Friend Is Not a Verb

by Daniel Ehrenhaft

  We all looked so skinny.

  Sarah’s mother didn’t have a head, though. A neat square was cut out directly above her evening dress.

  “Why is your mom’s head cut out?” I asked her.

  “She’s crazier now than ever. She hates the way she looks in pictures. She thinks her face will ruin them. But look at Hen. Doesn’t he look cute?”

  I found it a little uncomfortable to comment on whether I find Sarah’s brother “cute,” so I didn’t answer. The rest of the pictures were all candid shots of Sarah’s parents and her brother, scolding him the way I imagine they once scolded her. In one, Mrs. Birnbaum jabs a chicken leg at him, as if to say, What kind of person doesn’t eat chicken? I can only guess what her expression is, though, because her head is missing.

  “I should really go back to Brooklyn,” Sarah told me when we were done.

  Poor Sarah, I thought for the 487th time.

  She always has this same homesick reaction whenever she gets a letter from home. Every one is filled with hysterical pleas for her to surrender herself to the authorities. The way Mr. and Mrs. Birnbaum see it, if Sarah turns herself in, then Henry can finally learn the truth about why she did what she did. According to Sarah, they still refuse to tell him. They want Henry to hear it from her first. But does Sarah even know why herself? Lord knows, I still can’t figure it out. She refuses to admit that I’m completely responsible for it.

  The worst Sarah suffered over this was when her parents snuck down to visit back in March. I still can’t believe they actually came here.

  Mr. and Mrs. Birnbaum donned ludicrous wigs the moment they cleared customs. They didn’t want to be recognized. Sarah later told me that they even made up some silly lie for Henry about attending a conference somewhere in Florida. They assumed they were in great danger, which I still don’t understand. Their passports had been stamped. Immigration officials knew they were in the country. They’d already blown their cover. Yet they insisted on disguising themselves like bad hair-transplant models. And if they were so nervous, why did they come in the first place? Madeline’s parents don’t know where we are, nor do Tony’s, nor Rich’s, nor above all my dad. None of them want anything to do with us anymore. Wasn’t that the whole point, in a way?

  Mr. and Mrs. Birnbaum wouldn’t step foot in the house, though. Not that I can blame them for that. Instead, they stayed at the Eurotel, a tacky complex of beachside resorts about four kilometers from the airport. Everyone who works there speaks English or German. Sarah says it’s “just like the Catskills.” Even its restaurant—“America Restaurant”—features a pianist who knows show tunes.

  Dinner that night qualified as one of the oddest experiences in the short twenty-two years of my life. The Birnbaums wouldn’t take their wigs off. I hadn’t realized just how insane they were before, not even when they’d taken us out to dinner at Columbia. I hadn’t realized people like that actually existed. They were a very, very dark comedy come to life.

  INT—AMERICA RESTAURANT—NIGHT

  MR. BIRNBAUM: Sarah, are you sure you don’t want to see my electronic nose hair clipper? I bought it at the duty-free shop for only four dollars.

  MRS. BIRNBAUM: Irv, you haven’t seen your daughter in nine months and you’re talking about your nose hair clipper? It’s her birthday.

  MR. BIRNBAUM: What? At least they sell cheap merchandise down here. You know how much this costs in the States?

  MRS. BIRNBAUM: Stop, already. Sarah, look at you, honey…you’re so thin. All you eat are these bean sprouts.

  SARAH: I eat other things, Mom. Tonight I had some squash.

  MRS. BIRNBAUM: (Weeping suddenly) Why don’t you come home with us? Please? Hen misses you! If he knew the truth, that you live like a criminal—

  SARAH: I am a criminal.

  MR. BIRNBAUM: Hey! Don’t talk back to your mother!

  MRS. BIRNBAUM: You all used to be such nice kids. Gabriel, what does your father have to say about this? Does he cry himself to sleep every night?

  SARAH: Leave him alone, Mom.

  MR. BIRNBAUM: What, he can’t speak for himself?

  MRS. BIRNBAUM: Can’t you just turn yourselves in? Finally? Please?

  SARAH: We’ll go to jail, Mom, remember?

  MRS. BIRNBAUM: But why did you do it, Sarah? Just tell us that much. Was it…was it crack? I read somewhere crack is making a comeback.

  SARAH: Yes, Mom. We’re all on crack.

