by Ian Mark
“Yeah, but how many years can you do the same thing before you wanna quit?” Brian leaned forward and put his feet solidly on the ground.
“I don’t know man, I don’t know.” We both fell silent. I thought about Dobler as the game went on. With a minute left, I said quietly, “What else is there?”
“What do you mean?” Brian asked. He fired a shot and then collected the rebound and shot again. Rask grabbed the puck and I pulled the right trigger to get him to spit it out.
“Well if you don’t buy, sell, or process, what do you do?” Thornton stole the pass. The sticks on Brian’s controller clacked as he aggressively and quickly turned and fired a shot just under the stick of Rask.
“Create. You can create.” I pulled my goalie, but the game was over.
“You wanna play one more?” I looked at Brian. He grinned.
“I’ll play a few more.”
Stuck in a rut now, I knew what Brian’s advice would be. “Why don’t you just quit?” He had asked me numerous times. I hated that question, and had been glad in the months leading up to his death when he stopped asking. It was only later that I had two epiphanies: He stopped asking as he withdrew into himself and confronted his failure as an actor, and I hated that question because I didn’t have any good answers for it.
* * *
“So you and Amanda split, huh?” Kevin said as I brought over the first round to our usual table at Brad’s. I sat down, leaving the chair between us open, a ritual we had faithfully carried out since Brian died a month and a half ago. A semi-cute girl came over and asked if the empty chair was taken.
“Yes,” we said in unison. The girl glowered at us and walked back to her more attractive friends.
“How’d you know?” I asked Kevin. Had Amanda called him? Were they closer than I thought? Did they ever sleep together?
“She updated her relationship status.”
“Ah.” I knew I had forgotten something. Now it really did look like she had dumped me. I hadn’t even wanted to make it Facebook official, for this very reason.
“We’re just going to break up,” I had told her as she kissed my neck and snuggled up next to me. I pulled the covers over our naked bodies and wrapped my arms around her.
“Don’t be so pessimistic,” she chided me. “I want everyone to know.” She bit her lip and looked up at me. She was so damn cute.
“Fine,” I said.
“You wanna talk about it?” Kevin interrupted the memory. “Are you-”
“I’m fine.” I said. “Let’s just get fucked up.”
“Hey,” he said. “You don’t need to tell me twice. You done with that?” I sucked down the rest of my Budweiser and nodded. He went to get another round. A busboy came to take the empties. He had a hideous chinstrap beard and a scar across his forehead. I nodded to him and surveyed the bar. As usual, it sucked. Barely any women, and what girls that were there were seated at tables. It’s weird hitting on girls when they are sitting down. Creepy, really. I was still stuck in a relationship mindset. I needed a few more beers to get back in the single-guy mindset. Kevin came back with a pitcher and I laughed.
“So what’s our game-plan?” Kevin asked me a few beers later. “Let’s find you someone to take Amanda off your mind.” I laughed. I liked Kevin. He played with the top button of his dark blue button-down and gulped down some beer. I took charge, relishing being single again. When I was eighteen, I arrived at NYU knowing almost nothing about women. I soon learned I had a certain effect on them, and while it still surprised me at times, I enjoyed the benefits of it.
“First off, if you’re debating it, undo that.” I gestured to the button he was playing with. He did so.
“How’s my hair?” He said. I looked pointedly at his crew cut as he ran one hand over it. We laughed raucously. Life was good.
“Sexy as always. Now, this place is dead as usual. I say we hit up Josie’s.”
“Sounds good.” We rose. I went over to the coat rack and grabbed our stuff. I had traded the t-shirt and hoodie for a polo and a peacoat. I looked at my reflection in the mirror. I looked damn good. I brushed my dark brown hair out of my eyes and smoothed it down by running a hand over the top of it. One of these days I’ll buy a comb, I told myself. An undergrad nervously looked at me, and I grinned at her. I was warming up. We left Brad’s and its poorly lit grungy decor for the just slightly classier Josie’s across the street. I pulled a cigarette out and lit it. Kevin frowned. He didn’t like me smoking. Cancer, he said. I don’t want to live that long anyways, I always replied.
