Lakewood, Colorado. Fifteen minutes from Denver, but part of Denver, part of the semi-urban sprawl. Another fake downtown. They call them “town centers.” Still can’t tell if these are better or worse than strip malls. The “town centers” of imaginary towns, lofts above chain stores, advertised as “a taste of luxury,” they even admit it’s the taste and no more. We wander from store to store and feel the nothing in our veins, 100 proof. Make enough noise to cover the silence. Turn on the lights and the TV when you get home, turn up the music so your ears keep ringing when the song is over, drink so the room is spinning when you lie still, focus on the pain because it stays while pleasure is so unreliable.
My forehead is against the glass in the break room, looking down on “Main Street.” A group of children run out of a chain store, skip across the street, squinting their eyes against the wind, and crowd into another chain store. This is their childhood, this is their hometown, and they are all growing up across the country in the same hometown, a little apartment on the prairie, the mountains here mocking the claustrophobia. What a wonderful world where your favorite restaurant is in every town.
I pour a cup of coffee, dig out the milk in the back of the fridge that hasn’t quite gone bad, too bad for drinking but not for coffee, add too much bleached sugar, take a sip, spit it out, throw out the cup; it has a sickly taste, sort of nutty and sweet like rotting.
“You East Coast people are so judgmental,” says a voice behind me.
I don’t bother turning around, “The coffee tastes like death.”
“Always looking for the negative.”
“You do realize you’re judging East Coasters, right? You’re an anti-snob snob. I don’t think what I like is better than what you like; you think what I like is better than what you like and it makes you feel like you’re better than me.” I’m talking to the window.
“Negative negative negative,” she sings. I could kill her. “Negative New Yorker.”
“I’m not from New York City, I’ve never lived in New York City, I’m from western New York, it’s six hours away. I’m on my break, just…give me ten minutes to look out at this beautiful pastoral scene here.” Two people walk out of the Lucky Strike Bowling Alley across the street.
“Ne. Ga. Tive.”
“You want to hear negative? They use polyurethane bowling balls in that place, they’re not heavy enough to get a strike.”
“Always looking on the dark side.”
“Save me, turn me to the light.”
“I think it’s too late for you.”
“See, we agree on something," I say, "I’ve always thought that.”
The people in these fake downtowns jockey for parking spaces at a buck an hour. The parking garages are free, but they’ll pay a premium to drive around for 20 minutes to get a spot three blocks away from the Wet Seal they’re visiting. Two guys wearing the same pre-ripped jeans, turned-trucker cap and pre-faded ironic shirt nod at one another as they pass, do they know each other or are they just covering their bases? A baby in the restaurant screams like a banshee every ten seconds, the mother absently rocks the stroller back and forth while talking on her cell; babies are the “in” accessory, but how can one focus on one’s own high maintenance demands when one’s accessory is so high demand? In New York City there would be Rosalia or Lupita, but such delegation is frowned upon here; more’s the pity, at least the Upper East Side baby grows up with the illusion that the poor Hispanic nanny or postgraduate au pair is their mother who loves them. And daddy is off ice climbing again.
My “Colorado Leg of Lamb” is over-seasoned and was freeze dried despite coming from fifty miles away. The vegetables come machine cut in a bag and the mashed potatoes are third generation; the price, however, is pure midtown Manhattan. A fourteen year-old girl and her fourteen year-old boyfriend are making out and petting in the booth across the restaurant from me as they wait for the waitress to run her parents’ credit card. He’s wearing a Megadeth t-shirt with no sleeves; she has a Forever 21 bag. An odd couple? No, his shirt came pre-vintage from Hot Topic; she used to shop there too, judging by the plum lipstick she’s smearing on his chin; she probably used to have black lip-liner and a lip or eyebrow ring, but girls mature faster than boys and she’s taken a step closer to her eventual Juicy Couture destination.
“Your life is going to change soon,” says my boss. He’s only 31, three years older than me, but management has suited him so well I can’t think of him as Ted. It’s like how your girlfriend’s father is always “Mr. Goldman.” I call him Ted, but his placeholder in my mind is “my boss.”
“Excuse me, Ted, my life is going to change?”
“That’s right, buddy, we heard back from Jim Garry, and he’s turning all of his clients over to us and moving to Arizona. That’s ten accounts, fifty employees.”
“This month or next month?”
“Well, maybe a couple this month, but with the paperwork I’m thinking plan on April.”
“Okay, good news. Are there more that will come from that?”
“Isn’t ten enough?”
“Just asking. Is this a special quota or something for next month?” The teen couple paid their bill and are making out on their own time.
“Buddy. Dom. What are you asking?” He has that half-smile look that could go either way, prepared to be stern and managerial but waiting for, insisting on a punchline.
“I’m just trying to ascertain the way in which my life is going to change so I’m not caught off-guard.”
The smile widens slowly and he emits a hard sharp semi-automatic burst of a laugh. Then he expenses the lunch.
The bar I’m in has various old fashioned local artifacts posted on the walls, except they are made in China and uniform throughout the chain. The sign outside says “Water Street Pub, a neighborhood bar,” but there is no Water Street in Lakewood. There are 15 breweries and brewpubs within 15 miles but here they only serve Heineken, Amstel Light, Coors and (thank god) Guinness. A large out-of-season banner says “Go Broncos!” and a thousand miles away over an identical bar it says “Go Raiders!!”
I’m sitting across the table from Craig. I’m still wearing my work clothes, but no tie as I found people think it isn’t folksy. Craig is wearing overpriced jeans and a t-shirt over a thermal. The t-shirt says “Colorado: if you don’t ski, don’t bother.” He used to ski, but he hasn’t had health insurance for a while so it’s better not to. We’re pretending to watch the Nuggets lose on the bar TV.
Craig moved here from New York City six months ago; worked up to the midterm election raising money for the DNC off the streets of Denver, ran out of work and money; began temping again to stay afloat, and is trying to earn enough money to move away while he figures out where he is going and what he is going to do when he gets there. He moved to Denver to get away from the grind of making rent in Manhattan month in and month out, now he’s borrowing to make rent in Denver. We went to High School together, but he moved out here in August to live with a friend from college who asked him to come share his condo until he gets married next June and help with the rent. Then the fiancée wanted to move in early so Craig was kicked out, had to put all of his moving expenses on his credit card and ran out of debt-ceiling and began borrowing from his parents, so now we’re pretty much the only people we know in the state of Colorado. I was transferred here to sell payroll. My first three choices didn’t work out so they sent me to Colorado. Maybe I should have punted.
The Nuggets are blowing a 12-point lead and we start up our old familiar conversation topic: where are we going when we get out. He’s thinking Portland, Brooklyn, San Francisco, Boston or Los Angeles. I’m thinking New York, San Francisco or back to Rochester. He has more debt than I do, but I was stupid and bought a new car when I moved here, the installments hang around my neck like a stone but they’re not really more than Craig’s minimum credit card payment and at least I get a car out of it. Once he’s gone I’d better get started on business school or something or I’m liable to just drive off with it some day and never come back, steal my own car.
What would I say is Craig’s vocation, and what his avocation? Tricky question. It isn’t a simple matter of hours logged, or even of superior talent or skill in one or another field. Maybe he doesn’t have a vocation. At various times he has been paid to write, fundraise, sing, proofread, act, office drone and work as a Quality Assurance Analyst at a major advertising agency working for the evil empire account of the world’s largest pharmaceutical company (well paid, that). Out of these I’d say that he has met with the greatest success as a fundraiser. The particulars are as follows: Geraldine Q. Citizen is running to Starbucks on a 15-minute break. On the way there she encounters Craig, in a bright blue Democratic National Committee t-shirt (to match his eyes, which he insists change color depending on what he’s wearing, and they actually sort of do if it’s blue) and a clipboard stacked with blank credit card forms. “Would you like to help?” he asks. “With what?” she replies, cautiously. Five minutes later she has written her credit card number on a piece of paper for the amount of maybe $200, maybe $110 for the 110th Congress, maybe only $35 for a tank of gas. He raises about $800 a day. One day, in front of the Park Slope Co-op in Brooklyn, he raised $2400 from more than 60 donations. He started after the 2004 Republican National Convention protests, during which he marched plainclothes with the Billionaires for Bush (“Someone had a sign that said ‘Why change horses in mid-apocalypse,’ I bet they thought I was a cop.”), roamed around watching the police action (“They lured a crowd of 100 families and grandparents into this intersection, put up sawhorses, surrounded them with cops in riot gear and waded in, all of a sudden news crews show up to tape the violent protestors.”) and found the people doing the accurate headcount (“More than half a million, reported by the press as 100,000 crazies.”). After he tracked down some of the people to find out where they were taken (“This one girl had her back cracked by a cop that picked her up, literally, when she was writing ‘Peace’ on the sidewalk in chalk. They took her to that pier they all called ‘Guantanamo-on-the-Hudson,’ and she had to sleep with rats next to a puddle of oil, they transferred her twice, photographed and fingerprinted her, then let her go without charging her 72 hours later.”). He started raising in September and brought in $35,000. Then his office went to Columbus, OH, and worked as volunteer precinct captains for MoveOnPAC. He started again in Denver and raised $20,000 over a shorter period.
