Beautiful Children

by Charles Bock

  “Bingading! How's that deadline going? You made any progress?”

  “Well, I'm gonna be hating life tomorrow—”

  “Join the club, baby. I hate life every day.”

  “And it's not like a meal with the zombies helps any. I swear, ten minutes of their inanity, I'm all but begging for death's sweet release.”

  “I'm on my way down to Irvine right now for SAT boy. Figure at least a half hour.”

  “Cool beans.”

  “For you maybe. You don't have to recross the friggin’ county.”

  “I know it's out of your way. I really appreciate it. Really, man. And like I said, I'll pay for gas.”

  This was the summer of shimmery cabana shirts. The high-quality ones hung loosely off the shoulders, but were form fitting around the waist, creating a slimming effect that was totally excellent—or so Bing had been told by a salesgirl in a clothing boutique on Santa Monica. Under normal conditions, Bing was allergic to salespeople, but this girl had come up to him while he was picking through a rack, she'd literally grabbed the shirt out of his hands, hunted through the rack, and pulled out a different shirt, swearing it would fit his body type better. He was in the dressing room when she'd brought him three more shirts, all similar in cut and style, but distinct in their own right, totally worth trying on, just for variety's sake. For the sheer hell of it, she'd also come by with a pair of what she termed cracking jeans—if he was buying the shirts to party in, he might as well try some jeans, see how they looked together, why not make an outfit, right? The salesgirl had been wearing a pink slip as a summer dress and its shoulder strap had been falling onto her arm in a way that had been quite charming, and when she'd left to find Bing jeans in the proper waist size, he'd watched the slip clinging around her backside. Over the store stereo, some sort of nu metal-ish band had been playing, one of those heavy, noisy messes that Bing usually dismissed, but for some reason, this time he was really able to hear and appreciate everything the band was trying to do, and when the girl returned and asked, “How you doing in there?” Bing had answered, “Just cracking, thanks.” And when he'd exited the dressing room wearing that first outfit, she'd touched him on the arm and had smiled, and Bing had been utterly disarmed, and that day, he'd purchased every single outfit that the salesgirl recommended, putting them on the credit card that he had gotten specifically for car repairs and emergency expenses, but what the hell. The salesgirl had walked him to the register and told him her name and casually impressed upon him the importance of letting the cashier know she'd been the one who had helped him, and once his charge had been approved, she had put her arm around Bing and told him to make sure he kept in touch, and a week later, when he'd gone back into the boutique, the salesgirl had greeted him with a perky smile and a blank gaze, and for a second Bing had been unsure if she really knew who he was, at which point she'd asked how the outfits were doing, and she'd inquired whether he'd come back for more clothes, and, sure, granted, this was part of the sales world these days, you drank more often at the bar with a hot chick behind the counter smiling and flirting in a halter top, there were no virgins in a consumer world, okay. However, as Bing put on one of those hideously shimmering eighty-five-dollar cabana shirts, fished out a relatively unrumpled pair of ninety-five-dollar jeans, and readied himself for a night of getting good and crocked with his buddies, it was all but impossible for him to be reminded of anything other than his little shopping outing. Equally impossible was recalling this memory without feeling a mixture of enthusiasm and embarrassment; enthusiasm because it was exciting when a pretty girl was nice to you, and he did look smooth in those clothes; embarrassment because nobody ever goes home with that hot chick in the halter top behind the bar, because nobody likes it when they find out they've been manipulated, and it's even worse if you have been willingly manipulated, and, finally, because the reasons you allow yourself to be willingly manipulated are never easy to face. So what Bing did, he got dressed. Slapped some of his housemate's cologne on each cheek, his neck, and his underarms. He scoped out his reflection in the mirror and then rechecked the clock. Where were those fucktards, already?

