Chapter 35
I need the World Wide Fucking Web so I’m in the back of an internet café with my back against the wall.
I have Dick’s laptop and a slice of pizza.
Pepperoni. But I can’t eat. How could I?
You’re still calling him and you’re not calling me and you’re sicker than I thought.
I got into his email, Vail. And it was one thing to read your little chats with Dick, but to see you put words in my mouth—NYC Bookstore Babe, you were so sexy in your cape—I mean, this sucks.
I HATE YOUR CAPE. You rewrote your Craigslist letter and reversed everything and I won’t judge you—it’s a cycle of abuse—but you’re a monkey in his circus and I have to save you.
We can’t have his mother getting in our way, so I send her a back-off-Mommy email. And then I can’t help it. I have to taste the spoiled milk. I dig around to find your Evite.
He wasn’t exaggerating. You invited one hundred fifty-six people to your birthday. Way more guys than girls. And you let your “friends” invite whoever they wanted. Especially hot guys! All guys welcome lol wooh!
So what do I do? Dick is alive, in the freezer, and I can’t actually, you know, kill him.
Is he hungry? He is probably hungry. I buy him a slice.
But not from the good place. From a shit place closer to the warehouse.
When I get back, he’s still down and he’s blinking, bloody.
And for a moment, it looks like he is the victim.
But no. I get my head together. I am the victim.
I pull the sock out of his mouth. I slap his face and he comes to and I give him a slice.
It’s a dangerous thing, to be a man with no plan.
That’s how you wind up spoon-feeding pizza to an asshole. He burps.
“Nice left hook,” he says. “See, that’s something else I did for ya, Goldberg.”
He talks like we’re downtown, killing time before we hit up Passerby. He eats like I am a boy. Not a threat. And then he spits out the crust and sighs. “So, we done here?”
“No.”
“Kid, it’s all right. She was your first love. Everyone goes batshit with first love.”
“She was not my first.”
Not fair, Vail. Not fair that he can read me like Miss Frascatore.
“Look,” he says. “It sucks, I know. You got your little heart smashed into a million pieces. You think some girl didn’t break me? I told you. They get to us. It happens.”
“That’s not what happened.”
“Maybe if I say it in your language…She’s fuckin’ Carrie, bro. She only loves guys who don’t love her back. That chick will never, could never love you. I mean, dude…she doesn’t even like your cock.”
It’s my PORTNOY and it’s perfect. Is it? “You don’t know that.”
“Relax, Goldfuck. You’ll rebound. And this…this is nothing. Let’s go knock back a couple of J?ger bombs and forget she ever happened. Seriously. She’s not worth it.”
This again, and I can’t let it go. “Yes, she fucking is.”
His phone rings, and it’s you again. As if even now, you are on his side.
Leaving you becomes a thing I could do, and he knows it.
I would delete your number and go knock back J?ger bombs with Dick.
I’d have to hang with him, make him trust me.
It’s that keep-your-enemies closer bullshit and what?
I’d just…never see you again? And he’d see you whenever he felt like it and I’d always kinda sense it when you two had a fuck-fest and—
“C’mon,” he says. “Take inventory, kid. You’re not walking away empty-handed. You got a sweet pad in SoHo. She really is trying to hook you up with a gig. You got me, you got the gym. Not too shabby for a—”
“High school dropout.”
“You said that, Goldilocks. Not me.”
I tell him to shut up and he shuts the fuck up and finally there is silence.
He is getting to me, Vail. Maybe he’s right.
Maybe there was never a chance for us and maybe I should forget I ever met you and untie the fucker and go get J?ger bombed with him.
You started this. You did this. You talked to him about me.
He went with it. He’s a shithead. But I wasn’t ever in love with him.
I love you. I’m a slave…4 U. Like it or not I’m Sam Cooked for life and I will always be your slave till I’m buried in my grave.
I saw the white box. The history. The Evite.
The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow might be a pot of shit.