In New York he had a reputation for getting celebrity donations: Glenn Close, Tim Curry, Anna Paquin, even Carrot Top gave. The way he tells it, he’s working the front of Barney’s, a tricky spot because you have to clear the right-of-way, there’s a paparazzo that lurks there every day and a racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic Eastern European Republican that incongruously sells little delicate animals made of bubbles of glass, wide-eyed mice and pudgy panda bears. Glenn Close walks out of the store, “Ms. Close, would you like to help?” he asks, stepping adroitly out of her way, subtly drawing the clipboard across his body like a matador’s cape he ushers her out of the lane of traffic; he insists his success with those people is because he calls them by their proper names (“Although ‘Ms. Gudmundsdottir’ didn’t help with Björk.”). He gets Glenn Close for $500. At that very moment, Carrot Top gets out of a limo. Glenn Close and Carrot Top know each other (“Is there some sort of weird club they all get together at?”). Ms. Close drags Mr. Top over and demands that he make a donation, she then jumps into another limo and vanishes. Mr. Top, wearing three-times the makeup of Ms. Close, tries to get out of it and offers $20. Skipping hope and help entirely in favor of guilt and shame, Craig cajoles Carrot into a donation of $149, the cost of one Greyhound bus ticket for George W. Bush from the White House back to Crawford, Texas (“Coach, naturally.”); he has thoughtfully prepared a printout of the itinerary (“CK used to pitch people a $2700 plane ticket to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. But that didn’t approach standing in front of the pet store shouting ‘Dick Cheney is in there killing puppies right now!’”). That story is only so he can tell this story: one week later Tim Curry walked out of Barney’s and Craig got him to match by saying, “Last week Glenn Close gave me $500 on this very spot, are you gonna take that kind of shit from her?”
None of this led to anything, though, because he was working for a company hired by the DNC and not the DNC itself, so they never heard about him; immediately after both the unsuccessful 2004 and the successful 2006 campaigns it was back to temp job hell.
Once, a freelance gig making mad money at an ad agency resulted in a serious job offer. The amount was simply too high to pass up, and though he would be working for the evil empire he accepted that the evil empire had a lot of what he needed: money. After a week of vacillating and weighing his debt against his values he accepted (“I’m not selling out, I’m buying in!”). Then the job offer didn’t materialize (“Why give the cow benefits when no one else wants the milk?”). This happened two more times, each time with him leaving other jobs to be available (“They’re like that sick hot ex-girlfriend that treats you like shit, but it could be really great if she’d just see you as something other than a puppy that needs kicking.”).
The job itself was pretty unusual to begin with: he was being paid a ton to end-user test direct marketing materials and write user manuals for intranet applications. This wouldn’t be so odd except that he was QA’ing for coders in the IT group, and being an “end-user” implies the average consumer who doesn’t know computer language or programming. So he was hired to point out flaws in professional coders Flash programming when he couldn’t even write html. At a practical level he was checking banners, emails and WebPages across platforms for glitches, repetitions and spelling errors, and there were mistakes in almost every batch of materials so he didn’t have much difficulty justifying his usefulness to himself (“It’s the only job I’ve ever seen based entirely on IQ; it was all ‘which of these is not the same?’”). The higher-ups were not so easy to convince, every time they realized he was working there they’d “hiatus” him and he’d have to wait by the phone. When he wasn’t there they didn’t have anyone doing his job, and he was the last line of defense so they just sent the materials out with errors. He showed me their company website and there’s a huge error right on the splash page; and in one of their campaigns for a major hair-care line there’s a typical picture of a weird-alien looking model, filling both of her eyes are silhouettes of the photographer holding the camera (“They did billboards of that one, the photographer was ten feet tall.”). It’s a tough sell to be a Quality Assurance Analyst when no one cares about quality.
At present this paragon of factotumhood is working for a community organization providing low-income families with quality housing but he’s getting itchy (“Providing only religious families with housing, teaching abstinence to the community; it’s all ‘here’s your bread, where’s your Jesus?’”). They asked him to stay, every temp job he gets asks him to stay, but he’s about ready to call for an extraction.
I’m in a spot too because I hate this strip mall Podunk and the anti-snob snob yokels that populate it, but if I ask for a transfer to civilization they’ll fire me on the spot, and how will I pay for my shiny new car then? My best shot is to get into business school and become Gordon Gekko. At least Gordon Gekko does what he was made to do. I look back at the last seven years and “where it all went wrong” and it’s obvious: I was working at a not-for-profit in my hometown that was supposed to provide health benefits to the ballooning number of families below the poverty line and I found out the guys running it just joined a $100,000 country club. I kind of shrugged at the time, but after five months went by and more money was missing I skipped town to L.A. If only I didn’t have a conscience. Oh, Gekko.
“Portland?” I ask.
“Be pretty weird. There’s just that one girl I know there and I probably wouldn’t see her. She’s gone a little crazy. Last time she said she’d pray for me. I don’t know if she converted or she meant the sh’ma.”
“Boston?”
“I’d run into too many people from High School.”
“L.A.?”
“When I die I’m going to go there anyway.”
“S.F.?”
“Expensive, but I have a friend in the Lower Haight.”
“Would you live with him?”
“Not making that mistake again.”
“Brooklyn?”
“Probably. Expensive but doable, close to family, not Manhattan but near it.”
“And what will you do there, exactly?”
“Ripen and rot. I heard somewhere that if you sleep on your left side it wears your heart out faster.”
“Stop, oh God that hurts, just stop.”
“What? Okay fine, your life is pointless, but everyone else’s is too, doesn’t that make you feel better?”
“Stop, seriously, you’re killing me,” I laugh.
“It’s like you’re on a team! You’re a part of something! ‘Team Nothing’! ‘Captain Nothing and the Zero-Sum Cosmonauts’!”
“Wow.”
“Shall I continue?”
“Go right ahead.”
“Fine, I’ll quit.”
“Come on, you get there, you want to do something there, what do you want to do…act? Write? Be a lawyer?”
“I really at this point just want to die.”
“Ouch, oh ouch.”
“I just don’t have the fucking energy to do this, to go to another city and sift through a new bunch of flaky asshole morons again. The whole extended family thing isn’t going to happen at this point, I’m not going to find a bunch of people I can rely on and it makes me feel like a simp when people look at me and I have to give them this hopeful look like I have confidence they’re not just another moron. Oh, wait, didn’t you want honesty?”
“I thought I did, I guess just a little more diluted.”
“Okay, I’m going to move to Brooklyn, get a job doing what I’ve always wanted to do and meet the girl of my dreams.”
“That’s the power of positive thinking.”
“And one day she’ll go off her meds and kill us both with a shotgun.”
“Even your dream girl is on meds. I’m thinking of trying San Francisco,” I say.
“Why?”
“Because I haven’t lived there yet.”
“Have you ever even been there?”
“No.”
“I don’t know, man. I think you have to be closer to your family, see your sister’s kids more.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I don’t know,” I say. “I can’t move without a job because of the car. I can’t get rid of the car. I can’t go to business school there because they’ll pay for it here. I don’t want to stay here. I can’t ask for a transfer or they’ll can me. I can’t go back to Rochester because there’s no jobs worth having there, and I can’t move to New York because I don’t have the money or any idea of what I’d do when I got there.”
“And I’m getting out of here as soon as I can.”
“Right.”
“Now would be a good time for a brilliant idea,” he says.
“Wouldn’t it?”
We drive through the streets of Denver, circling and not stopping or parking and doing one drink and leaving, the Jewish Flying Dutchmen. Circling the streets can be tricky, as Denver has the worst drivers in America. To turn right, for example, they bring their cars to a complete stop while swinging left across the middle lane; then they begin drifting around the corner but slow down as soon as their front bumper makes the turn because they forget you can’t continue on your way until their entire car is out of your way. Turning left is even worse, as they refuse to edge into the intersection on a green light and turn on yellow; instead they park until the intersection is entirely clear. Sometimes it takes three green lights to make a turn when you’re the second car. They also stop on yellow lights and, quite often, on green lights, too.
“You want to get a drink there?” I ask, about a college-looking brewpub that at least doesn’t seem to be stuffed with sausage.
“No,” he drives on.
“Want to get dessert?”
“No. Yes. No. I don’t care.”
“Express a preference. We can stop at the Mission and do both.”
“Shitty cake doesn’t taste better because it’s vegan.”
