It was shameful.
But this was the life he found himself living. He went to the Barnes & Noble and he sat down to read a long feature in The New Yorker but found he couldn’t concentrate. He was thinking, of all things, about Cassie. The longer he went without being touched by a woman, the longer he went typing in his basement, the more his memories of her overwhelmed the interstices of his life. That time spent chatting online might have pushed her from the forefront of his mind, but that didn’t keep her from rushing all the way back in when he came back into the IRL daylight. There were ways you could keep parts of your life discreet, but love smeared itself all over like you were greasing a baking sheet. And it wasn’t as if his other lives crossed this public life—here in the Starbucks in the Barnes & Noble, he opened his laptop and opened his browser to see how many hits he had on his latest missive. There were five thousand more than when he last looked.
He opened his e-mail and saw he had no messages from Cassie.
He closed the window.
He closed his laptop.
He browsed the racks. There was a lot of journalism, a lot of information well packaged, well written, and well researched, that didn’t pass his purview when he had sat at his computer, waiting for social media to tell him what he should read next. Though he had given his twenties over to editing a magazine, somehow he’d now come to prioritize the speed and impermanence of what he saw on his computer, same as everyone else.
During the years when he worked at a glossy magazine, Mark came to lose all sense of what he was doing. Even though all he wanted was to be a writer, being an editor was something, and going to an office every day gave him the sense that he was doing something even if he wasn’t. That was in no small part the effect of having a job: Even if you were hung over and simply did a top-edit on a page on the latest Japanese selvedge denim, you were doing something. Even if you’d identified a great story and were working on a pitch, if you didn’t get it finished by the time you left, you’d done something. By sitting in a chair, in front of a computer, fielding calls, you were technically being productive. Every day he was in an office made bright by natural light coming from the plentiful glass-window walls facing Eighth Avenue, he never set foot in a bookstore. He had piles of books all around him.
Now he was home. He had no job. He was doing the same thing he’d often been doing when he did have a job, but he was in a bookstore lit by fluorescent light, standing on the other side of an invisible partition cordoning him off from a chain coffee shop, and there were all these magazines: Guns & Ammo and Southern Living and Garden & Gun, on and on into gun oblivion, these thousands of dollars of paper and pulp he’d once contributed to helping produce, copyedit, and fact-check.
He was about to open his laptop again to e-mail Cassie against his better judgment just to check in when he heard someone say, “Mark? Mark B? Is it possible?” It took him a moment to respond to his own name. For weeks every communication he received was addressed to Isaac Abramson, and he’d grown used to thinking of that as his name. But now here he was, exposed in a way he never was online.
The man standing in front of him was maybe five foot five, with a long black beard and a clear strip of scalp down the center of his head where he had gone almost entirely bald. It took Abramson longer than he would have liked to realize that this was his old friend Christian Long. Chris. Costco.
“Holy shit,” Costco said. “Brah, it’s been what, like a decade or somewhat?”
“I think it has to have been at least that long.”
“Well, what the fuck are you doing back in Charm City, brother? Why didn’t you get in touch?”
Pale sodium light shone down. Mark didn’t know how he was meant to answer a question pitched to him so directly. For a month he’d chatted online, where no one could see his eyes, where he could interject a thought or not by typing, but where interaction was limited to his fingers and his brain and consideration for his body qua body was nil. His years working at a magazine pushed him to a point of squirming reticence. Each Monday morning his boss came by his desk to ask a question or two about his weekend and then said, “Um, so if you could do a LexisNexis to find everything there is to know about the attack on that school in Grozny, in Chechnya I mean, by, say, the end of the day, that’d be great. Thanks.”
“So what’ve you been up to since then, brah? I feel like you worked in newspaper reporting or something. And then you were in the Big Apple, right? Dude, I remember now, I saw your byline on a story in a magazine I was reading at the airport a while back. Back visiting your folks?”
