In the ink red blink of an out of tune digital alarm clock I'm laying there awake. It's some morning - likely as not to have been 9am as always - grappling thin air and dreams and pondering the hallway, which separates the shower and me. The shower is feeling pretty aloof; I can relate though, I'm feeling pretty shy myself.
Blugh. Or is it speigenplatz? Details I never bother remembering. Get up and wander down the hallway. Mm. Nude.
"Urgle-blattensquash."
Stumble into clothes and the door and the van when it pulls up on the curb outside the house, smack my elbow at some point, so nursing that, exchange pleasantries, "What up, Jeff. Schuster. Yo Mike.”
Mike just nods, as per the Yo. The other two, a little out of phase, "Nuthin."
We get coffee and then head up to north-Jersey, ritual weekend hangouts on a rotating schedule, sorted by couches. Cruising by the coast in Schuster's box-auto, munching cheetos and utilizing the properties of intoxicating substance X, debating semantics, which at present was all we were good for. It was a load of sap rot, probably.
"I could hold it in the crook of my arm."
Bend it backwards and laugh, that's all there is to it, "Gilly would have had something to say, to be sure." Gilly was currently passed out in the back seat. He had nothing to say.
"Looks like my old grandmother, man. Almost." Butt kisser, who really cared?
"Hey, pass the colon dude," it was a great Hammond festival. "Grass." The tide waved back, not that anyone would bother noticing in the wake of the moment, it was hip enough to have waved first, and everybody was snooged.
"Yo mama jama, give the cat's ass back before you ground it all yourself, smacky."
In said fashion we made our way to Trish Barton's place in Sayreville, Middlesex County, proud member of the pit of the nation, welcome to New Jersey. Her parents owned a house on East Kupsch Street, which was a few blocks from the Sayreville Boro Hall. Jeff had it in for Trish's neighbor Kristen, so this point of geography was ingrained in his skull.
It happened to be a nice afternoon, so while the rest of us shuffled into the basement to ensue ping-pong and further snooging, as was common, Jeff Durman walked down the street and rang the bell to Kristen's door. Jeff was forward, they'd only met in passing once, but he Knew. She answered the door, took his hand, and they went for a walk. Burke's park was barely far away.
"So, do you think dreams are real?"
"Oh definitely," Jeff struck out, "Easily more real than any of this," waving arms around, gesturing, grabbing things. "I can feel all this, smell it, touch, see it. In my dreams I can think it, feel things with all of my n+5 where n is a real positive integer senses. Now that's real. Maybe."
They'd walked once around the park, and having just met, which didn't make much of a difference for either of them, only made it from "blue-green algae is not unlike lefsa" to a rather shallow examination of surrealism. She was, insofar as he had seen thus far, perfect.
She goggled her eyes out and spread her fingers, mid-60's west-coast variety surfer voice, "Stuff you can feel with your head, man." Definite Thomas Chong overtones, which could only mean one possible thing.
Jeff returned later, obnoxiously glib. He beat me repeatedly at ping-pong, and told me What Love Is.
At the proper interval we repacked into the van and headed for Denny's. This among other things was routine, and so we accepted its inevitability without further thought. Trish Barton was going out with her new boyfriend, and so refrained from joining us. This was, of course, not routine, and the lot of us mulled over it about as deeply as anybody cared to, which was hardly at all.
Our corner booth was taken, so we took a window seat on the side.
Bob Marley's dead, not a surprise. Everybody was dead. Trish Barton was no longer a virgin. I experienced mild shock that then gave way to apathy. We'd broken up months ago, so there was no reason why I should care, except that I hadn't gotten any. This locker-jaw attitude, I told myself, derived from my inner-ape, who was no longer useful and therefore to be distrusted. Hence the apathy, if forced. I've come a long way by forced apathy. Jeff Durman was about to spit a chewed up piece of plastic into my bottomless cup of coffee. This was totally expected to some extent and acted as my anchor to reality.
"'This week in a bold career move Ringo Starr holds concerts in people's heads!' Ptu!" Jeff had impeccable aim as always.
"You know she has it at least six times a day now," Amanda said through a half-assed giggle.
Midnight mass at midnight, Tupperware in the oven, I could care about as much, I told myself. "This is something of a discrepancy," I said. So much for forced apathy, I was jealous.
