Cannibals in Love

by Mike Roberts

  “I don’t like the idea that you’re not taking care of yourself.”

  “Yeah, well, anyway. I’m sort of busy around here…” I could hear a hoarse barking sound coming from inside of Lane’s house, and I was desperate to go investigate. “See ya around, or whatever,” I said, leaving Lauren out on the sidewalk. I resented her coming back like this. It pissed me off.

  I let myself into Lane’s house through the back door, and was confronted by the apparition of a big gray pit bull. Lane had hold of a thick, knotted rope, and he was playing tug-o-war with the animal. Laughing maniacally.

  Lane’s mousy roommate, Hannah Wasserman, stood watching in the doorway. Smiling uncertainly.

  “What is that thing?” I asked, a little alarmed.

  “He’s a rescue dog,” Hannah said brightly. “I just got him today.”

  This dog did not look right, not at all. And I was willing to bet he’d never known a bleeding heart like Hannah Wasserman in his entire life.

  “He looks a little deranged,” I said.

  “He was abused. They were going to put him to sleep, but I saved him.”

  I nodded, taking a step back. Lane was still roughhousing with the fragile pit bull. Riling him up. Barking into the dog’s face.

  “You’re a strong dog, yes-you-are. What’s your name, strong dog?”

  “His name is Lucky,” Hannah offered cheerily. She was unnervingly passive about letting Lane wrestle with her new pet. I took another step away, spacing myself behind the couch. But Lane saw me do this, and he immediately tossed me the knotted rope. I caught it reflexively, as Lucky came launching over the couch behind it. I ducked and danced away as the big dog hit the parquet floor and went sliding into the hallway. Lane seemed to think this was hilarious.

  “Hey, guys, don’t…” Hannah said meekly.

  “Dogs can smell fear!” Lane shouted. “Dogs can smell fear!”

  Lucky turned and regrouped, barking loudly, and I slung the rope back across the room, trying to hit Lane in the head with it. But it thumped off the wall instead.

  As Lane bent down to pick it up, the big dumb dog forgot what he was chasing and grabbed on to Lane’s baggy T-shirt at the neck. As Lane tried to pull himself free, Lucky started to rip. It was everything Lane could do just to stay up on his feet then. The pit bull yanked and jerked, pulling the T-shirt right off of Lane’s body in one long coil of fabric. He was literally spun out of his clothes like a cartoon character. This all happened in a blink—far too fast to be properly scared by it. Lane was just suddenly standing there in the middle of the room without a shirt on.

  He looked at me with his mouth hanging open as we watched Lucky trot off into the kitchen with the T-shirt, like it was nothing at all.

  “Oh, my god, guys…” Hannah said pitiably, looking traumatized.

  “Ho-ly shit!” I shouted as Lane and I burst into hysterics. We laughed because we always laughed. This kind of stuff was bound to happen with Lane around.

  Needless to say, poor Hannah Wasserman took old Lucky back to the pound for his dirt nap the next day. Rest in peace, puppy.

  * * *

  Lane and I kept kicking on. Raising hell. Cheating death. Riding bikes. Taking drugs. Breaking locks. Lighting fires. Trespassing in buildings. Jumping off of rooftops. Staying up all night. There were no rules. We were channeling danger and destruction, and making no apologies for ourselves, either. Ours was the kind of fun you just have to surrender yourself to.

  Hannah Wasserman said that it was nice that Lane finally found somebody his own species. This was a love story, to be sure. But Lauren wouldn’t stop coming around. She was curious about Lane now, and she was wary and jealous of my affection for him.

  “I guess I don’t get it. Is it like a gay thing?” she smirked. “No girls allowed?”

  “Yeah, it’s a gay thing.”

  Lauren crossed her arms critically. “Seriously, though. What do you guys do all day? Where do you go?”

  “I dunno.” I shrugged. “There’s been a lot of good sports on TV.”

  “That’s what you do? Watch sports on TV?”

  “Yeah, I mean, there’s all kinds of good stuff on tee-vee these days,” I answered drolly. “We do other stuff, too. Like laughing and having fun. You wouldn’t like it.”

