Demand and Supply

by

Joshua Irwin

A Thesis submitted to the

Graduate School-Newark

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing

Rutgers University – Newark MFA Program

Written under the direction of

James Goodman

and approved by

Rigoberto González

______

______

Newark, New Jersey

May 2019 Acknowledgments

All the thanks I can possibly give the graduating 2019 fiction writing cohort: Ananda Lima, Andy Gallagher, Andrew Erkilla, Brian Loo, Lauren Parrot,

Madani Sheikh, Ryan Wong, Simeon Marsalis. Your feedback has been invaluable, and I admire each and every one of you. Yet another special thank you to the writers that have led our workshops: Alice Elliott Dark, for speaking truth and speaking it kindly. Akhil

Sharma, for being direct and honest. John Keene for his openness, uncanny insight and enthusiasm. Jayne Anne Phillips for founding this program. James Goodman, for his faith in me. All of you for your wisdom, care, and love.

ii Table of Contents

Hotbox 1

Nothing 11

Fresh Loot 18

How to Join a Startup 20

Christopher and Dr. Shabari 40 what r u doing 49

Level Zero 64

Big plans 77

iii 1

Hotbox

I saw his name on the news when I was getting ready for work. I remembered passing a grape-flavored blunt back and forth in his old Chevy Celebrity on our way back from the 18+ casino. The fog had settled into the San Joaquin valley like it normally does between sunset and sunrise, but that day, the fog was extra-thick. The Celebrity’s windows were up, so the inside of the car was smoked out too. We’d gone to the casino fresh off receiving our paychecks, stopping by the bank to cash them on our way up. I deposited half and brought the rest. I left with nothing, and I didn’t know how Donald did, but I saw him hit the ATM twice.

“You were supposed to bring some beginner’s luck,” he said.

“We were both on our way there for a bit.”

“Yeah.”

“When you stay in the casino long enough it gets you, I think.”

“Yeah, but it works the other way too. If we had a few more hours we could have

came up.”

“Maybe.”

Donald said, “You know the thing I like about casinos, you see how much money people can actually blow. Can’t make up for being a broke motherfucker just by wearing a nice shirt in a casino.”

I snorted, and I looked over at him, hoping for recognition. He looked over at me intently and turned back towards the road.

i 2

“I just want to be that dude with the chips. Sitting at a table with thousands of dollars of chips in one of those see-through cases. It’d make it easier to win too. You’re not thinking about every hand like it could be your last. The problem is getting the money to start with.”

“If that weren’t the problem people wouldn’t be going to casinos.” I glanced at the gas meter, expecting it to be nearly empty, and it was. “We good on gas?”

“As long as we stay at around 35 or 40.”

I didn’t know how often Donald went to the casino, or even how old he was. I knew he sold painted-up hermit crabs at the mall I worked at, he always picked up the phone, and his bud was killer.

“You know, I’m thinking about getting a strap. A big old school outlaw gun, like a Smith and Wesson. Just quit selling crabs and bud and start boosting shit.”

“You wouldn’t—” I turned my thumb and index finger into a gun like a kid playing stick-up.

“I could do it.”

“Yeah?”

“No doubt.” He nodded his head. “Yup. If it came down to it. I’d go after bigger businesses, not after people. I’m not tryna shoot anyone. But if it came down to it.”

The car vibrated more; Donald had sped up. I couldn’t tell if I was just blazed, but

I could feel each layer of sound: the wind passing under the car and over the hood, the rocks catching in the tires, the quiet roar of a motor working harder than it should. We

3 pulled up behind a car, our headlights shining onto the reflectors ahead of us. The car ahead was crawling. ​ ​ “Bet this dude would just pull over and let me pass him if he knew I had a gun.”

I took a big puff and started coughing. The car was hot, and the sweat on my back stuck me to the seat. I pressed the power window-button. The pane didn’t move. We were passing through an old deserted gold rush town. I set the blunt in the cupholder.

“Thought you weren’t going after people,” I said.

“It’s the principle. People can tell when you are carrying, they sense you’re in control.” Donald plucked the blunt from the cupholder, took a drag, held in the smoke, then exhaled. His front teeth scraped at his bottom lip as he glanced at his rearview mirror.

“We could just stop and get gas.”

“Watch this.”

He maneuvered into the left lane and accelerated. I pushed my feet against the carpeting, pressing my back into the chair as Donald pulled even with the car.

A balding man with glasses was in the driver’s seat, and we drove side-by-side for a few seconds. He looked over at us, blank-faced, and back to the road. I wondered whether he thought himself a winner or a loser. He snuck a peek back at us, but I hadn’t stopped staring, and he flicked his eyes just above and behind our car, as if he saw something in the deep murk. I think Donald keep his gaze on him too, because the driver slowed down and Donald pulled in front of him.

“See that,” he said coolly.

4

“You’re not carrying though!”

“I was acting like I was.”

“So what’s the point of being strapped? ”

“No matter what, you always have a winning hand. It’s like having—”​ ​ “Aces?”

“No, you have to be seated at the table to get aces. It’s like being able to play when you don’t have any chips.”

“You’re stoned.”

“It don’t make me wrong.”

The air inside of the car had become more dense than the outside of the car, and I slowed down my breathing, trying to calm myself down. The air was probably so cool.

So within reach. Just this thick metal shell in between. “It’s so hot. What’s good with these windows?”

“When do the phone shipments come in?” he asked.

“To the shop? Sundays, at night.”

He smacked the steering wheel with his palm. “Next Sunday?”

“Yeah.”

“Bro. How are we doing this?” He passed me the blunt.

I sucked in, made a circle with my lips and pushed out the air with my throat while saying “Bro.” The ring disappeared into the smoke already hanging in the car. “We aren’t doing anything. School starts in a month. Can’t be fucking it up.”

“Making big moves?”

5

“Tryin. Just 2 years at State.”

“Then what?”

“How do you mean?”

“You get a piece of paper that says you did something. Then what?”

“Find a better job. Meet a girl that doesn’t work at the mall. Have a kid.”

Donald shook his head like he was tossing out a bad memory. I imagined what he’d look like with long, curly hair dusting the side of his face. “Maybe find a wife you meet at the new job. Have a kid. 5, 10 years pass. Then you’re wishin’ you were fucking women you can’t. You mess around; you get divorced, and now you’re stuck buying your kid little light-up bullshits and pets at mall stands.”

“I’m not asking for all that.”

“That’s the rule, not the exception. The toys break, the crabs die like right away.

You’re the divorced, grown ass man asking for a ten dollar refund on a sorry little crab that didn’t make it, because that crab matters.” His eyes were completely bloodshot. “No ​ ​ matter what, you’re counting checks. Every way you look at it, every way it can be looked at, it’s for suckers. You’re telling me you don’t want more? Something that hasn’t been decided for you?”

I didn’t know what to say to that. The heat in the car was so stifling, it was hard to think. Somewhere deep in me, I had an answer, but somewhere between the dope and that weird thing that happens when you’re with someone like Donald – the usual line of logic just wasn’t locking into reasonable sense. I ashed the blunt.

“That’s not me.”

6

“You already can fathom where you are going to from where you are now. So where are you going, really? And where is the blunt?”

“I just ashed it.”

“Spark it up.”

I grabbed the blunt, and lit it. His pinkish fingers plucked the grape swisher from my hand, and he took another long drag. He blew the fumes out of his nostrils. I watched them float into the car and dissipate as we traveled forward in space.

“If I show you how to open the window, you’ll let me boost the place?”

“Just tell me how to open it.”

“You gotta open the whole door.” Donald’s face didn’t betray any indication that he was fucking with me. He kept his eyes ahead. Donald’s eyes were watering up, and mine were too. His eyes always looked watery though, like his soul was just a little bit closer to the surface than the average person. The thing is, usually, with the people I meet like that these days, they inspire some hope and belief. They’ve made it this far. Looking at Donald, the sad truth of it all stared back at me.

He flicked the stereo on, and an old Johnny Cash album started playing from the

CD player. The bass rattled all the change in the cupholders. Rattled my teeth and head too. We were behind another car again, which somehow was driving even slower than the one that had been ahead of us. The fog was clearing up, so we could see the lights of the cars down the road. I could see three ahead of us, each keeping a few car lengths of distance from one to the next.

“I’m just gonna turn the AC on, I’m dying.”

7

I pressed the AC button, and hot air blasted out of the vents.. I pressed the buttons on the panel, trying to figure out how to make the air cool. My throat cracked with each gulp and swallow, crunchy like dead leaves.

“It’s out of coolant,” he said.

“This is like a sauna in here.”

“So if I pull up on the store on Sunday what are you gonna do? You not gonna let

me boost the phones?

I leaned forward and pressed my face against the dashboard, because smoke rises and I thought the plastic would be cooler than the air. I sat there, panting like a dog. The dashboard felt bumpy, but not cool. When I leaned back again in my seat my cheek felt like it was peeling.

“Come on man.”

“All the expensive stuff has trackers on them.”

“Serial numbers?”

“They actually track the boxes. GPS.”

“That’s like the fake theft detectors in front of stores. They say that to make sure ​ ​ you don’t pull some shit. No fucking way man.”

“It’s legit.”

“Bruh. I’m serious. Soon that’s not gonna be the case though. Everything’s upgrading. The only way you’re gonna be able to be an outlaw is to be like, a computer genius or something. And they won’t need the money.”

“Why are you pressing me?”

8

Donald pressed his lips together, and we both sat there for awhile.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I kinda have a big idea,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Alright, you ever go to that old skating rink, over by the gym and the laundromat?

“The one that closed down last year?”

“I want to reopen it, but add a nightclub to it. Kids go during the day, skate, play arcade games, birthdays whatever. But the breadwinner would be at night, get some cool music in there, like an old school roller disco. Like on some legit shit. A roller disco. But not just disco either.”

“A roller disco?”

“You think that’s a stupid idea?”

“Didn’t the rink close after that shooting? There was like a lawsuit, no security or something like that?” I said.

“I’m thinking outside the box, man. No one ever got anywhere without thinking outside the box. That’s all I’m saying.”

We drove along for a time, and the fog was nearly gone.. As we hit a straightaway, Donald pulled into the oncoming traffic lane. No other cars were in sight.

“You know that those hermit crabs, the reason why they die? The paint from their shells poison them over time and they suffocate from being outside their natural habitat.

Their little crustacean-ass bodies shut down..”

9

“I’d rather be the person buying the crab than being the crab, you know?” I said.

He looked back over at me.

“We are the crabs. Call it however you want, but we’re the crabs. No doubt about it. We can stay still, crawl around a little and suffocate, or go out blasting.”

“We’re definitely suffocating.”

I couldn’t tell you exactly what his eyes looked like at that moment, or what I was feeling, but I remembered meeting Donald for the first time, earlier that summer. I’d stopped to look at the colorful, painted crabs on my way to the electronics store. They were shuffling around, crowding in the corner of a glass aquarium-like container.

Baseball crabs. Mexican flag crabs. There was even a New York hermit crab, with the

Manhattan skyline painted onto a shell. He asked me whether I wanted to get one crab for

15 bucks, or two for 25.

I’m not sure if it had been thirty seconds or a few minutes, but Donald had been speeding up and had changed lanes and we were moving faster than the other cars now.

We passed the first car. Then the second. As we pulled up behind the third, the road bended left, and, from behind a small incline, two bright headlights streaked into the windshield, shining onto and through the smoke in the car’s cabin. Donald’s face didn’t change expression, but in what may have been the final moment, he swung us further left on the opposite shoulder of the road and the oncoming car passed, honking at us as we bumped along the gravel.

