Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City (16 page)

Jason had discovered Adderall in college. He was
prescribed it because he had so much trouble concentrating. Well, but who
doesn’t? is what Jason thought. He didn’t know what these things were that
doctors gave you pills for: Restless leg syndrome? Seasonal disorder? You can’t
sleep? Of course people were depressed, they lived in a terrible place where
it
isn’t sunny. That was the same thing with attention deficit disorder, Jason
thought, which is what the Adderall was to treat. The kids are unfocused? Sure,
they’re kids. But all that said, he didn’t really object to these sorts of
pharmacological interventions. Jason’s doctor was particularly committed to
pharmacology and tended to solve every problem with a prescription. Jason didn’t
necessarily subscribe to that philosophy but he also didn’t want to go to a
doctor who didn’t subscribe to that. He didn’t want to be lectured to by a nanny
when he was in pain and needed some OxyContin or whatever. Maybe you need two
doctors, Jason thought. A real doctor and then a friendly doctor. Somewhere in
the middle was the Adderall. The pills were a stand-in; they were a crutch, a
goad, a spark plug, a fix, an idea.

“IS EVERYONE
WATCHING
the Yankees game?” Edward asked. This was at a party.

“Who cares. It’s so stupid,” Jason said.

“John has forced me to watch football two or three
times,” Edward said.

“He forced me to watch baseball once,” Jason said.
“I didn’t know what was— I mean, baseball I can understand at least. Football,
it’s so incomprehensible. It just starts and stops?”

“I felt like I was retarded because he kept trying
to explain it to me,” Edward said. “All those things about ‘downs’? I was okay
watching them run around, but any time there was any kind of numerical—”

“No, the point system is nonsense!” Jason said.

“Oh, that’s okay,” Edward said.

“Well, like you throw it through the ‘U’ thing and
that’s like seven points? I think?” Jason said.

“No, I think it’s like one,” Edward said. “Or
three?”

“Oh. I don’t even care obviously. At this point
I’ve gone so far over the top,” Jason said.

“I think it’s like six if you get a touchdown, then
it’s a chance if you go through the thingie and then you get an extra one,”
Edward said.

“That just seems so worthless,” Jason said. “I
think you should get a lot of points if you go through that ‘U’ thing, not just
one. Who wants one fucking point? I don’t. I want seven.”

SO EDWARD
FINALLY
had come to town, and he and Amy hosted a small gathering, in
the afternoon.

Outside, after, no one could figure out where to
go.

“It’s so hard to make friends now,” Rebecca said.
Rebecca worked as a tutor, just like Chad. She’d been working at a job but had
gotten fired. Now she was in a bit of a holding pattern, just like Chad, just
like a lot of people. The difference was she was handily rich, regarding which
she was super conscious. She knew that, unlike a lot of people, she was
insulated from disaster.

Amy looked at her. “You’re twenty-six!” Amy
said.

“You’re twenty-seven!” Rebecca said.

“I’m twenty-eight now,” Amy said.

Rebecca pulled out her phone. Then she just looked
at it.

“I don’t even know who to text,” she said.

Edward had told John: I’m going to be in the City
tonight, so can we please see each other? But John didn’t get off work till very
late, and he sent Edward a text: Hey, it’s really late, I’m going to bed. And
Edward sent a text: Lemme buy you one drink, I’m in your neighborhood, I can
get
there fast. So, fine, how fast? John asked. And Edward said, gimme three
minutes. It took him a good bit longer than that, but they had a drink, then
went to the deli to buy cigarettes. So let’s just go have a drink at my house,
John said. Where were you tonight? John said, on the way. Well, I was at Jason’s
house, Edward said. Sneaky: He hadn’t been in the neighborhood at all.

So was this active pursuit? It was definitely
active interest. John thought they could reach a good place if they talked about
taking it really slow. Not that “slow” didn’t mean that every time they saw each
other, they didn’t end up in bed! But they could work their way through it. They
both needed to figure out if they both wanted it. He didn’t even have a home,
John thought.

CHAD’S BIRTHDAY
WOULD
be at midnight. It was windy and dark. They were at a very loud
bar. It had a smoking section with bars all around it—actual bars, like in a
prison—and concrete walls, but an open shaft in the ceiling with the moon up
there. It was chilly, and everyone was shell-shocked.