“You don’t have to wait for me,” I said. We both knew he would. We stood in silence for a few minutes. Finally, I threw down the cigarette. Kevin stamped it out with his loafer. He dressed up for these nights. We went down the stairs and handed our ID’s to the bouncer. He nodded to us and we went in. The bar smelled like sex. The mix of perfumes and colognes combined with the stale beer and sweat that was everywhere to produce an aroma found only in bars like Josie’s. Everyone here was here to get laid, and most of them would. I went to the bar and bought four shots of tequila. Two girls were sitting at the bar. One of them smiled at me.
“Me and my friend are going to do shots,” I told her.
“What?” she said.
“Shots!” I yelled.
“Okay!” She squealed and grabbed her friend to get her attention. They each wore low-cut tops and short skirts. I signaled Kevin over to join us.
“This is my friend Kevin,” I said. Kanye drowned me out.
“What?” she said.
“Kevin!” I pointed at Kevin.
“Oh. Carol!” she pointed at her friend.
“What’s your name?” I said. I pointed at her.
“Becky!”
“Zach!” the shots arrived. I gave the bartender my card and opened up a tab. We threw the shots back. I caught Kevin’s eye. He nodded at Carol. I nodded at Becky. We smiled. We were in agreement.
Chapter 3
I lie in the grass. I stand up and walk over to the track. I am on my high school’s football field. I stretch. I head to the starting line. A voice from somewhere announces the results of the last heat and the names of those participating in the current heat. My name is not said, or if it is I do not hear it. I stand in the ninth lane and take my position. Amanda is next to me. She wears neon shorts and a white top. I can see the outline of her breast beneath her top. Her nipples are hard. She does not look at me. A gun goes off. Amanda takes off. I try to as well. My feet don’t move. It’s like running in Jello. I slowly move my way down the track. The other runners are all ahead of me, and none are as far away as Amanda. She looks back once, right before she wins. We make eye contact. She shows no emotion. I look to the stands. Brian and my mother sit in the highest row. He is eating pure sugar by the spoonful. She is crying. He makes no effort to comfort her. The other runners finish. Brian and my mother get up and leave. I trip and fall. I curse, but no one hears me.
* * *
Morning. A throbbing headache woke me. The hangover was worse than I expected. I wished I was eighteen again. I looked up. For a second I believed I really was eighteen. Same cinderblock walls as my old dorm room. I reached for my nightstand. I didn’t find it. I noticed for the first time the girl sleeping next to me. Or on me, really. The bed was so small I was basically pinned between her and the wall.
“Shit,” I said. Kate, or was it Becky? She woke up.
“What’s the matter?” She said. “Go back to sleep.”
“You’re a freshman,” I said. “You told me you were a senior.”
“So?” she said. “It hardly matters now. Go back to sleep.”
“I have to go to work.” I climbed over her and realized I was naked. And I still had the condom on. I went to the bathroom and discarded it in the toilet. I peed and looked in the mirror. I looked like shit. I walked back out into the tiny dorm room and noticed the Justin Bieber poster above her bed. A wave of nausea hit me. I grabbed my jeans and shirt.
I couldn’t find my socks. She sat up and watched me. Her dorm was too clean. When I lived here, my dorm was always littered with clothes, smelled like weed, and had beer bottles behind every nook and cranny. Hers was almost sterile. It was like a hospital. The aqua blue bedspread was the only color in the room. Her roommate, who evidently had been made to sleep elsewhere the night before, had a black comforter and black sheets. While Becky (or Kate)’s bed had a headboard, her roommates didn’t. It occurred to me that when I had lived in a dorm like this, she would have been twelve years old.
“Where do you work?”
“Small Monster Games.”
“You’re in the legal department there?” She reached for her phone.
“What? No, I’m a programmer.” I found my socks and put one on. The other had a hole in it. I sighed and put it on anyway. She typed on her phone while I talked. She didn’t look at me. She was a little chubbier than I remembered from last night. Or from what little I remembered of last night. She had a zit right by her left temple. The makeup that covered it the night before had worn off. Her neck was covered in hickeys. I had way too much to drink last night, I decided.