I felt weightless as Donald brought us back into the right lane. Donald’s pale face gone slack, calmly looking at the road ahead. Resolute.

10

“I’m trying to teach you something here. This was an opportunity and all you can do is think about the fucking AC.”

I didn’t know what to do, so I pulled out my hand to make an imaginary gun again, like a little kid playing stick up, pointing it to the road ahead. I made a gunshot sound, imagining the windshield bursting into little pieces. Donald said, “If you wanted to hit somebody, you’d have to aim higher, because of the windshield angle. Saw it on

Cops.” My skin felt like it was cracking like dry soil and I felt like my insides folding into themselves, like an accordian. I remember wishing Donald had won some money that night; I hoped that he’d never get his hands on a gun. I never wanted to meet anyone like him again. I pulled the handle by my hand and the latch clicked but the door didn’t pop open. I lowered my shoulder into the side panel. The door swung out and half of me fell out of the car. Hand catching weight, gravel pressing into palm, lungs gulping wet air.

11

Nothing

Dear God,

I didn’t recognize Sam when we all got back from summer vacation. I used to think he looked like a sloth. Stocky, round-faced, and sort of dopey-looking. Someone who floats through the hallways and classrooms and you never think to learn anything about them. I might be that type of person too, it’s hard to say. I think I only paid attention to him because our last names are next to each other alphabetically.

Now his skin pulls tight against his bones. His head looks very big, though his face isn’t round anymore. He still walks hunched over. He still looks sort of dopey. I can’t tell if he looks more interesting now, if my awareness of how he’s changed makes him more interesting to look at. I find myself looking at him though.

Last service, I was texting during church and mom told me using phones in

Church is disrespectful to ‘The house of the Lord’. I spent the rest of the sermon reading the Bible, because Pastor Mike bugs me out. The more I pay attention to what he’s saying, the more I get the feeling that everything I’m doing is wrong. When I get that feeling, my stomach gets hot and thick and I ask mom for a mint.

You know I don’t really believe in You, but mom said she doesn’t have a problem with me writing to You during church. And this three-hour service will go a lot faster if I do this instead of re-read Revelations and consider our impending doom.

12

Today, Pastor Mike is declaring we are under attack, in danger, and part of the generation that will give way to the Anti-Christ. He’s yelling a lot. Pastor Mike really believes in this stuff, and if I had the same take on life as he did, I’d yell a lot too.

Sincerely, yhwh j-money ​

Dear Yah’ll,

I’ve successfully avoided being here for 3 weeks. Hope that isn’t too offensive. If

You get offended by that, I imagine that writing yhwh in the last message didn’t rub you the right way either.

I’d like to point Your attention to a few events:

As You may know, I spent the night at Sam’s house last week, and dad’s house the week before. Instead of coming to church, after sleeping at Sam’s I met a woman at the gas station who needed a lift to her house. She smelled like burnt plastic. She said she needed to give some medication to her daughter, and it felt more Jesus-like to help her out than it did to come to Church. Thoughts on this?

Halfway to the destination, she changed the story, and she said she needed a ride to pick up the medicine first. Then she asked me for money for the medicine. I told her I didn’t have medicine-type money, but we could pick up some food. We got two breakfast sandwiches, two sodas and two milkshakes from Mcdonalds, but I accidentally spilled a soda and a shake in the center console. My car still hasn’t gotten out her thick smell.

13

Largest development: Sam and I hang out now, and he lives five minutes away from me. At the football game last week, I saw him carrying an ice tea bottle, and I asked for a sip, because I’d been yelling. He handed me the bottle. I gulped it down until my throat realized that it wasn’t ice tea. He patted me on the shoulder as I choked it down, asking, “You okay, buddy?” We traded sips as we sat on the trunk of his blue car in the parking lot.

His skin looked soft even under the extra-bright parking lot floodlights, and his eyelashes curled up at the ends. They are long! I remember thinking that he looked pretty like a girl. I’d never had a thought like that before. The liquor may have made me feel free. Or Sam did. I told him he looked a kind of like a girl, but kind of not. He laughed and said “you got some beer goggles, boy,” and lay back down on the car, his midriff poking out from under his shirt like it was on purpose. I told him he couldn’t drive me home because mom always inspects me when I get home from school events, so I told her I’d just be staying at dad’s place.

I drove to his house. We played video games. We drank more. I woke up, and I gave that woman a ride to wherever that was. Mom didn’t have a rebuttal to my argument that it was more Jesus-like to give her a ride than it was to come to church. She wasn’t thrilled though.

j-litew8

Dear God,

14

Mom’s snoopy-ass (is that even an insult) went through my letters. I wasn’t sure, for sure, if she had, and I spotted her car following me and Sam as we walked to Del

Taco. She told me that I shouldn’t be writing letters to You in church either. She said church is a time for listening and lifestyle adjustment. She told me she’s nervous about how much time I’m spending with Sam, and told me that I need to practice hooking up with girls that are “flucies.” That way, I’m confident when I start seeing a girl I actually like. Any chance of intervention on your part (?) because that is definitely the weirdest thing she’s ever told me.

I told her that I don’t know any “flucy’s,” but I’d like to meet them. It’s true. I don’t really know how I’d handle a situation like that, but I don’t really like the hardcore porn that some of my friends watch. I just like looking at pictures. It feels more holy.

Mom sniffs my breath when I get home from school now.

j-playa

Dear God,

It’s been awhile. Mom met with Pastor Mike, and at the last sermon Pastor Mike talked about sin, porn, and sexual deviance, and looked at me directly multiple times during the sermon, particularly during the altar call. I avoided the altar call, but when I got home, my eyes got all swollen, and I could barely see out of them. Mom made a comment about God working in mysterious ways.

15

That shit is very Old Testament”y” of you, and I really hope there’s a reasonable explanation as to why this happened. Otherwise, I’m fucked, because I didn’t feel weird about this thing with Sam until now. That’s on You.

j-angry

Dear God,

The doctor said my eyes were swollen due to mold exposure. After my mom and swept through the apartment, we found no mold. When opened the center console in my car looking for change, a poof of whitish dust emerged, and I realized it was all floating around in my car. The milkshake/coffee mixture in the car had become moldy and a hotbed for bacteria.

j-fool

Dear God,

I feel like Sam is in all things. He’s in the palm trees and in the beautiful blue of the swimming pool at our apartment complex. He’s in the shit-brown of the water-fat pollen that floats around in patches on the pool too. Do some people feel like this about

You?

I know that all churches aren’t like this one. I know that some of them interpret the Bible not as black and white, but as a guiding light. It presents an interesting question though:

16 is God in almost nothing, or is God in all things? At church, Pastor Mike seems to have a specific idea as to what God is in, and where God is not. The Bible is specifically unspecific on this topic:

“He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” ​ - Colossians 1:17

“Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the

Father except through me.”

- John 14:6

As you know, I don’t know if I buy into the whole Jesus thing, but if you’re going to pick a book to live your life by, it makes sense to me to follow it to the T, not as some wishy-washy book of suggestions, as Pastor Mike would say. If you are going to believe something, you should believe in the thing, whole heartedly. Full tilt.

j-searching

Dear God,

Sam was straddling me, and we were talking. His body felt warm. When I saw his bony body lowering to a kneel, I felt my throat clench up and my stomach flutter. His body was heavier than I thought it would be, and his hips were sticking out like the underside of a bowl. I was happy feeling the literal and metaphorical weight of Sam moving down, turning little gears in my body. When he asked me if there was anything I

17 wanted him to do, I didn’t answer. But when his hand touched the lower half of my torso, my body cramped. I seized-up. I folded in half. Then I told him “nothing.”

You and I both know what happened, and you and I both know what I wished had happened. I wish he hadn't asked; it made what was happening both more and less real at the same time. It forced me to determine whether what we were doing was wrong or right.

If he’d asked me if there were anything I didn’t want him to do to me, I would have said “nothing” too.

18

Fresh Loot

Lieutenant Johnny had got to thinking that when you start thievin’, you trick yourself to thinkin’ you are accumulating time. Clem passed on with a hodgepodge of the

nd usual equipment of a Continental Army corporal from the 2 ​ North Carolina Regiment. ​ A good pair of Lieutenant Johnny’s stockings, a bullet in his neck, a yoyo, a British

Brown Bess rifle, three pocket watches, a captain’s mess kit, imported coffee, and dead

Ralphie’s Bible. The unusual: a dozen or so pilfered letters from Patriots and Loyalists alike. Love letters, worry letters, prayer letters, unsent letters. “How many eternities does one love letter hold? Clem had started to ask these questions to his fellow countrymen during the day, and to his sleepless lonesome in the night..

As you continue thievin’, you think about what you have and what you don’t–what you carry when you walk and stow when you sleep. When you start thinkin’ about what your dead soldiers stole from other soldiers, and sweat leaks into your ears from digging yet another trench and the insides of your ears and back of your throat hurt: that’s when it’s time to pray.

“Resigned to the will of our Creator—but for the sake of our family & friends,

we wish to live long enough so that we too might again see them. Amen.”

Johnny dug his finger into the hard dirt to etch a cross, soil crumbs filling the space between skin and nail. The company knelt beside the trench they’d built for Clem, the youngest and last

19 of the casualties from the skirmish. They’d lost over half their men since embarking from

Raleigh, but four deaths are more real than 27 and 16.

Johnny stood up, and the company did the same. He raised Clem’s tattered bible, holding ​ it to the skeleton trees like a shield as he led the company toward the other side of camp. They’d ​ camped by the familiar pines, spindly needles already resisting the winter more effectively than their broad-leafed neighbors. The company cooked thin, hot, and crumbly flour cakes, and drank

Clem’s coffee, cheering their bellies before they trekked the last 20-mile leg to Valley Forge.

“This redcoat battalion we are fighting at Valley Forge musta just got off the ship – maybe the fresh loot will pop Clem out the grave too.”

The company’s laughs cracked through the forest, slipping through the conifers, digested by ​ something else far off; these were the first smiles since before seeing Clem’s birch-white body, ​ stained with blood and mud he’d pressed on the wound.

20

How to Join a Startup

(novel excerpt from Demand and Supply) ​ ​

A note on the weather

I learned during my time selling software at Fintara that, as a rule, you should never start a sales conversation by discussing the weather.

Instead, you should start by saying you live in New York City, and when you're not in your office on Madison Avenue selling groundbreaking software powered by AI, you’re doing dope shit. Last weekend you skydived. Next week you’ve got the sailing championships in Bermuda; and right now? Right now you’ve got 25 minutes before you’re heading off to Yankee Stadium for the back half of the game. You’re moving fast, and whoever you are speaking to is lucky they got a slot on the calendar.

They have to know you’re not going to waste their time.

21

Demand and supply

When it rains, my jaw clenches and my teeth grind.

If you've ever lived or worked in Manhattan, you've experienced the flash monsoons that pummel the city. Just before the sky opens up, the wind tunnels through the gridded streets and avenues. Disruption. The city goes silent for a split-second as the sky takes a breath. It comes down. Skyscrapers turn into shelters, subway staircases into run-off gutters, and unprepared pedestrians scurry from awning to scaffolding as if barefoot on hot stones.

During inclement weather, the thousands of food deliveries happening at any moment on the island multiply to tens of thousands. Packages, takeout food, groceries.

On-demand delivery for the demanding consumer. For every uptick in demand, there needs to be an uptick of available supply—couriers. And, as I'm sure you can imagine, storms are precisely the time when it is the least appealing to be schlepping through the city on a bicycle, muling around food that you can't afford for people you don't care about. Storms take the supply demand curve and move that motherfucker parabolic.