  Lauren frowned and I smiled. I could feel her patience wearing down. We had been totally incommunicado for over a year, and suddenly she was back. If I was cruel and heavy-handed now, that was the point. This was all preemptive.

  * * *

  Lane and I started calling her Yoko. We thought this was hilarious, and the fact that Lauren hated it only made it funnier.

  “I’m Yoko?” she said. “Why, because she broke up the Beatles? Well, ha-ha-ha. I’m glad she broke up the Beatles. I wish she would’ve broken up the Rolling Stones, too.”

  Lane and I were speechless.

  “I wish she would’ve broken up Led Zeppelin,” Lane deadpanned.

  “Or the fucking Who,” I said, smiling. “Jesus Christ, how about The Who!”

  And suddenly this was a game we were all playing. Van Halen, Lauren said gleefully. Aerosmith, I shouted. AC/DC. Pearl Jam. U2. Yeah, fuck fucking U2.

  “Yoko Ono,” Lane said with real gravity, “should break up Bruce Springsteen already. No man should be allowed to put a goddamn saxophone on every single song for thirty years. It sucks.”

  And that was it. We were rolling around the porch, enormously pleased with ourselves for breaking up all these sad and tired bands.

  “But not Peloton,” I said solemnly.

  “No. Peloton lives forever.”

  “What the hell is Peloton?” Lauren scowled, annoyed at always being one step behind. We laughed, and reveled in not telling her.

  “Peloton is Peloton,” I said.

  “It’s fucking Peloton!” Lane howled, and we laughed again.

  * * *

  Peloton was the band that Lane and I had started the week before. Lane played drums and wore a gas mask with a microphone in it, while I just tried to keep up on the guitar. That was it, really—it was every bit as crude and wonderful as it sounds. Lane hit the drums harder than any human boy I’d ever seen. There was a reason I was wrapping my wrist in duct tape. It hurt to play the guitar as fast as Lane wanted it played, and I loved every second of it. We wrote one song and declared ourselves ready to go.

  Lane arranged for Peloton to play a single show, opening for Black Eyes at Fort Reno. We played for six blistering minutes to a field of confused friends and cringing strangers. It was assaultive. People actually put their hands up over their ears, and I could tell that Lane was feeding off of this. He screeched and yelped menacingly into his gas mask, as I repeated my few caustic chords in a whorl of pitch and distortion. I broke a string and pretty much forgot the whole song completely, but it didn’t matter. We just kept playing and letting it all fly apart spectacularly, which Lane said made it great. We took a bow and cleared off the stage. People universally hated it, but Ian MacKaye came up to me afterward and said that he appreciated our restraint. He liked our six minutes and earnestly told me to keep playing.

  But, of course, Peloton broke up immediately. We had to. That was the point. That was the whole fun of making a band in the first place. And yet, somehow, we still ended up on the City Paper’s “Summer Bands to Watch” list. And rightfully fucking so, we reveled in telling everyone.

  In truth, it was Lauren who knew an editor there, which we thought was funny. Lauren had won Lane over, too, and I finally decided to stop fighting it. I kind of liked having them both around, together. I liked the way they played off each other. I liked the strange tensions it created. Plus there was a kind of peacemaking happening between Lauren and me now. Everything had a way of settling down. And, all at once, I began to acknowledge the possibility of a kind of second act: Friendship.

  I liked seeing Lauren and knowing what she thought again. I liked telling her stories, and hearing her laugh. Lane, for all his ch
arms, didn’t care to talk about books or feelings or real life. It just didn’t interest him. Lane liked violent and kinetic things. He lived with the earnest idea that the present moment would always extend forever.

  It was harder to admit that I was still attracted to Lauren Pinkerton, though. All her sharp Tomboy features had rounded and softened, and I never really realized how long her hair was, or how much I liked it that way. My grandmother once told me that a woman’s power was held in her hair. I always liked that.

