Twelve (13 page)

Chapter Seventy-Six

ANDREW WAKES UP
nervous. He fell asleep in his clothes on top of his bed, and he is sticky and uncomfortable and nervous. Today is the day of the party, and he doesn't go to parties like this. They happen, but he never goes, never hears about them till afterward. So when he showers, he wonders if he should have waited till later in the day because that might make his skin look better and he wants to look good when he goes to the party tonight, when he sees Sara. Maybe he should take two showers. He masturbates in the shower because he doesn't want to seem too horny if he ends up hooking up with her, which he understands is a long shot. Maybe he'll masturbate again if he takes another shower. Sara has a boyfriend, for chrissakes. He ignores this. There will probably be other girls at the party. He puts on jeans and a sweatshirt and makes himself eggs, scrambled with cheese and tomato and pastrami, then pours a glass of orange juice. He eats fast and does the dishes. He is nervous, and surprised that he is nervous, butterflies in the stomach even, this early in the day. What
to do today, he thinks. Today is really about tonight. Maybe he'll get a haircut. That's it. A haircut. You always look good after a haircut, if it is a good haircut.

At the Unisex Hair Connection, Andrew looks through the window at a forty-year-old homosexual with blond hair in a ponytail, tight black jeans, and shirt open down to his chest. The homosexual is cutting a woman's hair. Andrew decides he wants an old-fashioned barber-shop. He wonders, idly, if he is homophobic. He doesn't have any gay friends. He knows hardly any gay people. There is only one openly gay kid at school, and Andrew doesn't know him. But he knows he'd rather go to an old-fashioned barbershop. He thinks he remembers where one is, way over on Eighty-first Street.

There is a red and white barber's pole and a faded red awning that reads
THREE STAR BARBER SHOP
. Andrew walks in.

There are only three chairs in the place, in a row facing the big mirror. All of them are occupied. The three barbers are all short, all old, and all bald. They also strike Andrew as of the same demeanor and level of skill. They energetically, though carefully, snip away at their patrons, all of whom are middle-aged white guys in suits. It is lunchtime, and they have come to get old-fashioned haircuts.

Andrew moves his hands over the magazine rack next to the chair he waits in. There are many magazines;
Esquire
and
Entertainment Weekly
and
Sports
Illustrated
, but Andrew is drawn to the bright colors and lurid nipple detail
of Playboy
and
Hustler
. Shocked, he hastily covers them up and moves down the rack to pick up the day's papers. His eyes just move over the paper as he considers how they could have magazines like those in the waiting area. Weren't they just jerk-off books? What would you do with them here? Read them while you waited for the old short bald dudes to cut your hair? Talk about the women in them with other waiting customers, like
Take a look at those
!

All three barbers finish at the same time and look at him. Via the mirror, Andrew watches himself approach one of the chairs. The little man asks him, in a thick South American accent, what he wants. Andrew makes vague motions around his ears and says, “Just a trim, you know, clean it up a little bit, not too short.” The man nods and goes to work snipping around the ears. Andrew stares into the mirror, watching every cut. He worries that he should have been more specific but says nothing. When the barber moves to the back of his neck, he is confronted with all the short fuzz that runs haphazardly down Andrew's nape. The barber leaves for a moment, and Andrew anticipates the pleasant buzz of the electric trimmer. When the barber returns, though, he puts hot shaving cream on the back of Andrew's neck. Andrew sits up straight.

He still does not really have to shave; every once in a while, maybe once a week, he takes a safety razor to his face, dodging pimples and forgoing any shaving cream.
And now, for the first time, there is shaving cream on his body, and the barber has a straight razor that he is stropping on a piece of leather. Andrew has never seen a straight razor outside of the movies; it is thinner and keener than he expected, not the horror-movie death instrument, although it does catch the light. Andrew feels its sharp edge run against the back of his neck. Even, long pulls as the barber moves up and down and flicks the spent shaving cream into the sink every couple of strokes. When he is finished, he wipes Andrew's neck and asks if Andrew would like a full shave. Andrew almost asks “of what,” but considers it a milestone to be asked. He declines.

The haircut costs thirteen dollars, and Andrew notes the ten-dollar difference between that and what it would have cost at the Unisex Hair Connection. He walks out with the clean feeling of a new haircut and runs his hand through his hair a bunch of times. He stops and views his reflection in windows. How does the haircut look? He is not sure. On the way home, he gets a sandwich for lunch. The day is winding down. It is time to really start getting ready.