Being a delivery guy wasn’t my only choice after graduating from undergrad. It was that or move back to my mother’s apartment in Stockton, California. Sophomore year summer, I’d been the assistant to the assistant of a dean that left at the end of the prior school year. Junior year, I was fired from my job handing out towels at the school gym. An offhand conversation with one of my professors at the beginning of my final semester led to an editorial internship within a very large publishing company.

22

Two months in to the internship, I found out my boss’s parents paid her rent. She sat in the cubicle next to mine, and I heard her asking her mom if she could bring her rent check to dinner. I looked up the average salary for an editorial assistant at the publisher online. It hadn’t occurred for me to look prior. Until I’d checked, I figured most office jobs paid about the same.

The next few weeks, my ability to give a fuck rapidly declined. I started showing up late. I slept at my desk. I went home early. I went to college so I wouldn’t have to scramble to make ends meet when I got older. It wasn’t just the money though. I became aware of how slow and repetitive the work was. My presence had impacted only the degree of speed to which the unsolicited manuscripts in the slush pile received their

“No’s.” The two manuscripts I passed along were read and rejected quietly. Most days my superiors came into the office, walked straight to their grey cubicle and looked at their computer screens until they left. Galleys with different covers were the only visible change from week to week. No way, I thought. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew that wasn’t it. That felt like a trap.

23

Sacred Geometry

Like many 17-year-olds, I didn’t know shit about what I wanted to do in life, so I didn’t pick colleges based on majors. I picked schools that represented an abstraction of what I wanted for my future. I wanted my future to be an important one, rife with possibility. A route to worlds unknown.

I applied to places that sounded important and were far away. Name-brand schools in big cities on the East Coast. The only college I applied to in California was a school in San Diego, because, well, who wouldn’t want to live in San Diego? After receiving my acceptance, my brother drove me down the long seven hours from the townhome we lived in with my mom. I’d never set foot in a college before.

A rectangular walkway outlined the campus like a track. Off-white buildings with arches faced inward towards the campus quad. They were large, but not overbearing.

Smooth and elegant. A cathedral sized chapel with a blue dome and bell tower skied over ​ the campus. Inside the quad, walkways geometrically partitioned the campus into ​ tangram-like sections of aesthetic delight. Green lawn from green lawn with violet tree from green lawn. I looked over at my older brother, smiled at him and raised an eyebrow.

He said, “Damn,” and nodded his head. I laughed in disbelief. He exhaled, air whistling between his front teeth.

We paused at a square plaza. Mini crescent-shaped tree islands at each corner and a small fountain circle at the center, it’s circular shape giving shape to the square. Some students sat on the grass around the plaza, some stood talking near the fountain. Blond hair, brown hair, red hair, symmetrical, tan, athletic. I wondered how they all looked the

24 same, even though they had different features. No one stuck out. They were gorgeous, and they were gorgeous in the same sort of way. Extras on a set.

Our tour made its way to the chapel.

The tour guide stood with his back to the aisle and the altar. I saw the figure of

Jesus nailed to a backlit cross at the end of a long aisle, two parallel rows of arches on opposing sides of the pews drawing churchgoers eyes to the end of the structure. Backlit

Jesus was under a light blue umbrella dome with gold ribbing, a miniature of the massive external dome structure. He looked beautiful. Beautiful but dead.

A few weeks later, my brother and I went to visit the schools I was accepted to on the East Coast. We were in NY just for the afternoon, a pit stop we’d planned between

Boston and DC, cities where we had places to stay with extended family of extended family.

All the schools were grey and cold, but NYU felt particularly confusing. It was drab. It didn’t feel like a city, and did not feel like a version of New York I’d seen in the movies. Before we left, we stopped by Times Square. I stood in what I perceived to be the center of Times Square, at a triangular intersection. I stood in one place shuffling my feet to take a 360 degree view in of all the billboards declaring their different truths. I knew I was going to move there seeing an image of Diddy the size of a building on the side of a skyscraper.

25

Agent

My experience flipping through the school’s career portal for real job type-jobs reminded me of flipping through channels when I’d gone to visit my mom’s family in El

Salvador. It all looked vaguely familiar, but inaccessible. I posted on social media asking if anyone had leads for jobs. Like a shot from the heavens, a classmate acquaintance that

I didn’t know particularly well messaged me. He lived on my floor freshman year and he was always working as a hype-man brand ambassador for some company selling caffeinated products tailor made for college kids.

He told me he’d picked up an internship at this delivery company, and was making about 7 deliveries a day for 10-15 bucks a piece, since the internship didn’t pay.

He said he'd get me on the delivery team to keep me afloat in the meantime and see if there was space for more interns in office. After a 45-minute online training handled by an uncertain but friendly-sounding dude named Jake, I became an "Agent”.

26

Vivial

I received an email from Jake 3 days after I completed training, notifying me that my background check had been processed and my reloadable credit card was ready for pickup.

At the lobby, I looked at the address board, looking for Presto's name, and didn't see it. I asked the doorman where "Presto" was located. After looking in his computer, he said “7th Floor. The name of the company is Vivial.”

Confused, I said “Okay,” and took the elevator upstairs.

The space was gorgeous: rustic, but modern. Rows and rows of expensive looking workstations, cushy library-style furniture.

I asked a bespectacled guy by reception wearing a suit that resembled a table cloth if he knew where Presto was located. He said “No,” and walked away.

I walked down the main aisle. More rows of expensive looking workstations on one side, and frosted-glass conference rooms on the other. The aisle led into another room with a more casual seating arrangement. Communal tables, a ping-pong table, and a kitchen area with boxes of teas and a see-through fridge stocked full of artisan treats.

Julian was at a communal table and he greeted me with a reserved, professional confidence that I didn't know he had. He walked me a few tables down, across from a workstation where a focused dude typed steadily. His thumb had a certain purpose to its spacebar thwacking. His eyes unlocked from the screen and his lips curled up into an uneven, unsure smile. As he reached his hand out to shake mine, his facial muscles

27 tightened, like his business mode had just been activated. He sifted through a small stack of envelopes on his desk. He slipped one out that had my name on it, handed me the envelope, and asked if I had any questions.

I asked him what the relationship between Vivial and Presto, and he explained to me that Vivial was a co-working space, a place for companies that weren't large enough for their own space yet. We discussed the few questions that I had about orders (what happens if I can't contact the recipient, etc.) and he asked me how I'd heard about Presto.

I explained to him that I'd just graduated, and I couldn't afford taking "another" unpaid internship (making it sound like I'd had more than one, of course). I was looking for a permanent position.

He asked me if I'd consider interning at Presto. We set an interview for Thursday, two days later. When I went home, I looked up Vivial online.

"Vivial is a design-focused, shared workspace and home to the most innovative

and disruptive startups in Silicon Alley. Our offering is tailored and designed for

companies that value design and aesthetic as part of their company's core

offering, and our space offers super-high ceilings and large windows that flood

the space with light, offering gorgeous, inspiring views down Broadway and

across Soho. Each of our rooms is outfitted with cutting-edge tech infrastructure,

and our themed conference rooms incorporate thoughtful workspace design

throughout."

28

I'd never seen anything like it. The publishing house had felt familiar. It looked like the many offices I’d seen on sitcoms or toured on Career Day’s growing up.

Important people get offices, the average bear gets the cubicle pit. Divided and sterile.

This space had less rhyme or reason. It made me feel out of place, but like I was approaching importance, even though I hadn't done anything to belong in the room.

29

The first deliveries:

Presto’s user base bought shit that I either could not afford or would never consider to get delivered. Who would pay 10 bucks to have someone go to a convenience store or a Starbucks 3 blocks away from their house? These people, apparently.

When the first delivery notification came in, I felt excited. It felt like I was going on a little mission, on an easily accomplishable task with a very clear reward waiting at the end of the tunnel. Simple. I didn’t mind that my parents and I were in the hole for 80 grand, I didn’t mind that I had graduated from the most expensive university in the US and had a piece of paper and delivery job to my name. I knew that I got to skateboard to a convenience store, pick up a few items, and drop them off, the and by the end of those minutes, I’d be a few bucks richer.

The first night I ran 3 deliveries. The next day I did two. I made 70 bucks in a little under 4 hours, which seemed pretty good, considering I wasn’t on a schedule. For the sushi order, I had to take the subway both ways, which cut into payment for the delivery.

I wondered, based on the order, what I could guess about the recipient.

1.) Would the recipient of the condoms and a pack of cigarettes be some

suave-looking dude with two girls on each arm? No, he was a slobbish dude

wearing a flannel and boxers. I passed him the box, he said thanks, ripped the

plastic packaging off and immediately smoked up. I wondered how his

apartment smelled so appealing, like an expensive candle. “Do I need to tip?”

he asked. I said no.

30

2.) The sushi order: would I be the hero for date night? No, the order was for a

group of women. White women, all in cocktail dresses. I could hear them

from the elevator. When I saw them, I somehow felt underdressed for the

delivery, wearing cut-off shorts and a t-shirt. The woman who received the

order looked surprised when she saw me. She said, “Oh my gosh, thank you

so much.” She added, reluctantly, “I don’t need to tip, right?”

3.) What kind of person uses a delivery service to deliver a vial of coke? The

head of Presto’s PR agency. I could feel the little glass vial inside of the blank

white envelope that. As he slid the envelope that he knew that I wasn’t

supposed to take tips he slipped a $20 in my hand. He said, “Just make sure it ​ ​ gets to Steph alright? Ian’ll eat me alive if anyone else gets it.” I didn’t know

who that was, but I tucked the $20 in my pocket. unsure if I’d just passed or

failed some kind of test. He winked at me and grabbed my shoulder.

“Seriously, any one of those animals will take it from you if they know it’s

from me.” Steph answered the door, so I lucked out. ​ ​ 4.) Why would anyone need 600 laxative tablets on-demand? Still I never saw her

face, but I did see strands of long blond, curly hair on top of an impossibly

bony shoulder. She reached through the crack of the door to receive the

package. I looked her name up online, and she appeard to be a Manhattan

socialite, someone photographed frequently at charity events. We never spoke,

but I’d always look forward to her orders; I liked feeling like I knew some dirt

31

about this semi-famous person, a person who rubbed shoulders with the

Manhattan elite. I couldn’t even get into “the club” on my own accord

(bouncers can sniff out the broke-ass dudes —they always singled me out,

asking if I could open up a tab, perhaps sensing that I had a reusable, plastic

K-Mart juice box full of leg-warm whiskey nestled in my pant pocket). In any

case, I didn’t know she was a socialite when I dropped off the first order. She

was a repeat customer.

5.) What does someone who orders a grande soy peppermint mocha frappuccino

with no whip look like? I never got the answer to that question. Eventually,

I’d come to learn, that 7 days a week, this woman, Jennifer, made this order,

despite a Starbucks being located 2 blocks away from her house. She ordered

between 7:30 and 8:30 on weekdays, and between 9:00 and 10:00 on

weekends. Sometimes, on the weekends, there would be an additional coffee

on her order (more to come on that) I didn’t know this stuff yet, but what I did

know was that she always left, as a note, “Leave on ledge.” A clear plastic

shelf ledge was installed right next to the door frame, right below her

apartment number. I placed the drink on the ledge, rang the doorbell. I walked

away. I waited at the end of the hallway to see if anyone would emerge. The

door opened halfway, blocking my line of sight. The drink was gone.

I didn’t take any more deliveries that day. I wondered if letting Jennifer’s delivery preference affect me made me a lil bitch. I’d like to admit to you that I don’t have those kinds of thoughts anymore, but I do. I’d like to tell you that, thanks to my unflagging will

32 and resilience, I went home, researched the shit out of Presto, spruced up (lied) on my resumé, and got a good nights rest but I didn’t. I walked home; I watched City of God; I ​ ​ drank a 40; I texted a few girls “u around?”; I surfed any and all of the social media platforms; I waited; I masturbated; I went to sleep at 3am.

