Teen Angst? Naaah ... (10 page)

“Thanks,” I say, looking up from my cards.

Lanky seems lost without his Husky. He sits down, mumbles some more about Jimi, and hawks loogies as the tunnel lights flash by. We both have a real phlegm problem, and there's no one else in the car to stop us, so for a few stops there's this dialogue of
“Haaauck—ptooey.”

Lanky gets off at Wall Street, and stereotypical passengers get on: a college-age double date, a bearded guy trying to look smart, a frog-eyed woman eyeing him lustily. This is the back car, though—something has to happen.

At Clark Street, a foul stench enters the train, followed by a homeless man. His rotted black jacket lies in tatters on his chest. Dark stains dot his brown corduroys. He's wearing decent-looking New Balance shoes but no socks, which gives me a dead-on view of his hairy ankles. But his most striking feature is his scent. The college girls pull the tops of their shirts over their noses and giggle.

“Go back to sleep, nosy!” he yells at them. They burst out laughing.

“Hey, man,” says one of the college guys, standing up. “You're stinking up this car. How about you go to another one?” The girls think he's so cool. I think his head should explode.

“Shut up, nosy!”

“Hey, look, I'll give you sixty-five cents if you go to another car. That's a lot of money.”

“No, nosy!”

One of the college girls rolls a quarter across the floor—the homeless guy cocks his head as he hears it spinning on the ground. He stares at the coin as it spirals to a stop. It settles on the floor. We pull into Borough Hall. The homeless guy takes one last look at the quarter, dismisses it, and strides confidently from the train. The college kids are silent. They know he's beaten them—he didn't take their orders and he didn't take their quarter.

I grab that quarter before anyone else can. My pride's worth a lot less than twenty-five cents.

“Hey man, give me that,” the college guy barks from his seat. I flip the coin to him, but I'm not a good flipper; it ends up on the floor again. “Someday some kid is going to put that quarter in his mouth,” I think.

The college guy eventually picks it up and pockets it. The train pulls into Grand Army Plaza. I stow my Magic cards and sling my bass over my shoulder, to impress the college girls. One of them is nice to me. “Merry Christmas,” she says.

“Yep.” I zip my coat and pull my collar over my mouth. My breath moistens it, and by the time I get home, the moisture has turned to ice.

I
finally came home drunk. I was happy about this because Matt Groening,
^*
in
Work Is Hell
,
^**
lists the twenty-five steps to manhood, and “first time drunk” is number seventeen, right after “first compulsive masturbation” and just before “first car accident.” I had to do it sooner or later.

It wasn't even my fault—blame it on that clerk at the Mini Mart. I stopped at the Mini Mart by my high school almost every day; this was where I bought Nacho Doritos, Original Pringles, and orange Hostess cupcakes. I bought a porno magazine there once, too, but I felt like such a loser afterward that I threw it out on the way home and never bought one again.

One Friday afternoon, I strode into the Mini Mart following a butt-numbing day at school—one of those days when, by the end of classes, I was slouching so low that my spine lay on my chair, and my eyes were level with my desk. I was with my friend Owen, who was doing his best to cheer me up.

Owen was a pudgy little bug-eyed, dark-haired,
filthy-minded Russian kid who I met sophomore year. He thought of himself, in turns, as a master computer hacker, rock star, sexual savant, philosopher, skateboarder, DJ, and Gucci-wearing highroller. You could only believe a quarter of what he said, especially if he was talking about money or girls. But he was a hell of a guy.

“Hey, Ned,” he chuckled, as we entered the Mini Mart, passing the potato chips. “Let's buy beer.”

My mind weighed the options. Worst-case scenario: I get busted for public drinking and start a criminal record. If you have a criminal record, you can't become a doctor. But I'd already decided against that profession.

“Okay,” I said, standing by the beer fridge. “How?”

“You could probably do it with your Stuy I.D.”

I'm not sure how other schools handle identification, but at Stuyvesant, we had these little white cards. Each one listed your name, your date of birth (but the year was first, and there were no slash marks—which made it very confusing), and a bar code.
^*

My Stuy I.D. was a plastic casualty. I'd left it in the back pocket of my jeans for two years. It had been
through the wash countless times; it was ripped in thirds and held together with Scotch tape; and it said on top, in big scripty letters, “Stuyvesant High School.” There was no way that any clerk could mistake it for anything legitimate.