“Yes, to the former. No, to the latter. I’m back here, I don’t know, reassessing my options.” He wasn’t going to mention the Boomers and didn’t have it in him to confess he’d gotten a job working as a barista. It was something of a miracle Costco hadn’t happened upon him there in the month since he’d started back to it. Somewhere Mark’s brain flashed images of a six-figure number of hits on a YouTube video, an IRC chat with Coyote, the little pleasure punch of seeing a blue superscript number appear below a video on YouTube as another viewer watched. It was a visual and an emotional memory, the memory of pleasure injected in one small, finite, knowable dose.
“Reassessing—oh, shit, you’re back in your parents’ place, dude. So you lost your job? Oh, man. I get it. Sorry. I mean, sorry, but. You know, me too. In the basement?”
“Just taking a break to reassess, as I say,” Mark said. “Found some work here in the meantime.” The door to the women’s room opened and the sound of a hand dryer wheedled out like a tiny lawnmower, then went silent as the door swung shut. “But yes. Just like the Isaac Babel story. In the basement. What happened with you?”
“Oh, I was killing it, brohim. Got this job at T. Rowe, doing data analysis. Working on 401(k)s mostly, some Roth IRAs here and there, 403(b)s. Man, I learned every fucking thing there was to know about 403(b)s. Distributions of blue-chip stocks against less aggressive funds, yield analysis, mid-cap and large-cap and the whole kit and kabloozle.”
“You?” Mark said. “I mean, I just wouldn’t have thought you’d be interested in, you … you know.”
“I know, brother. But what the fuck choice. I was making good money there for a bit. Then, you know, like everybody else—the Great Decession hit and they had redundancies and whether I knew it before they made it official or not, I, my brother, was redundant. Am. Yo soy redundante.” Neither of them said anything. “That was more than two years ago.”
The sodium lights of the Starbucks inside the Barnes & Noble inside the shopping mall inside the Baltimore Beltway inside the suburb inside the state borders inside the country inside North America where they were sitting lent a flat look to Costco’s face. The milk frother blew so loud in its compressed heated burst it was the only sound in the place.
For a moment Mark was self-conscious: He thought of his own face, how it must have changed, given how much Costco’s had. The scar over his eye at least had healed, now months since his fight with Finkel. In the wake of the burst from the milk frother he heard a series of layers of sound that were ever-present but which it took such an awkward social silence to note: the clicking and banging of the espresso machine, the whirr of air-conditioning, the smell of coffee and bleach so pungent he could almost taste or touch it. Very faintly, under each of these sounds on the stereo in the store, only the bass of a song it took him a second to place. Costco heard it first, and Mark could see it in his face.
“Holy shit—isn’t this Steve Miller Band?” Costco said. “Oh, brah, this was our jam when we were what? Sixteen?”
“Way younger,” Mark said. He had a black hole’s memory for dates, years. “Thirteen. After Ashley Abramowitz’s bat mitzvah.”
Though when they first saw each other Mark was considering each way he could avoid the conversation, hoping to fold back into himself and thinking over and over again about his favorite stanza from a Galway Kinnell poem he’d loved, called “When One Has Lived a Long Time Al
one”—he’d found the book in his house when he came home and remembered how much he loved it—Costco and Mark found a table in the Starbucks itself, and they hashed out all they remembered of their history together:
Christian Long was the kind of person who didn’t believe in anything, and so he was apt to believe in everything. Though his parents were Episcopalian he refused to attend church even on Christmas—“That’s just some Pagan bullshit being carried over into Christian theology,” he’d say. He read C. S. Lewis and then Gandhi, and in each phase was as into the question of whether Jesus was Lord, Liar, or Lunatic as he was whether we should practice ahimsa, attempting not to disturb even the mites in our eyebrows. He read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and was quickly a practicing Buddhist. His girlfriend bought him James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy and for months he talked about the energy aurae he could see around every living pantheistic thing. He discovered the writings of Malcolm X as a sophomore and then Allen Ginsberg as a junior.