"This is the great vortex swill of the American night," echoed Mike.
I pondered that for as long as possible. Not so much jealous as, well. No, right. Jealous. But not of that, just that I nearly rather liked her to begin with, but not so much that I didn't feel like I wasn't missing out on something. Being clear-headed I pursued my other yearning in life.
"Not only that, the coffee's cold." I beckoned the waitress that resembled Big Bird, minus the feathers, nose like a beak, tall and pear-bottomed.
"Yellow swirls before me, " Jeff dove, "in hazy green and purple. A peak of light balances at the foot of the bed." The coffee always made him hyper, too much sugar. I usually took it black.
"You're a lunatic Jeff,” suggested Amanda.
On the other hand I was missing out on something.
"Yeah, I'm likely crazy," Reiteration, "something black and sinister, with long brown hair." So he was not only some semblance of paranoid neurotic today, but also in something vaguely resembling love or infatuation. "Wicked! Molten flesh spilling over the bedside," Jeff melted into the booth beating his chest and screaming death all the way, "death death death death!"
I hated these conversations. Jeff was a nutcracker and expected us all to buy his little act because it was cute. Asshole. "The less beautiful Allison Becker looks, the bigger the dick you are, Jeff." The rest of them, who had been doing their best to retain the proper amount of giddiness for such a venture, had broken into a healthy chorus of sniggering.
The tabletop was littered with fuck-spoons that Mike and Gil had been collecting. Spoons in lieu of the traditional fuck-tab from soda cans. Despite the efforts of a highly organized and rigorously bored student body our sophomore year - which realized there was nothing better to do - both soda by the can and coffee by the pot were still absent from Denny's assortment of products.
"Fuck-spoon for Trish!" Donating to the cause, all six of us. "How many spoons to equal a fuck-tab?" Fuck-tabs took something resembling talent, spoons took mere guile, hence the inequality.
"Think it's five." I offered.
"No, six. I checked the handbook," said Schuster.
"One off."
"Okay, we've got twelve so far." Mike jerked his hand up, "Gilly! Table four is leaving," he dewed up his eyes a little for effect, "And look, I think they had soup and dessert..."
"Evasive maneuvers men!"
Gilly tripped out of the booth mumbling something about checking the urinal cakes. Mike got up to harass the busboy.
"For the fiftieth time tonight, I haven't got the matches, they're up at the counter." said the typically fat busboy, Norman Gordan at the helm tonight, like usual.
Norman had glasses as thick as Montreal, maybe even Ontario, but that'd be stretching it.
"No way man, you took them again, they're not up there." Eventually the kid had no recourse but to take Mike up to the counter again, and show him, again, that the matches were in the little basket by the register. This was also a routine, which humans are subject to in such cases. Gilly made his way back from the men's room, swooped up all available spoons at table four, and came back to our booth, a triumphant hero. Mike continued to grill the kid for upwards of more than necessary. He didn't give a rat's ass about the spoons; he just liked shredding on the busboy.
"How many'd we get?"
"Seven." said Gilly, "Soup spoons! They count as one and a half spoon."
"We've nearly got Trish covered for the weekend." said Amanda.
We managed to entertain ourselves until nearly 2:35 AM, at which point we directed ourselves home via Schuster. We refrained from Mystery Machine jokes, which had stopped amusing us three weeks ago exactly, after completely wearing down all references and firmly establishing Jeff as the most likely to be old man withers.
The next weekend Jeff stayed in Sayreville, for the obvious reason. Her parents were vacationing or something similar, in any case the house was empty and so they could have their way with it.
The two of them waltzed to the downstairs living room after properly greeting each other; she had had brownies in the kitchen, which she shared. Her father enjoyed esoteric music, and because it belied her sense of propriety she wished to have a waltz previous to pursuing their relationship further. Jeff obliged, and was a commendable partner.
She led him downstairs then, and before reaching the couch or the TV control, she turned abruptly and stepped in closer to him, thigh towards his body, causing him to walk into her. Tripping a little into the eyes, these big blue, seeking sort of crazy kinda eyes -Wow. Where the hell did those come from? He didn't remember those, and suddenly a feeling akin to boiling water unclenched through his veins and stopped up someplace. Hands reached around, pensive, leading to the couch and the barren, the white skin. The small of her back felt electric. She nuzzled into his frame, abraded him, and in response he rolled himself around the curve of her body, landing them on the rough carpeted floor. The linoleum rug ground them both, flesh like a powerline, nervous, twitching - white and unsure as fluorescent lighting - their breath tangled together like the sigh of hissing cast-iron radiators in winter.
