1143 PM Richie
Standing next to the open window, Richie fumbled in his pockets for a cigarette.
He had been doing this for the last five minutes, which was probably enough time to deduce that he had, in fact, smoked all his cigarettes already, but the truth was Richie really wanted one, and searching for them temporarily distracted him from the fact that he had gotten—damn it—a little too fucked up.
How had this happened? He considered the evidence: he’d started drinking at six o’clock, and then he smoked a little weed, and then he drank a lot more, and then he did some cocaine.
He was not cross-faded—he was four-way-stop-faded.
The cocaine was supposed to help with all that.
Was supposed to slice through the fog, leave little Bolivian breadcrumbs for his brain to follow.
Someone call the authorities! The cocaine was falsely advertised!
Either that, or he should have done a few more bumps.
Yes, more was probably the answer—had, in Richie’s case, always been the answer.
A little more of this to lift you up, a little more of that to bring you down, a little more of whatever else there was to forget that you were ever too up or too down in the first place.
Obliterating yourself was a science that required a delicate balance.
It always shocked him that, given his prodigious experience, he could never seem to get it right.
“The Bronx is very fertile. People don’t know that.”
Richie blinked. He looked next to him, where Nina Guzman was standing.
For the last five minutes, ever since he started searching for a cigarette, she had been talking to him.
She was wearing lint-covered black pants and a pilly gray sweater.
Dry skin formed crusts at the corners of her nose. Richie had forgotten she was there.
“That’s why we’re planting our community gardens there. Because the ground is so fertile. We think it will really help increase interest in organic farming in the neighborhood.”
Community gardens? The Bronx? Richie had no idea what she was talking about.
All he could think about was how Nina and Courtney Paulson used to hook up in college.
Sophomore year the rumor was that they shared a room in the Tri Delta house, where they slept in the same bed and shared cigarettes.
Nina all but confirmed the rumor when Courtney started dating one of Theo’s teammates on the intramural basketball team, and Nina blew up at her in Smokey Joe’s.
She’d called her a whore and a traitor and, after throwing a vodka gimlet in her face, said that she was cheap with her Marlboro Lights and couldn’t eat pussy to save her life.
Nina said, “Right now we’re really focused on carrots.”
“That makes sense.”
“They’re so versatile.”
“So versatile.”
“They also have a ton of antioxidants in them. Did you know that?”
“No. I didn’t.”
In college Nina had driven a giant SUV around campus.
She was majoring in sociology and wanted to be a publicist for celebrities in Hollywood.
But then the summer after sophomore year she went on some camping trip in the Australian outback to get over Courtney Paulson, and while she was there she had a spiritual experience with an Aboriginal shaman; when she came back that fall, she changed her major to environmental science.
From what Richie could remember, she kept the SUV.
Nina said something about photosynthesis; Richie wondered if he was dead and this was hell. What confused him about Nina was that their politics were more or less aligned, and yet talking to her about them made him want to become a raging, fanatical, homicidal fascist.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Your hands have been in your pockets for, like, ever.”
“Hey, Nina?”
“Yeah?”
“Fuck off.”
She gasped, sighed, stormed away. Richie kept digging.
He found, among clumps of lint and a lone piece of gum: a small dime bag with two bumps left, his keys, a dry-cleaning receipt for three shirts, a Heineken bottle cap, another loose key whose origins were a mystery, and one of his business cards from the Boston Consulting Group.
It was folded in half, though now he flattened it out in his palm, reading his own name.
He had gotten the job nine months ago, through a series of on-campus recruiting events where women in pantsuits asked him to explain his thought process for deducing how many gas stations were in Los Angeles.
Richie couldn’t remember what he’d said, only that it made the women laugh hysterically, and then nod enthusiastically, and then laugh hysterically again; in the end, whatever it was, it was good enough for him to get the job.
When that happened, Richie let out a laugh of his own.
He called his stepfather to rub it in his face.
“Consulting?”
His stepfather managed a Bank of America branch in Windham, New Hampshire.
He had a thick mustache, wore appalling short-sleeved button-down shirts, and generally thought the only thing Richie was good for was spending his mother’s money.
He was a tacky, hateful man, and only a slight improvement over Richie’s father.
“That’s right,” Richie said. “With the Boston Consulting Group.”
His stepfather let out a nasal huh.
Then he said: “You know, a job means you actually have to work.”
From his pocket, Richie pulled out a chipped Altoid, frowned, and threw it and his business card out the open window.
A half-finished drink sat on the sill—he did its owner the favor of finishing it and licked his lips.
Then, thanks to a brief portal of clarity opened by some residual cocaine, he discovered something tucked neatly away in the pocket of his shirt.
His shirt! How had he not thought of that before?
It was a leopard-print, polyester button-down that he claimed was vintage Gucci, by which he really meant H Sasha had knocked him in the head with her elbow.
How had that night ended? He had stayed until the bar closed, he remembered that much, but after that things got a little blurry.
Had he gone home with Eric? He had certainly come with Eric, but that didn’t necessarily mean he’d gone home with him.
He tried to picture himself waiting in line at coat check, and then walking out of the bar.
An image began to solidify: lighting a cigarette on the street outside, stumbling eastward to Seventh Avenue, climbing up three flights of stairs, stepping on a cat, being told to be quiet because of a sleeping roommate, the first few chords of the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack…
Nick. He had come with Eric, but he had gone home with Nick.
Richie pulled the joint from his shirt pocket.
Adam sat on the bed to his left, but Sasha was standing up, and he wished she would sit down already.
She was leaning against the closet door, her hands crossed behind her back, and she kept tilting her head from left to right.
He looked at her for a moment longer; he was suspicious of tall people as a rule.
He didn’t like how they could always look down.
“I need a lighter,” he said.
Sasha scoffed. “You asked us to get high and don’t have a lighter?”
“I’m gay, Sasha—not a Boy Scout.”
She patted her jeans. “I don’t have one.”
Adam shrugged. “Neither do I.”
Loser energy, Richie thought. Total, absolute loser energy.
He sighed, loudly and paternally, conveying his disappointment.
Maybe he should have gone to the bathroom and finished the last bits of his coke.
One bump, two bumps, red bump, blue bump, as easy as that.
He still had that phantom key in his pocket.
Earlier he had used it, and had been amazed by how exquisitely designed it was for scooping up drugs from tiny plastic bags.
So small, so slender! It was these little coincidences, these everyday graces, that kept Richie believing in God.
But then Adam began plunging his hand into the pockets of random coats, rummaging around until, at last, he pulled out a blue Bic lighter. He held it up to Richie and smiled. Richie immediately took it from him without saying anything.