He leaves, and the first thing I do is take your computer and sit on your couch and smell your green pillow and drink water out of your Brown mug. I washed it because his ashes lingered (you don’t know how to wash a dish). I read your story called “What Wylie Was Thinking When He Bought His Kia.” It’s about an old dude in California buying a shitty import car and feeling like that’s the last vestige of his life as a cowboy. The twist is that he wasn’t an actual cowboy. He just played cowboys in Westerns. But they don’t make Westerns anymore and Wylie never adapted. He never had a car because he spent most of his days at a coffee shop where guys like him sat around talking about the good old days. But they recently outlawed smoking—you italicize outlawed, which is cute—and so now the gang has no local place to smoke their cigarettes and tell their stories. The story ends with Wylie in his Kia and he can’t remember how to start it. He’s holding his key that’s just a miniature computer and he realizes he doesn’t know where to go so he buys an e-cigarette and returns to the coffee shop and sits alone smoking his e-cigarette.
I’m no genius MFA candidate in your workshops—seriously, Beck, they don’t understand you or your stories—but you yearn for what was. You’re a dead guy’s daughter, thoroughly. You understand Paula Fox and you aspire to make sense of all things Old West, which makes your settling, even temporarily, in New York a self-destructive move. You’re compassionate; you wrote about old actors because of the photography books in your apartment, so many pictures of places you can’t go because they aren’t there anymore. You’re a romantic, searching for a Coney Island minus the drug dealers and the gum wrappers and an innocent California where real cowboys and fake cowboys traded stories over tin cups of coffee they called joe. You want to go places you can’t go.
In your bathroom, when the door is closed and you sit on the toilet, you stare at a photograph of Einstein. You like to look into his eyes while you struggle against your bowels. (And believe me, Beck, when we’re together, your stomach issues will be over because I won’t allow you to live on frozen shit and cans of sodium water labeled “soup.”) You like Einstein because he saw what nobody saw. Also, not a writer. He’s not the competition, now or ever.
I turn on the TV and Pitch Perfect is your most watched thing, which makes sense now that I can see your college life on your Facebook. I’m finally inside, studying the history of you in pictures. You did not sing a cappella or find passion or true love. You and your best friends Chana and Lynn got drunk a lot. There is a third friend who is very tall and very thin. She dwarfs you and your little friends. This outsider friend isn’t tagged in any of the pictures and there must be something redeeming about her because you appear very proud of this friendship, which has lasted since your childhood. The untagged girl looks unhappy in every shot. Her nonsmiling smile will haunt me and it’s time to move on.
You dated two guys. Charlie looked like he was always recovering from a Dave Matthews concert. When you were with him you sat on lawns and did club-kid drugs. You escaped that drug-addled dullard and fell into the pin-thin arms of a spoiled punk named Hesher. On a side note, I know Hesher, not personally, but he’s a graphic novelist and we sell his books in the shop. At least, we do right now, but obviously, the first order of business on my next shift will be burying Hesher’s books in the basement.
You’ve been to Paris and Rome and I’ve never been out of the country and you never found what you were looking for in Hesher or Paris or Charlie or Rome or college. You left Charlie for Hesher. And you were cold; Charlie never got over you. He looks permanently drunk to this day in his pictures. You worshipped Hesher and he never reciprocated, at least not on Facebook. There are lots of posts where you praise him and he never responds. Then one day, you became single and your friends “liked” your status in a way that leaves no doubt that you were the one dumped.
Pitch Perfect has ended and I go to your bedroom and I am on your bed, unmade, and I hear the sound of a key entering a keyhole and turning, and a blitzkrieg in my mind, the landlord bitching to the gas man earlier today—
Smallest unit in the building, smallest fucking keyhole, always sticks
—and I hear you put a key into your keyhole and the door opens and the apartment is small and you are inside of it.
You’re right, Beck. It is a fucking shoebox.
4
I never go to Greenpoint, where people chase whiskey with pickle juice, but I’m doing this for you, Beck. Just like I hurt my back for you when I fell out of your window so you wouldn’t see me when I was trying to see you, trying to know you. And I hate that you could see me here now and think that I’m some dick who overestimates the cultural value of Vice and drinks whatever fucking Vice tells me to drink. I didn’t go to college, Beck, so I don’t waste my adulthood trying to recapture my time in college. I’m not a soft motherfucker who never had the guts to live life right now, as is. I live for living and I’d order another vodka soda but that would mean speaking to the bartender in the Bukowski T-shirt and he’d ask me again what kind of club soda I want.
I’m in a mood and you’re up there reading in yellow stockings and there are holes in them and you’re trying too hard. You left Charlotte’s Web but I don’t look so hot, either. I had to climb out your window and it’s a short fall, but a fall is a fall and my back stings and if I hear the word pickleback one more time, I swear.
Your best friends are at the table next to mine, loud and disloyal, real F-train types with the boots and the overprocessed hair that quietly insults all the Jersey girls that do that shit on purpose. The three of you were at Brown together and now you’re in New York together and you all hate Girls and complain about it incessantly but isn’t that exactly what you’re all trying to do with your lives? Brooklyn, boys, and picklebacks?
You sit with the other quote unquote writers, which allows your friends to go on about you and unfortunately, they’re right: You’re so much more invested in being a writer—accepting compliments and drinking whiskey—than you are at writing. But fortunately, they’re also wrong: Everyone in this room is too full of pickle juice to understand your cowboy story.
Your friends are jealous. Chana’s the big critic, a girl version of Adam Levine with beady eyes and unwarranted self-confidence. “Explain to me again what this fucking MFA shit does for you if you’re not Lena Dunham?”
“I think maybe you can teach?” says Lynn, and Lynn is dead inside, like a corpse. She Instagrams methodically, clinically, as if she’s gathering evidence for defense, like her entire life is dedicated to proving that she has a life. She loudly mocks your reading at Lulu’s as she tweets about how psyched she is to be at a #readingatLulus, and I’m telling you, Beck, I swear.
Lynn again: “Do you think this is like an art opening where you go once and you’re good or is this gonna be like . . . an every week thing?”
“Do I set up a fucking runway every time I finish a design?” Chana vents. “No. I work on it and work on it more until I have a collection. And then I work on it again.”
“Is Peach coming?”
“Don’t put that in the universe.”
They might be talking about the unsmiling tall girl but it’s not like I can ask them.
“Sorry.” Lynn sighs. “At least at art openings you get free wine.”
“At least at art openings you get art. I’m sorry, but a fucking cowboy?”
Lynn shrugs and it just goes on, a machine gun that won’t stop, can’t stop.
“And can we talk about her costume?”
“She’s trying too hard. It’s kinda sad.”
“What the fuck are those tights?”
Lynn sighs and tweets and sighs and the machine-gun fire quickens for the last round.
“No wonder she didn’t get into Columbia,” Chana snipes.
“I feel like this is all cuz of Benji,” says Lynn. “I feel bad for her.”
Benji?
“Well, this is what happens when you fall for a sociopathic party boy.”
All I hear is fall for and you love him and you lie to them, to your computer, to yourself and you think they don’t know it and they do know it and oh no. Benji. No.
I have to stay tuned, present, and Lynn sighs. “You’re being mean.”
“I’m being real.” Chana huffs. “Benji is a snobby little prick. All he does is get fucked up on overpriced drugs and launch pretend businesses.”
“What did he major in?” Lynn wants to know.
“Who cares?” Chana snaps and I care and I want to know more and I want to cry and I don’t want you to fall for anyone but me.