Friend Is Not a Verb

by Daniel Ehrenhaft

  For one thing, I expected the building to be a little more…well, ghetto—something closer to Sonic Rehearsal Studios. But there wasn’t even any graffiti on the redbrick wall. The glass doors were relatively shiny, and there was a sparkling new intercom system. I stood outside for several minutes, debating whether or not to ring. Sarah told me he was in 1B, the only apartment without a name label. I’d come all this way, and I didn’t want to go home anytime soon, so…Screw it. I pressed the button.

  The buzzer rang instantly.

  When the door to 1B cracked open, I was even more surprised. Gabriel’s place wasn’t crawling with cops and FBI guys, which was what I’d been secretly hoping for. I guess it did look like a crash pad for fugitives. Either that or as if a movie set designer had been hired to create a “monkish, ascetic interior.” It definitely wasn’t the kind of place where a well-adjusted human being would want to spend more than a few days.

  My eyes zeroed in on his bass, perched on a stand next to an unmade futon. Unfortunately, it seemed to confirm my suspicion that Gabriel Stern was a jackass.

  A bass, like a high school locker, can say a lot about its proprietor. I own a cream-colored 1976 Fender Precision that I have chosen not to desecrate in reverence both for 1976 (the year the Sex Pistols and the Clash broke) and for how I bought it on eBay for only $250: the greatest steal of all time in the history of the world. It is not an advertisement for my personality, however. Gabriel owned a custom Ken Smith, for which he’d probably paid well over a thousand dollars. Everything about it said “I’m trying too hard.” The body was smothered in stickers from the nineties, a clutter of grunge bands (remember Mudhoney?); not-quite-gangsta rappers (remember Naughty by Nature?); an official Friends cast photo (Get it? It’s kitschy!); and, what do you know, one big exception right between the pickups: STEAL YOUR PARENTS’ MONEY.

  There wasn’t any clutter in the apartment, though. Aside from the bass and bedding there was just a cheap practice amp, plus a two-foot-high stack of bound manuscripts next to the door. No dirty dishes or empty bottles or cigarette butts; no stereo, TV, or computer, or even (worst-case scenario) firearms…all of which I’d half expected to find given Gabriel’s postcollegiate meltdown (if that’s what it was). He looked awful, too. His blond hair was a mess, and he was about twenty-five pounds heavier than when I’d seen him last at that fateful graduation. He was wearing the same outfit I was: jeans and a plain white T-shirt.

  “Hey, Hen,” he said. “I really appreciate your coming—”

  “My sister thinks I need bass lessons,” I interrupted. “She’s right. I stink.”

  He closed the door behind us. “So what else did your sister say?”

  I was beginning to regret my decision to come here. What if the cops or FBI did show up? Would I be arrested, too?

  “Nothing,” I grumbled. “Look, why did you and my sister run away?” I demanded, mostly out of nervousness. Best to get the important stuff out of the way.

  He laughed. The puffy circles under his eyes twitched. “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you that. Look, why don’t we jam a little? I’ll take the rhythm, you take the melody.”

  I turned away from him. “I don’t feel like playing,” I confessed. “This was a bad idea. I just came here to piss off my sister in front of my parents. I should leave.”

  “No, no,” Gabriel insisted. His voice was hoarse. “Stick around. Come on, you came here all the way from Brooklyn. We don’t have to play. We can just hang out. Ask me something. Anything…you know—aside from why your sister and I ran away.”

  I glared at him. “Were you really in a band called Friends?”

  “Yeah.” His face brightened. “Remember the show?”

  “Sort of.” In truth: Emma and I sometimes watched Friends reruns when we were bored and nothing else was on—and, yes, sometimes we even laughed. There was no way in hell I’d tell him that, though.

  “The band was more than a tribute to the show,” he said. “It was a tribute to the word itself. When we were little kids, ‘friend’ wasn’t a verb. You didn’t ‘friend’ someone. You had friends. It was only a noun. It didn’t multitask.” He sighed dramatically. “It was a simpler time, Hen.”

  Jesus. He looked at me as if he expected me to laugh. The silence between us stretched awkwardly.

  “Um…anything else?” he said, clearing his throat.

