What's Important Is Feeling: Stories (13 page)

Nathaniel sidled up to me, clearly still in disbelief. But he was playing it cool. He said, “I’m thinking this thing with Monica wasn’t such a good idea. Actresses . . .”

I shushed him, nodded at Felix.

Nathaniel said, “You wanna get out of here? They’re calling the shoot anyway. Equipment’s too wet. Let’s ditch this and find a couple beers. We can hide out in the hair trailer while they pack.”

“I’m busy,” I said.

The cat wouldn’t go up the stairs. One of the grips had to rush home and get his cat, a gray cat, not even the right color. I put a tin of sardines at the top of the staircase and the grip’s cat got it right. The scene was completed. Solstice said that’s a wrap, and we took cold beers out of picnic coolers and patted each other on the back. We returned to the motel, watched the sun lazily emerge. Day after the rain and everything smelled like wet oil and ragweed. Francisco had his guitar out by the pool, and Kathleen did her best Loretta Lynn.

When it went to DVD, Nathaniel and I were in Brooklyn, sharing the ground floor of a freestanding Victorian in Ditmas Park. We had hardwood floors and original molding, and we got a grand feeling eating cereal under our twelve-arm chandelier. New York was nice; everything was expensive, but you didn’t need money. You could take a girl to the nearest dive, drink cheap pitchers, and tell her about your brush with Francisco Gomez, the way he closed his eyes when he played guitar. The girl would grab your wrist. Then you’d lean in close to talk over the DJ, say something like, “I’ve got a record player and some beers back at my place,” and let her ride sidesaddle on your single-speed bike through the falling snow.

We were finding work, or Nathaniel was anyway. I liked the cold nights, smoking out my cracked window, staring at the empty yellow cabs that lined our block. Off-duty drivers speaking loudly on cell phones in Cantonese and Arabic and Staten Island English.

People came over for the screening—Nathaniel’s idea. Put out cheese and hummus, a jug of Rossi. Crowded onto the couch. Nathaniel was wearing a cowboy hat. The girls appreciated irony; they’d gone to art school. Gwen, Nathaniel’s latest thing, had stringy hair, a shrill laugh, and fingers pink at the joints from New York winter. She wrote for a weekly paper that published blind items about people we knew, or at least that we were friends with on Facebook. Nathaniel had his arm around her. Gwen’s friend Anne sat to Nathaniel’s left, her fishnetted legs up on the coffee table. She said the phrase
shit, man
at all possible instances—when she saw the chandelier, when she saw the TV, when she saw Nathaniel’s Texas-flag tattoo.

Two girls I didn’t know sat cross-legged on the floor. One was beautiful but kept checking her cell phone, awaiting better plans. The other had eaten Adderall and blew gum bubbles she then poked with a mechanical pencil. “Roll tape,” she said, then said it again. “Action,” she said, and Nathaniel dimmed the lights.

Title screen, then open on an empty beach, littered with foil and aluminum, cigarette cellophane blowing in the wind. Pan across to the oil rigs. Long-muscled men, like evolved primates, hang from the machinery’s rungs. And there I am in my brief appearance as an extra. They’d needed people to swell out the crowd. I look ridiculous as a roughneck, draped in too-large Carhartt, hard hat in hand. The camera only sees me for a second. I’m sweating and blotchy, and my shaved head has a bull’s-eye sunburn.

Everyone laughed, and I felt myself blush.

“You look like a dork,” Gwen said. Nathaniel agreed. The other blew a confirmative bubble. But Anne looked over, gave a nod of recognition, said, “Shit, man.”

It was all wrong. What I wanted was the action just offscreen. I wanted Tipplehorn screaming indecipherable instructions across all walkie frequencies; Solstice silly in boots and unnecessary spurs; Kathleen on speakerphone in the hair trailer, oblivious to outside commotion; Nathaniel hidden behind a garbage can, whispering “Cut” to a featured extra.

I looked at Nathaniel when Monica made her debut. They’d given her entrance music, some too-obvious C & W ballad about lost innocence. Monica stands on the porch, watches Francisco watch her from his parked Mustang. Nathaniel’s face didn’t move, but I saw him ball a fist around a skinny hipster hand.

