You First

1

There’s the blonde to my left, a shy reader with tortoiseshell glasses who took her eyes off the page when I got onto the subway. The floor shook. I stumbled. I could’ve sat beside her, but I didn’t. I’m six seats away, and we’re the only two people on the train, in the universe that is a crowded New York subway car. The tension is there, here. She isn’t reading, not anymore, and I can imagine a life with the blonde. Missionary mornings on a comfy sofa we found on the street, a frisky orange cat we adopt one lazy Sunday in Union Square after a long brunch because we do things like that. We adopt cats and sofas.

But then my Portnoy twitches. Jay-Z and Vince Neil see them too. Girls, girls, girls.

Another one calls, silently. A suited minx with short hair and dark red lips and she’s right across from me. She doesn’t adopt cats, and she would never just lie there and take it. She is the cat. Older. Wiser. Dirtier. Not a shy bone in her lithe, horny body, and did she giggle when I adjusted my pants? Yes. She giggled. She fakes a yawn and strokes her neck, and she won’t look at me again. It’s on me to make the next move. Do I do it? Maybe that’s what I need. A martini of a woman who would hit me straight up, force me to get my GED, go to night school and make something of myself.

“Achoo!”

That’s a wild sneeze and that’s door number three and this girl is different. Not so nervous. Not so domineering. She’s standing, unlike my exes—sorry, ladies, it was fun while it lasted—and she’s holding her Atonement in that way where she wants me to know she walked into a bookstore and bought her Atonement. I work in a bookstore, so already you know we’d have something to talk about. Her coat is too big and too red, and she seems annoyed that she has to break away from Atonement to blow her nose and yeah.

That’s it. That’s my girl.

She’s not a missionary mouse, and she won’t push me to “make something of myself.” She’s cotton panties to the core, but then she crumples up her dirty Kleenex and gasps—I know that book, I know that part—and I can’t do it. I can’t be with someone who’s just like me.

It’s not time for me to atone. I’m seventeen years old. I’ve barely even lived.

This one down the way . . . This one f***ing lives. 2:12 p.m. and she’s visibly, clearly drunk. Wobbly legs in a skirt she put on last night. Chomping on a ham and cheese croissant in that way where you just know she’d devour my Portnoy.

She looks at me. She waves. What the f***ing f***, and I put my eyes on my tote bag. Do I get up? Talk to her? What would I say?

Doesn’t matter. Not anymore. She licked her fingers that were just on the pole, and she scrunches up the tinfoil and tosses it on the floor like we’re not all in this together, like litter isn’t f***ing illegal. Ham and cheese my ass, and it’s true what Mr. Mooney says.

Girls really do have a sixth sense buried in that extra hole between their legs.

She could feel me losing interest. That’s why she bends over and picks up the tinfoil.

Too little, too late, and I spy a prescription in her purse. She pinches her eyes. The pain. I can’t go there. You can’t make a sad girl happy, and I’m way too young to die trying.

“Seventy-second and Columbus!”

This is it. My last chance to make something happen. I freeze up. I do this all day every day. I talk myself into things and out of them and what the f*** is wrong with me? I don’t know these girls and they don’t know me, and it’s all coming to an end. The train slows, a direct f*** you to my speeding, stupid heart.

I rise. Eight eyeballs and four holes to choose from. Pick, Joe, pick.

But it’s predictable. I’m predictable. I don’t make eye contact. I just walk up the f***ing stairs into the street and—

“Wake up, asshole!”

I hold up a hand and wave at the justified old cabbie. “Sorry!”

I’m no good at being a New Yorker lately. I’m just not the same since 9/11, but then again, who is?

My appointment isn’t until three, so I walk into an internet café and pick a computer in the back. It feels weird, choosing this place over the bookshop, shoving my ATM card into the slot like a junkie who needs a fix as I wait for the machine to rob me blind. This should be free, it really should, and I do what I do all day, all night.

I go on f***ing Craigslist.

“Heya, buddy.”

