Good Kids

by Benjamin Nugent

  It was nice of the reporter not to mention that we were also victims of being kind of shitty. Critics didn’t so much hate us as find themselves incapable of caring about us enough to experience an invigorating hatred. We were, we gradually learned, 6.6 out of 10, hooky new-wave, post-Arcade-Fire decency with a vein of California somnolence, passable post-punk-post-dance with a beat you can nod to, not unhappily.

  “Does mine still start with the Peabodys video?” Julie passed me the laptop.

  The Peabody Awards ceremony footage in which she tripped on the hem of her scarlet gown and toppled into a nest of gift bags—this video, after twenty-nine Julie vs. Animals episodes, remained at the top of the screen. I nodded and stroked her head.

  We were quiet for a moment as she smoothed her hair. I peed. “We’re both horse-fucked,” I sang in James Taylor’s voice. She extended the melody in Louis Armstrong’s: “Horse-fucked to death.”

  Side by side, we washed our hands. “You’re perfect,” she said. “You’re all I want.”

  “You’re my dream-girl princess,” I said. Julie touched the napkins on the way out of the bathroom. I did this too. We were like teenage football players thwacking the insignia of a school, painted on a wall, on the way out of the locker room and onto the field. We went out, to charm the new owner of the science channel for the sake of our future children, to fight for something greater than ourselves.

  2.

  I Try Not to Think of Anyone in Terms of Categories Like That

  To get to the party, Julie and I had to walk through a decorative, glowing white tube set up on a lawn. I decided the tube was not intentionally designed to evoke the white tunnel people see when they’re close to death. Piped-in contemporary R & B, with its throbbing, celebratory, watery message of enter me, suggested the tube was intended to be more like a ghostly vagina. But the tube was everything you’d expect from a passage to the afterlife. It led to a glowing place just out of sight, and was sewn of fabric that vibrated dreamily as you walked, translucent enough that if you stared through it hard you could see the contours of the hills rendered off-white on white.

  The party was in a hillside subdivision near Laurel Canyon called Mt. Olympus. The houses here had porches with Ionic columns and triangular pediments. Being almost broke, I felt out of place in a setting so explicitly divine, but, then, I found many things unsettling that other people didn’t. I’d spent almost seven years in a band; I heard things through a veil. Tinnitus was like the fabric of the white death tube, a translucent material that made everything softer and eerier than it actually was.

  We emerged from the tube into the glare of a spotlight erected beside the house, and when our eyes adjusted we found ourselves observed by a tiger. It paced a black cage set on the illuminated grass. A tiger attendant nodded to us as we passed, his hands clasped in front of his belly. He was a tall, strong-looking man who might have been an effective bouncer with humans, but it was unclear what powers he might exercise upon his charge. He told Julie how brave she was on television, approaching wild animals that were uncaged, and studied my face to see if he recognized me. The predator rose on its haunches, as if it was going to apply its jaws to the bars, and ultimately to us. But it lay back down and licked its white forelegs instead.

  We passed into the house itself, its dimmered kitchen, where we saw the mark: Jeremy, the science channel’s owner. Julie caught him by the arm, and he planted a kiss on her cheek, delighted, before he remembered himself and composed a smile of steely command. A forty-year-old Silicon Valley eminence, Jeremy had purchased the channel four months ago, changed its name from The Zoo Channel to Tusk, shifted his primary residence from Palo Alto to the Holmby Hills, and explained in the trade papers that he hoped to improve the science literacy of the average American young person. He wore a somber, plum-colored suit; it was late October. As Julie and Jeremy lay hands on each other’s shoulders, Julie glanced out the window toward four nearly nude women, who floated like corpses in a man-made cove. Above them, heat lamps glowed like magic toadstools. I added up the tiger and the unseasonably bathing-suited women and understood: Jeremy wanted the world to know he was no longer a computer person but a Los Angeles person. Julie was betting that zoological programming could be a springboard to Hollywood-Hollywood; so, I decided, was Jeremy.

  “Did you hire whores?” Julie asked him. She pointed a thumb at the floating women. “Seriously, is that what they are?”

