You (You #1)(42)

I am SO sorry Joe. Peach is super sick and I don’t want to leave her alone. Is there any way you could do us a favor?

What can I do but write back:

Anything.

Now you call for me to come so I walk over to the bathroom door. I don’t open it. And neither do you. I knock on the door. “At your service, ladies.”

You open the door the tiniest bit and you smile. “Would you mind running to the deli and getting a bottle of Evian and a pear and some more ice?”

“Of course,” I say. “Should I grab your keys?”

You start to say yes but she nudges you, I think, and you tell me to buzz when I get back. I don’t kiss you good-bye.

It’s clear to me as I walk past Graydon Carter’s house and breathe in the West Village air. Benji’s got to go. Peach is your best friend, so you’re allowed to be excessively tolerant of her bullshit, but you’ve got this thing in you, Beck. And it’s not your fault, because everybody has something. Dennis Lehane would call it a misguided Ivy League omertà and he would be right. You will always choose the Peaches and Benjis of the world over me because you’re loyal to the gentry. I pick up the smallest bottle of Evian and the worst pear in the bucket and a two-buck bag of ice and a pair of rubber gloves I’m gonna need.

I haul my sweaty, sore ass back to your place and you don’t buzz me in. You come to the door and take the plastic bag.

“She’s really not up for company,” you say.

“I get it,” I say. “You okay?”

“Oh I’m fine. And so is my bed.”

You smile and peck me on the lips and Peach is calling so you run back to her and as I walk cross town to the shop, all the good of our day, all the boyfriend joy is obliterated by how much I hate this fucking city for being owned by people like Benji and Peach. It’s not until I reach the shop that I realize I left the rubber gloves in the bag. If you ask, I’ll tell you that I was going to clean your bathroom. You’ll believe me. I know how to do stuff like that, I do.

I go to my corner store that’s not as nice as your corner store and pick up more rubber gloves and peanut oil and then I hit up Dean & DeLuca for a soy latte. I get back to the shop and I pour a healthy tablespoon of peanut oil into the soy latte. Benji lies about everything. He’s probably lying about his peanut allergy but who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky.





16


MOST people think that Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage about war. But he didn’t. He based his battle descriptions on his experiences on the football field in school. Crane was somewhat of a pussy in his youth, perpetually sick and not a jock. He’d never been to war; he’d only been sacked by the early American equivalent of Clay Fucking Matthews. You should have seen Benji’s face when I told him this, Beck. He knew the book inside and out but he knew nothing about Crane, had no idea that Crane was full of self-loathing over the fact that veterans bought his bullshit. He pretty much spent the rest of his days killing himself slowly, enlisting in war after war and trying to make up for the fact that he’d been young, clever, and lucky.

“That’s unreal,” Benji marveled, shaking his head.

“What’s unreal is that you love the book so much but never learned about him.”

THIS much is true: Benji wasn’t lying; he is, was, allergic to peanuts. He died educated. He died with new confidence and new pride and who says a life has to take eighty years to be lived? He learned, you know? How many people get to go out feeling like they’re just hitting their stride? Most people die old, full of pain and regret. Or young and full of drugs and self-indulgence—or sheer bad luck. But Benji had the ultimate privilege; he died with an opening heart, an improving mind. Benji wasn’t any good at being Benji, Beck. You know that, above all people. Look at the way he treated you and look at the way he treated his body. The trap I set for him was a relief from the trap he was born into. I created a world where he couldn’t steal, where his counterfeit words didn’t count. I took his drugs away.

I look out over the water at IKEA on the horizon. It’s the craziest thing, Beck. The storage locker Benji told me about, the one with the key card? It’s right near IKEA. You gotta get a kick out of the little things and I wonder what Paul Thomas Anderson would make of this “coincidence.”

It’s easier to make sense of things at sea, in a river that could kick your ass if it wanted to. You remember that we really are nothing compared to the elements, ashes to ashes, Beck, dust to dust. Benji’s ashes are in an IKEA box, one leftover from our trip. I tell a deckhand that there were parts missing, that the product looks nothing like the picture. In truth, this box contains Benji’s ashes. And you wouldn’t believe what I had to go through; a person doesn’t just disintegrate to dust.

Two days ago, you started stressing about Halloween. You were going to be Princess Leia (you really are a flirt), and you were taking pictures of yourself and your friends and getting drunk a lot. You did not ask me to be Luke Skywalker, and going forward, we are gonna have some fun fights about how to celebrate Halloween.

And two days ago I started stressing about what do with Benji’s body. I had to get Curtis to work crazy hours during Halloween and I had to learn to cremate a corpse. Curtis was amenable; potheads need to buy pot and respond well to overtime. And I figured out what to do with Benji thanks to the instructions on fiscally practical backyard cremation readily available online. It wasn’t something I could do in the city so I took Mr. Mooney’s car out by Jones Beach and found a good hiding spot. Cremation takes time. You have to keep that fire going for ages and it’s not a perfect job. Benji’s ashes are definitely bony so you wouldn’t want to go pouring them into a colander! A proper cremation requires time and chemicals, but I think I did well, given the circumstances. And I care enough to box him up and bring him home, and most people in my position would leave him out on the island. I crack a smile because when you think about it, you’re not really Princess Leia (your buns were much smaller), and I’m not really an undertaker. There’s a symmetry of some kind, and I like it.