  MR. BIRNBAUM: Of course it wasn’t crack, Rachel. Inner-city blacks smoke crack.

  SARAH: Inner-city what? Jesus, Dad! Listen to you! You sound like the Ku Klux Klan.

  MR. BIRNBAUM: Whatever—African Americans, Afro Americans…I can’t keep up with your lingo. The disenfranchised, is what I mean.

  SARAH: Dad, the president of the United States is an “inner-city black.” You went to college in the seventies, for God’s sake! The Cultural Revolution was already over.

  MRS. BIRNBAUM: (Sniffing and adjusting her wig) Leave your father alone. He went to a community college, not a big-shot Ivy League school like you. What does a community college know from a “Cultural Revolution”?

  MR. BIRNBAUM: Please, let’s not fight.

  SARAH: Fine. I have to go, anyway. I told Madeline I’d meet her at Karl’s.

  MR. BIRNBAUM: This Nazi you told us about? (He looks toward the ceiling) Lord God, where did we go wrong?

  SARAH: He’s not a Nazi. He runs a free clinic.

  MRS. BIRNBAUM: You told us he was in the Hitlerjugend.

  SARAH: Well, he’s sorry, okay?

  MR. BIRNBAUM: Sorry? Sorry? What—are you a Catholic now? Ten Hail Marys absolves the murder of six million Jews?

  SARAH: He didn’t murder any Jews! Just go home! Back to your “inner-city blacks”! Leave me alone! (She bolts from the table)

  MR. BIRNBAUM: (Screaming after her) Fine! But before we leave, just tell me what a geriatric Nazi wants with young girls like you! Is he some kind of sick pervert? Is this part of your Cultural Revolution? Just answer me that!

  The episode taught me something important. It taught me that our situation is permanent. I knew it all along, but I guess I didn’t fully grasp what it meant until I found myself stranded alone with the Birnbaums that night. There’s no going back in time, no way to undo what we’ve done. And sitting there in silence, staring at those wigs and silently cursing Sarah for running off, I saw that my life would never change. This was the closest I would ever come to a family dinner or an evening out on the town. It’s hard to believe that a future in the Dominican Republic once seemed so seductive. Not even. In a fateful wrongheaded moment last summer, it seemed like the only viable option I had.

  I have to get out of here.

  Correction: I have to get Sarah and Madeline and Rich and Tony out of here. It was never their problem. It was always mine. They just made it their own. I have to ante up for them, Sarah most of all. Her pictures clinched it.

  PART II

  The Gig That Didn’t Change Everything

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  My Glorious Future

  Emma stopped by the next morning on her way to her new job. I was still in bed. She’d actually dressed for work. Well, not formally or anything—she was going to volunteer at a homeless shelter—but the jeans were new and she’d put her hair in pigtails. She stood in the doorway, smirking as if she had a secret, while I scrambled for the pair of corduroys and T-shirt lying on the floor. I decided it was going to be one of those wear-what-I-wore-yesterday days. I foresaw a lot of those days in the near future.

  “I have something for you,” she said. “Consider it an apology for hanging up on you yesterday.” She reached into her knapsack and handed me a CD.

  I was still annoyed with her, or I wanted to be, but I couldn’t help but smile. The case was labeled Hen Birnbaum’s Super-Awesome 90s Nostalgia Mix!!! in felt-tip pen. She’d dotted all the i’s and exclamation points with hearts. The song list looked as if it was taken directly from some terrible mail-
order compilation CD (“Not available in any store! To use credit card, call…”). “The Love Theme from Titanic,” by Celine Dion kicked it off. It got progressively more awful from there, with bands and songs I’d barely heard of: “I’m Too Sexy,” by Right Said Fred, “Mo’ Murda,” by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony…For some reason, little stars were drawn next to “The Macarena” and Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It.” There were also a couple of selections meant as jabs: “Cowboy” and “Devil Without a Cause” by Kid Rock. I’d once made the mistake of telling Emma that I liked Kid Rock, which prompted her to make the universal sign for barfing. By including his songs in this mix, she was reminding me that I had no taste; every song was of equal merit.

  “I also left a couple of apologies on your phone,” she said. “I think I might have clogged your voice mail.”

  “Thanks, Emma,” I said. I placed the CD on top of my bureau, right beside the joke of a stereo I owned. “But isn’t that Titanic song called ‘My Heart Will Go On’?”