  With artisanal care, Jeremy pushed back his long chestnut tresses, unveiling his ears. “I try not to think of anyone in terms of categories like that,” he said.

  Julie took me by the hand and led me outside to the main corpus of the party. In the center of the lawn, the guests spoke with their faces close together, but in their cove the prostitutes floated in isolation, avoiding each other’s eyes. I felt a warm beam of empathy connect me to them. You are my sisters, I thought. I am an escort, like you, something trucked in here for the fun of bringing the outside (the world of vulgarity and failure) into the inside (this party) like a Christmas tree. The tiger stared at the translucent death vagina. Nobody appeared to be interested in feeding the big cat, or giving it water. We must have made it hungry, we slow-moving, unarmed meals.

  After Julie was ensconced in a conversation with people I didn’t know, I sat on a white rhombus and thought about fetching the tiger an hors d’oeuvre, tossing it through the bars. Something with ham in it, or fish. But the tiger guard was still there, and preventing people from feeding or freeing his prisoner was his only conceivable job.

  I was midsulk when Gordon and I discovered each other. He waved to me from the bar and floated out of the crowd, bearing down on me with two large drinks.

  “You guys didn’t tell me you were coming here,” he chided. “But it’s a sweet coincidence. Now, don’t get mad at me for saying this: I brought Todd Rosenberg as my date, because Cora’s too pregnant-sick to go to a party, and, look, I’m sorry, but it turns out Todd Rosenberg hates you.”

  I gulped my drink, which was reddish, a pomegranate-infused vodka. There was a potential reason, I reflected: Todd Rosenberg might have been the one person at the party who had less money than I did. Todd made music in which microphones were dragged slowly through sand. What could he live on?

  “Todd Rosenberg’s prestigious.” I chewed an ice cube. “I feel like prestigious people always hate me. But how would you actually know he hates me?”

  “He pointed at you and said, ‘Don’t you hate Josh Paquette?’”

  “He asked us to contribute a track to a compilation that was going to use all its proceeds to stop some intertribal war over water,” I explained to Gordon, “and we forgot to get back to him. Is that was this is about?”

  I spied Todd now, communing with the tiger from the edge of the throng. I took in his soft, white, high-reaching hair, his height—he must have been six three—his wrinkled black suit, his tan, his predatory dark eyes. He turned and stared at Gordon and me. We smiled and waved. His face registered surprise for a moment before he smiled and waved back.

  “It sounded to me,” said Gordon, stroking his mustache, touching his bald spot, “like pure jealousy. He told me he saw his fiancée reading that article about Shapeshifter. Apparently, she said she used to know you in high school.”

  Todd approached. He flicked the red contents of his drink—it looked like the same brand-sponsored pomegranate vodka we were drinking—on the grass as he approached.

  “Hey, dudes,” he said, with hatred. “Do you like these drinks?”

  “Yes,” I said, and drained the last of mine.

  Gordon looked back and forth between me and Todd. After an infinitesimal hesitation, he finished his pomegranate vodka too.

  “It’s fucked up what they did to that tiger,” said Todd.

  I had an interesting desire to make him hit me. If he despised me, I wanted him to be demonstrative. “But admit it,” I said. “Also awesome.”

  Julie joined us then, trailed by a man s
o clearly European I tried to think of nonstupid things to talk about in front of him. He wore sky blue overalls, an orange scarf, and a green cap with its brim flipped up.

  “This guy’s from Italy,” Julie whispered in my ear, “and dressed almost exactly like Super Luigi.”

  “Where are you from?” he called after Julie, pursuing her into our midst.

  “Here,” she said. “Or, Glendale.”

  “But what is your ancestry?”

  “A mix,” said Julie. “Mystery meat.”

  “You look like one of these beautiful Jewish girls from Los Angeles,” he said. “I like Jewish girls.”