The Mission Café is a local place with mostly overpriced mostly vegetarian mostly unimpressive food. Many of Denver’s various subcultures share the space, the jazz people playing downstairs while the swing dancers trample like mating rhinos on the floor above. There’s little overlap, Craig finds it depressing that everyone there is so cliquish and unfriendly but I like how that means they’ll leave you alone. Of course, sometimes they leave you alone too much; all the waitresses have tattoos and piercings and if you don’t as well you can wait a long time for service. I admit, I went to an open-mic there once and seeing how no one was there but the people queued up to go on, and how they paid no attention to each other’s sets, I wondered who the hell they were playing for.
Craig is less charitable about the place. He met a beanpole girl there with some ridiculous made up name and she invited us to a party. The party was in a bombed out auto-maintenance garage that had been converted into a bike shop/living space (all the insufferably Earth-conscious ride bicycles) with minimal ado. The kids that lived there were all much younger than us and pretending not to be rich; pretending pretty well, as the place was fucking squalid. I just sat on a torn couch and went catatonic but he played the game for a little while, sorting through people’s shit they were selling or throwing out as the place had been condemned and was going to be torn down. He got a free copy of “Silent Spring” but never got around to reading it, being more of a fiction person. We had some laughs pretending I was an off-duty policeman when the kids started smoking up, and later that Craig had bought the garage and was going to put in a TGI Friday’s (“We’ll put the margarita bar here!”); they were high, stupid and aghast, they really believed us. They had vegan lasagna and vegan fish and there was some argument amongst them as to whether one is a true vegan if one’s diet consists of meat-substitutes, soy cheese and other “impostor” foods, or if the only true vegans were the ones that ate “true” foods like plain tofu and falafel. I asked about the raw diet and got a dirty look. None of the guys showered, the girls had terrible skin and half the time the beanpole was either fending off or subtly encouraging the advances of a kid trying to look grungy by going unshaven in a brand new Le Tigre shirt who didn’t get the memo on the difference between the “hot asshole” act and the “plain asshole” act. We gave up after they started playing “Giants, Wizards and Dwarves” in an alley, feeling very very old.
The beanpole came out to an Apples in Stereo concert with us the next week but lost interest and wandered off halfway through. We ran into her at an all-night diner a few hours later and she ignored us. Then a few weeks later I passed her on the street, she stopped me and told me to say hello to Craig and have him call her. He called her and left a message and she never got back to him. He also writes fiction, plays and poetry, but he never tries to publish any of it, which I find ridiculous. He says that frees him to toss off things like the following for his own amusement, without worrying about how formally observant they are or, frankly, how consistent they are. Anyway, with this whole situation he wrote some verses about it in the cadence of the early poseur rap from a 1980’s Fruity Pebbles commercial and read them at the Mission’s poetry night; let’s just say it didn’t help his cause.
There’s a girl I like but I don’t fit in
It’s a different situation than I’ve been in
She’s not a foot soldier of the establishment blob
I’m in love with a dirty fake hippie snob
She won’t eat but claims she’s not anorexic
She dropped out of school cause she says she’s dyslexic
She’s way cooler than me but I think it’s absurd of
Her to only like bands that no one’s ever heard of
I met all her friends and they weren’t that friendly
The guys were all stoned and the girls were bi-trendy
They live in a warehouse without heat or water
With a CEO’s son and a Senator’s daughter.
The place was condemned; they were getting kicked out
They had a last blast with PBR and Vegan trout
They were giving away for free all their things
So I grabbed somebody’s paperback of “Silent Spring”
I follow her to opening bands and open-mics
For the coffee-shop folkie music that she likes
That sixteen year-old white girl can sure sing the blues
I really believe she killed her lover down on the bayou
We saw a MySpace band in a microbar
They used a theremin, a zither and an old keytar
To play a deconstruction of “Crimson and Clover”
But they released a record so now they’re over
I had them needle over every inch of my skin
And my face is covered with hooks and pins
My pierced lip turned green and started to ooze
And I think I’m allergic to the ink in tattoos
I had to shave my head; I had to wreck my shoes
I had to learn the names of fifty microbrews
I threw out all my Modest Mouse, White Stripes and the Shins
And I vote for people that can’t possibly win
I bought a bike and I lost my job
Now I’m a 24-hour fake dirty hippie snob
I know how all your scorn is well deserved
But if you don’t look the part then you never get served
When I came here I heard individuals ruled
And exclusionary cliques were establishment tools
I guess I thought I’d just walk in and belong
But it seems like my basic conception was wrong
I thought it was about love and understanding
Not silly haircuts, tattoos, lip-gloss and glad-handing
I thought it was about a great world we haven’t made yet
Not opening up a fucking Cracker Jack box and finding a coupon for your Coors-sponsored government-issued sub-culture alternative-personality set.
“We’re wasting my gas,” I say, “what do you want to do?”
“Nothing. I am out of motive-power. I don’t have the energy to do anything. Stop at one of these places and go through it all to pick up a girl; get stinking-drunk; more energy than I have. Move somewhere else, meet new people; I don’t even like people, not these fucking people anyway.”
“We have three days until we have to be anywhere. Should we just drive out to the mountains?”
“That costs money,” he says. “Gas, hotels, bullshit, it just sets back the last week of bullshit I had to do to save up that money, it undoes it.”
“Come on, split gas and a hotel and it won’t top a hundred bucks each. If you were still in New York you’d be spending that much just to go out.”
“Fine. Sure. Let’s go.”
“Do you want to?”
“I have no desire, I am a machine. I don’t fucking care. Drive off a cliff; buy a gun and kill me, please; drive to the mountains, whatever. It’s your day.”
“Oh no, not that!”
The phrase “it’s your day” came into usage one time when I told Craig we could go anywhere he wanted and then proceeded to veto every place he mentioned. It’s the same style as “let me know if I can do anything to help you,” which comes from the social situation where somebody who wants to feel like a person who helps others but doesn’t actually want to go through the bother of actually helping them will offer their assistance. The fake conversation goes like this:
“Hey, anything I can do to help.”
“Oh, that’s great, I can use some help. Can you help me?”
“Yeah, anything I can do to help, call me.”
“No, I really actually need some help right now. Can you help me?”
“Anything you want champ, I’m here for you. Give me a ring later, ‘cause I’m a helpful kind of guy. The kind of guy who helps people, that’s me! See you later, tiger, keep up the good fight!”
“(Dejected sigh).”
I think about driving out to the mountains. Putting it on my credit card. Actually visiting Durango or Vail so I don’t have to explain why I never did for the rest of my life.
“Okay. No. I give up,” I say.
We both have Good Friday off. Back in High School, school would close for Passover: it takes all sorts. Every weekend we’ve been taking field trips of sorts, over to Boulder; up to Fort Collins; further up to Laramie and Cheyenne, Wyoming, we keep meaning to drive down to Colorado Springs but just can’t get ourselves to make the 120-mile roundtrip (“I don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze,” Craig says). To the west we’ve explored Golden, where the air is filled with the doughy smell of the Coors mega-brewery pumping out its macroswill. Golden has these really accessible looking mini-mountains around it, they look like you could wake up, walk out your front door and just keep going to the top of one; there are no fences so I suppose you could. It also has a great little art center near the university with small but well-curated shows, and a general store packed with everything from Mallow Cups to local-made beef jerky, to western wear and ancient Coke machines for sale.
After Golden we’d only made it as far as Idaho Springs, a little mountain town with a brewery, the original site of a statewide pizza chain, a mom and pop ice cream “Shoppe” with homemade fudge, and not much else; peaceful, though.
Further south we made it out to Dinosaur Ridge and the Red Rocks amphitheatre. Red Rocks was closed in preparation for a John Mayer-Sheryl Crow concert. We asked if we could look around, they said we could if we came to the show, we said, “No thanks.” Dinosaur Ridge is where the exposed rock is so old there are actual dinosaur tracks impressed in it. Of course, tourists were having trouble seeing the difference between a huge dinosaur footprint and rock fissures, so they helpfully had all the footprints colored in; now it looks completely fake.
North of Idaho Springs we drove through Lyons and Estes Park and into Rocky Mountain National Park. Lyons was much nicer than I’d expected, packed with smart and thoughtful shops and restaurants to catch people exactly like us; the Oskar Blues Brewery there accomplished the difficult task of putting a good darker beer into a can. At Estes Park we visited the hotel from “The Shining,” and had to wait for an entire herd of Elk to cross the road. In the National Park we drove to one of the mountain lakes and then to an overlook where we could see about 50 square-miles of unbroken wilderness. We climbed an outcropping to get a view minus the traffic from the road and it took me 20 minutes to get down from it; I’m like a cat, I scramble right up and then I’m stuck. It’s sort of embarrassing; I actually started shaking and had to slide down on my ass. I don’t really understand it. I don’t feel connected to wherever that fear of falling was coming from.
