Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City (14 page)

But the next morning he did write back. “Sorry, I
fell asleep, sorry I was such a bitch.”

What a complicated deal to close! Finally John
wrote Tyler on Facebook and was like, when are you leaving town for that trip,
let’s have a drink or a cheap dinner, just you and me. And Tyler wrote back,
sounds like fun, Friday or Saturday. I don’t even like him, John thought.

THE IMMEDIATELY
PREVIOUS
mayor told the City to be afraid if they did not reelect the
Mayor. This previous mayor now made all his money from speaking engagements,
providing fairly useless advice to corporations and other cities on their
safety, and also lobbying for companies that polluted the planet. If they did
not reelect the Mayor, he said, they would be afraid to go outside and walk the
streets. “You know exactly what I’m talking about,” he told a room of older
people. “This city could easily be taken back in a very different direction.”
He
meant muggings, and poor people running wild against rich people, and who knows
what, it was a vague threat, but he meant something.

FRED SENT JOHN
an old Internet chat transcript—from the summer two years prior. At
the time, Fred had been actually kind of dating Tyler.

fred:
who are you
fucking these days?

sorry.that was a
vulgar question

i
need ac

john:
a hipster, a blogger and a park slope
boy

fred:
how’s the park slope boy?

john:
he’s the worst of the batch. so thank god
he’s far away

fred:
i’m also doing this hot hipster, but he’s
leaving for europe in a week or two

john:
i can’t maintain any relationship

fred:
yeah. these aren’t relationships

john:
they all fall apart, somehow

i
know, but i long
for lost fuck buddies

fred:
yeah. all i want now is just somebody i
wanna fuck more than three times

JASON SAW A
guy on the train, going home. They made a lot of eye contact. They got
off at the same stop—Jason was walking a bit behind him. Well, he kind of
followed him, but in a way he hoped wasn’t stalkery. And then the guy met
someone at the end of the block so Jason turned about and aborted mission.

When he got home, he went on the Internet, and he
put up a “Missed Connections” post on Craigslist. That was a bulletin board for
people who’d encountered each other but had no other way of identifying or
reaching the other person. It was surprisingly effective for this kind of
reunion. His post read something like: You were wearing a salmon cardigan and
got off the train. And an hour after he posted it, the guy sent an email through
the system and included his picture. His note said: I think you mean me? So they
went for a drink, but a drink in the neighborhood, so it was convenient to go
straight back home, which they totally did.

Then a few nights later, he texted Jason late,
late, late at night. His text just said: “Sup.” Jason didn’t bother texting
back.

CHAD AND DIEGO
decided they wanted to move in together. Chad’s roommate was leaving, for
one thing, and so it was a convergence of desire and logistics and economics.
Way back in spring they had begun thinking about this and then Chad’s lease
ended at the end of July. A friend of a friend of a friend of Chad’s was a sort
of fancy but no-fee real estate broker, so she showed him the cheapest of her
listings. They saw an apartment way out from the center of the City, and they
really liked it—a two-bedroom for 1,200 dollars. It was on a two-block street
called Regent Place. Not only was Regent Place in the running for the most
unsafe place in the City, according to the random chatter Chad saw on the
Internet, but the apartment next door to the one they’d been shown was the site
of a major drug bust three months before. They regrouped. They wanted to be on
the train that went to the neighborhoods where all their friends lived. It was
important to John that Chad be accessible via subway.

Chad had been paying 650 dollars before, and Diego
maybe slightly less. They were looking for one-bedrooms for 1,400 dollars or
so,
and found one for 1,350. So it worked out, they thought. Though it would take
a
while to get in. They had to stay at Chad’s parents for two weeks while it all
worked out. Chad’s mom had just gotten a promotion at work. She was the only
person that Chad knew who’d had any kind of career advancement that year. They
were even renovating their bathrooms.