33

Interview

In preparation for my interview, I considered my limited wardrobe and determined that I only had one button-up shirt that fit me properly, a white oxford that I’d bought for graduation. My other shirts fit me fine, but the arms were so wide that they looked like, at any moment, they might balloon with air, like inflatable air dancers in front of car dealerships. The oxford was wrinkled, so I hung it in the bathroom turned the shower knob all the way to the hot side.

I wandered around my room shirtless and imagined the only two interview questions I could remember having been asked. My biggest strengths? I’m capable. I knew to lie about being detail-oriented. Biggest weakness? I care too much.

My phone chirped, notifying me that I had a text message from Jake. Before I could read the message, I received another notification, this time from my Agent application. It notified me that I’d been assigned an order.

1 Take this order before you come in for the interview. It is right by the office.

Okay.

I wanted to impress Jake so I got my ass into gear. I snagged my hanging shirt from the shower rod, now smooth from the steam. I put on a canvas pair of Vans (no one at Vivial wore dress shoes), and left.

It was muggy, grey clouds offering no respite from the heat. I lightly jogged towards the Starbucks, fully intent on completing this order really quickly, aiming to

1 ORDER: Grande soy peppermint mocha Frappucino no whip (125 Cooper Square) TO: Jennifer G

34 complete the order and be at Vivial within a half hour. The city seemed to move slower and slower as I continued my jog, settling into a near quiet as I approached the Starbucks.

I ordered the Frappuccino. Sweat slipped out of my pores. I’d forgotten to put on deodorant. I surreptitiously wiped myself with some napkins, looking around to see if anyone had noticed me. People were not looking at me. They were looking outside at the people that were either looking skyward, searching in their bags for something, or walking much faster than people usually walk. The rain came. A barista called my name, and set the drink on the counter.

I arrived at Jennifer’s place, sufficiently wet, but not soaked. I’d managed to remain mostly dry, with some wet spots on my shirt and damp cuffs in my pants. I confidently strode through her building lobby, waving at the doorman as I passed his desk. This time she received her drink in silence, accompanied by a photo of the drink on her ledge, my hand wrapped around the cup, ensuring that even if she wanted to avoid the human contact, she’d know a human had physically gone to a Starbucks, physically walked through the rain, physically placed that 6 dollar drink on her ledge, and physically walked his ass back out of the building on her behalf. For some reason, I thought that sending that photo would really “show” her.

She texted me, “Thanks!

35

Ian Nevins

2 Jake added another order to my queue , an order to be picked up at a clothing store down the block from Vivial. Just 5 blocks away from my current location, but now the water was gushing. From the lobby elevator I heard the rain slapping against the glass storefront violently.

No chance I could walk the next 5 blocks without getting absolutely drenched. I spotted an umbrella in one of those umbrella containers by the exit of the building. I looked over my shoulder, and saw that the doorman wasn’t looking in my direction.

Umbrella in hand, I made my way onto the street, assuring myself that I’d be sure to bring it back the next time Jennifer G made an order. I received a text.

This is Ian. Are you the Agent on my order?

Yes! What kind of boxers would you like? Also, size?

What kind do they have?

Send pictures

Hello?

Sorry, pictures aren’t sending for some reason!

Here one second

Black plain.

How much any charcoal ones?

…

2 ORDER: Underwear (546 Broadway) TO: Ian N

36

Like these?

7.95 for all of them, but 3 for 20.

16.31.Yeah ​ Size?

You there?

Medium

Eta?

Great! Waiting in line now. Be there in 5.

Meet downstairs

As I departed from the store, the monsoon was still in full effect. The umbrella blew inside out just a few steps away before arriving at the building. I waited.

A gangly guy wearing jeans and flip-flops stepped out of the elevator, with Jake in tow. The dude assessed the lobby, rapidly shifting his eyes across until he saw me, looked down at the bag. At a closer look, I couldn’t help but think he looked like a hyper-realistic doll, his clay-white face, large eyes, and short, styled hair all creating a

Gumby effect. No smile though.

I handed the bag to him, and he, without grabbing it, peeked inside briefly, then whisked past me, telling me to follow.

We stepped out into the street, which had been fully engulfed by the storm. He skip-ran toward a black Mercedes on the corner. He got in the driver’s seat, and Jake opened the front passenger door. I went to the back. Ian pulled a laptop from a black leather case, opened it, and typed in his password. The laptop booted up to a screen that

37 with a counter that read 500 in big, aqua colored letters. Below, rows of names and emails.

Jake piped up. “Ian, this is Josh, he was coming in to interview for the internship.

Josh, this is Ian, founder and CEO.”

Before I could extend my hand and introduce myself, Ian said “Nice work on that delivery bro. Where’d you go to school?”

“NYU.”

“So what do you think about the reactions? When you drop their stuff off.”

“Honestly, they’ve loved it. It’s an amazing service, I mean, it’s hard not to love.”

“Yeah man. It’s like fucking crack.”

I laughed uncomfortably. “It’s pretty amazing.” I said.

“Yeah.”

“What are we looking at here?” I asked.

“The waitlist.” He addressed Jake, “Should we open the floodgates?"

A flash of fear registering on Jake’s his eyes. He gulped. “I don’t know, are we ready to handle it?”

“Where’s Julian at?”

“He’s at a music festival”

“He’s already taking days off?”

“He told us about it two weeks ago.”

Ian didn’t say anything for a moment, then rolled his shoulders back so they cracked. He swiveled his neck, and looked back at me.

38

“What do you think, Josh?” Ian asked.

“Think about what?”

“I press one button, we take everyone off the waiting list, and they get a notification saying they are off the list, and that they can get one of those.” He pointed at the box next to me. “Free.”

I peeked in the big box that was nestled next to me, and saw it was filled to the brim with transparent umbrellas with the Presto logo on it.

“That’s awesome.”

“I know right? So should we do it?”

“How many are on the waitlist?”

“500 fuckin people bro,” he said excitedly. “All in Manhattan.”

I could tell he wanted to do it.

“Fuck it. Let’s do it. Right?”

Ian turned towards Jake and patted him on the shoulder. “Fuck it! This kid is a

maniac. I love it.”

Jake shot me a look and sighed.

Ian hit a few keystrokes, and we sat there for a few seconds. Then he switched the screen to a dashboard that looked like an Excel spreadsheet. He put the computer in Jakes lap.

“Shit’s gonna get crazy.” Ian said gleefully. ​ ​ He started the engine, and the wipers swished back and forth, efficiently nudging the water off the side of the windshield. He pulled the car alongside the parked one ahead

39 of us. He pulled a latch, popping the trunk. He opened the door, giddily scampering to the back of the vehicle. He pulled out a few traffic cones, and placed them, one by one, outlining the corners of a rectangle where the car had been parked.

“How many so far?”

Jake said, “5.”

“You excited Josh?”

“Hell yeah” I said.

“How about you Jake? You don’t look pumped. Come on man!”

Another chime.

Ian turned up the volume, which was tuned to an EDM radio station and started bobbing his head, pointing his two index fingers to the roof of the car.

“This what you thought working at a tech company was gonna be like Josh?”

I think I remember wondering, “What the fuck is a tech company?”, but before I had a chance to filter and respond, Ian put the car in drive, and hit the gas.

40

Christopher and Dr. Shabari

(novel excerpt from Demand and Supply)

After a brief phone interview, I learned that Ron and his business partner,

Christopher, were launching Sweetly, an on-demand custom cake delivery startup, within the next few months. Currently, Ron was the CEO of a real-estate startup, and the other co-founder, Christopher, was a VP at a hedge fund. I didn’t know what a hedge fund did, exactly, but I reasoned that the two of them could easily pay me handsomely, and asked for the same fee the consultant at Presto had charged Ian.

After reviewing my rate sheet, Ron suggested a dinner with him and the other co-founder to meet in person and see if we’d be a good fit. I agreed to the meeting via email in short, informal sentences—so as to appear busy-- and signed off the email with a confident “Cheers.” We were to meet at a restaurant on Union Square, just a half block away from Sophia’s dorm two years before.

I arrived at the restaurant sweating hot from the heat and cold from the nerves.

The restaurant was on the corner, with sections of outdoor seating on both sides filled with well-dressed patrons that glowed under the sunlight.

I strode up to the counter and asked the hostess for a reservation under Ron. I remember holding my gaze on her face longer than I normally would have, hoping for a moment of meaningful eye-contact. Since leaving Presto, I’d felt the urge to extend eye

41 contact with women I encountered in my daily life, wanting some affirmation that pretty strangers still found me attractive. She didn’t have the reservation on the books, and made no additional gestures of hospitality to assist me. No eye contact either.

I walked outside and emailed Ron. I tried to pick out my potential employers from the crowd, but the seating area was so jammed that I decided to wait and scan the park instead. The lush trees shaded the park benches, the chanting Hare Krishna provided a rhythm to the bustling farmers market, the vendor tents full of people hustling from one stand to the next, purchasing last-second goods before the market closed.

I received a response within seconds. Ron was also outside.

I swiveled my head, and saw, standing on the other end of the outdoor seating, a slender dude with glasses and a wide-armed white button-up scanning the sidewalk.

Like a lost child, I cautiously walked up to him, cocking my head to the right, seeking acknowledgement. He took some steps in my direction, perhaps recognizing me from my social media headshot. Within seconds, my moist hand was shaking his warm, average hand.

We made our way through the maze of square-shaped, glass bistro table tables and came upon a well-built man alone at a table, leaning back, one arm loosely draped around the patio chair to his left. He had one of those broad, manicured faces that seem to solely belong to wealthy folks. He wore a thin, white button up that showed the top of a pale, hairless chest that did not reflect the sun. He looked similar to Ron, but he felt different. He oozed expensive. The table tipped slightly when I sat, and I pinched the silver rim edge to minimize the wobble.

42

“You must be Chris. Nice to meet you.” I said, as I sat down.

“Christopher,” he said. “Good to meet you too. Order a drink. Some food, whatever you want.”

I said a beer would be great, and Christopher flagged down the server, asking for three skinny margaritas and a Corona before she'd made it halfway to our table.

“You want tequila with that? Something a little stronger?” Christopher asked me, and without waiting for a response, asked the server to bring us tequila shots too. As the server walked away, he kept his gaze on her backside. A tan dude walking our way also looked the server up and down as he passed her. He sat himself at our table. He was wearing a periwinkle blue linen shirt, buttoned halfway up, exposing a cluster of chest hair. He looked expensive too.

Christopher introduced the man as his business associate.

“I’m Vincent. But you can call me Dr. Shabari.”

I laugh-coughed, and Christopher grabbed him by the shoulder, gripping it heartily. “He’s serious. This guy is a doctor. Neuroscience. Columbia.” ​ ​ “What’s your background, kid?” Dr. Shabari said. ​ ​ “That’s not a bad idea, Josh, why don’t you tell Christopher, and I guess, uh, Dr.

Shabari about your background. Get everyone on the same page.”

I’d given 2 years of my life to sham of a company that was acquired at a loss in a fire-sale for its customer list and remaining assets, and had spent the last nine months receiving unemployment while rewriting the first three chapters of a thinly disguised memoir posing as fiction” novel. I’d perfected the “wake up at 1pm, masturbate, eat,

43 watch movies, shower, eat, consider my place in the universe, sleep” schedule too. No small feat.