I showed it to Owen.

“Dude, it's cool,” he said. “It just looks like it's been used a lot.” At this point, we were pacing in front of the beer fridge like two stooges planning a jailbreak.

“Owen,” I mumbled, pacing, “stop pacing.” He stopped.

“Okay,” I took a fast breath, put my hand on the metal door handle, and pulled.

It didn't budge. It was a
sliding
door. I smiled,
slid
open the door, and grabbed a Corona.

“Corona, Corona,” Owen chirped, impersonating Beavis.

“Huh, yeah, Corona,” I responded, as Butt-head. I do a decent Butt-head.

I proceeded to the cashier; Owen bravely stepped outside to wait for me. I put my Corona on the Lotto placemat and plopped two dollars beside it. Would two dollars pay for a twenty-two-ounce beer? I had to look as if I'd done this before.

The cashier was a scruffy Hispanic guy who sat on a stool all day watching black-and-white TV. I
respect that. He turned away from the set and stared me dead in the eye. I stared back.

“I.D.” He rose from his stool and held out his hand.

I reached into my pocket, tugged it out, and slapped it down in front of him, as if people were always asking for my I.D. and it was a real nuisance.

He picked it up and ran his fingers over it for a long time. Then, without warning, he took my money and rang up the sale. He put the Corona in a brown paper bag. I picked it up and left. He was already back to his TV.

Outside, Owen was fidgeting. I marched up to him.

“It worked?”

On cue, I popped the beer open with my Swiss Army knife.
^*

“Aaaaaaaah, yeeeah!”
Owen actually jumped in the air and hugged me.

I drank some beer. It was like apple juice, in that it was yellow-brown and, if you drank fast enough, you didn't taste it for a few seconds. When I finally did taste it, the beer was bitter—like dirt mixed with tap water. Every gulp I took made me thirstier, until all I really wanted was a Coke. Owen and I walked to
a more secluded street, sat on the curb, and passed the bottle back and forth until only froth remained. Then we bought another.

I had always thought alcohol was a ruse. That is, adults are never actually drunk; they just use liquor as an excuse to bump into things, have sex, and do whatever else pleases them. I assumed I'd have to put on a big show for Owen, acting stereotypically drunk. I didn't expect the beer to have any real effect on me.

The slurring began after two bottles. Light at first, then heavier as Owen and I sampled lower Manhattan's permissive Mini Marts. I knew what I wanted to say, and my mouth seemed to work fine, but the last few words of each sentence mushed together. Plus I had no volume control; I talked like someone wearing headphones.

I mentally gauged inebriation, comparing it to other forms of mental unrest, like smoking pot
^*
and spinning around for a while in the living room. The loss of motor control and speech was interesting, but the overall effect was fatigue, and it wasn't fun to be tired.

I turned to Owen. “Okay, man, is there anywhere you want to go?”

“I know a place, yeah,” he said.

Owen led me uptown, through the Village, to a rundown side street—no cars but too well lit to be an alley. In the center of the street was a telephone pole, lying sideways, as if a tornado had just blown through. Circling it were punks—real, ridiculous, leather-pants-all-ripped-up, scabs-on-their-necks, skin-that's-pasty-white-where-it-isn't-filthy punks. They scared me. I stumbled behind Owen, pretending to be invisible.

Owen strode by the punks and sat down on the telephone pole. I followed. The punks—seven guys and one girl—eyed us angrily. They each had distinguishing features: an exposed nipple, a big spike sticking out somewhere, a deformed finger.

We simply sat. Nobody talked. Finally, the tallest punk, a guy with a wool hat and a dark bruise over his eye, walked up to Owen and gestured at the bottle.

“Lemme have some of that.”

It was an order. Owen gave him the bottle, and the punk joined us.

“You play?” he asked Owen, indicating his guitar. Funny, I hadn't noticed that Owen had been carrying a guitar since we left school. I don't know how I missed it; it was in a big black case slung over his shoulder.

