One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories(46)
Before the vague restaurant critic could write a second review, he was fired.
A couple of weeks more and he might have caught on. He might have developed a following beyond the world of the traditional restaurant review readers for what he was doing, for the statement he was trying to make—about criticism, about restaurants, about our expectations in life on a larger level.
But he was fired before any of that could happen.
If it was even going to happen.
He didn’t care. He knew what he did.
But he kind of did care. He wished other people knew what he did, too.
One of These Days, We Have to Do Something About Willie
We had all known for years that someday, sooner or later, we would have to do something about Willie.
We knew this from the night we met him: freshman year, orientation week, at the first real party we went to—the first party that didn’t have ice cream. He was standing by the speakers, spinning pop-rap songs off the click-wheel edition of the iPod; he looked untroubled beyond his years, a life-sized version of the people you see on trophies; he seemed to be blazing outside the lines of his own body, as if he were drawn in crayon by an excited five-year-old; whatever fuel source was powering him couldn’t possibly be sustainable, and its excess poured easily off of him in the form of expansive declarations about how awesome the party was, an enthusiasm that somehow circled back in order to power, even overpower, the party that was powering him; and when he noticed the three of us, all aspirants to social normalcy who had chosen this college partly because it scored higher than average among schools of its academic caliber under the “Party School” index on the U.S. News & World Report college guide, he decided in that moment, for some reason we would never understand or question, that he loved us, and that we would forever be at the center of his infinitely expanding galaxy of friends.
I think we knew even then how much he was going to transform our lives; and that eventually, to pay him back, we really would have to do something about him.
After college, the four of us all moved to different cities. I moved to New York to work as a copy editor for an alternative weekly (not the one you’re thinking of); Josh went to San Francisco to work for a video-sharing website (not the one you’re thinking of); Dave spent three months of an intended year backpacking alone through Japan and Singapore and then hastily abandoned it to go home to Chicago and apply to law school; and Willie, with more than enough alum connections to make up for a general studies diploma, got a job as an entry-level investment banker in Houston.
Even though we lived in different places, we still saw ourselves as moving through life as a group. It would have been great to get to see each other more—that was, in fact, one of our most frequent topics of conversation—but for four people pursuing their dreams in different cities, our presence in each other’s lives really was quite substantial. We were more in touch with one another than with anyone else, including (if not especially) our families, and we gave one another as much advice and support as we ever had—more, even, because there was more to talk about, more decisions to make. We all still considered each other the closest people in each other’s lives.
As that first year went on, though, the posts coming to us from Willie’s corner of the internet became something that I felt more and more uncomfortable ignoring. By the January after graduation, almost every update from Willie’s life involved a picture of him getting comedically (or was it dramatically?) incapacitated the night before, with captions to help tell the story even more clearly—“TYPICAL MONDAY,” “TYPICAL TUESDAY,” etc. A new photo of Willie passed out on a floor or out of control in a bar came across our screens literally every day. All these posts got nothing but favorable and favoriting comments and replies, except for one sensitive-looking girl named AliBaby90 who once asked “r u okay?” below a photo of Willie passed out, facedown, on a suburban lawn, to which Willie responded “HAHA DO I LOOK OKAY?!!?” which was apparently enough for her, since she “liked” the response.
Were we, in fact, really still friends—like we said we were, and thought we were, and which comforted us as we each staked out new lives in cities where we didn’t really know anyone at all? Or, I wondered, were we just slowly transforming into simpler and more easily digestible fictional characters to one another—in other words, becoming our profile pictures: cool, expressionless Dave, unfazed even at majestic Mount Fuji, his much-remarked-upon good looks defiantly hidden behind sunglasses; sweetheart Josh, playfully presenting a prom corsage in a cookbook-filled suburban kitchen to his overjoyed six-year-old sister, standing on a table, playing along; me, as a preposterously anti-Semitic cartoon depiction of Woody Allen at a typewriter, drawn of me at the insistence of my girlfriend, Sarah, by a caricature artist in Times Square who knew only that I wanted to be a writer and that I looked, apparently, extremely Jewish; and Willie, drinking simultaneously from a handle of vodka and a handle of Jack Daniel’s beneath a U-Haul at a tailgate party, surrounded by friends that didn’t include us, screaming at someone or something, the photo filtered to look like an image that belonged in any era.
Except, I thought one day as I looked at that picture, wondering what my relationship to it was supposed to be—we didn’t live in any era. We lived in the era when people treated things like alcoholism and addiction as the problems that they were, something that friends were supposed to save each other from.