Naked in front of a mirror at home, he gives himself a full going-over, like a panning shot in a movie, the kind that starts at the toes and works its way to the head, except that it usually happens for women. Andrew looks at toes, shins, knees, thighs, balls, cock, pubic hair, faint traces of “treasure trail” between pubic hair and navel, navel, stomach, ribs, nipples, clavicle, neck,
and finally face. Special attention is given to the new haircut.

Andrew decides he looks bad. He is doomed. It is too short. It makes his forehead look too big and accentuates his pimples. He is all red, like the rotten mangoes his mother recently threw away. Who eats mangoes in the winter in New York, anyway?
Not me
, thinks Andrew. So
they went bad and got thrown away
.

Andrew puts on a clean shirt, Quicksilver, dark blue and stylish, and spends the next fours hour in front of his TV waiting until it's time to go to the party. He plans to get there at ten; he wants to be sure that Sara will already be there be cause, he realizes unhappily, he wont know anybody. Or he probably will. Everybody knows everybody. Sara said to come early, because kids would be there early and then all night.

Andrew decides that tonight might be one of those rare occasions on which he will get himself drunk.

Chapter Seventy-Seven

MOLLY WAKES UP
and jumps rope. It is her favorite exercise. She was queen of double Dutch at school. It was funny. There had been a kid in her class from the program that brought poor kids to the private schools. The girl introduced all her new white friends to double Dutch when they were in the first grade, and during recess that was what the girls would do. Molly was great at it. Years later, when nobody jumped rope in recess anymore, Molly still wanted to, so she bought one and jumped at home. She thought that when she exercised, she felt better. She did it sometimes when she was nervous too.

So now she is in her room gracefully jumping rope. The ceiling above her has black marks in one place where the rope slaps the ceiling every second with the same sound. Molly is counting down from one hundred; ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven, all the way down to zero.
All it is
, thinks Molly, as she feels a burning in her calves,
is the endurance of time
.

I know I'm going to work and do the hard thing and be good. There's no equivocation, so it's really just
waiting it out. I know I'm going to keep jumping, so it's just getting past sixty, fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven
...

Chapter Seventy-Eight

CHRIS DECIDES WHEN
he wakes up that he had better go buy some condoms, in case he finally gets laid tonight. Pops his cherry. Fucks her brains out. Fucks her raw. Fucks her hard. Fucks her from behind. Fucks her gratuitously. Taps that ass. Gets with her. Gets some. Gets in. Gets it on. Pokes her. Bangs her. Boinks her. Scores.

Does the hibbity-dibbity.

But what monster is more heinous than the man behind the counter. Chris walks casually into the drugstore. It is large, with the condoms in the back behind the pharmacy checkout. He grabs a plastic basket and prowls the rows of deodorants, picking one out. He gets some shampoo and a razor. He picks up some hydrogen peroxide, tosses it in his basket. Then, with an air of finality, he strolls to the back of the store and the condom display behind the counter. He makes as if to pay, then gives an audible
oh
and snaps his fingers: “Could I also have a pack of Trojans, please?”

“Which ones?” The man motions up and down the dizzying wall of contraceptives.

“Oh, umm,”
think fast, think fast
, “regular's fine.”
Please God, let there be a regular
.

The man hands him a pack of condoms. Chris pays for everything and leaves, walking as fast as he casually can.

Chapter Seventy-Nine

BACK HOME
, the maids are cleaning up. They'll be gone by five. Chris suspects people will start showing up not long after that. It's not like they have anywhere else to go.

Chris doesn't have much to do in the way of party preparation. He doesn't bother to move any of the valuable stuff, but he does rearrange his room beyond what the maid usually does. He has stuff that he doesn't want seen. He checks his stash of pornography and decides that it is well enough hidden (behind a grate in the ceiling). Then he thinks,
I'm about to get laid. I'll never need porn again. From now on I can get someone else to whack it
.

So he takes all his porn, a great armful, and shoves it into a garbage bag. He carries the bag downstairs, knowing that the garbage gets taken out every two days, and dumps it in the can behind the kitchen. Chris is elated by this disposal, feels liberated as he climbs the stairs to play video games for a couple of hours before showering and taking great care dressing himself.

Chapter Eighty

WHITE MIKE GOT
a pair of high-powered binoculars from his father for Christmas one year, and he looked into different windows with them. He never saw anything that interesting, but there was one window across the street that he had a good view into and liked a lot. It was a living room, and a family of five watched television and ate dinner in the room. White Mike imagined the times and travails of the family, and though he could not make out their features that clearly, he invented personas for all of them. There were two boys and a girl and the parents. The entire family, White Mike saw, was redheaded. The kids watched
The Simpsons
almost every night. The parents occasionally fought, and once White Mike saw them making out on the couch. He made a point of checking on them regularly. It was another one of the things he did. Like, it's eight-thirty, time to check on the Joyces, which is what he named them.