But there were two birthdays to celebrate. “And
John’s is next week?” Jason asked. Jason had gotten drunk last night and, oddly
enough, gone back to Amy’s to crash, and then he got up really late and almost
didn’t go to work.

“Shall we go say hello to the birthday boys?”
Edward said. The birthday boys were glued to the bar.

The reason most everyone was shell-shocked was that
John’s new boss, Timothy, had quit, and the boss’s best friend, Jacob, who was
now the new number two, had quit too. This rather shattered the system of belief
that the office had chosen to accept from Timothy. The layoffs, the
penny-pinching: Well, now what? The sacrifice for the good of the team? What
people were feeling was betrayal, though they didn’t know who to be mad at.
Timothy had taken the job, been an executioner, and now he couldn’t stomach it?
That probably wasn’t fair to Timothy though. For all anyone knew he’d been
thrown out too. For all anyone knew, he’d saved them from worse. So then who
would come in—someone from the outside, with no desire of protecting the staff?
Lots of people from the company’s office were there at the party, and they
looked ashen. Amelia, in particular, looked like she’d been hit in the stomach.
And it was all supposed to be a secret, except it wasn’t really a secret, and
why should it be a secret anyway?

“You know what Gilda Radner said, what her book
was?” John said. “
It’s Always Something
. I’m not
telling anyone on staff,” John said.

“It doesn’t matter, everyone’s going to fucking
know in like five minutes,” one of his coworkers said. “It’s so stupid.”

“But I’m not going to tell anyone on staff,” John
said.

“Can I have a cigarette, somebody?” his coworker
said.

“Hey!” John said. “What’s up, Timmy?”

Timothy had stumbled by.

They were all out in this smoking area, there was a
hard breeze through the bars all around, and rock music was blaring.

“Are you under the impression this is all over in
like a week?” his coworker asked.

“No, the way it was described to me was the end of
the year.”

“Yeah right,” his coworker said.

“Do you think it’s bullshit on that one?” John
asked.

“No, no, I mean, I think it’s end of the year or
whatever, but don’t you feel like this trigger has been pulled before? I think
it’s real, but do you know what I mean?”

“Here’s what I was saying a second ago,” John said.
“Here’s what I said. Talking to Timothy, I said, bullshit, you’ve told me you
quit like eighty times before.”

“But then you talked to Jacob?”

“And then Jacob—”

“Jacob kicked me in the face today.” That was a
metaphor.

“And I was like, fuck you,” John said.

“I went in to see Jacob and I said, ‘Do I need a
new career?’ And Jacob was like, ‘Yeah, actually, you do.’ What should I do with
myself?”

The drama! An acquaintance came in.

“Hi, guy,” John said. “Very good.” He was
surrounding himself with everyone.

Then Trixie came in. “I’m underdressed, but I came
out anyway,” she said.

Sally had been out of town all week, so, Trixie
said, she was making other people come into her office to hang out with her and
entertain her. “I make Kyle come in and take off his glasses for a little
while,” she said. “I’m always lecturing Kyle about his twenties, and how he
shouldn’t waste them.” She meant that, at this time, being young was still for
making mistakes.

Then Timothy and Jacob came again to the smoking
area.

“Oh no. God. I came out here to get away from them.
I can’t do it. I mean I saw it coming this afternoon,” said one of their
coworkers. “Then I just went home. Because I was like, I need to run away from
this right now. Because I knew I would see them here tonight. And I ate an
entire fried chicken to fortify myself.”

Timothy lurched back inside.

“Wow,” someone muttered.

“Hi, I’m Trixie,” Trixie said.

“I’m Edward.”

“It’s really nice to meet you.”

“So you, you’re John’s boss, right?”

“I would not say ‘boss,’ ” she said.

They talked about work things for a while.

“I want to work so bad,” Edward said.

Then why don’t you have a job? someone asked.

“Well, because I’ve never had one,” Edward said. “I
was actually so pissed, because there was a big
New
Yorker
story this week about the company I wanted to get in at, and
now everyone’s going to want to work at it. Whatever. I still feel more
eminently qualified than everyone else but now it’s like a big thing. So. John
emailed me and was like, did you read this article? And I was like, I can’t even
read it! You need to be on the lookout for a job for me.”