  I would catch myself letting my guard down in old ways, too. Lauren liked to push: asking inappropriate questions, saying pointed things. Somehow she knew that I’d started seeing a girl once I got back from New York. I could tell that she was amused and vaguely threatened by the idea. She hinted around it, entreating me to spill the beans already. But I was coy because my fling with that girl never amounted to much of anything. But I didn’t want Lauren to know that.

  I was surprised how easy it was just to talk like normal again. Lauren downplayed all the damage done, because that was just her way. There was something loose and beautiful happening now. Something that I worried I might need to protect myself against. Lane liked her, too, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that she knew exactly what she was doing. Lauren was fun. She was funny and flirty and irreverent, and it all made me a little paranoid.

  We were out at a bar one night when she put her arms around my neck sweetly. “I want you to kiss me,” she said mischievously.

  “Why?”

  “See that guy over my shoulder, watching us? He comes into my coffee shop every morning and stalks me there for hours. He needs a bigger hint. I want him to see you kiss me.”

  I smiled at her and leaned away slightly. “No,” I said.

  Lauren laughed. Rebuffed. She squeezed my hand and danced away, into the crowd. She knew that I was watching her, terrified that she would go in search of Lane.

  I couldn’t blame Lane for wanting to sleep with Lauren, because I still wanted to sleep with her, too. But that wasn’t healthy. We’d tried that for a while, before I left for New York, and there was no halfway. More than I wanted Lauren, I knew I didn’t want anyone else to have her. Especially not Lane. Lane probably liked to suck on toes or have a finger up his butthole, for all I knew. How could I compete with that?

  Or worse, what if they actually liked each other and I got spit out again? I’d spent every day of the last six weeks with Lane, and I hardly knew a real thing about him. I couldn’t say that he wouldn’t fuck me over, because I didn’t know. It was obvious that Lane could feel this tension, too.

  “Isn’t this something?” he said to me at the bar. “You and me fighting over a woman.”

  He surprised me with this, and I didn’t know what to say. Lane’s eyes got big, and he laughed in a way I couldn’t figure at all. That was it. I knew I had to tear the whole thing down again. Even though everything was good. Even though it seemed like Lauren and I had moved beyond all of this pettiness. It was still too painful for me.

  So I went right back to frustrating her: turning off my phone; breaking a plan; arguing about details. I told her she’d only end up making out with Lane and ruining everything in the end. It was better just to save ourselves that unpleasantness, right? Needless to say, Lauren resented this deeply. But I didn’t care. We had our blowout and she stopped coming around. And Lane and I went on our reckless, merry way.

  * * *

  This was right about the time the cicadas started dying off en masse. Their siren song was sung and the new eggs lay buried, silent underground. Structured birth and structured death. The cars brushed their husks to the edges of the road, where we crunched through them on our bicycles. And then one day they were gone completely.

  Lane was just as happy to take or leave Lauren, in the end, which was another one of his virtues. I was the one who was stuck fixating. I was afraid to admit that I was still in love with Lauren Pinkerton, and now I’d gone and blown it all over again. It was right in the midst of all this self-pity that my wrist really started bothering me. Strangely, it was the fact that it stopped hurting that worried me most.

  “I think I need to do something about my wrist,” I said to Lane one day.

  “I’m sort of perversely jealous of your wrist,” he said cryptically.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Once, when I was eleven, I fell out of a tree and tried to hide the fact that I’d broken my ankle,” he said, lighting up. “But that’s a tougher one because I was limping so bad. My mother figured me out in like an hour, and—”

  “Jesus, who gives a shit about your eleven-year-old ankle, Lane? What am I going to do about my wrist!”

  He just shrugged, seeming to have no opinion whatsoever.

  * * *

  Lane was getting weirder altogether, I thought. Or maybe it was just my patience that had slipped. Either way, I finally started to see how his current of nihilism ran deeper and more destructive than my own. We were pretty much hanging out by rote at this point. Drinking too much. Insulting each other. Destroying each other’s property. We’d had two separate incidents in the last week where we each drew blood. Lane and I were getting sick of each other, plain and simple. This was a thing we found impossible to articulate. All the same shit, but only half the fun.