We usually take my car because the “check maintenance” is red on Craig’s, a souvenir from the winter: just before Christmas we were hit with three feet of snow that immediately froze into ice. When I visited NYC recently, there was an ice storm and two days later the whole city was screaming for blood because every last cube wasn’t off the road yet. Well, here in Denver the roads had a 2-foot high ice shelf covering them for SIX WEEKS. Wheels wore deep grooves in the shelf, which resulted in a jagged center sticking up to tear the underbelly out of your car. While a few main drags were cleared, side streets and some major avenues even in the center of downtown remained barely passable for all six weeks. Council members even stopped lying to their neighborhoods that help was on the way, they just waited until the cars wore it away, even refusing to use salt. During those six weeks, most of the city stayed at home; in the middle of the day going downtown could feel like driving on the moon, craters included. The ice did eventually get worn down, and then there was more and again it was left there until this time it melted on its own. The endlessly repeated phrase during this stretch was, “This never happens here!” but apparently it does. At some point the maintenance indicator in Craig’s Civic turned to yellow and then to red. He has been stalling, hoping it will magically heal itself or something will jolt it back into line. Normally I’d say that’s stupid, but in Craig’s case he’s had a TV, a cell phone and an iPod, all of which could be restored to working order from the brink of the junk pile with a firm and convincing punch (“It’s the American way,” Craig grins).
Instead of going home we go to Wynkoop Brewery. In their second-floor pool hall they have an unusual v-shaped table, and they don’t charge for it. Their best beers are seasonal and not bottled; once they’re gone they’re gone, so we go there a lot. I’m drinking cream ale and Craig has a smoked porter. It’s tough not to become a beer snob when the stuff’s this good and there’s little else to do; that might account for how serious Coloradoans are about their alcohol, there seem to be more liquor stores in Denver than in Manhattan. My cream ale is good, but it can’t compare with Genesee Cream Ale from High Falls Brewing Company in Rochester; there are beers and then there are religions.
“How is the job going?” I ask.
“It’s all right, but my boss keeps reprimanding me for things she hasn’t told me. I got a call from her husband and couldn’t find her, he says he’ll call back, when I see her I tell her and she’s, like, indignant, ‘Whenever my husband calls come and find me, whatever I’m doing!’ I’m like, ‘Sure,’ and she gives me this look like she thinks I should be more remorseful, and…can we talk about something else? I’m boring myself here. I’ll fall asleep on the fucking pool table. I will say this, my time is up next week and the one good thing about temping is how many last days you get.”
“Last days?”
“Last day of work, the best day. You get to walk around and think, ‘I’ll never have to set foot in this place again.’ Everyone says, ‘Be sure to visit,’ and I say, ‘Sure thing!’ While thinking, ‘Sucka!’ But you, my friend…you I truly envy. Your life is about to change.”
“Fuck you, my life is never going to change.”
We’ve played pool together on maybe a thousand tables, in L.A., Rochester, NYC and Denver, and I’ve never beaten him a single time in a full game. It isn’t that he’s that good, he’s streaky, it’s that either I play terribly or it looks like I might win and one of us knocks in the 8-ball. Still, not once, so he must be pretty okay, and I know he doesn’t hit in the 8 on purpose, but we’re talking 2,000 to zero.
He finishes it off and re-racks. Some girls are standing nearby but there are too many and we’re not up for it. One of them separates from the pack and comes over to me.
“Is there some special way you play on this table?”
“No. You just play.”
“Are there special rules?”
“No,” aren’t I friendly? “We’re playing normal bar rules. We just break from one of the points of the V.”
“Can I try?”
“Sure,” she calls another friend over from the group.
Out of all eight they’re the only two I’m not attracted to. Craig writes these fucked up depressing fortune cookies, he calls them “Misfortune Cookies,” and this feels like one of his.
I whisper to him, “My fortune is: YOU HAVE A MAGNETIC PERSONALITY FOR UNDESIRABLE THINGS.”
He counters with, “No, your fortune is: YOUR STANDARDS ARE FAR TOO HIGH.”
She sets up the break from the wrong place, immediately in front of the rack at the angle, and her friend keeps shooting after slop. They giggle as they cheat and we lose graciously.
“Wanna play again?” she ventures, biting her lower lip.
“Nah, we should get going.”
We’re at another all-night diner, packed in with half of Denver.
“If you stay with the job,” Craig says, “you can get your MBA. That’s what you want, right?”
“I don’t ‘want’ anything. I just need to have some sort of plan and without a better one my plan is ‘make more money.’ If I’m going to be miserable I’d rather be miserable but able to do whatever I want.”
“If you stay at this job long enough what will they promote you to?”
“There’s only my boss’s job in some other city. And you’re saying that like there’s some sort of progression. First, they usually take people for his job from other companies; second, if I stay longer I’ll probably get headhunted away by one of those other companies; and third, my life doesn’t have a plot, there is no progression, nothing leads to anything.”
“Come on, you sound like me. You were doing the phone job and you waited it out and they promoted you to this job, there’s the progression.”
“This job sucks.”
“Does it suck less than the phone job?”
“Yes.”
“Progress! Maybe the next one will suck even less.”
“I don’t want to be management,” I say. “It freaks me out. I see what it does to people. I’m labor. I’ve never been management. I don’t think I want to be.”
“Shouldn’t that be what qualifies you to be management? Like how we’re suspicious of people that really want to be President? I mean, I feel the same way, but wouldn’t we be better at it?”
“It’s not a question of better, of course we’d be better at it. I’m scared of what it does to people. It turns them into petty little zombies.”
He says, “Your fortune is: YOU DESERVE BETTER – BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN YOU’LL GET IT.”
I respond, “Your fortune is: YOU ARE VERY ACCOMPLISHED IN SEVERAL INCONSEQUENTIAL AREAS.”
I started this job back in Rochester, in a call-center in the corporate headquarters. This was after Los Angeles, when I moved back in with my parents to pay down my debt. When I started at the job, endless phone calls setting up appointments for sales reps, which is what I am now, they said, “Work here for a year and you can move with the job anywhere you want!” I kept working there and people started quitting. Then more people quit. Then I heard they don’t actually follow through and send you anywhere so I started looking for another job. One day my boss calls me in and says, “Where do you want to go?” It caught me so off guard that I took a quick look at the openings and said LA because there wouldn’t be a long acclimation period and I wanted to get the hell out of Rochester before they changed their mind. The person that ran the LA office was a typical LA moron dickhead, and he never filed the paperwork, so I looked again and said Portland; I’d never been there but Craig says it’s nice. The people in Portland made me take all of these tests; then said they lost the tests; then said they lost the results; then said I did top percentile but they wanted to hire a local. I was more worried than ever that they’d yank the offer, so I looked at the now quite short list and picked Colorado. Problem is that this turned out to be a new territory carved from a larger one and it’s barely big enough a rep to do it on their/my own. The girl before me grew up in Lakewood and knew everyone there so she cleaned up, that inflated her numbers and then she took off and it looked big enough to require its own rep. The second problem is that where in New York you can tell people that they’re saving money by having us do their payroll because time is money, people here are perfectly happy to waste hours and hours doing it themselves because there’s nothing else to do. Then they mess it up, get audited, and it costs them five times the time and five times the number they balked at that we gave them. I go out to speak to accountants and they’re supposed to refer me clients but they don’t, really. My boss said I look too official and obviously not like a local so I got rid of the tie. I asked if the girl who used to work here could introduce me around, they said no. I’m doing okay, something like number 10 out of the 50 in my training class, but I don’t feel like I’m doing well. I feel like I’m doing crap. More than 50% of the sales reps quit during the first year anyway, I still don’t know which side of that line I’ll end up on. I feel like I’ve been treading water for a long time and soon I’ll start sinking.
It would help if any of the relationships I cultivate wouldn’t turn out to be weird. When I first moved out here I was dating this girl named Rivka for a little while and that helped me acclimate a little bit. She was from Arizona and was going to DU Law School to become a civil rights lawyer, but she kind of pulled that out of a hat. She was living at home with her parents, sitting around the house and working at a coffee shop, they convinced her to apply to law school but wouldn’t pay for it. We got along okay and explored the area together, but she was obsessed with this band called The Cosby Sweaters to the point where it was unhealthy. They were a real hoot of a band: no record label would touch them because they were too “independent,” yet their songs and audience were so middle of the road and mopey-teenager-centric that they were constantly touring with crappy mainstream teenybopper bands. She was a total apologist. The cracks revealed themselves slowly: she went out of town to Vegas for the weekend and when I found out why she went I felt like something was up. Then she told me she went there by herself to see the band; then she mentioned it was to try to meet their lead singer; then it came out that she was friends with the girlfriend of one of the band members; then it came out they were only friends online and she’d expected the girlfriend to hook her up with the lead singer; then it came out that she’d spoken with the lead singer once and felt they had a “real connection.” I wasn’t exactly the stabilizing influence she probably needed either, so it was a relief when she dropped out of law school after a month and moved back south. I think she used part of the loans she took out to get her own apartment. It’s a start, I guess.