  They still logged in nightly to the Knitting Room, zapped e-mails back and forth with ridiculous frequency, and sometimes met in pairs for lunch or a quick drink; but it was undeniable: forces of nature and time had started pulling at their closed little chat room. 1450SAT, for example, had left an array of fellowships and graduate school offers on the table, turned his back on all subjects that involved stress or competition, and was way down in Orange County, working entry-level tech support for a medical distribution company. DOMINATR69, by contrast, was stuck in the gray town of Covina, a half hour east of Los Angeles; Bing had pulled strings and got DOM freelance work as an inker and background man with his comic book house, but the gigs were sporadic, and the comic house had neither the money nor the interest in DOM for a full-time hire, so DOM lived at home and ran the stock room in his dad's furniture shop and spent a lot of time complaining about his dead-end life. Meanwhile, nobody knew KC_FTT_B's deal, he'd been bumbling around Venice Beach for a while, flopping from one McJob to another. It was hard to keep track of him. Then again, logistically, it was difficult for all four of them to get together that much anymore, what with the Southern California freeway system being what it was. They still tried, doing what they could, meeting up to see big summer action movie blockbusters on opening day, spending designated nights in the furniture store, where they smoked fifty-cent cigars, passed around a five-dollar jug of wine, and played nickel-ante seven-card stud. And on the first Saturday night of each month, they all met up, it was set in stone, even if the back room of the store was unavailable, and they didn't do anything more than drive around and pass round an open container of alcohol and catch up on one another's problems.

  The nights weren't necessarily friendly. The polemical, argumentative free-for-all nature of the chat room usually translated into a fair share of face-to-face rants. Each Knitter consistently judged his friends, weighing their respective stories and successes (and lacks thereof ) as if the progress of a peer reflected on everyone else's personal well-being. At the same time, exchanges took place that were every bit as thoughtful as they were ridiculous; the Knitters still made one another laugh, still held a mutual, genuine affection for one another; the chat room was a major part of their lives and, even now, remained a refuge for them, though it was obvious that each participant felt conflicted about his involvement, felt constrained, a bit trapped. Sometimes things crossed the line, jibes became uncomfortably personal. Nonetheless, when the Knitters were like fifty and they looked back on their time in college and the years afterward, while it was true, there wouldn't be a whole lot of warm and fuzzy feelings, while a lot of their memories would be gruesome, tinged with regrets and bitterness, it would be stuff like driving around with one another and the endless hours they wasted online, crap that in another light might be seen as boring and pointless, this, each Knitter had to know, is what they'd remember. It was sappy and it wasn't the kind of thing that you could admit without getting ragged on, but this didn't make it any less true. So when that first Saturday of the month rolled around, Bing did not think twice about cutting his meal with his housemates short, found himself counting the hours until Go Time.

  One week before Bing left for Vegas, after far too long a wait, the esoteric stylings of a posse of self-described old-school gangsta Negroes did indeed thump from up the road, signaling the arrival of DOMINATR69’ s Kia. Bing was two steps out of the door when the first wolf whistle hit. A call of Looking smooth served as confirmation, his clothing would be the night's prime source for humor.

  The car was supposed to be a compact hatchback, but that was just the sadistic joke of some ambitious junior marketing exec. DOM's Kia was a tin can, cramped with bodies and an opened bottle of Jäger, with arguments and insults and rat-assing. One unseen Knitter pretended to adjust the collar of Bing's cabana shirt; another poked at the shirt's fabr
ic and made sizzling sounds and then poured some beer on Bing to put out the imaginary fire. “Only thing missing is the cape,” someone said, causing much laughter, with 1450, the asthmatic among them, breaking into a coughing fit, leaning over, taking a few deep breaths into a paper bag.