  “Yeah. Were you and my sister ever involved? Are you involved now?”

  He smiled widely at the question. It was the same sort of smile I’d given my parents this morning when they’d asked me what I was doing with my bass case. His bloodshot blue eyes didn’t waver. He looked at peace, like a grizzled statue of the Buddha. I wanted to punch him. “There’s no easy answer to that,” he said. “Have you ever had certain thoughts about a girl who’s just your friend?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “Interesting.” Gabriel shrugged. “In my experience, if you’re a straight male and you’re close with a girl, it’s a thought that crosses your mind, no matter what. It may be a fleeting thought, but it always happens. Maybe just once. Maybe a thousand times.”

  “What are you, a shrink?”

  He laughed. “No, but I could use one. You know of any? Kidding. Look, man, I know it’s early, but I’m going to fix a drink. You want anything? A Bloody Mary? I won’t tell Sarah.”

  I watched him disappear around the corner into the kitchen. His bare feet slapped on the shiny wooden floor. My breath quickened. I had a choice: I could stay and endure this excruciating torture, or I could bolt. My eyes fell to the pile of manuscripts. The clear plastic covering reminded me of Sarah’s old term papers.

  DIARY OF MY LIFE ON THE LAM

  BY GABRIEL STERN

  Contact number: 347 555 7809

  Email: gsternfugitive@webmail.com

  I snatched the top copy off the pile.

  “Hen?” Gabriel called. “You sure you don’t want a Bloody Mary?”

  “Actually, I think I do,” I said.

  “Cool!”

  I heard the refrigerator door open. And with that, I shoved Gabriel’s manuscript into the front pocket of my bass case and ran from the apartment. I didn’t stop running until I’d reached the nearest subway station, ten blocks away—my heart pounding loudly and even my normally obedient lungs disobeying the unspoken command to mellow out.

  Only later at Emma’s, sitting on the edge of her bed next to her, could I confess to the theft—and only after I’d hashed out the drama of my sister’s surprise return and the ensuing madness of this morning.

  “Hen!” she cried. “You’ve never stolen anything in your life.”

  I hung my head in shame. “I know.”

  Emma’s room is the kind of place that breeds confession. Or maybe “confession” is the wrong word; it breeds honesty. There’s no mystery, either. It’s a pure place. I’ve always liked her room more than mine, even before Sarah’s disappearance, because it never changes. She still has those same threadbare stuffed animals on her bed (the ones Sarah had threatened to slice to shreds), those same posters of forgotten boy bands on her walls, with their eyes and teeth blacked out and horns markered on their heads.

  “Hen, you need to bring back that diary now,” Emma warned me. “Don’t read it. It’s not yours. You might not like what you find out. Look, let’s make a pact—”

  “No; no more pacts. I have to read it. Nobody will tell me why Sarah ran away. Not Gabriel, not my parents, and definitely not her. The way she’s acting…It’s like she thinks that if I find out, it’ll have some adverse affect on my mental health. As if my mental health could get worse. And if I don’t find out what happened, I really will lose it. I’ll read it all tonight, and then bring it back to Gabriel first thing in the morning. Better yet, I’ll call him as soon as I get home and apologize for bolting—I’ll make up some excuse; you know, it was too weird or too soon after Sarah got home or whatever—and reschedule the bass lesson for tomorrow. And as soon as I get there, I�
�ll just slip the manuscript back where I found it, right on top of the stack with all the others. He’ll never even know it was missing.”

  Emma sighed. “You better hope he doesn’t. He’s a fugitive from the law. I bet he keeps pretty close track of his possessions.”

  “He won’t miss it,” I said, mostly to myself. “Don’t worry.”

  She didn’t say anything. She ran a hand through her ratty hair.

  “What?” I said.

  “Worrying is your specialty, Hen,” she said. “You just don’t know it.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Balinese Demons

  I arrived home that afternoon to find my father at the dining room table, swamped in a sea of crumpled receipts and jabbing at an oversize calculator.

  Dad insists on doing his own taxes, which I’m pretty sure is a weird thing to do. He also cuts his own hair, which depending on his luck and wardrobe alternately makes him look like an absentminded professor or a homeless person. He is the only adult I know who does either.