By the time he was a senior he’d run away to live in Eugene for the whole fall semester. He came back in January with the egg-yolk yellow of two black eyes still healing, his nose now twisted to the side, track marks on his arms, and a tattoo of Jerry Garcia’s face covering the entirety of his lower leg, pastels of the man’s face obscured by leg hair. But he and Mark had been inseparable for years. When Mark and Costco were in eighth grade this was the exact song, the exact node upon which their obsession with their parents’ baby boomer music began, until it took Costco all the way to Eugene. On a mix tape Costco’s sister had given them, filled mostly with NWA, Public Enemy, Boyz II Men, Ice Cube, and a song or two from the Guns N’ Roses Use Your Illusion records was that song. They listened to it over and over, pressing the two backward-facing triangles on Costco’s Aiwa compact stereo, complete with three-CD changer. From there Mark and Costco began to peel back the layers of their parents’ music. They moved to Van Morrison, not to Astral Weeks or Bang Masters or even Tupelo Honey, as they would later, but to “Brown-Eyed Girl.” Then on to The Doors: The Oliver Stone biopic was in theaters.
“I remember after you got the soundtrack I went and found each record each song came from,” Mark said, sitting there in that Barnes & Noble, mainly letting Costco do the reminiscing and quietly allowing the layers to silt away in his mind.
“For six months you pretended your girlfriend was Pamela,” Mark said. “You were Mr. Mojo Risin, Jim Morrison.”
“Dude,” Costco said, “I even figured out my own Mojo Risin name, right? It was—okay, I’m embarrassed to admit I remember. Glitch Arinson. I tried to get everyone to call me Glitch for one whole winter.”
There was a newfound sense in them, that something strange and rock and roll had been hiding in their very homes, and which sent both Costco and Mark to their parents’ record collections and from there it exploded: from the stringy-haired Southern girls on the jacket of the Allman Brothers’ Brothers and Sisters to the giant flying pig balloon on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals, Mark and Costco both slid right down the slide to Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty and then hundreds of tapes of live Grateful Dead shows. They listened to all the bands affiliated with the Dead: Moby Grape and Traffic, Jefferson Airplane and Spencer Willmont and the Cherub Band, Jorma Kaukonen solo records and the New Riders of the Purple Sage.
Clarity was not up for offer in those days. It did not even occur to Costco and Brumfeld then that they were listening to their parents’ music. They were smoking and eating and snorting the same drugs their parents had. They were long past any semblance of feeding off the music of their own generation. They were steeping themselves in the sound of an era their parents had lived in when their parents were the age they were just reaching now. Unlike every other generation in American history, their generation was only too happy to accept as revolutionary the music their parents had handed down. By the time they were high school juniors, and Costco also inherited his parents’ bronze Audi, they themselves mail-ordered tickets to four-day runs of Dead shows at RFK Stadium, at Giants Stadium.
Mark was surprised how clearly he remembered that day. Here was one consequence of talking to another human in person: It evoked memory, memory which came unbidden, fragmented, and unpredictable. IRC chats had almost never done so, only impelling themselves forward as text moved in fitful jerks toward the top of the computer screen. Brumfeld found himself remembering that in the days around the time they’d discovered their parents’ records, a kind of anger and violence had been building in him. He hadn’t thought of it in years. At night he went to sleep so angry at nothing specific that he fantasized running around their house with a baseball bat, smashing in television sets, breaking windows, and smashing drywall. There was no impetus and there was no explanation behind these fantasies.
“Oh man,” Mark said. “Remember we saw those kids on the hill at that first RFK show?”
“We’d just sucked all that nitrous,” Costco said.