  Julie wasn’t Jewish, of course. I watched her react; she placed her hands on her hips, as if confronting a gorilla. Especially when she straightened herself to her full height, her eyes often appeared angry at first glance, allowing for a dramatic softening interesting to behold on screen. I watched them undergo this transformation now. She could forgive this sorry creature. She didn’t demand any kind of response from me, and there was no practical need to defend anyone. The Italian was very drunk, and pretty small. But I felt it would be an embarrassment to all of us if I didn’t comment.

  “That’s enough, okay?” I said to the Italian. I didn’t want to hurt him; the eagerness of his face, the terrible hope in his white teeth, almost made me want to protect him.

  He nodded sadly to Julie. “Your Jewish boy.”

  “Hey, man,” said Todd, my erstwhile nemesis, to the Italian. “Are you saying some shit about Jewish people?” Todd’s hands hung loose at his sides. “Because that isn’t funny.”

  The single most common subject of jokes between myself and my friends, I couldn’t help but remember, was our shared Jewishness and half-Jewishness. But I had to escalate hostilities against the Italian as quickly as Todd, or Todd would look like he was braver than I was.

  “Listen to me,” I said to the Italian, careful to speak exactly as loudly as Todd had. We were operating on the assumption that a language barrier could be transcended through ferocity of inflection. “Why would you want to start talking about Jews? I don’t approve of that.” I had never accused anyone of anti-Semitism before. It turned out to be exciting.

  “I’m not prejudiced,” moaned our enemy, a final cri de guerre. He threw up his hands, twisting back into the crowd.

  “Together, you defeated that small, childlike man,” said Julie. “Nice teamwork, guys.”

  I felt bad for the Italian. But it turned out that a shared experience of ethnic persecution was a way to bond with somebody who hated you. Todd Rosenberg and I got to talking. We did share experiences we could plausibly link to Jewishness. We’d both taken Russian in high school; we both had mothers who’d persuaded us as teenagers that we had visceral and neurological disorders it later became clear we did not have. He told me he’d resorted to writing reviews for alternative weeklies in order to fund his semiambient music without working full-time in a savory pie shop, and we wandered the house, complaining about the lot of musicians and leaving Julie and Gordon to discuss gentile matters. After we had recited Russian poetry to each other on the balcony, drinking the scarlet vodka, I felt great closeness pulse between us.

  “I’m like the whores, and you’re like the tiger,” I explained to Todd. “That’s why we were effective back there. Good cop, bad cop. I was like, Relax, we’re trying to talk to you, and then you surged out of the darkness, and you were, roar, we hate you, you sick fuck.”

  He snorted and looked to the side. “A tiger,” he said.

  “But you are. Even like what just happened now. I was kind of kissing your ass. Like a whore. And you were like, I care not for your flattery. Fucking tiger.”

  He bent to one side and tagged my shoulder with a soft punch. “You used to hang out in Brooklyn, way back, right?”

  “I went to your show at that loft on North Tenth and Kent with that furnace that if the duct tape came off would have killed everyone.”

  “Nineteen ninety-eight,” he said. “I was nineteen years old.”

  “Me too. Good times, right?” That in these times we had both been wearing overly elaborate outfits, that we had both failed, in the intervening years, to worm into the historically significant Williamsburg cliques organized around the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, DFA, TV on the Radio, the Secret Machines, this we did not say. We swished the slush that remained of the ice in our glasses. “Speaking of being a teenager,” I said, “who are you engaged to who knew me in high school?” I belched, to show I didn’t care he’d said he hated me. “I didn’t even know anyone from Wattsbury was out here.”

  He gazed at the stars, down the slopes of canyons, south into the city. “We’re doing long-distance,” he said. “When I moved out here, getting engaged was part of the deal. Showing we were serious. And I am serious. I fucking love her, man.” He looked at me searchingly, for extra confirmation we were cool with each other. “Did you know a white Khadijah in Wattsbury?”

  I hadn’t had a cigarette all night, but I lit one now. Nausea flailed through my stomach on the fourth drag. With my hand on my chin, I joined Todd in looking at the stars, and the much brighter windows across the canyon.

  “She said you guys had a ‘weird friendship.’”