  “Yeah, but that’s not the song I put on there. It’s the actual soundtrack score when Leonardo DiCaprio starts making out with Kate Winslet—you know, on the deck of the ship. No lyrics.”

  I peered at the case. “Why are some of the songs starred?”

  “Those are the ones you’ve danced to in public,” she said.

  An embarrassing memory flashed through my mind: trying to teach Emma the dance moves to the macarena last Christmas break in the basement of some senior’s brownstone, one of the few big Franklin blowouts we’d talked ourselves into attending.

  “How long did it take you to make this?” I asked.

  “Not very,” she said. “I did it in my dad’s office last night. Now, remember, when you listen to this mix thirty years from now, you’ll have a perfect little snapshot of this crucial moment in your life. Scientific studies prove that music is a great stimulus for triggering memories. It’s true; I saw a documentary about the brain on PBS. It’s the second-best stimulus, in fact—right behind odors.” She tapped her chin absently. “I tried to capture my own breath in a Snapple bottle, but it was harder than I thought.”

  “I thought you said that this wasn’t a crucial moment in my life,” I reminded her.

  “I’m not talking about being in Petra’s band,” she groaned. “I’m hoping you’ll come to your senses about that sooner or later. I mean, if you’re doing it to keep your mind off Sarah, I can understand…”

  Emma kept talking, but I didn’t hear a word after that.

  Instead, I heard: “That morning, Henry ‘Hen’ Birnbaum’s head was in an understandably dark place. He was back in the band, but solving the mystery of his older sister’s disappearance weighed on him more heavily than ever. He found himself faced with two pressing questions. Would he return his bass teacher’s stolen manuscript? And if so, would he do it in secret?” (Dramatic pause) “When he was thirteen, Hen read the unauthorized children’s biography of Kurt Cobain: Kurt Cobain (They Died Too Young). Cobain was no stranger to petty theft….”

  The man speaking was Jim Forbes, the narrator of Behind the Music. At some point yesterday, without warning, he had popped into my head to provide moving commentary on my life. I couldn’t get rid of him. Last night at dinner, in fact, his soulful drone allowed me to completely block out whatever Sarah and my parents were blabbering about. (Which brand of mulch was best for the garden? Something like that.) But I didn’t mind. I figured it was natural, given the hours I’d spent watching Behind the Music reruns—coupled with the newfound certainty, thanks to Emma, that every vital moment of my existence would someday be chronicled in documentary form.

  It was all very clear now.

  Yes. If everybody else in my life could inhabit a fantasy world that they somehow willed into reality, then I could, too. I would be a professional musician. Just like Dad wanted. More important, I would be a rock star. Duh. Of course I would be a rock star. And being a rock star would dazzle my family so much that they would spill the beans about Sarah’s absence and return, because people always tend to lose their inhibitions and act stupid around famous people. It’s a fact. Best of all, this horrible secret that they couldn’t share with me, that Gabriel couldn’t even write about—whatever it was—would seem laughably trivial by comparison. We’d all be a lot happier, and I’d buy them all yachts.

  Seriously: How could the future turn out differently? I was back in the band, and Dawson’s Freak would be huge. I knew it. Even the stupid name was growing on me.

  True, none of this was terribly original. Half the kids at Franklin wanted to be rock stars (all right, an overstatement). But I wasn’t worried. Their bands sucked. And their strategy was wrong. They played the same crappy clubs for the same dozen friends over and over—until even their own band members stopped showing up.

  I was too smart to go that route. Having steeped myself in Behind the Music lore, I’d learned the two crucial lessons.

  One: You needed a “thing.” And Dawson’s Freak had one. We were the world’s premier nineties nostalgia band. Grunge, rap rock, “The Love Theme from Titanic”—you name it, we would play it. Two: You needed a connection. We had one of those, too: Emma’s father. (He even represented Nada Surf, one of the big bands of the nineties.) For most of my life I’d known how Mr. Wood made a living, obviously—but only now did I recognize it as the springboard that would catapult me into the stratosphere.