And Chad was getting 500 dollars a month in
piecework from John’s company. Chad had made enough money in the spring that
he
didn’t really have to make much money this summer. Also he’d been drinking
less!

The tutoring business was better than ever. When
Chad didn’t have other income, he just picked up more clients. The agency was
always contacting Chad with more students than he could manage. For spring he’d
maybe had five students a week, at 100 dollars per student per week. But this
work also kept Chad from reaching out to do better things. It kept him
comfortable and fed, and he didn’t spend a lot of money, and he wore the same
sweater all the time. Plus Chad had no debt because his school had no student
loans. And Diego made like 40,000 dollars a year and had just a little debt,
but
they also lived really cheaply. Chad had about 15,000 dollars in savings. He
spent only 1,500 to 2,000 a month. He was on a “family plan” for his cell phone,
but his family never paid for anything else. Back when he’d had a real office
job, and made 25,000 dollars a year, well, he thought that in that case, one
should be paying 600 dollars a month in rent, not 1,100 dollars.

Chad was becoming Joni Mitchell–friends with
Edward. That meant he’d IM with Edward and they’d talk about Joni Mitchell.
Also, Edward wanted to talk about John a lot.

Chad’s mom loved John. Chad was talking to her
about John shortly after he moved in for his temporary stay. John had come and
stayed for a few days too, and then gone back home. They thought John had issues
with money that kept him from improving his life. They thought there could be
little sacrifices he could make. But it was so much all tied in with his family
and feeling very bad about money. He actually hated money, they thought. He
wanted it to leave him as soon as it possibly could. Chad thought John saw the
very idea of money as being all wrapped up in the death of his father. But
Chad’s mom said that she thought that John just believed that he didn’t deserve
any security.

It was unthinkable to Chad that John had never been
in therapy, which was a process of recalibration during which you talked with
someone to discover things about yourself. And Chad thought John still blamed
himself for his father’s death. And he thought John was happy in some ways but
not in others, and that father surrogates would always be disappointing to him.
Father surrogates actually couldn’t be there for you, not in a meaningful way.
If they were your boss, for instance, they would leave at the end of the
day.

While John was there with Chad’s parents, John had
finally told Chad the whole story straight out. John believed that if something
happened, you just had to move on. Not dealing with finances was a way of
putting off dealing with all of these things. It was a way of putting off
adulthood. Being an adult might be stressful, but so was being a child, and
being childlike. That anxiety, and its constant presence, was what kept John
on
the run. Thomas quitting meant more than he could say. It confirmed his sense
that people would always abandon you.

They talked about having sex without condoms—and
Chad had done this too, in the past—but Chad would plead with John: Please don’t
do that again. He couldn’t bear the idea of something so bad, and so
unnecessary, happening to John. Chad worried about John all the time but also
he
tried not to.

THE STRETCH OF
living with Chad’s parents dragged on all through hot August. The
apartment wasn’t ready. His parents lived way, way out, and he would take the
train to the end of the line, out past the airport, and then they’d come and
pick him up. One night it was about ten and there were about six people in the
train car. He was sitting on a bank of four chairs, and his calf was up touching
another chair, his whole leg extended. And the train stopped at an aboveground
station and he heard some voice. It said, “Get off the train.” And this big guy
in street clothes came over and held up a badge. “Get off the train,” he said,
holding the doors open. This was in the first car, so he looked at the
conductor, and the conductor said, yeah, it’s okay.

“How many seats did you pay for?” the man
asked.

Chad thought about it. Trick question, he thought.
I paid for a ride, not a seat.

“You had your foot on a seat,” the man said.

There were many rules for the use of “public”
transit, which was not really public; it was a corporation controlled by people
proposed by the state and by the Mayor. It was, however, more “public” than it
once was; three competing subway systems were consolidated, some sixty years
previous, when the two of the systems that were “for-profit” corporations filed
for bankruptcy. The City then owned all the subways, and the transit corporation
paid the City for their use.