Then the house is on fire, flames reaching up into Texas night. They’d gotten the colors right, a hundred shades of orange, gray, and blue. We were coming to the cat’s coda, the feline waltz that Felix had dreamed about. I hoped Solstice hadn’t screwed it up in editing. I wanted Felix to have that victory. Anne got up, stretched, shook her curly hair from its bun, and bent to tie a shoelace. She walked toward the kitchen, asked if I wanted another beer. The cat did its thing, but I wasn’t watching. I was in another movie, myself the star, Anne lit by the headlights of a passing cab.

The Porchies

I
t started with Grace. Jason was heading back to Philly for the summer to work at his father’s carpet-cleaning company. None of us knew why. Maybe carpet cleaning runs in the blood. My theory was he had some action back there he didn’t want us to know about for fear we’d tell his girlfriend. It was good thinking on his part. We weren’t malicious people, but considering the amount of alcohol we consumed on a weekly basis, someone was bound to let it slip.

Whatever the reason, Jason was gone, and we needed a subletter. Or rather, he needed a subletter. The rest of us didn’t care if the room stayed empty and Jason had to pay his share of the rent while he wasn’t even there. This option, however, defeated the purpose of Jason’s plan to live rent-free with his parents. Jason was determined to find someone, and we were determined that whoever he found not be a complete and total loser. So really it became a group project.

There were two major obstacles. First and foremost was the house. It wasn’t entirely our fault. The house had been falling apart long before we’d leased it. Our landlord was a big man named Big Frank. The upkeep of our duplex was not his main concern. Once the front door fell off and it took him a week to put it back on.

Neither (and this is why we got the house) was he concerned with the fact that we crammed seven people into a house zoned for four by stashing beds in tiny, windowless rooms in the basement. This is an exaggeration. Only one room was windowless. Jason’s. Though to call it a room would be unfair. It was a closet, and no one in his right mind would live there by choice. That is, no one except for Jason, who liked that it stayed dark enough to sleep all day.

The other obstacle was ourselves. No one had done the dishes in weeks, and the kitchen was infested with flies. The power had gone out recently because we’d forgotten to pay the bill. The food in the fridge went bad and stank. Eventually someone, I think it was Donny, couldn’t take it anymore and mailed the check. The power came back on, and we sort of cleaned the fridge. By sort of, I mean we tossed all the meat except one pack of hot dogs Mike F. claimed wouldn’t go bad.

Although the kitchen was the worst room, it barely took the gold over the living room, with my room, perhaps, coming a close third. But you get the idea. The details aren’t important. This isn’t a story about the house, or even us, but one about the Porchies. And, as I said, it started with Grace.

Here’s what happened: no one wanted the room. I couldn’t blame them. Jason, sensing failure, and being the crafty guy that he was, put an ad for the room online—on some kind of Boston message board. This was pre-Craigslist; Jason was ahead of his time. His assumption being that someone in another state might be moving to Boston, desperate for any room, see the cheap price, and blindly hop on board. Because this person would be out of state, he or she wouldn’t have a chance to look at the room before entering into a contract. A week later, a small Asian girl unpacked a blue Ford with Florida plates.

Grace accepted her windowless fate with no hint of emotion. She moved in quietly. Not once did she complain about the smells or the stickiness of the floor. In fact, unless you were paying attention (I was), you might not have noticed her at all amid the trash, the clutter, and the revolving cast of guests and girlfriends who breezed in and out of our door each day, stepping lightly to avoid sleeping people on the floor as if they were land mines. Someone once overheard the neighbors say, “They live like Mexicans in there.” We recited the story with pride. It was better to be Mexicans than middle-class college kids.

Aside from the seven rent payers we had three “extended stay” guests. These were people who’d shown up one day and never left. The first and longest-standing of these guests was Tommy C-Slice. C-Slice was a friend who’d taken time off from school to go back to Queens and sell dime bags off his bicycle. He was a funny guy, half-Dominican, with skinny dreads and a penchant for dry sarcasm. After some coaxing, we convinced C-Slice to come for a visit, unaware that he would never leave.

C-Slice was not obtrusive upon our lifestyle. He watched TV all day and hand-rolled cigarettes. He had no income and survived on scraps of people’s leftovers. We liked him.

We also had the Junkie Sisters. The Junkie Sisters were younger, dropouts. They slept with my housemates in (unwritten) exchange for room and board. No one minded them either, mostly because they were good-looking and walked around in short shorts. They both chain-smoked and were always high. I don’t think either of them ate food. It was C-Slice who coined the nickname.