  Last spring I even conducted a little survey to determine if doing one’s taxes was, in fact, as weird as I thought it was. Of the six adults I’d queried, every single one said that they paid someone else to do their taxes for them. Four (all teachers at Franklin) asked if my dad was an accountant, and laughed uncomfortably when I told them he wasn’t. Three, including Mr. Aziz, added that doing one’s own taxes was an invitation to get audited. One—Emma’s father, who can always be counted on for something offensive (like I said, more on him later)—said simply that Dad was a moron.

  It isn’t pride that drives Dad, and it’s something beyond stubbornness; it’s the belief that what makes him self-sufficient makes everyone else foolish, misguided, lazy, or all three. It’s admirable in a way, which I guess is what keeps the rest of us from complaining when he takes over the dining room four times a year and turns it into his own private little H&R Block. (The dining room table is the only surface in the house large enough to accommodate all the paperwork.) On the plus side, it also prevents him and Mom from entertaining. During those tense little stretches leading up to the IRS tax deadline every third month, I know I won’t be hearing, for example: “Hen, can you dust, vacuum, and set the table for five with the good china? Saul Levy’s hernia operation was a success and we want to have him and Myrna over to celebrate.”

  To be honest, the sight of Dad slaving over the familiar mess made me feel sort of relieved. Sarah’s return was not cause for a breakdown in the household routine. Mom was right: There were rules, and we could all stand to stick to them, even the bizarre self-imposed ones. Sarah’s disappearance hadn’t prevented him from doing his own taxes, so why should he stop now that she was back?

  “That was quite a long bass lesson,” Dad remarked as I shut the door.

  Uh-oh. Had Gabriel already discovered what I’d done and called the house, looking for his stolen property? “I stopped by Emma’s on the way home,” I said defensively, glancing down the hall toward the empty kitchen. “Where’s Sarah?”

  “Out back with your mother. She says the garden is falling apart.”

  For some reason, that irritated me. Who was Sarah to say that the garden was falling apart? And so what if it was? What had she expected, that we would all become expert horticulturists to make up for her absence? Screw the garden, I felt like saying. I didn’t know why I was so upset, but I found myself wishing we’d blacktopped the backyard and outlawed gardening altogether, in any form, period.

  Dad leaned back in his chair. “Hen, what do you see yourself doing when you graduate from college?” he asked, peering at me over the rims of his glasses.

  The question caught me off guard. “What do you mean?”

  He nodded toward the bass slung across my back. “Do you see yourself being a professional musician?”

  I didn’t answer right away. Dad almost never asked about my plans for adulthood. Any rare discussion of my future usually occurred at mealtimes and was pretty much limited to Dad’s insistence that I give up vegetarianism. (“You don’t want people not to trust you,” he’d told me in one of his more memorable non sequiturs—as if honesty and, say, hamburger, were inextricably linked.) Obviously, this peculiar line of questioning had something to do with Sarah’s reappearance; I just wasn’t sure how.

  “I don’t know,” I said finally. “Why do you ask?”

  “I suppose I’d just like to know how seriously you take playing the bass,” he said.

  “You’re the one who bought me that great bass rig,” I replied, feeling defensive again. “I have to take it pretty seriously, right?”

  “Do you see yourself applying to a music school, like Juilliard, or that one in Boston…?” He tapped his chin.

  “Berklee?”

  “Yes.”

  I glanced up the stairwell, wishing I were upstairs already. “I don’t know. Probably not. You have to pass an audition to get in. I don’t think I’d qualify.”

  “Do you think taking bass lessons with Sarah’s friend might help?”

  I laughed. Dad’s pensive expression didn’t change. “Um, I doubt it,” I said. “You know, I really don’t have to take lessons with him if you don’t want me to. I’ll look for some summer tutors first thing tomorrow.”

  “The time for finding summer tutors was back in March,” Dad said.

