themselves when they kill a nobody like me. All the notoriety they’d gain from me would be as a tidbit for a boring podcast a few years down the road. They wouldn’t even name me. They’d just say, “Victim Number Three was a fifty-two-year-old single woman,” and leave it at that.