What I’m getting at is that we were a happy family before Grace came along, and that Grace was small and it was easy for her to disappear into the windowless room in the basement, out of sight and beyond the general concern of the roommates.

I tried to help Grace move in. I carried things from the car, offered to go to Target. She was unreceptive, though not unfriendly.

Grace was plain-looking too. Her skin was terrible: dry, acne-scarred. Some guys don’t mind that, but it’s one of my turnoffs. I like soft skin. The point is that my interest in Grace wasn’t sexual. I was convinced of my love for Annie, who’d blown me to Jimi Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner” before heading home to California for the summer. I entertained fantasies of driving cross-country and showing up at her doorstep, but I knew that I wouldn’t, and that even if I did she wouldn’t want me around.

Instead, I spent my time writing awful love letters that went unanswered. She thought they were creepy, but I didn’t know that and still clung to the belief that my surfer girl would return, tanned, into my arms, come September.

It was probably because of my ongoing infatuation with Annie that I turned my attention to Grace instead of a romantic prospect. That Grace didn’t want to have anything to do with the rest of us didn’t bother me. I was happy to watch her life from the wings. It gave me something to do.

I didn’t have a job that summer because my father had died a few months earlier and left me some money. It hadn’t been a pleasant year. Like Grace, I’d spent a lot of time indoors. I watched reality TV, particularly
Survivor
. I was engrossed in the race for survival: the backstabbing and manipulation—the strategy, will, temerity, and luck that it took to survive. I lost touch with my friends. I passed my classes because of grade inflation and because some of my teachers knew about my dad and felt bad for me.

I met Annie at a frat party. I don’t remember what I said to her or she to me, but we kissed. I thought she was beautiful. I told her she was beautiful. She’d gone to an all-girls Catholic school and wore a tiny silver cross around her neck, though she claimed to be an atheist and hate her parents. For me, a Jewish boy with a dead father, there was something deeply alluring about the way she wore that cross, secretly, beneath the clothes she now let me remove. Or maybe it just reminded me of a Billy Joel song. When she slept I fingered the cross and whispered, “I love you,” just to see how the words sounded coming out of my mouth.

This was a week before school ended. We spent the week drinking wine, making out, eating takeout. I thought we were soul mates. I don’t think Annie agreed. I drove her to the airport on a Saturday morning. We kissed in the car for the last time.

Once school ended and she was gone, I went back to my lethargy. I didn’t want to get a job and didn’t plan to. The problem was, I wasn’t sure what else to do. I figured Donny and I could go fishing on weekends and I’d watch reruns during the day. Maybe get some reading done. At night I’d drink and sit outside with no shirt on. I was bored within a week, but there was no turning back.

Summer in Boston is slow and humid. The students leave and the heat smothers you. If you don’t have A/C, you’re fucked. We didn’t. We had an intricately designed system of fans that only worked if you were standing directly in front of one. I paced from fan to fan and thought about Annie. It was too hot to sleep. I’d get up early, smoke cigarettes on the porch with C-Slice. We’d watch our neighbors leave for work. They would get in their cars, sweating in their dress shirts, tightening their ties. They looked at us and I knew they hated us. Sometimes we’d drink Bud Light or Bloody Marys, but usually it was too hot for drinking. We didn’t talk much, which was okay with me.

The Junkie Sisters never came out on the porch. They hogged the TV and watched girl crap too—Home and Garden—indulging some secretly harbored domestic fantasy. Usually they’d fall asleep in front of the TV and I’d come in and steal the remote. They were often up all night doing coke and ecstasy. By the time it cooled down in the afternoon they tended to pass out. The rest of the house went to work during the day. Except for Grace. She stayed in her room and talked on her cell phone to her boyfriend. I sometimes listened to their conversations through the vent. Grace’s voice was quiet, and I couldn’t hear much, but there seemed something tender in her tone, something warm. Soon I would meet her boyfriend and the rest of the Porchies.

In the meantime I did more of the same and nothing happened. My mother called me crying several times, insisting that I come home for summer and spend time with her and my brother. I stopped answering her calls when I saw her name on the ID.