The rules included that no person could engage in
any “commercial activity”; no person could take part in any “nontransit uses”
of
the transit system, including “artistic performances”; there would be no
consumption of liquids at all in any “open container”; one might not light a
match; one should not gamble; one could not use the trains when one was
“impaired” by alcohol or drugs, though what one was supposed to do in that case
was unclear; one was forbidden from causing “annoyance, alarm or inconvenience”;
one could not place one’s foot on any seat; one was not allowed to recline; one
could not block escalators or stairways or platforms; and one must not “occupy
more than one seat . . . when to do so would interfere or tend to
interfere with the operation of the Authority’s transit system or the comfort
of
other passengers.”

He gave Chad a fifty-dollar ticket for having his
foot on a seat.

Oh, you should absolutely fight it, his friends
told him.

EDWARD BROKE UP
with his boyfriend, just like that. Perhaps this was something his
boyfriend could have seen coming, what with Edward living in the Capital with
his parents so much of the time.

Perhaps not. People are surprising, and easily
surprised, and also people have always been willfully blind.

Except now Edward was spending more time in town.
He would send an email to John that would say, hi, I’m coming up, can I see you?
And John would have this ambivalent rush of feelings and in the end? Well. He
would.

So Edward and John were talking, at a party, and
John had also invited this guy he used to have a crush on too, in a fit of
craziness. Originally he was going to invite Tyler Flowers as well. He wanted
them all there; he wanted something to happen, to break. Why did he do this,
his
friends asked, why did he always pile all these people together? “I don’t know
why!” he said. He did it in part to take Edward at his word. Weren’t they not
together?

Inevitably John got drunk and mixed up their
names.

But then Edward and Jason and John went to take the
train home. Edward was going to stay at Jason’s, they were pretending. Of course
he wasn’t. John fell asleep in the subway station with his head in Edward’s lap.
Some guys walked by and said, “Oh, that looks nice, I wish I could do that,”
but
in a totally hostile, sneering way.

John slept right through it. Then he woke up in
time to go home with Edward.

FINALLY IT WAS
time for Fred to leave the City. So he had a going-away party.

Edward came in and found John at the bar. This was
down in a little neighborhood, not far from the patiently waiting waterfront,
clustered under some bridges. Inside it was huge and brown and an absorbing kind
of loud, and it was unclear where the party stopped and started; the party
itself was a meandering throng of pressed people.

“What do you think is the cheapest beer here? Will
you order it for me?” Edward asked.

“I wouldn’t be comfortable doing that,” John said,
quite seriously.

Jason was behind them. He’d just taken a vacation
with his ex-lover. That was probably a bad idea. “It was okaaaayyy,” he told
people, when they asked. He was talking to a glittery-eyed guy, who was very
tall and had very intense hair and a big, impressive nose. This guy knew Fred
because they’d slept together once, not happily.

“Did you use a C?” this guy asked Jason, aggressive
but teasing.

“A connie?” Jason said. He meant a condom.

“Did you come inside him?” the guy asked.

John and Edward went out to smoke and talked about
the writer Iris Murdoch. When the glittery guy came out too, John tap-punched
him in the stomach. “Those are my abs,” the guy said, absently.

It was sticky, and up and to the right was the
black looming metal mass of a bridge, so dark and heavy it made all the streets
look gray-yellow instead of dark. Cabs and partiers passed on by. It was like
being in a secret tiny village hidden inside a big stage set.

“Where does Eleanor Clift live?” Jason asked.

“I’m sure she lives in Chevy,” Edward said.

“I never knew she was the sister-in-law of
Montgomery Clift!” John said. “I wrote it on my Twitter. This Truman Capote
essay I was reading on the train? It was a profile of Elizabeth Taylor, written
for
Ladies’ Home Journal
in 1967.” These were the
names of rich people who were all dead.

“Oh my God, link?” Jason said.