“So we both lied, then. You told me you were a lawyer.” She looked up at me, her brown eyes filled with a strange combination of regret and apathy. I found my shoes and headed towards the door.
“It hardly matters now, does it?”
Amanda’s face flashed through my mind as I asked the question. She wasn’t impressed by my conquest, but disgusted. I wasn’t winning the breakup, I was losing any chance I had of getting back together with her. I recalled bitterly how we got together in the first place…
Shortly after graduation, Kevin, Brian, Amanda and I had crashed a wedding. We had all started hanging out senior year. It was an interesting dynamic. People always assumed Amanda was dating one of us. She was just one of the guys, and we had made a game of tallying which one of us outsiders thought was dating her. I was winning by a large margin.
The wedding was in Brooklyn’s Botanic Garden. Amanda wore a shining black dress that hugged her as she gracefully walked away from our table to the bar. The three of us wore black suits, with different color shirts and ties underneath: white and blue for Kevin, blue and silver for Brian, and maroon and black for me. Kevin waited until she was out of earshot, then turned conspiratorially towards us. I watched the bride smiling and laughing as she was congratulated by a procession of beautiful guests. I saw the groom watching her and smiling to himself. Something stirred inside me.
“Are you guys ever uncomfortable hitting on girls?” Kevin’s question snapped me back to our table. Kevin was uncomfortable? He had never seemed it. Granted, he normally needed a few drinks in him to get going, but I always figured that was nerves. I waited for Brian to answer. He liked to talk about things like this, various aspects of society that are taken for granted but rarely discussed.
“Not really. Nervous, maybe. But that’s what this is for.” Brian raised his champagne glass as he talked, scanning the dance floor for lonely bridesmaids. “Why else would you crash a wedding?” He chortled. Kevin seemed unsure. He looked down into his glass. It was mostly full.
“I don’t know, Amanda’s certainly not here to pick up girls.” I watched her order a drink from the bartender. He wore a white jacket and black bow-tie. He nodded and smoothly grabbed a Corona from beneath the bar and popped the top off all in one motion. Amanda took it from him and smiled, then turned to come back to our table.
“I think she has a different reason for being here.” Brian and Kevin looked at each other knowingly as a tall black man wearing a blue suit approached her. He placed his hand on the bar next to her and smiled. His teeth were strikingly white, and he had a goatee and mustache combination that would have made Clyde Frazier jealous.
“I guess,” I conceded. Amanda smiled back at him. With her mouth at least. Her eyes didn’t have the twinkle they normally did when she really smiled.
“Here’s how I look at it,” Brian declared. “When girls go to bars, they are going out to meet people. They know just as well as we do why we go there.” Kevin listened intently. Amanda extricated herself from the man at the bar and picked her way through the tables and dance floor towards us. “They dress up because they want the attention. As long as you listen when they say no, and are polite, there’s nothing wrong with it.” As Amanda approached, Brian sped up, eager to end the conversation. “I look at it as meeting new people, no lines or ulterior motives. If I make a new friend, great. If I get laid, even better. What’d you get?” He directed the question towards Amanda as she sat down between Brian and me.
“Just a beer.”
“You’re hardly taking advantage of the open bar,” I said. I raised my Long Island Iced Tea. “You gotta get creative.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. What is that, your second already?” I nodded. “What are you guys talking about?”
“Football,” Kevin and Brian said in unison. They nodded at each other approvingly. I sipped from my glass.
“You know what? You’re right.” With that, Kevin got up from the table and approached a lonesome perky blonde girl wearing a revealing aqua-blue dress and drinking a cosmo. I watched him go.
“I hate hitting on girls,” I said, still looking at Kevin. Brian raised his eyebrows, but didn’t say anything.
“Really?” Amanda didn’t believe me. “You don’t like hitting on girls?” Brian laughed at her emphasis.
“I really don’t,” I protested.
“But you do it all the time. And you’re good at it.” Amanda took a swig of her beer and continued. “It’s like if Brian said he didn’t like acting or if I said I hated drinking beer. And Zach,” she took another gulp of beer, “I love drinking beer.”