White Mike did not feel guilty about watching them. He didn't stay to watch the parents kiss on the couch
because that felt weird, but otherwise, he watched. White Mike didn't know why. Maybe, he thought, it was just voyeurism. Or maybe he was living through them. Whatever. Families interested him.

What the fuck, Mike,
he thought
. What do you do? You watch a family through a window with binoculars every night at eight-thirty. Fucking loser.

Chapter Eighty-One

ON THE WAY
back to his room from the shower, Chris pauses at his brother's door and knocks. There is no answer, but he can hear his brother padding around the room. Chris knocks again, harder. He hears the padding feet come closer to the door, and it opens a crack. It looks dark inside.

“Claude, you know I'm having an open house tonight. You know, like you used to have.”

“Yeah.”

“So I just wanted you to know, there'll be a bunch of kids here. Maybe some pussy for you.”

“Whatever.” Claude thinks about how he might engrave the handle of his sword.

“Tobias is coming. He's bringing some model from one of his shoots.”

“Whatever.”

“What're you doing in there, Claude?” Chris is thinking about how into these kind of parties Claude used to be.

“Nothing. Later.” Claude closes the door in his brother's face, turns around, and sees his room in candlelight. He
has drawn all the curtains and blacked out all light from the outside. Every candle in the house has been gathered and is now alight and flickering before him. More chips have been hewn from the wall. In front of the full-length mirror on the door to Claude's bathroom, there is a circle of candles on the floor. Another half circle surrounds the weapons closet. Locking the door, Claude goes back to the closet, opens it, and admires how the candlelight shines along the steel of his weapons. He takes out the sword, razor-sharp from his furious sharpening that morning, and walks over to the circle before the mirror. He stands in it and takes off his shirt. He is wearing jeans only, and he looks at himself in the mirror in the circle of candles, the sword in his hand. He looks quite attractive, like some sort of action hero at the climax of the movie. Just what he wants to look like. Claude is glad he stopped taking drugs. This is better.

Chapter Eighty-Two

AS ALWAYS
, White Mike notices the tops of the buildings as he walks. He sees gargoyles and urns in relief, and various edifices repeating in similar patterns from building to building, a function of zoning laws that requires new buildings in the best neighborhoods to be constructed to match the style of the neighboring buildings. They don't actually have to have solid cornices, as long as they look the same. The projecting cornices and gargoyles on some of the new buildings are in fact not stone but rather hollow, weather-resistant plaster. So White Mike knows that if he has to jump from rooftop to rooftop, he will have to be careful not to catch himself on any of the projecting cornices or gargoyles as he is landing, for while some of them would hold, others would snap and crumble.

White Mike knows he will never jump from rooftop to rooftop, even though he wishes he could. Just like he knows he's never going to fly. That is what he is thinking as he hails a cab to go to the special bird bookstore he has discovered in Midtown.

*

In the last year White Mike has gotten interested in birds and has read a lot of books about them, especially parrots. He has ordered some of them off of Amazon.com but gets most from the bookstore he is going to now. He has a decent little ornithological library. White Mike likes the whole idea of flight, and if anybody ever asked him, he could explain in scientific detail the mechanisms of the wing. He likes owls and condors and ospreys, but nothing has ever captured him quite like the parrot. Pirates had parrots. White Mike even considered getting a parrot and teaching it to talk, although he doesn't know what he would have it say.

Of course, he knows parrots don't think. They just imitate, just repeat.
But that's okay
, thinks White Mike.
Everybody sort of does that. And my bird will say the smartest shit you ever heard. None of this teaching the bird to curse or any of that
. The humor behind teaching parrots to say
fuck you
baffles him.

Such humor does not baffle Timmy or Mark Rothko. When the two of them, sitting on a stoop in the Fifties, see none other than White Mike get out of a cab and get buzzed into a nondescript building there on Madison Avenue, they are intrigued. First, because they smoked all their weed and need some more. And second, because they have nothing to do, and yo it's White Mike.

Mark Rothko flicks his cigarette into the street like a tiny, angry miner. He follows Timmy toward the
building, where they wait for a half hour until White Mike comes out.

“Yo, Miiike!”

White Mike just looks at them.

“Whas in there?” Timmy points at the small bundle of books White Mike is holding protectively.

“Some weed?” Mark Rothko asks hopefully.