“Yeah,” Owen said, unsnapping the case. “I found
this on the street a couple months ago. I think it's, like, from the sixties.”

“You have an amp?”

“Yeah. A little one.”

“Okay, well, my name's Aeneas.”

Maybe I heard it wrong. Owen told me afterward that the guy had said, “Neevis.” But I still like to think of him as Aeneas, Homeless Greek Warrior. He told us he was a runaway from Groton, Connecticut, living off Domino's Pizza “back orders.”
^*
He needed money, and he said the best way to get it was to be a street musician. Owen, Aeneas, and I trudged over to a nearby stoop and plunked down among the gum stains.

“Okay,” Aeneas said. “Owen, you just play chords on the guitar. You”—he never got my name—“slap your knees to keep the beat. I'll sing.”

We played.

Owen strummed E, A, B over and over while Aeneas crooned, “I got no money / It isn't funny / I need some money today / Because I run-ied away.”

He was actually a good singer. Whenever someone passed by, Aeneas incorporated the person into his song: “Hey lady / Nice sweater / I need some money / If that man you're with abuses you / You
don't have to take it / Leave him / Leave him.” Whenever a remotely Hispanic-looking person approached, he belted,
“No tengo el dinero / No tengo el dinero.”
He sang in Spanish to a lot of Asians and black people; evidently, anyone who wasn't punk-cadaver-white was Spanish to Aeneas.

People loved us. They tossed us dimes and quarters. Whenever a really attractive woman passed by, Aeneas would walk with her for a few blocks, serenading, and return with three or four bucks. At some point, Owen turned to me and said with intensity, “You know, dude, we're really helping out the poor.” I nodded.

At 8:00
P.M.
, it began to get dark. We stopped. Aeneas thanked us and left for a local supermarket, claiming the chicken there was easy to steal. I went home.

I entered the apartment at 9:00, right at my curfew, not considering—even for a minute—that my parents would notice I was drunk. I didn't smell, and I wasn't drooling—I just looked a little tired. I proceeded directly to the bathroom.

“Where've you been, honey?” Mom asked from the kitchen.

“With Owen,” I yelled over my shoulder. “Helping the poor.” I'd reached the bathroom door; it was locked. My brother was in there.

“Daniel, get out!”

“Why?”

“Because I need to take a bath!” I suddenly had this urge for a warm bath.

Mom came by, cocked her eyebrows, and said, “You were
helping the poor?
”

“Well, sort of,” I smiled. “I tried my hand at being a street musician.”

“
Oookay
. You're a complete lunatic, you know,” Mom said, walking into her room. “But I love you, and you're home on time, which is nice. How was school?”

“Fine,” I said. “I have to talk to you or Dad about applying for the Math Achievements, actually.”

“Well, talk to me about it—you know your father can't handle administrative tasks.”

“I protest!” Dad yelled from the living room. Was I just drunk, or were my parents unusually funny?

“Hey, Daniel!” I turned my attention to the bathroom again. “What are you doing in there?”

“Nothing! I got here
first!
” He was probably reading
Road & Track
.
^*
Because Daniel and I shared a bedroom, he always monopolized the bathroom, treating it like his private suite.

“Daniel, I need to get in there
right now!
”

“Oh, calm down!” Mom shouted from her room. “What is
wrong
with you?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

Finally, Daniel appeared at the door. He punched me in the arm and ran to our room. I walked into the bathroom and turned on the hot water. Climbing into the tub, I noticed I was still wearing my boxers, but I left them on.

Two minutes later, Dad entered the bathroom. I hadn't closed the shower curtain, so he saw me in the tub. In my underwear.

“Ned, Ned, Ned. Look at you.”

I looked down. I did look a little silly.

“Do you want the Spanish Inquisition in here? You better start acting with a little sobriety, or your mother is going to put two and two together. Get out of this tub in ten minutes, okay? Or, if you've lost your ability to keep track of
time
, I'll cue you.”

Dad left the bathroom, closing the door behind him. Then he popped his head back in. “Oh, yeah, and the obligatory father-son thing: don't come home drunk ever again.”