  And then Lane went and started a brand-new band, called Tworek, without me. He had the brilliant idea of taking a player out of every band we liked to make a rotating lineup of ten kids. Forming an eponymous band was the sort of stunt that only Lane pulled off. The whole thing was made more amusing by the fact that Lane was not only not the frontman of Tworek, but he was hardly a blip in the sea of bodies up onstage. He just stood at the back, playing bass. Lane told me, with some pride, that he hadn’t even made it to a practice yet.

  But Tworek was actually getting some buzz going. They were the new hot-shit band you were supposed to go see live. The stage shows were these violent cataclysms of snarling guitar and convulsive drumming. Bodies jostled for space as the whole thing threatened to collapse under the weight of all its moving parts. There were three different drummers in the band (who couldn’t hold a candle to Lane playing alone, I thought). But the whole thing was undeniably beautiful: everything rising up out of this wreckage, almost impossibly, into real songs.

  Tworek was undoubtedly becoming the stuff of myth in these circles. Each next show was bigger than the last, amid swirling rumors (which I dutifully helped Lane circulate) that the band was breaking up. The truth was they were frantically trying to pull together enough songs to make a record for Dischord before the end of the summer. The whole thing hinged on the idea that they were going to be fucking huge, just so long as they didn’t break up that very night.

  I loved Tworek, the same as everybody else, which was the reason I resented everything about them and wished them unmitigated failure and misfortune. I had no idea why Lane didn’t ask me to be in the band, and we never talked about it. It was his name and his idea, and I had to give him credit for that. But, yeah, I was sour. Tworek was fucking awesome, and I wasn’t in it.

  This tension built up to the morning that I woke up on the long, shared roof of our rowhouses. Lane and I had ended up there the night before, after the bars closed. We sat on the peak and stared out at the bleary lights of the city. Watching and not talking, as we finished the dregs of some awful bottle that Hannah Wasserman had hidden in a cupboard. I had this one perfect image of Lane standing up and throwing the bottle backward over his shoulder. It arced and disappeared, crashing down on the street between parked cars. Lane cackled, and I lay myself down against the cool metal roof, very careful. I had the spins.

  The next thing I knew, I was waking up with the sun in my eyes, like a knifepoint. I was alone. I could feel the tin heating up underneath me and beginning to cook. And I realized, with a start, just how close I had drifted down toward the edge of the roof.

  Sitting up, I was reminded for the one-thousandth time of the dull ache
in my puffy wrist. This throb of recognition each morning before it went away. I scraped myself up from the unforgiving roof, feeling like I’d lost an entire year off my young life. I was light-headed, and dehydrated, and still a little drunk. I checked the hatch into my own attic, knowing it would be locked, and I climbed down into Lane’s house instead.

  I made my way down the stairs, toward the strange disembodied sound of a toddler crying somewhere out in the street. I found Lane there, in the living room, standing bare-chested with his back to me. He was holding the bars of the front door like an inmate, glowering out into the empty street.

  “Jesus, will somebody shut that kid up! People are hungover in here!”

  Just like that the crying stopped. Lane turned around with a self-satisfied smile.

  “Why did you leave me up on the roof?” I asked, accusing him.

  “You were asleep.” Lane shrugged.

  “Did you sleep up there, too?”

  “On the roof, no way. What am I, an animal? I slept in my bed.”

  “You asshole,” I said, pushing past him toward the door.

  “What?” Lane said incredulously.

  “I almost rolled off the fucking roof!”

  Lane couldn’t help but laugh at this. A week earlier I could have stayed and laughed, too. But now I just wanted to get away from him.

  “Pfft,” Lane smirked. “What? Like you’ve never fallen off a roof?”

  I grunted and pushed out the door, feeling stupid for being so angry with Lane. I couldn’t shake this phantom feeling of nearly dropping off the house. It was running on an endless loop inside of my stomach, making me sick.

  * * *

  It was at one of these blistering Tworek breakup-shows a week later when I ran back into Lauren. She caught me leaning against the wall with a deep-set frown, and she stood there, mocking my crossed arms. This was when she noticed the cast.