“Some part of me thought I might never go to a show again after that,” Mark said. While he knew Costco wasn’t, he was thinking about the Boomer Actions now: vandalism, violence. That afternoon when they were teenagers, Costco’s lips were still purple after sucking a balloon of nitrous when over the crest of a hill next to the prickly yellow grass where they lounged, they saw a kid with dreadlocks whipping against his back come flying past them. He was about their age, with dark freckles stippling his face, and as the world was returning to them, the nitrous finishing its brain-scrambling, joy-inducing work, another kid came right after him, pulled back a field hockey stick, and slammed the dreaded kid in the head. He got on top of him, punched him in the face over and over while the guys who’d just sold them their balloons ran over and pulled the field-hockey-stick kid off. A rope of blood swung down from the dreadlocked kid’s mouth. No one stuck around long enough to see the EMTs show up.
Mark remembered looking up in horror and looking over at Costco and being shocked by what he saw on his face: a look of sheer joy, almost avarice. It was a look that foretold Costco’s departure, those black eyes he came back from Oregon with.
Costco Long had never believed in anything, and in not believing he was susceptible to anything.
“Thems was some crazy, crazy times,” Costco said. “Rough. Violence. Was some violent times back then. But then, now we live in even crazier fucken times, don’t we?” Costco wasn’t going to let that conversation drop. A sensation shot up Mark’s spine like a human-sized spider crawling up his neck. There were three different lives he was leading now and two of them were crossing, well beyond his control.
He didn’t like it.
Costco looked at him.
“I’ll just go ahead and say it, this Boomer Boomer shit is the bomb. I mean, not the bomb maybe, but it’s some energizing shit. Those speeches Boomer1 gives? I’d follow that guy anywhere.”
Costco looked down at his hands like he’d said too much, like he realized he was with another adult he hadn’t seen in a decade. But then a sense of recognition passed over his face. This was his old friend Mark Brumfeld after all, the look on his face said, with whom he’d participated in who knows how many felonious drug-based acts. He looked up. Mark was just looking right at him still.
“I mean, how could you miss it? Even if you weren’t a journo in your former life. Shit, you must have all kinds of ways of understanding the shit that’s happening that the rest of us don’t.”
“Not exactly,” Mark said.
“Close to the actual action,” Costco said. “All we ever wanted to be was close to what was going down. Maybe this is it but maybe this is not it. Is an attack on the baby boomers the way to get this shit done? Maybe it seems misguided. Think Gandhi. Think Thoreau. Think Dostoyevsky, man.”
“I think Dostoyevsky would’ve approved,” Mark said.
“Right,” Costco said.
He looked up and for the first time since they first saw each other he grinned the grin he used to right after
they swallowed a tab of acid. “So. Boom boom.”
Costco didn’t look Mark in the eye and Mark couldn’t tell if he meant it ironically. But Jesus, it seemed close to an admission. They’d come of age in the Clinton Era, in a time of such broad and ubiquitous American prosperity that seeing a suburban kid at a Dead show get pounded in the head with a field hockey stick might have been the most violent single act either of them had ever witnessed.
“All I are saying,” Costco said, “is give peace a chance. Or whatever.”
“Maybe that’s what they’re going to do,” Mark said. He realized after it was out of his mouth he was being dangerously indiscreet. A burst of milk frothing blew in Mark’s ears. Clouds fled the sun, ditching its cover, and the space around them heated just barely. “Don’t go getting any ideas in your head, Brumfeld. You missed being a millennial by about three birth years, my friend.”
“Did I?”
“Did you ever.”
“Demographers place millennials as pretty much anyone born between 1980 and 1990 or so. I was born squarely in 1980. As were you.”
“I was born in ’81, brah. But now? Now I am a prematurely bald, very nearly middle-aged man. You were not present for the course of the hair’s disappearance, but you got eyes. Any other generation in human history, and by all rights I should have a wife and seventeen kids by now. Be out hunting or gathering, working as a titular councilor. Now instead I got my parents’ lawn to tend to, and a whole lotta sperm wishing they didn’t end up at the bottom of an overused tube sock every morning. I am become forever adolescent.”
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