Donny and I went to his parents’ cabin in the Berkshires during the last weekend of June to go fishing. We had wanted to go before, but he was working in a lab and kept getting stuck there on Saturdays. No one else came. Dan and Jay spent their weekends having sex with the Junkie Sisters; Mike C. went to visit his girlfriend in Connecticut; Mike F. sold hot dogs at Fenway; C-Slice never went anywhere. “Keeping an eye on the house,” he’d say.

This isn’t one of those stories where going fishing reminds me of my dead father and I get maudlin. He wasn’t an outdoor guy; he was more into watching sports on TV. I learned to fish at summer camp when I was twelve. If anything, fishing made me nostalgic for girls wrapped in towels wearing their bikini tops in the dining hall to show off for older boys.

We didn’t catch much. I liked drinking beer with Donny and shooting the shit, grilling hot dogs.

“What do you think of Grace,” I asked him.

“Who’s Grace?” he said.

It was understandable. Donny worked a lot.

During the day we swam in the lake and played one-on-one Wiffle ball. It felt good to move my body again after all that time on the couch. I liked the way the wind felt when I took my shirt off.

The drive home was peaceful. I slept and Donny drove. I’d wake up and catch glimpses of the mountains, hear snatches of oldies coming from the radio, then fall back asleep.

When we got back it was drizzling. Three guys sat on the covered porch drinking Budweiser and eating pizza. I was still half asleep and wasn’t alarmed.

“Hey,” I said. I lit a cigarette.

“What’s crappening?” one of the guys responded. He was funny-looking, with a fifties-style flattop and a big, round belly. He looked about our age.

“Who are you?” Donny said. He was tired from driving and slightly on edge.

“Chill,” the dude said. “I’m Jeff, Grace’s boyfriend.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m Seth.”

“I’m Donny,” Donny said. “We live here.”

Jeff’s friends introduced themselves. They had thick Boston accents, no Rs. Probably townies.

Donny and I went inside. The dudes stayed on the porch for another couple hours, drinking. Eventually the two guys who weren’t Grace’s boyfriend left. Jeff came in and went down to Grace’s room. He gave a nod as he walked past.

“Gonna get laid,” he said, and smiled.

When he was gone, I asked C-Slice, “What’s the word on that guy?”

“Townie,” C-Slice said.

“He asked me what’s crappening,” I said.

“Bizarre,” C-Slice replied.

It was still raining when I woke up. Jeff was gone. I watched TV with the Junkie Sisters, drank coffee. C-Slice slept on the couch. The rain made it feel like a Sunday, and maybe it was one.

By five thirty the sun was out and Jeff and his buddies were back on the porch drinking Budweiser and eating pizza. I didn’t say anything. No one did. They came back the next day too and the next and the next. Five thirty each day, and they were gone by nine, ten if there was a Sox game. They listened to the games on a portable radio. On the fourth day I invited them in to watch the game with the rest of us.

“No,” Jeff said. “We’d just stink up the joint.” He talked like he was in a greaser movie.

“Okay,” I said, and went back inside.

“What’s the deal with those dudes?” I said to C-Slice.

“Porchies, dude,” he said, “just Porchies.”

The Porchies became commonplace. Aside from C-Slice and me, the housemates were too busy to pay attention. I watched them through the window. I liked looking at Jeff. He was an animated speaker, constantly waving his arms, moving his body. The fat around his cheeks gave his face a cartoon look.

The other Porchies weren’t as interesting. Al was short and blond with wavy hair and big arms. Steve was scrawny. He wore wifebeaters and had eagle wings tattooed between his shoulders.

I made a habit of inviting them in, but they never accepted. Every day when his friends left, Jeff would walk past us on the way to Grace’s room and say something about the fact that he was about to have sex. It was different each time, and it became a part of the day I anticipated. Once he said, “It’s fornicatin’ time,” and the next day, “Get ready for the horizontal tango.”

“That’s disgusting,” one of the Junkie Sisters would remark.

July Fourth came shortly after the Porchies’ arrival. We decided to have a party. My brother was coming to town for the weekend, and I wanted to show him a good time. I figured his summer had to be pretty shitty dealing with Mom. He deserved to let loose.

Derek showed up an hour before the party started. He looked worn out. He was still in high school, and it must have been a lot to handle. We sat on the porch drinking and smoking until the guests arrived. We talked about Boston bands and how there was nothing good on TV in summer. I asked him if he’d been to any Sox games this year. He hadn’t. We couldn’t talk about the big stuff, but that was okay. It was good just sitting together.