Good Friday morning we go to a breakfast place and drop $30 on fancy omelets and coffee. Mine has green chilies because everything in this part of the country must have green chilies. Craig’s doesn’t come with an English muffin so he asks how much one is. The overmoussed waiter says two dollars; when Craig balks he says, “You can always go get a pack at Albertson’s.” We don’t tip.
Craig is truly amazing at getting bad service, and as a frequent observer I can confirm that it isn’t actually his fault. If he asks for something then they’re out of it, if he asks what’s in something then they don’t know, and some huge percentage of the time his food is brought out uncooked, burnt, the wrong order entirely or he’s mischarged, it’s uncanny. I think he just accepts it at this point. At first I assumed he was doing something to piss off the waiters but no, even the ones that try to flirt with him mess up his orders. Once a waitress read off a whole list of specials, Craig immediately ordered the first one she listed; she replied that they were out of it.
The weather sucks so we figure we’ll go see a movie. He wants to see David Lynch’s “INLAND EMPIRE” and I want to see Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s “Grindhouse.” They’re both three hours so we can’t see both but, this being Colorado, “INLAND EMPIRE” will only be playing at one theatre for a week, while “Grindhouse” will be around for maybe two or three. Meanwhile, “Ghost Rider” plays for three months.
I’m asking Craig about getting out to meet people. It’s the same questions and the same answers as always; it’s just the thing we do.
“What about Mensa, why not go to one of their meetings?”
“I don’t know, I know I joined it but all of the magazines are so self-satisfied. They’re always trumpeting celebrities but the best they can do is Geena Davis. Everyone just joined so they can say they’re in it.”
“The girl from ‘Dead Like Me’ is in Mensa.”
“I’ll move to Vancouver.”
“Why did you join if you’re never going to go to any of the meetings?”
“I joined to meet girls.”
“So go meet girls.”
“No, because I’m stupid now,” he says. “Smart goes away when you don’t use it. I haven’t had anything to be smart about in so long it’s gone away. And they’ll probably be creepy shut-ins anyway.”
“That’s your target demographic. What about playing basketball?”
“You don’t make friends at the gym. No one talks to each other, and I don’t play in the running games, anyway, I just shoot.”
“You used to pick up girls at coffee shops.”
“That was in New York, and infrequently. You know, all the times we’ve been to bars, must be hundreds, I’ve never picked up a single girl at a bar. With you or without you. Actually, never in my whole life.”
“You’re better off,” I say. “But let it not be said that we don’t make a terrible team.”
We have a little while before either movie, so we go to the REI flagship store. This store is the high temple of Colorado. People come here just to gaze longingly at a special mummy sleeping bag or rock-climbing axe. The clothes are nice, but everything they put on a shelf immediately winds up on everyone’s back. This is the mindset we are trying to shake, but we wonder if we just get the full costume with locally made Keen shoes and Capilene thermals, will it make us fit in or just stress further how much we don’t belong here. The centerpiece of the store is an enormous custom-built climbing wall. You can see spry sixty year-olds and precocious six year-olds scurrying up it every day, with their proud cargo-pant-wearing family members looking on.
“Let’s buy it,” I say. “Let’s get all this shit, put it in my car and go learn how to camp.”
“Dude, you’re born doing this or you’re not. It’s like appreciating classical music, you have to grow up in that kind of house.”
“Weren’t you a boy scout?”
“For two seconds,” he says. “I got my orienteering, archery and riflery badges, shot a squirrel and got the hell out of there. I even went to Massaweepie, that summer camp upstate.”
“What was it like there?”
“Total sausage fest.”
“But your sister goes camping.”
“My sister was also senior class president, we’re from different planets.”
It’s true, Craig actually went to Catholic school for 8th-10th grades. When he came back to our public high school the year after his sister graduated nobody even guessed they were related. As for the Catholic school, I think it had something to do with some fight he had with this fat kid in seventh grade. We were all out on the playground and someone threw a soccer ball at Fat Kid’s head. Then everybody points at Craig and says he did it. Craig isn’t even paying attention. So Fat Kid runs up to Craig and tackles him at full speed. The way Fat Kid tackled, though, left his head right next to Craig’s fist, so Craig is being squashed by the kid’s fat gut but he’s just punching away at his face. Eventually they tear them apart and they suspend Fat Kid for fighting. Then they suspend Craig, too, and his parents sent him to the Jesuit school.
“What was it like at Loyola?” I asked him.
“Total sausage fest,” he said. “It’s like how guys get when there are no girls around, complete assholes, except all the time. Nazi fucks. If that school was burning down there were maybe two kids I’d have dragged out.”
It sounded like a pretty strange place to me. They had a bunch of different Vice Principals, and the main one was the Vice Principal in Charge of Discipline, and he was also a Private Investigator on the side. Detention was called JUG or “Justice Under God,” and consisted of writing two words like “conduct” and “discipline or “conduct” and “character” over 500 boxes on both sides of a piece of paper. One of the words was usually “conduct,” so he’d casually grab two sheets at detention, hide one, bring it home and fill in half the boxes. He said he’d had 45 JUGS in 8th grade. He even won some “Get out of JUG free” passes at a raffle and they wouldn’t let him use them. The school was obsessed with sports, in the way most all-boys schools are, but their teams invariably lost. Because of his blue eyes and dirty blonde hair he doesn’t look very Jewish, but his nose was bigger then and he got a lot of, “Hey, Barash, did you break your nose?” from kids in the know.
He wound up hanging around with a group of kids that everyone called “The Black Team,” this was back in 1994. They all dressed in black and some were trendy pagan in the way kids at religious schools are. They dated girls from the sister school, “Our Lady of Sufferance,” most of whom had a pentagram drawn somewhere on their bodies and read tarot cards. The nominal leader of the crew, Steve, was obsessed with weapons. His father had an entire person-sized safe filled with guns and Craig and Steve used to spar with wooden knives. Steve showed him how to play with all those ninja turtle toys like a pair of steel-nunchaku, they were very competitive. Steve’s father used to beat him up and throw him into walls, so every few months Steve would run away. He stayed at Craig’s house once, and during a mission back to pick up some of Steve’s stuff they wound up having to jump off the roof. Then Steve slept with Craig’s girlfriend and they stopped hanging out. Craig was never all that into Wiccans or weapons anyway. Steve was expelled for bringing a gun to school. He moved down to Tennessee near some relatives, had a kid, and then joined the Army. Steve considered himself a career grunt. He did a tour as infantry in 2004 and went back to Iraq twice, voluntarily; on his third tour he was blown up by an IED. I don’t think Craig has a single piece of black clothing in his closet today.
One good thing came out of their rivalry: Steve always did the plays they put on over with Sufferance, so Craig got competitive and started doing them too. Steve’s father made Steve stop, but Craig kept at it. He was the lead in our first grade play too, come to think of it.
We didn’t know each other very well growing up. Barely at all, really. All I remember is that we went to the same Hebrew School during Middle School and he always used to watch “The Disney Afternoon.” And that he was a pitcher in Little League and I got my only hit off him. I never let him forget that. Hebrew School was pretty useless, I can sound out Hebrew now but I don’t know what any of it means; I guess it was worth it for the Bar Mitzvah money. We’d get there at 2pm but the classes didn’t start until 4pm and sometimes not even then, so we’d roll up the aluminum foil they wrapped the pizza bagels in and play soccer with it; me and this fat kid and this boring kid. Craig had always been a latchkey and liked to be alone, so he just watched TV, but I’d always play soccer. The fat kid thought he was tough and tried to bully Craig, he thought Craig was scared of him; I never thought he was scared, just not interested in conflict. I didn’t blame him for not liking the fat kid, I didn’t like him either, I was just really fucking bored. I also remember that “Goof Troop” sucked.
We weren’t friends when he came back to the public school, either, though we were friends with some of the same people. He was doing the leads in the plays and I was doing, well, just school, but we both hung out with the kids in the library instead of the kids in the cafeteria. I remember he got banned from the library for five six-day cycles for talking back to the librarians. Our High School was around number five in the country then, and more than half-Jewish. I never thought of it this way, but Craig pointed out to me that in our grade there was a real divide between the Jewish kids and the ones that seemed to live the normal High School experience. When I was a freshman we didn’t even have a Varsity football team, all the kids played soccer instead. I played modified football in seventh grade, but everyone did, they made me the fourth-string center, why I have no idea. They had me at defensive back on the other side of the ball and I remember late in one game we were winning or losing by fifty points and there was a pass I could have picked off. I started to reach for it, then realized I just didn’t see the point of getting flattened by 20 kids in battle gear. Football wasn’t really for me. Anyway, the sports teams were almost entirely non-Jewish, and so were the groups of kids that you’d think of as conventionally popular, although I think the actual most popular kids at our school were the smartest kids, there was a real cult of the grade and SAT. The most popular were these two brothers that were both in AP classes and in the school band. Then, on the other hand, student council, prom king and queen, the sports teams, almost all non-Jewish. Most of the cafeteria kids, too. I don’t know if I’m imagining that but it seems strange. Craig went to Northwestern for theatre and I went to a SUNY for…what the hell did I major in? I don’t remember, but I lived over a bar.