Of course, I didn’t tell them that story. I told them this one. Straight out of college became the first non-founding employee at on-demand delivery startup. Launched ops in

San Francisco. Recruited and managed fleet of 200+ couriers. Successful exit. Since exit,

I’d been consulting and finishing a novel with help from my writing professor at NYU.

The table went silent, and I couldn’t get a read on Christopher and Dr. Shabari, but they seemed impressed. Shit, I was impressed.

Ron cleared his throat, and said “Josh brings in the real-world experience, and we’re hoping that he has inside knowledge of the operational side of things. He’ll be able to tell us what’s realistic, what’s not.”

“Ok.” Christopher said.

Ron went on to review the company’s offering, explaining that, as per our discussion, they were starting an on-demand delivery company specializing in delivering custom cakes. Ron wasn’t much of a salesman. He spoke evenly, missing much of the enthusiasm I’d come to associate with co-founder/CEO types. As he went through the finer points of the business, each subsequent sentence become more difficult to follow.

The farmers market vendors were packing up their wares, and the Hare Krishna raised their voices. In response, the outdoor patrons were speaking louder. Dr. Shabari was texting on his phone, completely removed from the conversation, which I found odd and distracting. What the hell was this guy doing here?

Christopher cut in. “It doesn’t require much intelligence to determine what we’re

44 good at here. Ron knows the start-up world, I know the finance side, and I know exactly what type of experience we want to provide.”

“We’re not fully set on the model yet, but we have some ideas we’re throwing back and forth, making sure we land on one before going all in. We can iterate from there, but we should have a clear idea first.” Ron said.

“Ron thinks we need outside help, and he found you, so I’m interested learn more about your background, what you bring to the table. I just want you to know this isn’t your standard, pick-up and drop off supermarket cakes operation here; we’re talking beautiful cakes.”

“You wouldn’t believe the type of response he gets from them,” Dr. Shabari said, perking up.

“Fashion week – I had this huge replica Louboutin shoe cake made for fashion week; the girls went nuts; it was fucking beautiful.” Christopher said, grinning knowingly in Dr. Shabari’s direction.

“You’d think they all got some red-bottoms,” Dr. Shabari said.

“We have a lot of connections to the fashion world. My girlfriend is-” Ron said.

“And we’re not just thinking fashion. Every year I send my good friends a cake for the birthday, bankers, big-time guys. The feedback I get on it.” Christopher said.

“I can imagine. Personalization is everything.” I said.

“This is a real untapped market here,” Christopher said, “I already have a good relationship with these bakers, high-end shops I’ve been doing business with for years.”

“And the prices that Christopher gets are a fraction compared to what you’d pay

45 at a place here in the city.” Ron added.

“And we know that customers are going to like the product.” He sighed, then leaned forward in his chair, resting his forearms on the rim of the table, the change in weight tilting the uneven table again. “So what aren’t we seeing here? What can you bring to the table?” Christopher asked.

I explained to them that in the delivery business, merchants are not the biggest headache, it’s the supply.

“At Presto, we couldn’t pay our delivery guys enough while also making enough money to make it a viable business. You have to consider things like weather, holidays, scheduling, batching orders. It’s a nightmare.” The information was coming out of me, like a preacher declaring the evils of the world at peak sermon, “You either to have incredible volume, or ridiculously high margins on the deliveries themselves. Since it’s on-demand and the cakes are fully custom, you are going to have to win big on the margins.”

“This is great stuff.” Christopher said. He lowered his voice. " You know how much it costs to make a cake? It’s practically nothing. The markup on custom jobs is insane. And these bakers I know, we are looking at pumping more volume into their little shops than they’ve ever seen.” He took a sip from the skinny margarita smacked his lips deliberately. “I’m not sure you are clear on the vision though, like the experience side.”

He flicked his wrist in Ron’s direction and added “It’s something me and Ron aren’t seeing eye-to-eye on yet.”

I expected Ron to lower his head, just as I would have with Ian, but he held his

46 head high, showing no reaction to Christopher’s dig. I thought back to what Ian had said, in television interviews, what he said every time he chewed me out after an Agent botched an order or lingered in his doorway long enough to leave an odor.

I leaned forward in my chair, looking at Ron, then back to Christopher. “You want this experience to be magical. Maybe there are pre-determined cake templates and sizes, but we want it to feel fully bespoke. We could do all black packaging with a small, white, thin cursive script that says “Sweetly. We want that brand to mean something, we want a website churning out beautiful content, Pinterest linkbacks,” I spewed on, hurriedly sharing the imagined experience with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what they’re talking about (or knows how to talk like they know exactly what they’re talking about), throwing out buzzwords like intuitive app interface, white-glove drop-offs. “And the great thing is, an experience like that markets itself,” I added, confidently adding improv flair of my own. Christopher slapped the tabletop, rattling the glasses.

“You get it man. You get it. I’ve been trying to explain this to this guy over here, but you just said it.”

“Come on Christopher, I’ve been saying we need blend content as part of the core platform too, building a community of dessert enthusiasts.” Ron said.

“Absolutely, we want both sides to be actively engaged on the platform. I’m just glad we’re on the same page,” Christopher said. He directed his attention to Ron,

“Top of mind, always.” I said.

“You hear that Ron? Just like that. Boom. Let’s do it boys.” He raised his tequila

47 shot. Ron exhaled, possibly relieved, and picked up his shot.

Dr. Shabari did not raise his glass, and I cheerfully clinked my shot with Ron and

Christopher’s glasses. I was on my way to the big leagues of business: short hours, and absurd hourly fees exchanged for tidbits of specialized advice. The tequila went down smooth.

We continued chatting and both Christopher and Dr. Shabari made it a point to strike up a conversation with two women seated at the table next to us. The women informed us they were from Brazil and starting a lingerie company. Dr. Shabari and

Christopher introduced themselves as “angel investors” hoping that their joke would land.

It didn’t, but they gave their cards to the girls anyway.

A nearby car was blasting a New York hip-hop classic, Black Rob’s “Whoa!” and

I bobbed my head slightly, and Dr. Shabari noticed.

“Irwin, are you a big hip-hop guy?” Dr. Shabari asked.

“Huge.” I said.

“If I were to quote from a hip-hop classic, you could finish the line?”

“I could try”

“Okay. If you answer right, I’ll personally make my recommendation to Toph here.” He paused. “How about that?” he added with a grin.

“Sure.”

Dr. Shabari leaned back. “Let’s see if you know your history. Finish the lyrics to this," and recited “From these streets that we done took. You walkin' witcha head down scared to look. Shook…”

48

I knew the line, but I felt there was an underlying trap, and I paused before answering.

“There aint no such thing as halfway crooks.”

This lyric is from Mobb Deep’s most famous song, “Shook Ones Pt. 2,” a beat made famous to the masses from the climactic, final rap-battle scene in Eminem’s biopic,

8 Mile.

“Right? Mobb Deep.” I repeated.

Dr. Shabari raised his tequila shot, tossed it back, and smiled.

49

what r u doing

Xavier hadn’t planned on coming to watch the game, but Jenny had been coming home irritable from work lately, and had been getting on him about reducing costs. She’d told him to cancel the cable, at least until he picked up a job. Xavier had been taking his daughter to pre-school in the morning, watching sports at home, then picking his daughter up in the afternoon. Before Jenny got home from work, he’d been unplugging the cable box so Jenny would think he’d already canceled it. He couldn’t watch when

Jenny was at home though, so here he was.

A group of girls walk by Xavier. It’s dark, but Xavier looks closely at the one with the glossiest face, her eyes and cheeks smoothed to a sheen that evenly absorbs the neon light from the bar signs. She walks up to a tall button-up dude that looks like a taller, better version of Xavier, and they get to talking. She is wearing a tight black spandex skirt that stretches like magic, and a thin white button up shirt that appears to glow, her bra strap clasps protruding slightly below the shoulder. Xavier considers how different she’d look with one or two less buttons buttoned. She laughs. The people at the bar make an “ooh” sound - the batter has hit a pitch just right of the foul pole.

Tall dude takes a cue from her, and walks up towards the bar, and the girl follows him in tow. She makes eye-contact with Xavier, looks away, then looks back, and away again. She crosses her arms. He can’t decide if, three years ago, he would have made a move on her, if he’d have added two beers to the tab and struck up a conversation.

50

Button-up dude tells the bartender he wants a certain IPA, but they don’t have it, and the girl looks back at Xavier. He hadn’t expected her to look back.

“There’s someone on the other end of that look.” she says.

Xavier nodded, and directed his attention back to the television.

He met Jenny in a bar like this. She had been wearing a jersey that was tied up, revealing her bellybutton and tan belly. She was a ‘beer with the boys’ kind of girl. She’d whispered this in his ear, and he caught a whiff of settled cigarette smoke and a thin perfume that lingered in the nose, long after she pulled away and brought beers for the both of them. He’d imagined them having sex often, settling in and have a life where they’d both work, and when she’d agreed to see him again after they’d finished up at his place later, he felt he had a shot at something greater than himself. The very next day, he’d spent his break from his mall security guard shift looking at rings at one of the jewelry stores. He didn’t know if things were going to lead there, but it felt romantic. A few months ago, the galleria had been jacked on his overnight shit and he’d been let go immediately, even though he’d been working there for years. There’s two outs now, and everyone is ready for the pitcher to wrap the game up and take the boys home.

Tying run is at first, and dude at the plate is a 19 year-old from DR. He is slender and sinewy, his youth stretching the skin on his biceps, his eyes focused and virile.

Xavier rubs his hands along his own biceps, and flexes. They are neither stronger nor weaker than he thought they were. The batter swings, and the ball goes far and over the fence, and now he’s trotting around the diamond. His team is waiting for him at the plate.

The camera cuts to the greying, husky pitcher. He hits his glove with his fist, works his

51 mouth around the gum in his mouth, and steps back on the mound. It’s happened too many times for him to care. Xavier wonders, does that make him a bum?

“He’s a bum!” someone shouts, and Xavier nods his head knowingly and takes a sip of his drink. He was still bringing the bucks home though. Everyone was bringing the bucks home.

It’s raining outside, and Xavier lights a cigarette for his walk to the car. He continues to smoke when he gets in, balancing the cigarette in his mouth with his lips as he turns the ignition, and exhaling once it putts to life. Puffs emerging from Xaviers mouth spreads onto the inside of the windshield spreads then recedes as the car defrosts.

The car speakers are busted, so he pops in his headphones to listen to the radio on his phone. The parking lot leads to open land on all sides, with no buildings visible in any direction, save for the strip-mall the bar was located in. The effect of the light with the smoke inside of the Xavier’s car makes the parking lot seem more alive than it had when the sun was up. He looks where the headlights look and watches the car move out of the parking slot, and back onto the road. The radio announces that the game is over now.

He turns off the radio, rolls down the window and tosses his cigarette. He decides he’s going to cancel the cable, and figure out what he’s going to do for work. He looks up the number as he drives, and makes the call. They tell him there are no available representatives, but they’ll call him back within the next half hour.

He taps the steering wheel, listening to the noise of the car and the layers of the wind and rain careening into the windshield, a loose rock caught in the spin of the tires.

He presses on the gas pedal and feels his seat vibrate under him. As the speedometer’s

52 digital green numbers ticks up, he feels the top of his head tingle. The road could be endless, and he could be going somewhere fast. The yellow gas icon flicks on, and Xavier sighs and slows down. He pulls off an exit early and makes his way towards the gas station with the cheap gas.

He looks at the price of the IPA’s. He brings a sixer of High Lifeto the register.

“This and $20 on 7.” He points to his wet car. A car pulls in quickly, directly in front of the gas station, recoiling as it hits a full stop. Xavier’s shoulders go rigid, then he sees that it’s a woman. His shoulders stay tense. The cashier grabs the beer, scans the barcode, and looks up with expectation.