  It would have been helpful to have a sharp instrument at hand, with which to discreetly stab my own leg, and thereby prevent myself from sighing. “‘Weird friendship’ doesn’t entail boning,” I said. And then: “You have nothing to worry about. I’m engaged too. Julie and I are getting married in June.”

  The way my eyes watered and I was suddenly cold, this was the past tormenting me. These were symptoms you ignored. Being engaged granted you freedom to ignore them.

  “Hey,” said Todd, pointing to the front lawn, where a rectangle of the grass lay flat. “The tiger’s gone.” His tone took on drunken mournfulness. “Why’d they take the tiger away?”

  “Maybe they’re giving him a break to take a dump, man.”

  “They’d better be. And a drink of water. I never saw them give that tiger one drink of water. Maybe they don’t want it pissing in their little gilded cage, the fucktards.” It was the second time in the course of the evening that somebody had said fucktard. I thought of how beautifully the word had formed in Julie’s mouth. Where was she? My wistful reaction to the name of an old crush from high school made me feel I had betrayed Julie, in a small way. I wanted to be near her. I needed an excuse to end the male bonding and track her down.

  “I have to take a dump myself,” I said to Todd. He thumped me on the back, our bond solidified, and I went in search of my fiancée.

  I meandered through the house, dark save for the spotlight, which cast white domes on the walls. Soon I was in a neo-Victorian living room. Realistic paintings of rappers hung from the walls, lit from below. There was elaborate lace on the arms of a purple and green sofa. I heard a woman’s voice, from behind a closed door. It was Julie, speaking loudly enough for me to hear, but not loudly enough for me to make out her words.

  There was something about the conversational music I didn’t like. Julie was speaking in a low, deliberate tone, blending restraint with amusement, coy. Whomever she flirted with remained inaudible.

  This is my fiancée, I thought. I’m entitled to come in. I knocked softly, three times. Julie continued speaking. The nice thing to do, I supposed, was to knock louder. I turned the knob and, in what I hoped was a casual, unhurried manner, pushed on the door.

  The first thing I saw was the source of Julie’s voice: a flat-screen television, fixed to a wall, turned up loud. It was tuned to Tusk, a Julie vs. Animals episode about crows, originally aired last year. The second thing I saw was Jeremy, Tusk’s new Silicon Valley–bred owner, kneeling on a queen-size bed, his plum-colored suit discarded, his stallion hair wild. He straddled a woman who was not one of the women who had been floating in the pool; there were two piles of clothes on the floor, one the plum-colored suit, the other what appeared to be gray pants and a jacket, meaning she
had discarded a complete outfit rather than a bathing suit. They were in missionary position, her back arched, his back hunched. His belly hung, her toes curled. He was struggling to force his hesitant penis into a condom, but it was soft. The third thing I saw was the tiger, still crammed in a cage. It was tucked into a corner of the room on the far side of the television. It stared into space with Olympian indifference. It was as if the humans on the bed weren’t even there.

  “Oh my lord,” yelled Jeremy, so shocked at my appearance, I surmised, that he forgot to talk like the Hollywood-executive characters in movies and use profanity. It had been only a second I’d been tarrying in the doorway, but he might have thought I’d been watching for minutes. He put his fist in his mouth. The woman screamed and sat up.

  I apologized. As I shut the door, I said, “I was just looking for the bathroom, so.”

  In the Victorian living room, I spun 180 degrees. I walked very fast. Out of the house, down the lawn, from one circle of conversations to another, never speaking. Finally, I made for the hedge and, hiding my face from the partygoers, threw up. I wiped the vomit from my face and wandered. I didn’t see Julie anywhere.

  I hadn’t been able to see Jeremy’s face well, because of his hair. But I understood the drama he was staging: Look, woman, upon this cable channel that is mine. He’d put his star on the TV and had the tiger brought in to show what he could have done. He’d told a story about who he was. The story was not really for the woman (she was part of the story) but for himself. And the self responded. The soft dick was the self saying, I don’t believe you.

  I want to see my wife, I thought, and corrected myself: fiancée. Instead I saw Todd, squinting at me from the bar. He homed in on me and took hold of my arm.