Next time I saw Craig was in Los Angeles. I’d done some plays in my time off from the job I was at back in Rochester, so when I split for LA I thought I’d give acting a shot. Okay, actually I thought I’d show up and they’d hand me a contract on the spot. I went out to Newport Beach with my father on a business trip, spent a week looking at the molded plastic bodies and eating room service, then his trip ended and I had to head up to LA knowing nobody and nothing about it. I’ve since found out that this is the time period during which things are most likely to happen for you, when you’re too stupid to know any better, to know that things never actually happen there. Craig tells it that on his first day he was in line at the Post Office reading Backstage West and this model-looking girl goes, “anything good in there?” He didn’t really follow up because he figured it was going to happen all the time there…it never happened that way again. He even had a distant cousin offer to bring him on auditions; he went with her to one or two, then he had to get his stuff from Chicago, when he got back she never offered again.
I was staying at the Holiday Inn on Sunset near LaBrea, right next to the In-n-Out Burger, so not bad; apparently he was living three blocks away. My parents found out that he was out there, Jewish Geography, and he offered to show me around. He had been doing the film extra thing for a while, trying to get into the Screen Actor’s Guild, and it was getting him nowhere. I was frankly put off by it because I’d heard that once you become an extra you stay an extra. We started hanging out; he’d had a lot of psychotic unreliable LA roommates so because we could count on each other financially we moved in together out in Sherman Oaks. We lived there for a year, then he left for New York. I stuck it out another year before packing it in and heading back to Rochester. There are many stories of our time in Los Angeles, but I’d honestly rather not remember them.
In New York, Craig lived in what was basically a garret. He was sharing a one bedroom and his whole space was 8 feet by 8 feet. He couldn’t move, though, because the rent was so cheap and he was at 28th St. and 3rd Avenue, right in the middle of the city. Meanwhile, I was back living with my parents to save money, which wasn’t actually that bad as they’d bought a new house and I had an entire floor to myself.
Living in Rochester was fine, different from when I’d been there just out of college, but I was there for a purpose: reduction of debt. I got to spend time with my sister’s kids and had some people to hang out with, but I always hated running into people from High School because they’d stayed there and I’d left. Worse, I’d left and had to come back. I didn’t really think of the trade off of taking the job in Colorado, getting the car and having to factor in rent again, moving there I put myself in the same situation I left LA to get out of, except here there isn’t even anything I want to do. I don’t camp, I don’t snowboard and I don’t rock climb. So I drink beer.
We get out of “INLAND EMPIRE” and I ask him, “What the hell was that all about?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have some idea.”
“I’m not holding out on you this time, I have no clue at all.”
“Come on, you’re made out of opinions.”
“Well, I think it had something to do with making and watching movies, representations and how they help us resolve ourselves. Maybe Laura Dern’s character was more of an archetype than one character, or a character playing a character or so on.”
“And the creepy Polish lady?”
“I’m fairly certain she was a creepy Polish lady.”
“Did you…like it?”
“I’ve been seeing so much of the same. Everything is sameness. I liked it just because it wasn’t sameness. Did I find it enjoyable? Parts. But I can watch things I know I like if I want enjoyable, I can watch old episodes of ‘The Prisoner.’ Did you enjoy it?”
“No. It was really long and really slow. But I’m glad I saw it all the same. And a good thing it was in a theatre, or I’d never have got through it. But did I find it enjoyable? No. Laura Dern was really good, though. What song was over the credits?”
“Nina Simone, ‘Sinner Man,’ I’ll burn it for you.”
We get in the car and he plugs in his iPod. Can’t go ten feet without having it in. I like some of the stuff he plays, like Neutral Milk Hotel and the New York Dolls, and I’ve got to the point where I can stand Elliott Smith. Every now and then he’ll play something I actually like, like those Brian Eno/David Byrne songs they had in “Wall Street,” or Jeff Buckley. I can’t really get into the Bob Dylan and Beirut, maybe some day. There are a few local bands he goes to see, though neither of us really like live music. The scene here is actually pretty good, lots of bands that got tired of competing for too few venues in Portland and Seattle. He’s dragged me to see Porlolo a few times and tried to track down this one-man-band called Pictureplane. There’s also some collectivist band that plays pots and pans called, get this, “PeePee,” but they’re good…and have a cute accordionist. I think some ridiculous number of the bands he likes have an accordion in them somewhere. I like Radiohead and early Weezer and some of the shit he burns me, like A.C. Newman, but I just don’t devote all that time to it. I accept that I need a hobby, but I’d rather turn on “Rocky” or “Groundhog Day” or watch the Mets, Knicks or Bills blow leads than learn how to fucking whittle.
We pick up booze at the store. We do this before Sunday, as all the liquor stores close on Sunday because Jesus disapproves of drinking on Sunday morning. Drinking on a workday morning is fine, though. There are millions of liquor stores in Denver and there are no chains because they’ll only issue one liquor license per owner or something, so there are tons of backdoor deals. This is tangentially related to the parking problem: parking anywhere near downtown or the Cherry Creek shopping area is a huge pain in the ass on any day except Sunday. All the other times the place is metered up the ass until ten at night. There are even some of the fake downtowns where the meters run 24/7. That’s why there’s so much drunk driving, because if you leave your car and take a cab you’ll get ticketed and towed.
Now it’s Friday night. I’m comatose after the movie, I feel like I’ve just had one of those restless dreams where you dream that you’re living the next day then wake up and have to do it all over again. We give up before the night even starts, no bars, and head to the apartment. I sleep on the futon in the living room; I convinced him to save money by getting the one from Wal-Mart instead of the futon store; I deserve what I get because there’s a big freaking difference.
The apartment is classic. A converted basement, 600 square feet for $395 a month. Not bad if you don’t mind the pipes at forehead level, the crumbling plaster, the strange little bugs that inch their ways across the walls and disappear in and out of little pinholes and the black mold. The walls are a sickly yellow color. They probably were white once upon a time but with damp, age, no sunlight…I try to get him to paint them but he’s never lived with anything but white walls.
“It’s cold,” I call into the bedroom.
“There’s a space heater next to your head, jackass,” he calls back, and I switch it on.
I remember when we were stuck together in that tiny apartment in LA. I think LA is a fiasco for so many people because they’re not honest with themselves about what they want. I was dating this girl out there near the time I left and she kept trying to get me to buy these suits that made me look like that guy from the Men’s Wearhouse ads. She was good to hang out with and I liked her, but I felt like she had those weird daddy issues some girls had and wanted someone to take care of her. I didn’t have a problem with that, and probably wouldn’t want to settle down unless I could give my wife at least the option of not working. When I said that to her, about wanting to be taken care of, which might not have been the most politic thing to do, she completely denied it. Then six months after I left she was engaged to a 50 year-old rich guy who looks just like the dude from the Men’s Wearhouse ads.
It isn’t a big surprise that people in Los Angeles are deluded, it’s full of people that want to be directors but don’t actually want to direct anything, producers that haven’t made a movie in 10 years, lazy idiots that want respect they’re not willing to earn and serious actors who really just want to be rich and famous. I’m not saying Craig wanted to be a celebrity, but his template was always character leads like Walter Matthau or Philip Seymour Hoffman, or even those guys you see in everything whose names barely anyone knows, like Harry Dean Stanton and Dan Hedaya, or even just one of those guys that nobody knows but is never out of work, like Daniel Roebuck, or that guy from that show, you remember, the one where he played the burn victim? You get the point. He came out because one little TV credit gets you an audition at any regional theater in the country. I think it was a sensible plan, but I feel he may have sort of sabotaged himself for trying to take the shortcut. So what if he wanted a shortcut? Why not skip past being miserable and get to the good part? A bunch of other assholes did, why not him, or you, or me? I still don’t see what’s wrong with it, but I don’t think he’s forgiven himself for not freezing and playing spear-carriers back in Chicago. And, of course, he wound up putting in more time and paying more dues for less than those other people did. All he does is pay dues. Everyone says follow your dream, his fortune cookie is: A DREAM IS A LIE YOUR HEART TELLS.
“Dude,” he calls out.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think life is ever going to happen.”
“Maybe it won’t,” I say. “To be honest, bro, I think that’s kind of a relief to you.”
“Yeah and no.”
“I’m just rolling along here, trying to think of things to do, but you have things you really want to do. You’re afraid of success.”
“No it’s not just that. I’m afraid I’ll think it’s going good and I’m a big fake, or it’ll be going good and I’ll go off the rails and lose it, or really lose it and go crazy.”