Craig doesn’t say hi back. I don’t even know if he’s a real person with a last name. But God f***ing bless him either way. The world used to be this black hole. You see a girl, you feel something, you chicken out and you know you’ll never see her again. But now we have this magical place called Missed Connections. I’ve fallen in love in my head seventeen times today and there’s a chance that one of the sweet seventeen can’t get me out of her head. The page is loading and . . .

Nope.

I should be used to it by now, the rejection, but Emily Dickinson said it best. “Hope is the thing with feathers.” It’s still early. Maybe one of them will realize that she deserves to be loved by the cute guy with the bookstore bag because we all deserve to be loved.

Well, not all of us. Certainly not Angus F***ing Kaplan.

Of course he lives in a penthouse on the Upper West Side. The kind of place protected by soulless, scowling stone f***ing gargoyles. Angus is a gargoyle. A crackhead who gets a pass in this world because he can afford a high-end crack den. A book buyer who burns the books in his fireplace. Everything about this is wrong, but it’s like Mr. Mooney says. That’s capitalism, Joseph. I am delivering Angus a signed first edition of Goodbye, Columbus. I could do something to save this book’s life. Throw Angus in the fireplace. Punch his lights out.

But it’s the same way with the girls on the subway. It’s all in my motherf***ing head, fantasies on my Moleskine as more foreskin goes untouched. Use it or lose it. I am losing it. I don’t do stuff. I just think about doing stuff. And the whole point of being here is that you gotta live. Do something. Be something. F*** someone. Pick a life and live it or you die in your head.

I press his buzzer.

“Yes?”

“Hey, Angus. It’s Joe.”

“Who?”

“Joe from the bookstore.”

“I don’t know a Joe.”

EVERYONE KNOWS A JOE. “Angus, I got your Philip Roth.”

He laughs. I hear it now. The flick of a Bic. I can almost smell the fumes. Real actual crack. He coughs and he belches, and he sighs. “Come on up, Jimbo.”

Gargoyles are nipping at my legs, and I don’t like the way I look in the lobby mirror. My head is too big for my body, or my body is too small for my head. I’m in the elevator trying not to cry, and I can’t go on like this. Malleable. Alone. Collecting typewriters and living in a four-by-ten room with cardboard walls. Yep, I got screwed. These NYU kids Chad and Hauser put out an ad for a cheap room “in the village.” They seemed nice enough on the phone, so I said yes, sight unseen. Turns out that by “village,” they meant Stuyvesant Town, a concrete mini-city in the far east. I don’t have a window and I sleep in a “converted pod” that Dumb and Dumber rigged with cardboard and duct tape. I went from one Stuy to another. No privacy. A cloak of shame that I can’t f***ing shake. My jeans feel good at home but here I am tugging at them. Nothing fits, not really. I haven’t touched a girl in centuries. I jerk off in the shower, on the sofa that isn’t mine, in the basement of the bookshop. Dumb and Dumber made an innocent mistake, but maybe I am Dumbest. I threw my fate in Craig’s hands, sight unf***ing seen. Who does that?

“Jimbo!”

“It’s Joe.”

Even for Angus, this is bad. He’s in a red-and-blue silk robe, and the belt doesn’t belong. It’s black. There’s a wad of chewing gum stuck to the chest hair by his left nipple, and I shouldn’t see his nipple. This can’t be the only nipple I see every week.

He laughs. “Oh, don’t worry about my eye, Jerry. Just a blood vessel. Come on in.”

I didn’t even notice his eye, because I try not to go there. The darkness of this penthouse. The long walk down the hall, a trail of septic breadcrumbs, cracked f***ing crack pipes and vomit, and is that piss? That is piss. A chew toy for a dog—Angus doesn’t have a dog—and I want to run. Flee. Live.

He rocks back and forth on his hairy-toed feet. “Hear that?”

“Peter Frampton, right?”

“Oh yes, Jake. That’s my boy.”

And then we’re moving again, down the hall and past the foyer—more crack pipes and a bag of blow—and Angus pulls a Heineken out of his pocket and tosses it. I catch it, but this is new. This is not how we do this. “Thanks, Angus.”

“Drink it.”

“It’s already open.”