  Nightclubs that advertised on the radio had too high a guy-to-girl ratio, so they were out. Franchises like Ruby Tuesday were ridiculous and not worth considering. And ixnay on the ipsterhay arsbay, because (A) the Knitters did not know how to find them and (B) even if they did, there was no way past the velvet ropes. A disagreement spread as to whether velvet ropes were even used at hipster bars, whether they were passé. Prospective destinations were shot down; arguments came and went, and it wasn't long before one of DOM and Bing's most favorite and longest-running gimmicks commenced, and the overblown language of kung fu subtitles took over. (“Foolish mortal, you have walked into my trap, prepare to be destroyed”; “Your powers are no match for me! I welcome the opportunity to squash you in my manly hands.”) This did not last long, either, for the jibes were quickly drowned out by the sound of feedback and guitars, the rest of the crew shouting lyrics—“All I wanted was a Pepsi, just one Pepsi, AND SHE WOULDN’T GIVE IT TO ME”; “You'll take my life but I'll take yours too; You'll fire your musket but I'll run you through”; “FUCK THA POLICE. Comin’ straight from the underground. Young nigga got it bad cuz I'm brown.” By the time the tape flipped to the B side, everyone was winded and a little hoarse. Bing took control, announcing, with appropriate gravity: My brothers, the time has come to go find ourselves some poon.

  Hermosa Beach. A bar with a packed outdoor patio. The Knitters stayed in the car for a while, killing the bottle in a rising and tense silence. Among them, there were known dry spells. Bad stretches. Streaks of involuntary celibacy. It was more than possible that half of the members of the Knitting Room were virgins; and even if they weren't, Bing was relatively sure that the other Knitters were on streaks far longer than his, although this wasn't real consolation. Rather, it was more like winning the gold medal at the Special Olympics: you won the gold medal, fine, but then again, you were still retarded. Eventually the group could not avoid it any longer, and they paid the cover, and stumbled into the dark, packed bar, and the beer commercial that was in progress: cliques of tan and beautiful bodies grouped off with other gorgeous creatures, everyone chatting amiably, as if they all had been best friends with one another for the entirety of their beautiful lifetimes.

  1450SAT immediately faded into the shadows. DOMINATR69 scowled and got intense and scary-looking. KC_FTT_B was too blitzed to do more than pinch asses. What the guy with the thunderous voice from the movie trailers would call a time of crisis. “When courage was at a premium and tyranny ruled the countryside,” he would say, “one man would step forward: Beiderbixxe the Fearless. Beiderbixxe the Conqueror.”

  Tucking in his shirt so that his flab was not so obvious, rolling up his sleeves so as to showcase his burgeoning pythons, he made his way, ever so shakily, toward a gaggle of females, each of whom possessed singularly incomparable beauty.

  Intuition told Bing that women like these knew what guys were really after; that by talking to him, they'd only be humoring him, or worse, humoring themselves. But wholesale amounts of alcohol flooded intuition. Liquid courage was still courage, wasn't it?

  “Hey? Um, excuse me.”

  He tried to come off as irreverent and artistic, introducing himself and explaining that he saw them all standing here and looking so stunning that he just wanted to draw them all.

  He jabbed and parried and tried to look cool while he admitted that, well, that is to say, um, comic books. He illustrated comic books for a living.

  “But, see, comics are getting much more acceptance than ever. Look at all the movies—”

  “Betty and Veronica not so much,” he answered, “but Jughead's kind of funny, I guess.”

  Throw in his daily routine of protein shakes, which gave him major league blackheads and had him farting dust. Add the vitamin supplements that fucked up his breath and turned his piss flaming yellow. What the voice-over guy from the trailers would call a recipe for hilarity. What the other Knitters would sensitively label, shot down in flames.

  At two-thirty in the morning, Bing was back in his room, back at his drawing table, still buzzed but sobering up, willing his hand steady, hoping to salvage something from this wreck of a night and not screw up any of his last two days’ work, all this while listening to the pounding headboards and squeaking bedsprings and grunts of monkey love that carried through the drywall from not one but each of the two bed-rooms that bookended his. It was funny enough to make a mental note about, cruel enough to make Bing believe God was getting laughs at his expense, and he could not take too much before he slipped on his shower thongs and walked across his bedroom and rummaged through his strewn laundry. Upon finding his fifteen-pound barbells, he carried the weights into the bathroom and locked the door behind him; he sat on the toilet and busted out curls in sets, lifting and grunting until his arms burned and shook. Then Bing stayed on the can and took heavy breaths and checked out his pectorals in the mirror, kind of zoning out, just staring at the windowsill, this dead flower stem propped up in an Evian bottle.