He sees plastic flowers in a vase on the floor by the register. They are on sale.

He’d bought Jenny the featured discounted bouquet from FTD when he noticed she stopped telling him about her days and started spending more time in bed. She’d be in bed and he’d be on the couch. The flowers ended up being an arrangement of roses that hadn’t bloomed yet. He’d had difficulty figuring out what to write on the note, and ended up with some amalgamation of results on “love notes.” He did not mention that he felt she was slipping away. She put some of this superplant elixir that came with the bouquet, and they bloomed, and she’d been happy about it. Those plants had died shortly after, but

Jenny wasn’t the type to ascribe meaning to things like that. Neither was he for that matter, but he noticed some sort of correlation. Xavier wasn’t even sure if Jenny liked flowers, and it was her money - but he figured she’d appreciate the gesture at least. Jenny was into gestures.

53

“You know what, let me buy one of those things too.” Xavier points at the packet of tablets of which the label includes a large, aggressive rhino.

“Sometimes you just need that extra little-” He says this while gently pumping his fist, and smiling a small, boyish grin. The cashier reaches to grab the packet, smiles back at him, and says Ok. Xavier keeps smiling, thinking about how great it’d be if the pills made him a fucking machine. The cashier stops smiling at him. Xavier plucks one of the flowers, a pink one with a lime green stem, and sets it on the register.

The woman from the car comes in. She has dirty blond hair and close to Xavier’s age. Her skin is stretched tight against her face, and her flannel is oversized. She might be wearing a bra underneath, but Xavier couldn’t tell. He feels a surge in his gut.

“Just slide it in the bag there.” Xavier says.

He looks behind him, and she already is angling toward the cigarette section at the counter. He pulls out one of his headphone pods.

“I’ve been trying to quit since a few years ago.” Xavier says.

“Oh yeah?”

“Oh yeah,” he say eagerly. “They’ll kill ya.”

“Newports, please.”

“Those’ll really kill you.”

She turns towards Xavier, tucking her lips in.

54

“You want this?” The cashier taps the flower on the plastic register. The matte pink paint on the plastic now looks cheap and stupid. Xavier shakes his head and hands over his crispest bill. He picks up the bill from Xavier’s hands, and opens the cash register. Xavier looks back at the woman, who waits with a hand on her hip, one hand swiping her phone screen even though she’s not looking at it. He turns back to the register, where the cashier has bagged his beer and packet.

He picks up the bag and lowers it to the opposite side of where the woman is standing. If this were a movie, he thinks, she’d tell him his shoes were untied, and they’d have a conversation that could lead somewhere. She’d give him a little tidbit to give him a new perspective. He didn’t need it to lead to anything more than that

He shuffles his feet toward the door and she says nothing. He looks back at the counter before opening the door and stepping out, the cool air of the night connecting with his face. The car’s boxy shape, solitary and white under the fluorescent lights remind Xavier of an escape pod in a flight hangar. Jenny had picked it out of the used car lot when he bought it, just a few months after they’d gotten together. It was cool that it was an old car; it wasn’t flashy, and it was cheap. It’d had a working radio at the time.

Xavier walks back into the store and announces, “I do want the flower thing.” He ​ ​ marches up to the counter, puts a five down, and pulls the flower off the counter. He doesn’t look to see how she responds.

He pops a beer on the way home to wash down one of the tablets, swigging it down with an excited urgency. His phone vibrates - there is an incoming call. The

55 customer service rep’s name is Lisa. She thanks him for being a valued customer, and she asks how she can help.

He tells her he wants to cancel his account, and she tells him she’s sorry to hear it, and wants to know why he’s canceling.

“I haven’t enjoyed watching TV these days.”

“I’m looking at your account, and you may be eligible for some special promotional packages we’re running now. You could be paying your current rate, and get access to our premium sports and entertainment package at no extra cost. Some great content coming out, including-”

“No thank you, my wife just really wants me to cancel it.”

“Let me talk to my manager and see if we can get some discounts for you on your account then. Will that help?”

“Well. Unless you can take a ridiculous amount off the price, then I’m canceling.

Happy wife, happy life..”

He feels good saying this. Like he’s doing business.

She gets back on the line and tells him that she can offer 6 months free of the premium entertainment package (which includes all the extra paid for channels and their additional networks), and a 20% discount on the year.

56

He asks, “Well what if I don’t want all that extra stuff? I don’t want to buy more,

I called to cancel.” He trails off, hoping she takes the bait.

She pauses. “I can ask for approval on a 30% discount, but you’d have to let me know right away.”

“Okay, well let me talk to my wife later tonight when I get home. I’ll call back later.”

“I do understand sir. Unfortunately, I can’t ensure that someone else will be able to get you this price. It’s a one-time offer. Could you call her now?”

“No, I can’t right now, she’s sleeping”

“ Do you usually ask your wife before you make small financial decisions like this? ”

Xavier chest tightens up. He looks down, as if to check if the tablets are working, and he notices that the fabric is fraying white over his crotch. He sighs, and looks back up. “I guess not, Lisa. If you didn’t have such a sweet voice I might think you were strong-arming me.”

She chuckles on the phone, and Xavier wonders if Lisa thinks he’s funny, or if she just enjoys the attention she gets on the line. No matter, he was feeling good about this. “Okay, let’s do it.” He feels his circulation kick into gear, and he’s ready to go. The road is dark, and the wet street gleams black from the high-beams, and he drives straight through the next red light, since there are no other cars in sight.

57

The townhouse is silent when he returns. He leaves the flower on the couch, puts the beer in the fridge and pockets the tablets. He walks up the stairs to his daughter’s room, who is asleep in her crib. He makes his way across the hallway, and the half-bathroom light is on, showing Jenny’s curls spiraling on the white bed sheets. Xavier unbuckles his belt and his jeans drop.

He gets into bed with her, and presses his nose between her shoulder and neck, trying to remember what she used to smell like when they first met. He remembered remembering how she smelt, but can’t get there now. She smells like laundry detergent, onion and chocolate milk. He pushes his body up against hers anyway, and she’s warm, and he likes how her body accepts his now, soft where it had been taut. He can now confirm the tablet has kicked in; he feels good that he wasn’t one of the suckers at the bar trying to pick up a girl and do the dance to arrive in a bedroom.

”I’ve got a surprise for you, love.” He presses against her harder.

She murmurs and pulls the sheets tighter around her.

“You smell.”

“I’ll shower up baby, I didn’t even drink that much.”

“Your breath. I’m going back to sleep.”

Xavier turns over and curls up for a moment, then scoots out of the bed and walks to the bathroom.

58

He pulls out his phone and sits on the toilet, brushing aside a pubic hair that could be his or Jenny’s. He taps on the headline on his phone with the game highlights. He remembers most of the game, but he’d missed a few of the key plays. They picked the same scene, the one that sealed the win for the other team, replaying the same close up of the pitcher retaking the mound, gnashing his gum. He didn’t roar like a pained lion. Not even a grimace.

He opens up the old dating account he’d made when he and Jenny had broken up.

She’d called him a few months later and said that their kid was due in five months. He flicks through his old conversations, searching for sexual ones. An ad pops up for an anonymous webcam chat rooms. He taps it, and uses his old junk email address to sign up, and puts his headphones back in. He looks over at Jenny, who is sleeping again, and then stands up to close the bathroom door.

He starts to watch, and he feels his heart rate quicken, but he doesn’t perk up as he had a few minutes before. He fills the Dixie cup he uses to rinse his mouth with water in the small, round sink that juts out from the wall, it’s cheap piping blackening from moisture. It had been a bright silver before. He takes another tablet.

He shuffles through a few webcam rooms, and he settles on a girl who he finds pretty and ordinary. Her eyes seem active, aware, not the same flatness that the other webcam girls seem to have. He sits up straight and stretches his neck so he can see his face in the mirror, then turns on the faucet to splash water on his face, and working the moisture into his hair so that it looks put together.

59

He opts to enter a private session. He speaks quietly into the phone, and says

“You’re beautiful.” She doesn’t say anything, and he can hear the music in the background of the room, a classic rock song that you’d expect to hear in a strip club.

She’s all made up, and she’s leaning back with her legs spread wide open.

“You’re beautiful,” Xavier says.

The screen buffers, and then it goes back in. She’s close up to the screen now, and he recognizes the traces of dark circles under her eyes, and he says it again. She moves her hands upward, likely to where the keyboard is located.

can’t hear u

I said ur beautiful

She blows him a kiss.

thats nice thank u can u get the sound to work?

sorry mic doesnt work hows ur night?

playing with my tits and pussy

Xavier’s pulsating spreads to the rest of his body. The phone shakes in his hand, even though he’s not doing anything with himself just yet. He adjusts the phone so it is parallel with his face, so that his extra neck skin doesn’t show as much.

60

straight to the point huh

what r u doing just got home from watching a game, shoulda just been here with u ;)

ill make this good for u baby ​ Xavier moves his hand down, and the screen buffers again, and now she’s back in the exact position as before, looking directly at the camera.

Xavier hears a wailing, and believes it to be coming from the headphones. When nothing has changed on the screen, he pulls out one of his headphones. It’s his kid.

brb

He tucks his dick into the band of his boxers, and stands up, putting the phone and headphones on the sill of the sink. Jenny sits up in the bed and sees him. She waves him towards the door and says, too automatic to be unkind, “You’re up.” she says.

Xavier trots out of the bedroom, and into his daughter’s room, dimly lit by a yellow nightlight on the wall and an orange tint coming through the thin white drapes from the parking lot lamps in the back of the townhouse complex. He watches the creature thrash in her little bed, no longer screaming. Xavier puts his hand on her forehead and feels a layer of moisture. She still moves back and forth, but quiets. They’d read that when a child is having a night terror, not to comfort them, but to stay in the room and keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t hurt themselves. Xavier hears a thunk. The sound of the house settling.

61

Xavier gives his daughter a reassuring squeeze and she sits upright with an unexpected force, overpowering Xavier’s grip. Her eyes open, darting wildly, unable to focus on Xavier’s face. She closes her eyes, and yells again. Xavier hears creaking sound, like someone is coming up the stairs. He sprints out of the room to the spiral staircase, ready, half-hoping to be killed if that’s the way it goes.

Xavier turns all the lights, illuminating the living room. There’s nowhere for anyone to hide; the room is spare. A patterned couch that seats three and a TV. Kitchen with a foldable table covered in a red checkered tablecloth that you might expect comes with a plastic picnic basket from K-Mart. No one there. The house is silent again. He feels strong and proud for being ready to do his duty, putting himself in the line of danger.

He pulls out a cigarette, a Newport, lights it and sits down on the couch. He smokes it down quickly, only taking a few shallow breaths in between inhales and exhales. He watches the smoke dissipate into the room, disappearing.

They’d been so hopeful when they moved into the townhome last year. They both had been working consistently, and were happy to be out of the shit-ass apartment they’d been staying in. They hoped this would add some level of wonder. He picks up the plastic flower, and rolls the stem between his palms so that the flower petals spin like a pinwheel. His knee pumps up and down, and his hands tremble as he stops spinning the stem and attempts to hold the flower still with his hands. He goes to the fridge, pops open another beer, and turns on the TV. He flips through some of the channels for a bit, then

62 remembers his webchat. He checks for a pocket that his phone might be in, but he’s in his underwear.

Xavier makes his way back up the stairs. through the bedroom and to the bathroom, and sees his phone on the sink. He picks the phone up and sits back down.

