Chapter 24
We’re off to a great start, Vail. You wanted birthday eve girl time with Cynthia last night, so I gave you “space” and called you first thing this morning to say happy birthday. You didn’t pick up (no hard feelings), and I sang to you.
I’m not a singer, and I can’t wait for you to tease me about my skills, and it killed me, waiting for it to get late, waiting for your quarter-life crisis to fucking end so that our full-blown happy life can begin.
The balloons were a mistake, and I run outside and watch them float into the black.
Back in the bar, I make a beeline for the rear, and there’s no air in here, only smoke. I’m bumping into jerks with jobs who jerk each other off like it’s not Friday fucking night.
Jerk 1: Do you work in the mail room at Condé Nast?
Jerk 2: More like Condé Nasty. I’m at EW now.
Jerk 1: Amazing. I’m at Hearst and I couldn’t be happier. So how do you know Vail?
Jerk 2: I don’t know her. Does anyone ever know the birthday girl at these things?
They’re not even here for you, and okay.
I need to breathe. You did say you’re in crisis and I’m late.
It’s late. But I’m here. I maneuver my way to the back room, a tobacco-scented, airtight colosseum.
It’s not late-late, not for Friday night in New York, and I can do this, find you, please you.
I walk under the banner and enter the war room, but it’s even worse in here.
The people, your people…debauchery and douchebaggery.
This isn’t a party room. It’s a performance space.
Stacked stadium seating. Awkward as a high school fucking cafeteria and who are all these people bragging about their jobs, their conquests?
Gently, Joseph. Girls do this—they hoard—and you’re in here somewhere, but I don’t see you.
I’m casing the joint, peering into the bouquets of Dunhill Carrie Bradshaws and half-shirt Samanthas and the men…
Terrible. Sleazy. U of M baseball-cap-on-backwards dolts mixed with pompous media men, all of them unfit for a two-episode story on your fucking sitcom, let alone you.
I plunk my ass on the indoor bleachers. Two sweater-set-style Charlottes glare at me like I’m the problem, interrupting their heart-to-fucking-heart about their careers. I butt in. “Hey, have you guys seen Vail?”
The answer is no, and they don’t want me, and I don’t want them, but it would be nice to be wanted right now. There are too many men in here. Do you know them? Do you…
Gently, Joseph.
I am not that bitter prick. I am Big. Cool. Calm. Unbreakable.
The Charlottes ditch me to flirt with bespectacled snobs who cross their legs and drone on about Jann Wenner and semantics. You’re not with them and you’re not with the Dick-ish baseball-cap bros in the corner, rating the Carries and turning their backs on the Mirandas.
“Dude, you looking for anything?”
It’s a beady-eyed snake in a Ramones shirt (oh, come on) and did you hire a drug dealer the way a mom hires a clown?
I can’t find you, so I look for Cynthia but the walls of people are closing in on me.
You’re not here. She’s not here. I don’t belong and I am late, too late.
A girl flips her hair, and the hair slaps my face.
She looks at me like I’m Mikey in Swingers.
Like she’s seen my fucking bank statement. “Can you move?”
I move. I walk and I wonder what your true friend Anj would say about this collection of unbearables. A tickle in my throat. A death in my heart.
I know you’re not my boyfriend.
Did you mean that? Did you want a night off from me? Did you go home with someone else? I dip my finger into the remains of your birthday cake. I clock the box. Magnolia Bakery. Who carried that cake into the taxi, into this room? Was it Cynthia? Was it a man?
A tap on my shoulder. Is it you? I turn around and no. It’s not you. “It’s a private party.”
“I know. Where’s Vail?”
“Who are you?”
“I’m her boyfriend.”
The girl makes a face and she gives me the hand. “Oof. See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya!”
I’m not the bad guy—I am holding a fucking mixtape—and the Bowie is foreboding—Twenty-five…
Don’t wanna stay alive—and is that you, Vail?
Did you run off to end it all because I didn’t show?
FUCK FUCK FUCK. I won’t let go of hope and I shove my way through the satin astrology sluts and now it’s Fatboy Slim.
“Praise You.” I can’t praise you. I can’t love you and the song is from Sex.
I am Carrie on the beach when she learns about Big and Natasha and there’s no one who’s gonna hold my hair back if I puke and no.
Don’t fucking puke.
But my stomach is rumbling. The techno and the flashing bulbs on the disposable cameras, not Nikons, not Polaroids, no greens of summers, just cardboard one-off cameras that wind up in a landfill.
Is that me? Did you throw me away? Did I throw you away?