I am not “the one.” We never even made it to Serendipity.
You are ice, and my pick isn’t sharp and hot enough to melt you.
And now look what I did. I put myself in hot water.
“Joe,” he says. “Remember the one where Big beat the shit out of his buddy who hit on Carrie?”
“That never happened.”
“Exactly,” he says. “Don’t blame me about ‘the end of love in New York.’ ”
“The line is ‘the end of love in Manhattan.’ ”
“Blame that fucking show. Blame AOL. Blame the fuckers who blew up the towers when shit was just getting fun and girls were at their new millennium Forever 21 fucking best. I didn’t do this, Joe. You want to blame me, but you can’t. I’m your bro. Think of it this way. If you did this to some girl…”
“I would never.”
“Well, no girl would ever forgive you if you lured her to your cave and knocked her out and locked her ass up in the icebox. We can’t let them turn us against each other.”
Maybe he’s right. Maybe growing up means outgrowing you. You’re not the only fish in the Central Park Reservoir. You mocked my Portnoy. I know for a fact that you didn’t finish Fast Food Nation and I’m not all that experienced. Maybe you’re not that good in bed.
“You know what you should do, Goldberg? EuroTrip. I did a semester in Manchester after I got pussy-whipped and, man…. It’d be good for you to get outta Dodge, seriously.”
I set up a bump on a dog tag. He smiles and hoots, and I am what I am. It is what it is. I can’t tell you that it’s not good to see the fucker laugh a little, relax.
But then my phone rings for the first time in a long time and it’s…you.
He shouts at me to stay, but I don’t stay. The Eric Carmen blasts in the heart part of my head and I run to the door and I step out in the street and the city’s the color of—
“Vail! I almost missed you.”
“You sound so out of breath. Are you okay? How is Jeremy?”
I gulp heaps of fresh air and I close the door. Tight. “He’s good. All good.”
“Oh, thank God, because I have a question for you, Cusack.”
Do you love me? Are you in bed with one hundred sixty jerks right now? “Shoot.”
“Well, I’m starving and I want something sweet….” Because your fingers got a workout calling Dick? “Do you…do you maybe want to finally do what we’ve been saying we’d do since the day we met? I mean…do you want to go to Serendipity with me, my dear?”
The answer is yes, and I can’t get back onto the island fast enough. Fuck it. I hail a cab.
I did this. I made this possible. I put Dick on ice and I defrosted your cold, scared heart—your freezer was good practice—and you did it!
You called me for frozen hot chocolate and steaming hot sex.
I know it’s hard, Vail, but you made the right call.
And I hate that I ever doubted you. I look down at my hands.
I do have to wash up, but then again…no, I don’t.
I fucked my hands up when I was defrosting your freezer!
My hands are clean in the way that matters, all the better to hold your hands over a nice cup of frozen hot chocolate.
Dick was wrong, and so were your bosses at Sex.
It is not “the end of love in Manhattan.” It’s just the end of you and that low-rent Hardy Boy.
Life is good. The taxi driver is a talker in the pleasant way, sharing his story of how he got his medallion, how many years it took to memorize this city and every street, every tunnel.
“Driving a car into Manhattan never gets old,” he says. “It’s the opposite of going home to the wife, but don’t tell her you heard that from me!”
We laugh together and I pledge my allegiance.
I’m a lucky man. I can’t imagine ever dreading coming home to you, Vail.
I’m going to see you and I love a spontaneous cab ride.
I love the idea of Dick tied up and crying in that busted-ass freezer.
I never had anything to worry about, did I?
If he breaks out of his cage—he will not bust out of that cage—I am fine. We’re fine.
That’s the upside of a simultaneously arrogant and insecure prick. That gym rat ice-hearted circus freak of a man would never tell a cop or a mother or a bored girl at a bar what I, the young, roid-free bookselling intellect, did to the big, bad globe-trotting dick.
You have to be very careful about who you lock up in a cage. I chose well.