  I kept quiet, not wanting to get into another argument about what should have been done in March, especially during what Emma now calls my Lost Weekend. Dad had been invited to attend a freelancer’s conference in Palm Beach, Florida (fun!) and Mom decided to tag along. Before they left, they charged me with a) finding summer tutors to help get my math and science grades back up, b) doing my laundry, and c) weeding the garden. The date of the conference was March 23, which coincidentally happened to be Sarah’s birthday. Unfortunately, being left home alone for this conspicuously uncelebrated occasion depressed me so much that I sat in front of the TV for two days straight—not only accomplishing none of my appointed tasks but also allowing an ant problem in our kitchen to go unchecked. The exterminator ended up costing more than $400. Mom and Dad’s subsequent freak-out marked the first time Mom threatened to burn my socks, in fact.

  Dad exhaled deeply. “If these bass lessons are legitimately helping you achieve your goal of being a professional bassist, it’s worth the risk,” he said.

  “The risk?” I repeated.

  “Sarah and her friends…Well, they’re technically fugitives until certain legal matters get straightened out. That’s all I can tell you. And aiding and abetting criminals is not something I generally condone; but, like I said, I’m willing to let the circumstances slide for the time being. God knows I’ve let a lot worse slide this past year.”

  I slung the bass case off my back and propped it up against the stairwell banister. “Dad, are you okay?” I asked. I figured this question was better than the ones I felt like shouting at the top of my lungs, which were: Why is that all you can tell me? What have you let slide? What is the big freaking deal? She’s back, goddammit!!

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know. Things are sort of weird, aren’t they?”

  “I’m not sure exactly what you mean, but I assume you’re talking about Sarah’s surprise homecoming. I guess I’d just like to see people in this household taking some responsibility for their futures. If professional bass playing isn’t your goal—”

  “It’s just a hobby, Dad,” I interrupted. “Playing an instrument is good for you.”

  “Yes, well.” He pushed his glasses up his nose and turned his attention back to his taxes. “Like I said, if you don’t intend on becoming a professional musician, I’d skip the lessons. Use your free time this summer to find a job or an internship that will help get your foot in the door of whatever you do intend to pursue as a profession.”

  I blinked. This odd little chat was fast degenerating into the realm of the creepy. Did he really expect me to have any idea
what I wanted to “pursue as a profession”? Had he been dead certain that he’d wanted to be a freelance managerial consultant (I’m still not sure what that even is) when he was sixteen? Maybe he had. Whatever. If he couldn’t tell me what was really bothering him—and I doubted very much it had anything to do with my employment status—then we were done.

  “Fine, I’ll look for a job, okay?” I said, grabbing my bass and scurrying upstairs. Odd: A long time ago, this would have been exactly the kind of nonsensical conversation that Sarah would have jumped right into on my behalf. I suddenly missed her more than ever, and she was right out back.

  “You don’t have to play the martyr here, Hen,” Dad called after me.

  I almost smiled, pausing on the top step. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You sound bitter,” he said.

  “Bitter? Really? That’s funny. Because I’m totally not.”

  I waited for him to laugh. Or something. He didn’t. Which pretty much clinched what I’d already suspected: Now that Sarah was home, the lines of communication in the Birnbaum household had disintegrated completely.

  Once I was alone, it took me a minute to muster the courage to remove Gabriel’s manuscript from my bass case pouch. The plastic cover trembled slightly in my hands. It took me another minute to open it, even though I’d locked the door and hidden myself in bed half under the blanket and sheets. I was careful not to make a sound. My heart thumped loudly as I turned to the first page.

  October 10

  Recently my life has become a series of broken promises to myself.

  I’ve promised to exercise, for one thing. I’ve gained fifteen pounds in 122 days. True, I’m not fat yet. I verged on emaciated in college. But I’m definitely more unkempt. I should probably promise myself to get a haircut, too, or at least to shower more often. But it’s hard to stay motivated.

  In theory, there’s no reason to stay motivated. I’m twenty-two. I call Puerto Plata, the Dominican Republic, my home, and it’s sunny and seventy-five all year, except for the rainy season. I don’t pay taxes. I’ll never have to work. But on some level, I keep trying to tell myself that I’m also sick of excuses. I think maybe my father’s skewed values have rubbed off on me more than I would like to admit—primarily the belief that hard work, regardless of its purpose or end, is the key to a guilt-free existence.