I spot a box with a sign on it. That’s your handwriting, proof of your participation: DROP YOUR CAMERAS IN MY BOX.
There are nine cameras in your box. My box.
Mine. I push my way through the monsters of Botanica—bad name for this bar, no flower would survive—and I walk outside.
I call you. Nothing. I call Dick. Nothing.
One of my red balloons is caught in a fence across the street.
You love me and I am late. I will not panic. Dick got it all wrong.
Interior. You in that back room, waiting for me.
Exterior. Me on the sidewalk, the asshole who stood you up on your birthday. End scene.
Or maybe not. Girls drink when they get sad, and it’s a dark bar.
I was in such a rush to get to the colosseum that I didn’t check the main floor.
The thing with feathers is alive in me again, and I walk back into hell.
Two bartenders on duty. A woman who wishes she were anywhere but here and a guy with a wifebeater and a mohawk.
I choose the guy, an anti-Steve who would notice a birthday girl in a plastic fucking crown.
A lot of guys would have noticed, especially those New Yorker assholes. Grrr.
“Yo, dude.”
“What’ll it be?”
“Have you seen the birthday girl around?”
“Ha. She was pretty toasted. Split a while ago…. You trying to buy her a shot?”
I picture you falling off the Titanic with an incompetent fake Leo. “Did she leave with anyone?”
He laughs and says he’s so happy he’s single and can anyone ever just let it be about me? “Are you drinking, or what?”
I toss a ten on the bar. I am not Big. I am small.
A ten isn’t a Benjamin, and I know what I look like.
Little boy lost carries hot pink gift bag around a crowded bar after midnight.
I check my Motorola and nope. You didn’t call me back, not yet.
I hate myself. I know better. I knew better.
You are my fucking girlfriend. The proof is in the Magnolia banana pudding you fed to me the other night and how could I be so fucking stupid?
I need to see you, Vail. I need to know what you did while I was home torturing you with my absence for no good reason.
I need to know what I fucking missed. I make one last trip into the colosseum.
I shove my hand in your box. I grab one of these cardboard plastic cameras and a screaming, semi-Charlotte shouts, “Hey! That’s not yours! ”
—
Oh yes, it fucking is, and New York was built for nights like this.
4:12 a.m. and the one-hour photo place by the bookstore opens at seven.
I walk and I walk, and I buy coffee for myself, for the homeless.
I help a drunk girl get into a cab and slip the cabbie a twenty to make sure she gets home safe.
I am a good man. Lovable. Loving. I won’t jump to conclusions, and I won’t look back.
Yes, Dick was wrong. People who are right a lot are wrong at times.
I should’ve showed up at 9:31. I shouldn’t have been singing into my Motorola at eight a.m. I get it.
What a fucking tool, right? I bet you woke up, puked in your pillowcase, and played my voicemail for Cynthia.
I bet she got in your ear, in your head.
Wow, that is not a cool cat. Does he think you guys are married or something?
I mean, give a girl a little space. Deep down, I knew it, didn’t I, Vail?
I was wrong to call you this morning when I wanted to see you, be with you.
I should’ve shown up at your place around eleven a.m. with my pink bag and my balloons.
It’s your birthday and you weren’t pushing me away.
You were daring me to make a real grand fucking gesture and I failed.
F minus. I knew that you wanted me to go to your party.
And if I really was all growns up like Mikey at the end of Swingers, well, come on.
An adult does what he wants. A pupil disobeys his teacher. A boyfriend comes through.
At 7:03 a.m., a scrawny guy with an Adam’s apple the size of a McIntosh unlocks the door to the one-hour photo place. “Whoa,” he says. “I haven’t even had my coffee.”
A business that opens at seven should be prepared to do business at seven. “Sorry,” I say as I slip him the garbage camera. “I didn’t mean to come in all hot.”
I lean against a wall and wait for the fifty-eight minutes to pass.
Like it or not, I will hold on to your first birthday with me and without me forever.
This place. The dust particles and the light and his Adam’s apple and the clock on the wall that ticks.
A clock that takes me back to school, to Miss Frascatore’s office.
Is this what that is? Did you run out on me because I ran out on you?
Adam’s Apple hands me an envelope. Twenty-four photographs inside. Gulp.
Opening a package of photographs is like starting a new book. It’s a ritual. It matters, where you are when you read the first page. I exit the shop. I breathe. In air, out dust mites and chemicals. I’m only a couple of blocks from the shop, so I walk to the shop, down to the cage.
“Hi, Hector.”