You (You #1)(10)

You all clink glasses but those girls have something to drink and your cup runneth empty. I go outside so I’ll know when you leave. Some asshole emerges, vomits.

Pickle juice, I swear.





5


THERE are three of us waiting in the Greenpoint Avenue subway station at 2:45 in the morning and I want to tie your shoelaces. They’re undone. And you’re too drunk to be standing so close to the tracks. You’re leaning with your back against the green pole with your legs extended so that your feet are planted on the yellow warning zone, the edge of the platform. The pole has four sides but you have to stand on the side facing the tracks. Why?

You’ve got me to protect you and the only other person in this hellhole is a homeless dude and he’s on another planet, on a bench, singing: Engine, engine, number nine on the New York transit line, if my train runs off the tracks pick it up pick it up pick it up.

He sings that part of the song on a loop, loudly, and your head is buried in your phone and you can’t type and stand and listen to his musical assault all at the same time. You keep slipping—your shoes are old, no tread—and I keep flinching and it’s starting to get old. We don’t belong in this dump; it’s a minefield of empty cans, wrappers, things nobody wanted, not even the homeless singing dude. The kids you run with live to ride the G train, like it proves they’re down, “real,” but what your friends don’t realize is that this line was better off without them and their cans of Miller High Life and their pickle-scented vomit.

Your foot slips. Again.

You drop your phone and it lands in the yellow zone and you’re lucky it didn’t fall onto the tracks and I get goose bumps and I wish I could grab you by the arm and escort you to the other side of that pole. You’re too close to the tracks, Beck, and you’re lucky I’m here, because if you fell or if some sicko had followed you down, some derelict rapist, you wouldn’t be able to do anything. You’re too drunk. Your laces in your little sneakers are too long, too loose, and the attacker would press you down on the floor or against that pole and he’d tear those already torn tights off and slash those cotton panties from Victoria’s Secret and cover your pink mouth with his oily hand and there’d be nothing you could do and your life would never be the same. You would live in fear of subways, run back to Nantucket, avoid the “Casual Encounters” section of Craigslist, get tested for STDs on a monthly basis for a year, maybe two.

The homeless dude, meanwhile, doesn’t stop singing engine engine and he’s urinated twice and he hasn’t gotten up to do it, either. He’s sitting in his piss and if some sicko followed you down here to finish what you started with those torn stockings, this dude would just keep singing and pissing and pissing and singing.

You slip.

Again.

And you narrow your eyes at the homeless dude and growl but he’s on another planet, Beck. And it’s not his fault you’re wasted.

Did I mention that you’re lucky to have me? You are. I am a Bed-Stuy man by birth, sober, collected, and well aware of my whereabouts and yours. A protector.

And the bullshit thing is, if someone saw the three of us, well, most people would think I’m the weird one just because I followed you here. And that’s the problem with this world, with women.

You see Elliot in Hannah scam his way to be near his sister-in-law and you call that romantic but if you knew what I went through to get into your home, that I messed up my back trying to know you, inside and out, you’d judge me for it. The world fell out of love with love at some point and I know what you’re doing with that phone. You’re trying to talk to Benji, the club soda, too-much-hair, no-show motherfucker with whom you have encounters that are not casual, at least not to you. You seek him. You want him. But this will pass.

And part of the problem is that phone. You have that function on that fucking phone that enables you to know when your texts are opened and ignored. And Benji, he ignores the fuck out of you. He is more passionate about blowing you off than he is about being inside of you and this is what you want? You stab at your phone. Your phone. Enough with this phone, Beck. It’s gonna do you in, waste your voice, and cripple your fingers.

Fuck that phone.

I’d like to throw it on the tracks and hold you as we wait for the train to run it down. There’s a reason it’s cracked and there’s a reason you left it in your basket at the bookshop that day. Deep down, you know you’d be better off without it. Nothing good comes from that phone. Don’t you see? You do see. Otherwise you’d treat that phone well. You’d have put it in a case before it cracked. You wouldn’t stand here fumbling with it and letting it dictate your life. I really do wish you’d throw it onto the tracks and go offline and turn your head and look over at me and say, “Don’t I know you?” And I’d play along and we’d talk and our song would be engine, engine, number nine on the New York transit line, if my train runs off the tracks—

“Can you please stop singing?” You growl, but the dude can’t even hear you over the singing and pissing and singing and pissing and you whip your head around too fast and damn it you need to not lean back like that but you do.

It happens so fast.

You reach out your arms but you’re wobbling. You drop your phone and you lunge to grab it and in the process you misstep—“Aaah!”—and you slip and trip on that damn shoelace and you fall splat and somehow you land the wrong way and you roll off the yellow danger zone and down into the actual danger zone. You scream. It’s the fastest slowest fall I’ve ever seen and you’re only a voice down on the tracks now, a shriek and his singing doesn’t stop, engine engine number nine, and it’s the wrong soundtrack for what I have to do now, bad back and all. I run across the platform, look down at you.