She’s still in the same position, leaned back with her legs spread open. Xavier puts his the headphones back in and hears her moaning, even louder now. He watches for a bit, then re-opens the chat.

have you been doing this the whole time

?

She stays in the same position, massaging and playing with herself, and does not respond. can you get the sound to work

sorry my mic doesn’t work

This response comes, but the girl has not moved from her position, and then the screen buffers, and she’s up close to the screen again. are you real?

all natural

He checks the duration of the the chat, and does the math for what he owes. He scoots off the toilet in a crouch down, balancing himself on the balls of his feet, elbows

63 on his thighs like a catcher, but his right knee doesn’t support his weight like it used to.

He tips over slightly to one side, and catches himself with his forearm. He ends the chat, and the screen shows that he’s been charged almost exactly what the new cable bill would be for next month. His lower back sweat makes his shirt stick, and his throat feels thick and full. He shakes his head, and makes a loud sound that resembles a truck horn, the result of air being forced through a constricted air duct. A laugh mixed with something else.

He dials the cable company back, and again, is informed he’ll receive a call back shortly, as they are experiencing unexpected call volume.

Jenny props herself up on her elbow and turns her head, looking at Xavier staring at his phone.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Canceling the cable. It’s been harder than you’d think.”

64

Level Zero

Origin Story

Spend so much time playing video games that your grandma threatens to disconnect the

Wi-Fi unless you find a job, get a twelve-dollar haircut and buy a twenty-nine dollar shirt and tie combo that came in a sleek, plastic pack. Look in the mirror and wish that your outfit looked more similar to the flexible, titanium armor that you’ve spent the past month acquiring for your character in dal;sdfja;lsdfj. Wipe the dust off the toes of your ​ ​ brown, plasticky dress shoes and put your legs through the itchy dress pants from your high school graduation. Leave.

Level One

Start inside of a convention center that looks like the inside of a convention center. Each of the different companies has booths with banners and brochures.

Middle-aged women with short hair in pantsuits and craft-show earrings and balding middle-aged men with gelled up hair and sagging faces. There’s a souped-up dude nearly bursting out of his grey polo who tells you that you could be a knife salesman as long as you were motivated and didn’t take no for an answer. Ask him for his card. He asks you what you’d say if he didn’t want to give it to you.

Shake hands too hard; shake hands too soft. Grip the wrong part of the hand. Your hands always have a slight tremble, and they tremble more at certain times more than others. Fiddle with the insides of your pockets and confirm, repeatedly, that your pants are not unzipped. Examine the other applicants. They’re wearing similar shirt and tie

65 combos, some with fly sneakers, and others with scuffed dress shoes, and they are all shuffling along, carrying company-branded folders like lunch trays or library books.

The Air Force booth is, by far, the coolest booth. Table-sized banners featuring beautiful aerial shots with hi-res color blends blues, yellows, greens. Wonder what these people in the booth were like when they were younger; if they’ve always been cut-up dudes with a sense of purpose. It’s not their strength that got you, but their lack of visible weakness.

The military men ask you about your goals; what you want out of life. Say you don’t know, exactly, and admit you suck at first person shooters. Listen intently as they tell you that the Armed Services are a place to learn purpose and be a part of something greater than yourself, a place to challenge yourself and come out a better man. Make sure you walk away from the booth straight-backed.

Scan the rest of the job fair, avoid Mr. Knife, and glance at the banners at the Air

Force booth once again before leaving, awestruck at the sleek metal machines. Don’t buy into the honor of serving your country bullshit. Split the difference and put your name on an email list. Go home, and later that week, get a job at the pizza spot your grandparents order from every Friday for dinner.

--

Be a good, hard-working pizza guy for three months. There’s a shift-skipping rotation, and now you’re a part of it. Your coworkers smoke up and cheat on their significant others in the back; you put up the out of order sign on the bathroom. Level up your character. Breaks from your break involve developing and intimate and refined taste

66 for animated porn. Work backwards and try equipping your video game character with new gear to make him more attractive. Female characters with well-thought out armor aesthetics near beginner outposts distract you from your quests. Learn this. The potential of the players looking like these characters become the reason for playing. Engage with them and hope they are looking for someone stronger to go on quests on with.

Miraculously, run into a low-level female character deep in high-level beast territory. Her screen name references a character from the same anime that your screenname does. A splinter of hope.

She’s fighting a asjdffssd, and losing badly, her character with way too little ​ ​ experience to be in this section of the map. Just before her health meter zeroes out, step in and finish the beast off. Offer her some extra armor, so she won’t die so quickly next time. She says thanks but no thanks; she liked dying over and over again. She wishes she can do it in real life and spawn somewhere else. Get to talking.

To match her schedule, work out an agreement with your coworkers to switch shifts. Pick the hours of 3pm and 5pm to go on quests with her.

--

She talks about things the way that girls in car magazines talk about things. She likes energy drinks, cars, going to clubs and parties occasionally, but would rather be at home playing video games. She’s quit school twice, and tells me she isn’t good at living life like a normal person. She tells you she likes how she looked with lots of makeup on, and she looks too young without it. She finally sends you a picture of herself, and she has pink and blonde highlights, large brown eyes, and rocks a winged eyeliner swoosh that

67 levels up a woman’s eyes from sexy to sexier. It matches the character in the game, but, obviously, looks way better on her.

Goddamn. You’d never have the balls to approach her in real life. Lucky for your sorry ass, she lives in Orlando, and something about her being on the opposite side of the country makes it easier for me to spit game. Of course, your character is badass too, which helps.

Someone knocks on the bathroom door as you are hunting for some flexible titanium dragon scales. Tell them the bathroom is out of order.

“Unless you have a really good reason for being in there, you don’t work here anymore.”

Open the door, your eyes zero in on your manager’s spiked hair, two inch clumps of hair twisted at the tips to make him look taller than he is. You aren’t going to be like him. The only difference between his sorry ass and yours is the color of the polo he’s wearing.

Sidestep him and walk towards the door. Your coworkers look at you apologetically. Push the door open, pause in the doorway, and make the peace sign, letting the sun make a silhouette out of you. They probably don’t care, but you feel like a symbol for myself, at least.

Level 2

You talk to her all the time now. At first, you went on quests together, but now you just run around the map and chat, finding different caves, rivers, gulches, and valleys

68 to explore, like background music to a conversation in a bedroom or a restaurant. You talk about the important shit: musicians, fan fiction, favorite movies, anime. You have whole days to ponder on all the shit she tells you about. She has great taste in everything.

She tells you she still lives at home too.

She tells you she feels obligated to tell you something. She’s dating someone.

He’s in school and works at a warehouse, and that’s why she has because plenty of time to talk until 9pm sharp. You learn about him, paying impossibly close attention to every little bit of info you can get about him. You don’t overtly talk shit about him, but you plant the seeds.

“My boy is mad at me again”

“For real? How come?

“cuz I get too reckless

“Like u eat two grilled stuft burritos instead of one? Like last time?”

“LOL”

“ What’d you do tho?”

“Ah just some drama shit. I fucking hate drama.”

“Me too… it’s never worth it, you know…”

“EXACTLY. He got mad I got lunch with some guys.”

“Sweating the small stuff is so dumb. If you’re confident that shit doesn’t matter.”

“Sometimes I really can’t believe you’re single.”

Ugh.

69

You respond to her immediately when she texts you, and pick up the phone no matter what when she starts calling you. She gets sad sometimes, and she sadder she is, the more apt she is to call you. She also calls when her boyfriend is mad at her, she calls when her and her friends are fighting, she calls when her dad yells at her for staying out too late. You are happy to take the calls. You’re a sad sack, too, but you don’t let this on.

She needs you. That’s good enough for now.

Ask one question for every answer she texts back. Second her opinions, track her quirks and poke fun at them. Wait for 3pm everyday because she gets off her cashier shift at 6pm, EST.

--

Your grandmother gets on your case about work. She’s tired of you hanging around the house, sighing when she comes home from church and you’re in the same position as when she left. She tells you to get a job or find someone else to take you in.

You comb the internet for job listings, and pore through the emails the Air Force has been sending you. There’s a position available for “aerial photographer.” No college experience required. Feel a little buzz when you see they offer 30 days vacation and free flights. ​ Tell her you are thinking about enlisting in the military.

“guys in uniform are so sexy”

“what, so if i get in a uniform, i’ll be sexy?”

“Maybe”

“better not let your boy see that”

70

“how can he not see what YOU sent <3. If you get in, take me with you.”

“for real?”

“I think so, yeah.”

Enlist. No brainer. Take the ASVAP. Your score says you are in the “highly-apt” percentile group. This doesn’t say much for the aptitude the rest of the gems you’d be in with. Wonder what percentile the people in the banners at the job fair were. A sergeant that could be related to the souped up guy at the convention center says there are only immediate openings for the position of air traffic controller. Air traffic controllers get accelerated shipping dates for basic training, and a sign-up bonus. Take the job. Tell her.

Receive a nice little photo in your inbox that she tells you to think of when basic training gets really hard. Cherish it.

Level 3

Get dinner with your family the night before you ship. Your grandfather was a pilot that served two tours. He’s tried to tell you the story recently, but he couldn’t remember the details all the way through. Then his skin and muscle and bone push up from the chair, all separate cogs and levers. He scratches at his Seran-Wrapped legs under his shorts, and shuffles out of the kitchen, taking the stairs slowly. Each step crinkles.

“He’s out of his mind, he remembers nothing. Driving me crazy. Crazy.”

Ask Grandma how they met, even though you’ve heard the story many times over. Grandpa thought he was hot stuff with his bomber jacket and pilot wings and

71 introduced himself by telling her to not go falling in love with him. They dated for four months before Grandpa got stationed elsewhere, and she picked up and left with him.”

“Lord knows he doesn’t remember - thinks he’s waking up on the battlefield when a car door slams outside, or he falls asleep with one of those stupid war movies. He thrashes around, and scratches his legs. Like spraying jungles full of chemicals isn’t gonna do anything to human skin. Uncle Sam stopped taking care of their own.”

By the time she finishes her tea, you’ve torn the napkin into pieces and are in the process of shredding the small pieces into smaller ones. You wonder if 50 years from now, baby girl would be sitting at a table like this, talking to your grandson like this. It’s not a beautiful scenario, but it’s better than what you’ve got. There’s a story there, at least.

Level 3

Basic training starts off hard and gets harder. You aren’t much of an athlete, and your mind isn’t in the game. You start off daydreaming, planning romantic outings and trips in your head. The physical work painful, but manageable. As the days pass; however, you start waking up with pressure in your head from waking up early. You generate some optimism, thinking about how you’ll look when she sees you for the first time. You consciously get a whiff of the morning dew, and appreciate it. And then you start to run. The cool moisture makes your ears and throat swell up and hurt. Your shins will ache. Your toes ache. Your balls stay cold well after the run is done.

Your 341 gets write-ups with infractions regularly, and though your troop won’t go Full Metal Jacket on you, they definitely wish you weren’t there. Your uniform is not

72 always tucked in properly, no tight hospital corners on bed, your fingernails too long.

Catch a write-up for not walking across the street at the intersection when they give you clearance to hit the food court on base. The workouts get a lot harder, and you aren’t proportionally getting harder, better, faster, or stronger. Watchful eyes weigh on your chest, and you feel your stomach pushing out against your skin, brain pushing against skull. Wonder if you are starting to lose it. You know that she’s not going to pick up and leave with you anywhere.

You fuck up all the drills. Your drill sergeant screams obscenities at you, you piece of shit, loser, bitch-ass eating motherfucker who deserves to eat shit for the rest of your life. They say they don’t come at you like that in the Air Force, but this instructor has a special place in his beady little heart for you.