“Books,” says White Mike.

“Yo, sorry, Mike. We gotta get some mo of dat shit.”

“Beep me later.” White Mike starts walking toward home. Timmy and Mark Rothko follow.

“What are you doing?” White Mike says.

“We comin' with you, man.”

“No you're not.”

“Yes we are, we gonna score some Chronic, yeah baby, yeah,” says Timmy. Mark Rothko nods in agreement and takes out another cigarette. White Mike looks down at the two of them and almost laughs. But he doesn't want these kids following him home, so he tells them that he'll work out a special deal for them if they get lost now and beep him later.

“Yo, we got the hookup.” Timmy practically jumps for happiness but is held down by his girth, low center of gravity, and cargo pants.

“Foh shizza my drizzle,” Mark Rothko concurs.

“What? Actually, never mind. You won't follow me now, right? Otherwise, no weed.”

“Yeah, fo'sho.”

White Mike leaves them behind, but he has overestimated
the power of his deal, because Timmy and Mark Rothko wait until he is two blocks ahead and then follow. They think maybe they'll find out where White Mike lives.

A block from home, White Mike gets something else he wants—a milk shake from Haagen-Dazs. They cost five dollars each. They are the best milk shakes in the city, in the world, as far as he knows. He chews on the straw and drinks it on his way home, so that the longer he has it, the more difficult it becomes to suck the sugary stew up out of the cup.

Mark Rothko and Timmy watch fascinated as their drug dealer drinks his milk shake. Mark Rothko thinks:
I'm gonna get one of those later
. He and Timmy follow White Mike down the last block to his apartment building. They stand across the street after he lets himself in. It is a small prewar building that looks just like hundreds of other buildings in the city, but not to Timmy and Mark Rothko—it is where White Mike lives.

White Mike is sitting at the kitchen table, sipping the last of his milk shake and looking at his new books, when Timmy and Mark Rothko buzz up.

“Hello?”

“Yo, it us.”

White Mike is pissed and goes downstairs quick to run them off.

“You little fuckers aren't getting any more weed, ever.”

“Awwww, man . . .” Timmy realizes their big mistake.

“Goddammit, Timmy. Now we'll never get blizzy.” Mark Rothko is pissed too.

“Get out of here.”

The two don't move for a second, and White Mike looks from one to the other. Just a couple of soft kids standing on the street, trying to get some weed, have some fun, fill the time, talk a certain way, dress a certain way, walk a certain way, be a certain way because the way they come from is unclear and uncool and with no direction, because no one really has anything to do, all across the city no one has anything to do, so they all do the same thing and make the same references to pop culture and their childhood cartoons (like,
Ghostbusters
was so much better than
Ninja Turtles
), and everyone wants to get laid and be the cool kid and everyone wants to be a jock, and everyone wants and wants and wants. White Mike is worried now about what will happen if other kids start showing up at his door. And White Mike doesn't want to give anybody else weed. So White Mike lets the two kids in.

After he gives Timmy and Mark Rothko their weed, he tells them he is going to get a bird, a parrot.

“That talks?” asks Timmy.

“Yeah,” says White Mike. “What should I name him?”

“Timmy,” suggests Timmy.

“Rocko,” suggests Mark Rothko.

“Rocko?”

“Yeah. So?”

“Nothin'.”

“Tupac.”

“Biggie.”

“Sylvester.”

“It's a guy bird, right?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you know? Do they have dicks?”

“I dunno.”

“Fine. Samantha.”

“Samantha?”

“S my mother's name, son.”

“Yo, sorry.”

“How 'bout Snoop?”

White Mike thinks immediately of Charlie Brown. “That's not a bad name,” he says.

Timmy and Mark Rothko burst into song:

“D-o-double-juh-zeee.”

“Snooop Daawwg.”

“Smoke till yo' eyes get cataracts.”

“Snooop Daawwg.”

“Who's that dippin' in the Cadillac?”

“Snooop Daawwg.”

“All right, enough.” White Mike shuts them up. “Snoop it is. Snoop the parrot.” Timmy and Mark Rothko nod triumphantly at each other.

“We call you tomorrow when we got the kiggity cash flow?”

“Fine.”

*

When they are gone, White Mike sits for a long time, thinking about adults. He is trying to pinpoint the exact moment when he didn't want to talk to them anymore. The only adults he talks to now are the ones he doesn't care so much about but has some kind of business with. Like Lionel. His beeper vibrates, and he takes it out of his pocket and puts it on the table, where it rattles violently. White Mike turns it on and off quickly to stop the shaking, at least for now.