“I guess you found the towels.”
“I hope it’s okay,” you murmur, and my home is no place for bare feet and you keep moving around because the floors are sticky and dirty and you’re looking down at my typewriters and asking too many questions and you’re picking up my taxidermy miniature alligator head that I would have hidden if I knew you were coming and this is wrong, all wrong, this is not right in the morning light and you got to sleep here and shower and soap up without making love to me and in what universe can that possibly be a good thing? Your clean hands are too clinical right now and you’re examining this place like it’s a crime scene. Maybe that yellow tape put you on guard. You are asking when I started collecting typewriters and dead animals and jokingly asking if I’m a serial killer and pointing at the hole in the wall and saying, “Joseph, tell me again about the hole,” and, yeah, you’re laughing and you don’t mean for me to defend it all but this is not good for us and you’re too clean and I have sleep in my eyes and morning wood and no coffee and no eggs to make for you. The faucet drips (you didn’t shut it off all the way) but I can’t shut it off because you can’t be alone in my living room. You excuse yourself to the bathroom and you wash your hands with a lot of soap (taxidermy and typewriters). When you get out of my bathroom with your freshly scrubbed hands, you’re all done with me, talking about school, kissing me good-bye, no tongue.
When you leave, I sit in the wet tub and breathe you in. All of you.
“DUDE, you don’t think that’s a little harsh?”
Curtis is pleading his case and turning red and the little shit has never been fired before and suddenly he loves it here at Mooney’s and suddenly he gives a shit and suddenly my pothead minion is never getting stoned again.
“Curtis, the right thing to do now is just say ‘Okay, boss.’?”
He flares and a fat little woman knocks on the counter like it’s a door. “S’cuse me, guys, but do you have any Zone cookbooks?”
“Yeah,” I say, and I am about to say where but suddenly Curtis actually works here and actually gives a shit and he’s zipping behind me and leading the sweet little fatty to the cookbooks and talking to her about our ability to special-order any Zone book her fat little heart could desire and telling her about our return policy, so loudly you’d think she was deaf, not fat, and it’s amazing, how people only shape up until they have a gun against their head and then I hear you (Hey, Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?), and that morning was all his fault and he will pay. He must pay and the fat lady wants to pay part by check and part by cash and part by credit card and I have to wonder how she will afford to buy the ingredients in the Zone book recipes and suddenly Curtis is a fucking Volunteer Police Man, all about double-checking her driver’s license like I taught him to do, like he never does, and running the credit card the right way, hard and tilted so that the weak old machine picks up the swipe. He’s inserting a bookmark in each fucking cookbook and, man, this kid, only a nut job psychopath perfectionist mother fucker would fire this kid, so good he is, so dedicated.
The little fat lady is pleased and she whistles at me. “Yoo-hoo, hon.”
I nod and I smile and she should have addressed me as sir.
“You should give this young man a raise,” she says and she’s pink all over from hustling around the store. “I tell you, I was in another little shop uptown for two hours before someone came to help me and this young man you have here was a wonderful and gracious host to me. And knowledgeable too.”
I’d like to tell her that in both bookstores and coffee shops, it’s actually polite to leave browsers and readers alone. When you harass people and offer to help them too much, they feel like you’re nudging them out the door. This lady doesn’t know anything about the world and she’s still raving about this friendly young man and I would like to tell her that overeager Curtis (did he start doing meth or something?) has actually driven customers away today because most people don’t want to be interrupted when they’re reading the first few pages of a novel. Oh, I want her to know that Curtis smokes pot four times a day and steals bicycles and fences them for spare cash. I could tell her that he is late every fucking shift and that he shits in the bathroom on a regular basis (rude), and that he’s cheated on every girlfriend he’s ever had, and that when she exits this place, were he not getting his ass fired, he’d mock her to high hell and possibly even write down her checking account information. Yes. She pays with a check.
Instead I just smile at the gal. “You’re the exact reason that we open up shop every day,” I say. “We’re in the business of helping people buy books.”
“This is just like that Meg Ryan movie.” She squeals. “You know, where the nice girl has the small shop and she falls in love with the man with the big shops?”
Curtis fucking sings, “You’ve Got Mail!?”
“You’ve Got Mail,” she cries and she laughs. “Oh, I love that movie! Do you have that here? DVDs?”
This sloth won’t use her cookbooks. She will buy a small shelf at Target and have someone nail it into the wall in her kitchen. She will line up those cookbooks and love the way they look and throw a pizza in the microwave and tear into the DVD of You’ve Got Mail that she’ll truck across town to buy. She’ll never come back here again.
When she goes, Curtis gets it somehow. He knows he’s done.
“Dude,” he says. “For what it’s worth, I thought I was helping you out. That chick was hot. Bangable hot.”
“You don’t give out my address to strangers.”
“She said she knew you. And did I say bangable? Mad bangable.”
Let it be known that I only punched him once and not in the face. You better remember that, Beck. It’s not like I’m some monster and it’s not like I hurt him. I fired him, man to man, boss to worker. It wasn’t personal and it wasn’t hardcore and that fat lady was the first customer he treated well since week fucking one. Also, you’re not bangable, Beck. You’re beautiful. There’s a difference.
26
THE day after our sleepover without sex, you asked me to meet up with you in midtown. Curtis was gone and I was alone in the shop, but the day after a woman is naked in your apartment, everyone knows the only thing to say to her is yes. We picked up your new cable box. The line was a mile long. Then you sent me home.
And it’s been more of the same for the past two weeks. Today, you asked me to meet you in front of a Starbucks in Herald Square, where I stand now as you kiss me hello (on the cheek). You’re not gonna sit on my lap in an overstuffed chair and lick whipped cream off my upper lip. You’re in get-it-done daytime mode and Christmas shoppers walking by probably think I’m your gay best friend. My dick hurts, Beck. Where’s my holiday?
“So the good news is, I know exactly what I want.”
“You do?” I say and I hope you’ll ask me to eat you out in the bathroom at Starbucks.
“I want to get my mom those headphones that double as earmuffs.”
“Ah.” Digital earmuffs are the physical opposite of oral sex.
“And the better news is, I have a coupon,” you say and we are on our way into Macy’s.