  A curvaceous, sleepy-eyed Latin woman gathered her panties from the stage and walked its perimeter. Bending quickly to pick up the few scattered bills, she waved and smiled to those who had opened their hearts and wallets. The disc jockey repeated her name, then announced which dancer needed to report to the stage. Bing watched her and continued nursing his soda, the first two of which came as part of the twenty-five-dollar cover charge. He'd moved away from the catwalk and was standing in the darkness of the main area, where black light turned T-shirts fluorescent, and disco balls cast snowflakes of light in all directions. One or two buxom women in dark leotards and fishnet stockings weaved between bystanders, delivering drinks and taking orders. Far more noticeable were the various panty sets, the teddies and dominatrix outfits and naughty teacher clothing. The black lighting electrified the lingerie, creating startlingly bright colors, you couldn't help but look at them. At the girls who filled them.

  Dancers who weren't onstage worked the crowd, slinging their hips, making their smiling rounds, seeking out specific guys who'd come up during their set and given them money, as well as anyone else who purchased lap dances with any sort of regularity, and anyone who spent a lot of time talking with the other girls. Standard protocol was to ignore all lumps who nursed their cover charge drinks and stared and never gave up a friggin’ buck. (Sure, you never knew who had money, who wanted to party, and who was biding his time until the right one came along; but usually, you had a pretty good idea.)

  Truth be told, Bing didn't mind being passed over. The dancers should have been ignoring him. He wasn't a big spender, wasn't recognizable as a strip club regular. Sometimes in the dead of night, it was true, he got antsy and drove out by LAX and blew twenty bucks, slowly draining his two-drink minimum while getting up the courage to sit at the bar and maybe inch a few singles up a thigh. It also was true that, whenever Bing hit the road for a store appearance or got stuck overnight in some town, part of his routine usually involved a strip club. Small-time holes, mostly; half-empty venues where most of the customers had no intention of paying for anything more than the cover, and the only way the strippers could get through a shift without falling asleep was to stare at their own writhing reflections in the mirrored walls. When you got down to it, most of the tittie bars Bing had been in were depressing enough to make the facts of his streak of celibacy, living arrangements, and basic life history seem like Times Square on New Year's Frickin’ Eve. Yeah, Bing had seen his share of tricks and special promotions. He'd watched Jell-O wrestling and hot-oil wrestling. He'd seen naked girls, kneeling inside half-filled plastic kiddy pools, doubled over, holding their ribs, looking helplessly at the disc jockey. Bing had watched more than his share of these sad spectacles and he had wanted to step
in and he'd had no idea how to begin, and so he had sat, a bystander, falling in love, in his own minor fashion, with each and every tragic young woman.

  Outside a near booth, a girl with straight, sandy hair and small, pointed breasts was giving a table dance to a frat type, who wore a shirt exactly like the one Bing had on. Bing watched the guy run a dollar bill up the side of the dancer's leg, saw her hold out the waistband string of her thong. The guy's hand stayed on the dancer's inner thigh, right where the waist string connected to her crotch. Unfazed, she took a step out of his reach and began a new series of rotations, such that her message—that's not allowed—was clearly communicated. The minor drama reminded Bing of war stories he'd heard at comic conventions—tales of different illustrators, guys who spent a lot more time in strip clubs than Bing did, who, on occasion, offered strippers two hundred dollars to draw them; stories about strippers who took the money and told the artist to come back at the end of the shift and said follow me, then waited until a yellow light turned red and gunned it, leaving the poor dumb bastard stranded at the light. Bing started thinking about the flip side, too; stories involving amiable young ladies who'd followed different comic book artists to their motels and who'd sat still for the artist and bullshitted and been really cool, and then afterward, in every case, when the artist had asked if the stripper wanted to get something to eat or, you know, do something, each stripper had answered with a smile and some variation of the line, aren't you cute, each comic book artist reporting amusement in his stripper's voice, like there was something he wasn't getting, like he'd blown some chance without knowing he'd had a chance.