“I don’t like it. It’s just that, I, well, I don’t-” I searched for the words. I would have had no trouble telling Brian this, but with Amanda there I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to admit. “I want a relationship, okay? But it terrifies me. So I do this. But I don’t like it. It’s creepy.” Brian laughed.
“It is not,” he said. “They want to be hit on.” He sat back, satisfied he had won the argument. I wasn’t done.
“I don’t care if they do, it’s still weird. It’s just better, I guess, then trying and failing at having a relationship. Which I know I will.” I slumped in my chair. I felt strangely tired. Amanda looked at me with a strange expression on her face. She pities me, I thought bitterly to myself, this beautiful girl thinks I’m a loser.
“I’m going to go… help Kevin.” Brian stood up suddenly. He winked at Amanda and headed over to Kevin, who had moved on from Blondie and was now talking to two similar looking brunettes. Sisters, probably. I remembered that we weren’t supposed to be here. If I had any respect for marriage, I probably would have left. But marriage had always struck me as the end of your real life, of being young and having fun. After you got married you had kids then you raised them then you were old and then they put you in a home and it all passed in the blink of an eye and then you needed a walker and then you died.
“Wanna dance?” I asked Amanda glumly. I was too tired to talk to girls. She smiled and offered me her hand. I took and it and led her on to the floor. A slow song came on and Amanda wrapped her arms around me.
“He’s right, you know.” I felt her breath on my earlobe as she whispered.
“About what?” I asked. We swayed with the music. I looked over her shoulder at the band. The singer had his eyes closed and was holding onto the mic stand with two hands. He was alone with the music. I wished I had a similar passion for my work. I had just gotten my job at Small Monster Games, and the work was easy and rarely interesting.
“About girls. Most of us like getting hit on. It makes me feel pretty.” I pulled back and looked at her. She blushed.
“You do know you are pretty, right?” My question made her smile shyly.
“I guess…” I laughed.
“I always used to assume that
hot girls knew they were hot. I guess a lot don’t. Amanda, you are gorgeous.” She blushed deeper. I put my head back next to hers. She later confided in me, that she did know she was pretty. “Guys like it when I pretend not to,” she had said. Manipulative bitch.
“You’re not too bad yourself.” She pulled back and looked me straight in the eyes. The song ended. A fast song started playing.
“I guess we better-” She kissed me mid-sentence. I hesitated, then reciprocated. I cupped her face with my hands. She stroked the back of my neck. I moved my hands around her waist. We stood there motionless, as couples all around us danced feverishly to the fast-paced jam. The singer was bouncing around the stage, mic in hand. After a while, we went back to our table.
“Bout damn time,” was all Brian said when we sat back down. I laughed.
“Shut up.” Amanda and Brian shared a look. It occurred to me that she had confided in him about me. I wondered how many signals I had missed, how many chances I hadn’t taken.
We danced the night away. Kevin and Brian were talking to a couple of beautiful women when we left, though I never found out how it ended. Amanda and I spent the night at her place. She admitted that she’d had a crush on me for a long time.
“I wasn’t going to do anything because I thought you were kind of a player.” She was making coffee in her red bathrobe. I sat at her kitchen table in boxers. My suit, undoubtedly now wrinkled, lay forgotten somewhere in the bedroom.
“What do you mean?” I watched her work.
“You’re always hitting on women, and I thought you’d just…” She stopped.
“Sleep with you and never call you?” I finished her thought. “What changed your mind?” She placed a cup of coffee in front of me and sat across from me.
“When you said you didn’t like hitting on people, and that you are scared of a relationship. I guess I thought we could, or would…” She trailed off, looking at me for some confirmation. She wanted to date me, I knew. The idea still kind of scared me.
“Well then, congratulations. You were the target of the longest play I’ve ever run. I had to pretend not to like it just to get you into bed.” She started to look upset, and I stopped the joke. “I’m kidding. Maybe. You’ll never know.” She still seemed hurt. She got up and turned away.