Are you talking to them at all? someone asked.

“Well, I know them all really well. I’ve never told
them directly that I want to work there. They tried to hire me as a freelancer
a
couple of months ago, but it wasn’t going to be enough money and it was too much
work. And it was kind of like, you know, just hire me in-house please. But I
don’t think anybody’s really hiring in-house right now! You don’t have to give
me all the benefits! I mean I do care about the health insurance, I guess, but
they can just give me health insurance and— I do want to be like, by the way,
‘I’m really cheap! Super cheap. You don’t even have to give me vacation days.’
”

“Remember that amazing
New
Yorker
story from the late nineties about the guy who just showed up
at a job and like started working?” Trixie asked.

“Wasn’t that like on
Seinfeld
when George gets fired, or he quits in a rage or something,
and they’re like, just go back to work and see if anyone notices?” Edward said.
“Yeah. I need a job.”

“Oh my God, this is so depressing,” Trixie
said.

“I think I need better clothes too,” Edward said.
“I get so jealous of people talking about ‘the weekend.’ Because, like, my level
of anxiety just remains the same, Monday through Sunday, I’m stressed about
life. I’m just sick of this—I just want to be a hack! I don’t want to do
anything anymore. I just want to sell out. For nothing.”

“Oh, Timothy and Jacob left!” someone said.

“Oh, Edward, this is my husband, Finn. Edward’s
been in our apartment.” John had house-sat for them once, and Edward had come
over.

“Just briefly,” Edward said. “There were no wild
parties or anything, I promise.”

There was a pause.

“Oh, with John! I was like, old apartment? New
apartment? The people before us?” Finn said.

“Somebody asked a question, like, is there like a
Jewish mafia situation taking place outside your window?” Edward asked.

“The guy? In the car?” Trixie said.

“The guy in the car does seem like a mafia
situation,” Finn said.

“I think he’s just getting free Internet from our
building and watching Hulu,” Trixie said. “Which is forbidden by his religion.
Because he just watches the computer in his car all night.”

“Some young Hasid comes and parks outside our
building and watches YouTube all night,” Finn said.

“That’s like a short story,” Edward said.

“Oh no, it’s insane, we’re going to have to talk to
him,” Trixie said. “Because it’s like, every single night.”

“I walked by drunk the other night and I was going
to do it,” Finn said.

“It’s definitely not porn,” Trixie said. “It’s like
TV. TV on his computer. Every night, in his, like, Lexus.”

“He’s going to break our heart when his Rumspringa
comes to an end,” Finn said.

“He is too old for Rumspringa,” Trixie said. “He
has a beard!”

“That’s the Amish,” Edward said.

“There’s more than one problem,” Finn said.

“My old college roommate, sort of my ex-boyfriend,
well, my— My college roommate is studying to be a rabbi,” Edward said. “He’s
like a real Yiddish scholar. He speaks, like, he’s probably the last person in
America who’s not Hasidic to speak Yiddish as fantastically as he does. So we
went to see Cat Power in McCarren Park a couple years ago? This guy, like, he’s
eccentric, and he’s only gotten more eccentric since college. Afterward I was
like, let’s go to dinner, and it was Saturday night. And he was like, you know,
Edward, it would really mean a lot to me if you would like come with me to South
Williamsburg so I can talk to Hasids. Because you know he’s fascinated with the
culture, and he doesn’t get that much chance to speak Yiddish.”

“And it’s going to help if you go with him?” Trixie
said.

“And he wouldn’t let you have dinner first?” Finn
said.

“That was our compromise, I got to have dinner
first,” Edward said. “But I was wearing like, I was wearing like—”

“Men’s low-rise pants?” Trixie asked.

“I was wearing cutoff booty shorts, and like one of
those deep-V-neck American Apparel shirts that came down to like my belly
button.”

“That seems like the least appropriate outfit for
talking to Hasids,” Finn said.

“I know, I was like, I am not doing this; please
please please. So finally we did. And it was really weird. And I think the guys
we talked to—they were actually really excited to talk to him too, I think! It’s
weird to meet this young guy who was really interested in talking about religion
and stuff with them. And they were asking all these trick questions.”