I’m not fucking Freud, but I can see he’s talking about Jason, the kid who brought him out here. I only met Jason a few times but he didn’t seem very nice to me, and not at all like the kid Craig described him as. For one thing, he had this air like he wanted Craig to think of him as an older brother sort instead of a friend. Craig says he wasn’t like that back in college, it’s just that he has this image that he’s got it figured out and Craig is wandering lost, an image he needs to make himself feel better about how lost he is.
“What if you met the girl of your dreams,” Craig asked, “and she made you a worse person?”
The Jason kid was a kind of guy-with-guitar singer-songwriter. They lived in the same dorm and used to do weird college things together, like cook hamburgers out on this big lakefront park and hand them out to hungry stoners on the school’s party days. Craig Assistant Directed and acted in an opera with Jason and since college they were each other’s support net over the phone for a long time. During that time they only got in the same place on a few occasions and things didn’t always go smoothly. Once there was an ex-girlfriend of Craig’s who he felt Jason led on, and once he went to visit Jason in Santa Fe when he was working at the opera there over the summer; after bugging him about coming to visit for months, Jason barely had any free time and left Craig stranded at his place most of the weekend; then he made Craig help him move; then Craig got altitude sickness. It sounded like a bad vacation. Jason moved to Nashville after college, then Denver because his sister was staying there. The sister left but Jason stayed, and after a few months he was getting regular gigs and found a manager. He wasn’t making any money at it, though, and couldn’t afford studio time, so when he was close to bottomed out on funds and topped out in credit cards he decided to go to nursing school and started working as an orderly at a hospital while taking the prep courses. Just two months after starting there the steady work had him chipping away at his debt pretty cleanly. Within six months he bought a condo east of the city; he got it cheap from a foreclosure and intended to fix it up. Craig went out there for a week and they had a great time, dinner at Table 6, snowshoeing above Nederland at 9000 feet, Craig even helped Jason make dinner to try to romance a girl from the swing dancing nights at the Mission Café. A month later Jason called him to tell him he was getting very serious with a girl. Craig assumed it was the one he’d met but it turned out it was a different one entirely. This one, Cecile, lived in Chicago and was a friend of a friend; it was the first Craig had ever heard of her. In three months Jason was traveling to Ohio to meet her family and in another month he proposed. Now this sounds like a whirlwind courtship and Craig was happy for his buddy but there was reason to be cautious: in the past two years before this Jason had fallen for and tried to move across the country to be with two other girls: an opera singer in New York City and a cellist in Houston. The one in New York declined so she could sexually experiment with more people, and the one in Texas flew into rages when his moving there was delayed. When Craig found out Jason was traveling back and forth to Ohio to help Cecile deal with a drunk driving charge there were red flags.
I remember talking to this Jason kid and really wanting to punch him in the ear. He was so holy about going to work as a nurse and Cecile getting a degree as a physical therapist. He even said something to me about how I might want to get a job, “helping people,” when he only got into it because he needed the fucking money. That and he was always telling Jewish jokes, like the guy on Seinfeld who converts so he can tell them; he was half-Jewish but didn’t even go on Yom Kippur, then he would introduce Craig to non-Jews as his “Jewish friend.” Craig told him it wasn’t funny but he thought it was funny that it wasn’t funny and wouldn’t stop. He continued the streak of being delighted by making Craig uncomfortable once Craig got here by buying a rescue cat and leaving it alone with him all day while they were at work. This poor fucking thing was one of those weird cats with only a thin down-covering and it was always shivering and running to any stranger. It was probably neglected before the shelter found it, and it would miaow constantly so you couldn’t fucking think, it would just follow you around miaowing. Craig let it sleep with him and did his best, but the cat was seriously fucked up. Anyway, the point was Jason just wanted this life so badly he’d shoehorn anything that didn’t work into it and if you resisted it you had to be written out of the fairy tale. The magic castle they were moving into was a dump, you could hardly call it a condo, it stunk like sweat socks; the cat was neurotic; the prince was desperate and the maiden was manipulative. It all scared the shit out of Craig because what if you go forward with your life and it’s the wrong life? This kid, Jason, would have been better off living on someone’s couch and playing his music at night, but instead he kicks one of his best friends out, making him get by alone in a state where he knows almost nobody and never wanted to move to in the first place. In his mind he was standing up for his life, but he was standing up for the wrong life. They’d visit REI every week and she’d buy him whatever sweater everyone was wearing; they painted the walls of the condo these horrific trendy colors, one wall hooker’s lipstick-red, another cream and another off-white; there was an espresso maker at Sur la Table they had their eye on and they would visit it at the store and have the employees get them sample cups, over and over. Seriously, what circle of hell is this? Jason’s fortune cookie: YOU DIDN’T SELL OUT, YOU BOUGHT IN.
“This kid,” I’d said to Craig, “he knows this is all fake, and that’s why he brought you out here. He wants you to go along and make him feel better about it. Problem is, you’re a better friend than to do that so you’re telling him the truth, so he has to get rid of you.”
And that’s what happened. Sometimes we see the kid when we go out and they pretend they don’t know each other. They were there for one another on the phone every day for five years.
“I could have seen it if I’d wanted to,” Craig said. “I’d help him with his songs but he’d never help me with my stories.”
“That kind of guy,” I said, “needs to feel like he has it wrapped up and you don’t, he needs to feel older and wiser than you to convince himself he knows better. He didn’t even treat you like a kid brother, he treated you like you were his kid brother’s friend and he was doing you a favor to let you stay over on his couch when you’re paying full rent and he couldn’t live there without you.”
“Cecile could move in.”
“She could have moved in back in August and none of this ever would have happened! You never would have moved here! Why didn’t they just do that?”
“He didn’t want them to live together before they got married.”
“Why not?” I ask, “is he religious? Is his family religious, or hers? Are they not having sex before they’re married, too?”
“No, none of that stuff. It has no explanation at all.”
“Wow, your friend is a fucking douchebag.”
“Yeah. I’m finding that out.”
He wrote them a wedding gift before he left, but wasn’t mean enough to give it to them. I think he should have:
Mount a mountain bike and lose the paunch
It’s time for the crunchy yuppie hyperlaunch
We’ll live the life out of magazines
Capped grins and skins made of plasticene
The thing that makes me nervous is if Health and Human Services
Can’t finance us to pay our rent on this condo or subsequent
If it’s we must starve and suffer for the welfare of another
We’ll be noble in our losses, come on, nail us to our crosses!
Panacea of IKEA, answered prayer of Crate & Barrel
Wearing thermals dyed in earth tones from American Apparel
We’ll both erase our carbon footprints, promise me that when I die
You’ll bury me beneath the mountain at the flagship REI
We’ll both worship our espresso maker and our pressure cooker
We’ll paint our condo’s spackled walls red as the lipstick of a hooker
Every endeavor goes our way as if by heaven’s fortune kissed
We even got our little rescue cat a psychotherapist
If we’d persisted chasing all our foolish dreams we might have missed
All the manifold rewards of the Compassionate Capitalist.
The futon frame’s bars are digging into my back through the shitty thin cushion.
“I don’t know if it will ever happen,” I say, “I don’t know if mine will either, but I know if it’s just going to be fake I’d never have it go on in the first place.”
“I feel all this potential,” he says. “Like if I could start in the right direction I could keep going and going. I’m waiting to get the scent. But even if I knew I would hesitate, I think.”
“Why? Why hesistate?”
“I always feel like I’m sitting in a room, in a chair, in the middle, and there are all these wires or webs hooked up to me, and if I start moving at all this huge machine is going to switch on. I don’t know what the machine does, but good or bad the second it starts running I begin aging, and everything I do from that moment on counts, it’s actually real, it actually means something or if it means nothing that means it’s an actual waste of something that could have been, should have been actually meaningful. If I just sit still, though, I never age and I never die and nothing has to be real, and nobody I know or care about ever has to die either. It’s a complete lie, I know, but it’s like when you were trying to climb down from that rock in the Rocky Mountain Park and you couldn’t do it. You were actually scared. You were scared that you’d slip and die and nothing would have ever really happened, or that even if it didn’t mean so much to you that your parents or your sister’s kids would be hurt. And the idea of really doing what I want to do, even if I do it well, really well, scares me just because it’s so real and if I lose it it will really mean something. Not just a shrug but like your parents dying. It’s too real for me. And I don’t know but that I’d fuck it up. I don’t want to do anything that means anything if I’m just going to do that to it.”