  It was wonderful, really. One day, I was a loser—confounded by secrets, with a batty family in danger of sending me over the edge—the next, I was a player, on my way to immortality. Sure, Dawson’s Freak had a couple of potential weaknesses. We were another power trio, one of maybe five hundred in New York City. Emma, in a bad mood, had once called PETRA “a bad Luscious Jackson rip-off, two decades too late.” But now that was a selling point. Plus, we weren’t nearly as annoying as Luscious Jackson. Petra was hotter than any one of their now-grizzled members. Sounding like them could only help.

  Potential problem number two: I was a below-average bassist. Gabriel’s lessons certainly wouldn’t help matters. They might even hurt. I could hold down the roots of the chords, and I had decent rhythm, but I didn’t have an ounce of flair. Every note was a Herculean task to get just right. Then again, Krist Novoselic of Nirvana didn’t have a lot of flair, either. And his best friend’s dad probably wasn’t an entertainment lawyer.

  The other pieces were in place. There was our drummer, for starters. Bartholomew Savage looked like a young Justin Timberlake and played like John Bonham himself. He was also a computer whiz who boasted more homemade beats and clever mash ups than Dr. Dre. Plus, the ladies loved him. I’m talking older ladies. The one time we’d performed live, at a Franklin assembly, untouchable junior and senior hotties had checked him out (while ignoring me). But sex appeal was a bonus; with a name like Bartholomew Savage, he was destined to be famous, anyway.

  And for a not-so-great guitarist, Petra was an incredible stage presence. Her songs were undeniably catchy, too. My favorite was her ode to the STEAL YOUR PARENTS’ MONEY stickers, called “Ask Me Why I Stole It.”

  You want a real answer? I stole it on a whim.

  I stole it for the sexy man who always calls me “Slim.”

  I stole it for the children, for the helpless, for the poor,

  I stole it for the crazy lady drinking gin next door.

  I stole it for my country, for the people white and black,

  I stole it for my parents, cuz I’m gonna give it back.

  Petra half sang, half rapped the lyrics, her usual MO. The riff was pretty much indistinguishable from Rage Against the Machine’s “Freedom”—but the tempo was slower and funkier and there was more wah-wah. It had a deeper groove, a real power to shake your booty. It would be our hit. All we had to do was record it and pass it along to Emma’s father. Then we would get signed. I figured the whole process would take about a month. (It didn’t take Fiona Apple much longer than that to get signed after a producer heard her demo
; it’s true, you can watch the Behind the Music episode.) We’d definitely be signed before school started in the fall. Given the rigorous demands of recording our first album and placing “Ask Me Why I Stole It” in a Nike or Lexus commercial, I’d have to drop out no later than Christmas break.

  And after that…well, the next forty years would be a string of delicious clichés. World tours and Wal-Mart in-stores. The record for most iTunes downloads. Drug busts in Japan. Meetings with the Dalai Lama. Guest voiceovers on The Simpsons. Orgies at the Plaza Hotel. Séances on Loch Ness. A brief stay at the Betty Ford clinic, followed by plastic surgery—whereupon I would emerge fit as a personal trainer, after I’d drunk four bottles of whiskey a day and snorted up 5.02 percent of Bolivia’s total cocaine export. (On second thought, maybe I’d skip the drug phase. I’d have a sex addiction instead.) And, yes, later: the bitter breakup, the solo projects, the years of seclusion…then the reunion—a comeback worth zillions and capped off in 2036 by a tearful induction ceremony at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

  Oh, and somewhere in there, Petra and I would get married and divorced twice and still be the best of friends. By which point I wouldn’t even care why Sarah had run away. It would all be long forgotten, and she’d be a quiet, gray-haired shrew, tending the five-acre topiary garden I’d purchased for her on the outskirts of Paris.

  In the end, I would be to nineties nostalgia bass playing what Keith Richards is to classic rock guitar. (Laugh all you want now, but watch me in an American Express Card ad campaign coming soon.) I remembered seeing Keith on an HBO special a few years back, jovial and swarthy—smiling as he played all of “Tumbling Dice” a half-step flat. Emma had been with me. She’d started cracking up, her hands mashed against her ears. The sound was so sour, so preposterous, that even the most die-hard Stones fans in the televised audience gazed at each other in disbelief, their faces shriveled like prunes. But Keith kept right on grinning. He jerked and danced and postured. Did he know how terrible he sounded? Did he care? Did it matter? No. Another fifty thousand worshippers would pack the stadium the next night, regardless of how he played. He was beyond criticism: a god.