But because you’ve yelled these things at yourself your whole life, the insults fuel you. A steel runs under your skin now. Then everything becomes clear. You know what you are going to do. Email her your plan: you get 10 days in between boot-camp and being stationed wherever. You will fly to Orlando. If the week of hanging out doesn’t go well, she goes back to her normal life, and you get shipped off. If it goes well, you figure out the future, together.

She responds,

“You make it all sound so easy.”

You are very nearly crushed, again. This hard-earned resolve is clearly a figment of your imagination. The days rattle and shake. Your hands shake during your M-16 73 range test, and if you fail again, you may get washed back a week, or worse, sent home.

You write back the next day.

“Trust me”

She emails you and says okay. You are more than relieved. You book the flight to

Orlando. You sleep better than you’ve slept in my entire life. You imagine her light touch and soft hands when you shoot the target with the M16, and you pass with flying colors.

!!!!!!

Let her know you are on your way from the airport. Put on your civilian Air Force t-shirt. Florida is more humid than you’d imagined, but it’s a nice humidity. Sunny. It’s in the breezeway passage leading from plane to airport, and all around on the walk to the car rental agency in the parking lot. Your jeans stick to your legs. You like how your arms look, tighter against your sleeves. How the cotton feels around your tricep.

She tells you to meet her at the mall so you post up in the parking lot, and look around you, coolly assessing the different cars pulling in and out. You’d said you were a little taller than you were when you’d first started talking to her, but you brush this thought aside. You are a military man now. No matter.

Check the time and see you still have 30 minutes to kill. Get out of the car and walk into the mall, keeping your eye out for anyone that she might be. You’ve never notice how beautiful malls are. Temples of light. The sun shining through the large glass window panes, projecting polygon light patterns onto the smooth, speckled floor.

74

Walk into a video game store, and play around with the new war game on display.

It looked realistic, but from what you can see, the military was nothing like these heroes on the screen. The opening scene of the game lists all the names of the American soldiers that died in the skirmishes that the game has levels in. Wonder if your grandfather used to know any of them. How many of them wear Saran wrap around their bodies now?

Some kids walk up to you and, upon looking at your shirt, ask if you are in the military. You say yes. They ask if war is really like that. You look at them and don’t say anything, hoping your silence will be more profound than any answer you can give them.

Walk out.

It’s about the time she’s supposed to show up, and walk over to the ice cream store, preparing your selection so you can appear decisive in a half hour.

Call her. No answer.

Hey you close?

“I’m not sure if I can make it out there”

Call her again. No answer.

What’s going on? Everything okay?

“Yes. I mean, kind of. I keep trying to leave and I just can’t.”. ​ “I’ll come get you.“

You think about that stupid knife salesman from the job fair.

“Okay?” ​ No response.

“It’s all gonna be good. I’m scared too.”

75

Feel the size and magnitude of the mall, the lights pouring over you. You feel exposed, alone in an empty field. Imagine snipers on top of the glass panes in the ceiling, their rifle sights trained on you, holding in the breath before taking you down. The mall expands and shrinks at the same time. She doesn’t respond.

“I’m coming. Just send me your address,”

The stores seem smaller, and the mall’s glass panel ceiling looks very far away.

You wonder why glass ceilings are something anyone could ever hope to burst out of, they are always so far away.

She texts you the address and says she’ll meet you outside. This is all part of the journey, the dark before the dawn.

You sprint, though you are not sure to where. You slow down, find your way back through the mall, and you guess right, finding your car in the first aisle you check.

You hop in the car and you type her address in the GPS. It’s a 10-minute drive.

Five minutes in, you enter the residential neighborhood, full of large houses with similar color palettes that seem to be complimented by the pink, yellow, and orange hues.

Greener than you could have imagined.

As you approach the cul-de-sac, plan your entry. Unclick your seatbelt in advance and make the turn. Double check the address numbers confirm that her house is to the left-center. Open the door. Step out of the car so you can be leaning up against it, pushing your biceps out when she emerges from the house. Cool as a cucumber.

She steps out of the house, and looks at you, her eyes wet and hopeful, her hair messy and colorful just like you’ve told her you like it. She looks like she does in her

76 pictures, but skinnier. Two, toothpick legs wrapped in black jeans with holes. Younger.

She looks both ways, and starts toward towards the car.

Behind her, a balding, middle aged man pops his head out of the door, and looks at you, confused. His perplexed face starts to turn into something else. Break eye contact.

You realize what he has just realized, and you shouldn’t be there. Scurry to the driver's seat. Turn the car on. Pump the gas. Swing out of the cul-de-sac and onto the main road.

A few seconds down the road, then slam the brakes, right there in the middle of the road, all that resolve of you keeping you all together draining out.

You turn the car around and head towards the cul-de-sac, your eyes letting in more light than they should, overexposing your field of vision and washing out everything around the corners. This isn’t how your story is going to end.

77

Big plans

My phone is in my hand and Instagram is open before I’m fully aware that I’m awake. No messages.

I swipe down to refresh.

When I’m feeling up to it, I leave my bed and make food for myself. If I’m not feeling up to it, then I just make coffee. Since Allie left me, it has been just coffee. There is one coffee pod left. I put it in the machine and coffee comes out.

I scroll through different coffee options on Amazon. Illy or Lavazza? I have an

Amazon credit card that I buy things with because I get 5% back on those purchases. On

Amazon. I’ve accumulated over 3,000 points. 3,000 points can buy me Illy and Lavazza. ​ ​ A voice in my head yells “Ballin!”

My thumb presses the screen on photos of the girls that I am attracted to. They look prettier than the girls I’ve been seeing in places where I’m supposed to meet girls.

They look shaplier, wider-eyed, fuller-lipped, smoother, brighter, fun. Some of the girls in the feed are friends of mine.

I look through the notes on my phone. One reads, “I gave her the password to my phone, I have nothing to hide.” I have another from around the same time that reads, “I can’t remember the last time I felt goosebumps.”

I watch porn and masturbate and feel loss. I try to appreciate that I live alone. I walk to the bathroom naked, wash myself off, then brush my teeth with an well-reviewed electric toothbrush. Then back to bed.

78

I watch basketball highlights, then the Office for an hour or three. I wonder if this means I’m depressed, or if it’s a function of me being almost depressed.

Tell myself go for a run. Tell myself drink water. Time passes; I do neither.

I put on an album by Earl Sweatshirt called “I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go

Outside.” I’ve felt a particular kinship with this album since seeing the artist perform it as an opening set for Solange at Radio City Music Hall.

Earl mutter-mumbled through the songs, pacing back and forth, rapping at the floor as if talking to himself. Occasionally, offbeat, he shouted, yelling defeatedly at thousands of successful-looking people who had not intentionally paid to see him. The mid-30’s person sitting next to me screamed at Earl to get off the stage. He was not the only one unhinged by Earl’s approach to the performance, and Earl fed off of the confusion and anger rippling through the audience. During breaks between songs he repeated, “Ima wrap this up soon. Who hype for Solange?,” then smiling ever so slightly as the audience cheered, before looking back down at the ground and ripping into the next song.

As this became a motif of the show, I felt the corners of my mouth curl into an equally slight smile. Earl Sweatshirt was booing himself, inviting others boo along with him. Recognizing that Earl and I were in on the same joke lifted a fog from within my chest. I felt on the verge of spilling out of me and into something else. Allie didn’t boo during the show, but she wasn’t moved by Earl. She told me later that she understood how I felt from an abstract perspective.

79

My reverie drags me down an internet hole of sad internet rappers and callous internet rappers. They recite words that are converted into mantras, two to three minutes of packaged consciousness. One song melts into the next.

Lil Xan catches my attention. In his music videos, he is depicted alone, rap-talking into the camera with an exhausted euphoria like a teenager who has just returned from a trip to the dentist. The rappers from my childhood seemed powerful and unflinching. Superhuman. Lil Xan looks like he might fall asleep or die at any moment.

I’m reminded of listening to Notorious B.I.G with Allie, just a week before we broke up.

I’d seen an advertisement for a documentary about his life on Amazon, and decided to listen through one of his albums all the way through. Being a member of the

Napster and Limewire generation, I knew all the singles, but not the albums. After listening to the first song, I texted Allie, suggesting that we listen to it together.

Ready To Die is a full-blown epic. The album begins with the sounds of Biggie’s ​ reimagined birth, and as the song continues, samples of hip-hop songs from 1980’s and early 90’s are paired with reimagined snippets from Biggies own life. The intro ends with

Biggie narration, just as he is leaving prison. He says, “I got big plans.”

As the album unfolds, Biggie raps vividly. You can see it. Feel it. Biggie is plugged into the pulse of his reality, and he raps this reality with utter precision and urgency, like his life depends on his chronicling of it.

Allie came over, and we began listening to the album. We both started on the bed, but after a few songs, Allie got up and began sifting through my unkempt room, looking for her clothing items that hadn’t seen for awhile. I made a vague statement along the

80 lines of “because of the internet, you know, they can’t make them like this anymore,” and then the love song “Me and my B*tch” came on.

The song is about a girl who is a partner in crime and romance to the narrator.

Biggie’s verse in “Me and my B*tch” starts with:

You look so good huh, I suck on your daddy's dick I never felt that way in my life It didn't take long before I made you my wife

I felt uncomfortable during this part of the song. After the song finished, Allie said, “I liked that one,” and she continued to root through my things. On the final track of the album, Biggie narrates his suicidal thoughts to his friend and producer as he lies in bed. The album ends with Biggie shooting himself in the head.

My apartment buzzer buzzes but I don’t answer because there is nobody to expect. I hear the buzzer buzz from my neighbor’s apartment a few seconds later.

Allie and I watched porn together after finishing the album. We’d watched porn together before, usually opting to do so a few days after fighting and making up. The viewing experience was always a little weird, and we always laughed at our reluctance to select the first video, knowing that it shouldn’t be weird but it was. Usually I wasn’t picky; any depiction of fucking would do. That day though, I took much longer to settle on a video. I watched a few seconds of one and then clicked on another. I didn’t know what I was looking for exactly, but after five or six false starts, I finally found a video that felt right. It resembled an ordinary sexual interaction and the lighting looked natural, sun filtering softly through white curtains. We fucked. I imagined myself as the male actor in the video, and changed my behavior accordingly. I wondered if she would stop 81 and point out that I wasn’t acting or moving like me. To my surprise, she responded to me eagerly and with gusto. I felt both attached and removed from that present moment, like I could see myself being watched behind a screen in someone else’s reality. When we were done she said, “Wow, that was really good.” It shouldn’t have come as a shock ​ ​ to me when she said she wanted to see other people. “I just want to see what it’s like to be like, out there,” she said. “Not in here.”

Now as I listen to Ready to Die, I think about this album as a catalog of Biggie’s ​ ​ life. A life that he chose to leave fictionally, and a life that, in the real world, he did not make the choice to leave.

I delete all my photos so I won’t keep looking at other people then back at me.

It’s time to get some air but I live on a five-floor walk-up.

I leave my phone on my bed so I don’t check it and I walk to the kitchen and open the window. Skrt-Skrt(!). The cold shocks my bare stomach, and it’s getting dark. The buildings from the city across the river are very tall and bright but not promising. I walk back to my bedroom, but, instead of laying down and picking up my phone, I just stand there and look at my bed. When Allie would sleep over, which was about half the time, we cuddled, and there was a time when I used to wonder if I could be doing more with the time that we spent cuddling.

My phone lights up with a notification. My coffee has been delivered. 82

Bibliography

Notorious B.I.G.. Ready to Die, Bad Boy Records; Arista Records, 1994. ​ ​