“There’s a difference,” I say. “Your buddy, he’s forcing it. It isn’t there and he’s trying to make it happen, and he’s dragging other people into it and they’re going to make themselves miserable and hurt a lot of people but there’s a difference between just being right and being wrong. You know it’s not those news shows where they pretend everyone’s opinion is valid; in the real world lots of the time one thing is right and the other thing is wrong. I know that if you feel you’re forcing it you’ll stop, and you know I won’t sit there and not tell you, but you have to do something. I don’t know what, but you are fucking dying here, fast. I’m just bored and alone, nothing new, but if I can just stick it out things will get better or I’ll at least be in a position to make them better. That’s because I made this plan and I stuck to it. It’s a shitty plan but if I just stuck to it long enough I’ll be doing better. It might even be years, but if I keep doing the job, let the company pay for some of my MBA and have a shitty few years doing them both at the same time, or move on to a bigger job somewhere, things will get better and I’ll finally be able to get the hell out of debt and out of this stupid state. But you have to go be selfish now. You were following your opportunities, but I know you moved to NYC to give support to your grandmother until she died; then you stayed when nothing was going on so you could help your grandfather, and then you came out here to help out Jason and me. Jason’s gone and I gotta say, go and don’t worry about me, just get out of here as fast as you can. Do another month or two of temping, throw everything into your car and go somewhere; Brooklyn, Portland, back to LA, anywhere.”
“It’s not that easy. And not that pure, I also moved to NYC because they were out of the city and let me have their apartment for free for half a year. And I was trying at the time, sort of, and failing.”
“I know it isn’t easy, but you’re still down over what happened with your friend, and you have NO reason to live here. You’re totally uninspired because you shouldn’t even BE here, and that jerk-off was being selfish to ask you to come out in the first place, I was never asking you to move out here.”
“Yeah, I know,” he says.
“Look, it wasn’t you, it was him. You have the letters where he bugged you to move out here. He was like, ‘tired of New York, you should move out here, when are you going to move out here’ and then he says to you he ‘just provided a place’ and coming here to live in that ghetto apartment that stunk like shit was your idea? And you told me about the situation between him and your ex-girlfriend; that was over the line, this guy was a bad friend. You showed bad judgment to be his friend, but you looked out for him so you’ve got nothing to feel bad about. Forget it, get your shit together and get out of here, and if you actually write something we can do something with we’ll get it made.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Dude, why the hell are we in Colorado?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
“Why do you want to act? Or write? Nobody fucking appreciates it.”
“Because I can’t draw.”
“But if you keep doing it, keep banging your head against this wall, you won’t ever have your own family. You’ll have to keep working these jobs where you’re doing shit for people you’re smarter than. People don’t respect actors anyway; they think actors are all whores and waiters.”
“If I went and did anything else I’d feel the same way about it I do about the office jobs; even if I was helping people or a civil rights lawyer it would feel fake because that’s not what I do. If I had a family based on a person I’m not, the family would be fake, too, and the worst thing is the children would be fake children. They’d grow up in this lie of a family with a ghost for a father and probably a mother who wouldn’t have looked at me until I got serious and gave up everything I cared about.”
“But why do you do it?” I ask. “For me, I like doing it, but I don’t think it’s for the same reasons you do. You’ve been into it for a lot longer and you’re still trying. And, you know, I’ve never even seen you act! I never went to the high school plays or anything.”
“Come on,” he says,” that Aliens rip-off I did was great. With the Chinese midget in the rubber suit?”
“Cut it out, I’m serious. You really care about this and I’ve never asked you so I have no idea why. If it were me, I would be happy probably working at a studio or being a producer; being involved in movies like the ones I like to watch appeals to me. Being involved in that and making enough money at it that I don’t have to do some sales job like this during the day. The problem is that then I have to deal with those fucking LA people.”
“Wouldn’t it be worth it if you could make just one movie like ‘The Saint,’ or a T.V. show like ‘M.A.N.T.I.S.’?”
“Fuck you, I love ‘The Saint,’ it’s a classic. And they’ll rediscover M.A.N.T.I.S. someday, I’m just ahead of my time.”
Craig pauses. “Okay,” he says, “writing first. I’m an amateur writer. That’s why I don’t send my stuff out. I’m a professional actor and an amateur writer. I stay amateur because someone has to ask you to act, but you can write whatever you can whenever you can. And, as a professional actor, I can’t bother people with my process, I have to show up and deliver; if it’s singing I have to hit the note or there’s no chance. There’s no room for interesting or anything, you just have to do it. With the writing I don’t have to censor myself at all. If I want to digress and never get to what I meant to talk about I can do that; I can just decide to turn out a perfectly ordinary classically structured script. If I feel like it I am perfectly free to write badly, I give myself permission to; it’s like how B-movies like Romero movies can say things studio movies can’t and they can only say them by, I don’t want to say being bad, but by not making the eloquence of the story or the humanity of the characters the focus. I’m not usually interested in structure and plot, more about the best way to communicate what I’m trying to say; sometimes it’s just by saying it, sometimes it’s allegory. Writing is really what has kept me sane. Especially because I went from doing six plays a year to not working for the last three.”
“Okay, I get it,” I say. “I think you have to start sending it out anyway, but I see what you’re saying. The acting, why do you keep holding out for it?”
“I had a professor in college who said, ‘Imagine you’re God. And you made this world and all of these people. Wouldn’t it make you proud to see them create these little worlds where they can admire and learn from themselves, your own creation?’ There are people who can’t say what they feel or don’t know what to do and you can show them someone like themselves, in similar circumstances, resisting. Not always succeeding, but fighting.”
“But you don’t know what to do.”
“I’m one of those people that needs to see that. So I try to be that for them. Virginia Woolf said the main reason for violence is, paraphrasing, that people are too lazy to imagine how important someone else’s life is to them. And when we read or watch a movie or a play is really the only time we do that. It’s the only time we have permission to be serious, to really try to reach one another, especially people we don’t even know. That’s why working in movies isn’t totally scummy, you reach so many people and it could be so powerful if you could just make it as entertaining as watching things getting destroyed. So maybe you should go back to LA and produce the sequel to ‘The Saint.’ Do what’s in ya haht.”
“Jackass. Do you really think I should go back there?” hoping he’ll say no.
“I have no idea, but at least there’s something you want to do there. You should probably try doing it there and moving it to New York, we’re just not really west coast people.”
“That’s obvious. So what
do you think,” I ask, “are you moving to LA?”
“No idea.”
“You’re really going to just keep at it?”
“Every teacher I’ve ever had has told me I’ll work for the rest of my life, starting at age 35,” he says.
“That’s seven years from now. Do you really want to live this way for another seven years?”
“I don’t know any other way to live,” he says. “Is there anything you feel that way about?”
“I don’t even have to think,” I say, “No. There are things I love and things I wouldn’t want to do without, but nothing I’ve felt that way about.”
“Maybe you will about something. But maybe you’re better off.”
“You don’t think I’m better off,” I say.
“Yeah, but I’m like one of those ‘happy with the lord’ freaks about it; consider the source. Do what’s in ya haht?”
“What heart?” I growl, like Gabriel Byrne in “Miller’s Crossing.”
We pause for a moment. In the darkness and stillness it feels like we sort of acknowledge we’ve gone farther into what makes us friends and what makes us different than we have before. Of course, being guys, the rules of engagement state that now we have to disavow any previous sharing and restore an atmosphere of schoolboy camaraderie. So I fart. Long and loud.
"Farting," I say, "is such...sweet sorrow."
“Dear sweet suffering Jesus!” he says, “I have to live here!”
“It’ll keep you company when I’m gone.”
“Right, that’s my cue. Good talk, glad we had it.”
“Night. Little cold. Does this heater work?”
“You turned it all the way down instead of all the way up, jackass,” he says.
It’s true. The heater warms up and I start fading out. As I go out I try to bend my dreams, to force myself into dreams about the future instead of the past; to keep myself from going back to past humiliations for the thousandth time, or worse, things I miss that are gone. I don’t feel like seeing them again tonight. I want to dream of improbable futures, things that are never going to happen to me. Families and certainty, reliable people and fulfillment in what I do; shit, any interest at all in what I do. All that bullshit I won’t admit to myself that I want during the daytime, because coming up short of it time and time again wears on me, being so far away from it day after day grinds me down. Fuck it. Tonight I’m going to dream about things I might not even take if they were put on a table and offered to me. I’ll wake up in my dream, in a perfect little cookie-cutter white picket fence house, next to my beautiful pregnant wife. I’ll make coffee, walk the dog, bring in the paper. I’ll kiss my wife, and put my hand on the bump to feel the baby moving, like they do in TV shows. I’ll head off to work, say Executive Director of a theatre company, and let’s make Craig the Artistic Director, and he’s sleeping with the girl playing Ophelia, of course, and the walls of his apartment are finally not white. What else? All our parents are still alive, we’re all healthy, and our present state looks to continue indefinitely. I won’t think about the pressures, the complications of a pregnancy, the debt of owning a house, keeping a theatre company solvent, or, most of all, the fear that it will all derail, any of the realities attendant upon this almost embarrassingly mundane fantasy. I just try to wish us both a true, achievable, happy future.
I start sinking down into the dream. Just as I’m getting to the threshold of sleep I’m held back by something, something painfully mundane: a bar from beneath the cushion digging into my lower back. Man, this futon really sucks.