Later they're curled around each other on the couch, watching TV, whatever was on, nothing too engaging.
"Ever sleep with your mother?"
"Oh yes, often. On occasion." Now she's reaching behind the couch for something, pink cockroach suit? He doesn't think so:
"No."
Oh, day old pizza, maybe. He'd never reach a state of Nirvana or anything if he kept this up. He knew that.
"Want some?"
"No thanks."
So instead he's humming this tune he's had in his head for a good long while, maybe something about Tony Danza, like a giant black lightbulb, something hot.
"We'll have our second wedding in Rhode Island."
She would look good in a grass skirt, in the same way that Jennifer Dole had looked good in that tinfoil bra, back in the third grade right, eh, eclectic yet stunning. "You'd look really sexy with a ukulele."
So who knows what happened that by next week they weren't nearly on such good terms. Jeff's an asshole beyond assholes, so it's hard to say but easy to assume, either way they're at his place and he's staggering back looking up, "What the hell?" raising slightly the voice at the end because it hurt and he didn't understand.
"I don't like your face." She turned and disappeared in a red fizzle of walking out.
"Huh?" Oblique curiosity. Jeff fell to the floor.
He coughed blood for half an hour before calling an ambulance. This was all highly irregular, he thought. Having been one rather predisposed to laughing in the face of the likes of Walter Cronkite, coughing blood was simply not regular behavior, hence the ambulance. Anything out of the ordinary to be dealt with by the proper authorities - not that he was anal or obsessive-compulsive in any manner, just unconsciously ingrained fowards helplessness.
An hour later, explaining multiple fork wounds to hospital authorities, "So she didn't like my face much, can I help it?"
This is about where I walk in again; Mike is with me. After hearing the story we're left snorting about chicks, of course, or crazy chicks specifically, but we're not sure yet if that has any meaning. I'm at least pretty amused, but Jeff's not having a particularly good time.
"She stabbed me with a fucking fork you assholes."
"Well I'd have a hard time blaming her, she didn't like your face."
Mike is at least coherent, "Pressing charges?"
"What? Shit." Oh he's smitten all right, right down to the fibula, some kinda magic love-fork thing going on. Too bad she doesn't like his face.
We trudge out of the place and pack Jeff full of grub, McSmackball burgers or something equally indeterminate, and he really snarfs em down, he's just eating and eating and he can't stop and pretty soon he's eating the table and still doesn't stop and now he's just eating everything. He eats everything, even my fries. Poof.
Just like that. And now here I am floating around the resulting emptiness just sort of snoring along - you know, row row row, just passing the time, row your void down to the used void store and sell your void for a mass bonus or trade it in for another void altogether. Maybe grab a universe somebody left hung out to dry on your way home, dress up your void in some pretty spheres or strings or whatever you've got laying around and there it is, poof, everything again.
So we feed Jeff and take him home, say hi to mom and pop and Mike chugs some of their milk from the fridge, he's got this thing about milk, in fact, this is how it is that Mike Reissner ended up drinking all of the milk in the Durman household. It's only eight in the evening by this point, so we're sticking around for another hour or two playing cards with Jeff's mom, who has been a consumate milf for a number of years, and out of recognition of her status as such we feel the necessity to pay our respects in a few hands of gin.
Jeff's sleeping in front of the TV, he ate too much, food coma, we're hanging with Mrs. Durman, and she's made these just incredible monster-chocolate chip sugar-glazed super cookies which we wolf down, and Mike ends up drinking the last of the milk by himself before I can get my grubby little hands on it. I've been too busy stuffing cookies into my mouth, and I'm just ravenous, the bastard drank all the milk and now I'm turning into this beast, so I grab Mike in a suitably forceful manner and drive to the corner store and make him buy me a half gallon of milk and I'm roaring the entire time about how I need milk, my mouth is on fire with monster-chocolate chips.
Chill out he sez, we'll get you some goddam milk. But I can't control it and when I finally get the milk I chug the shit down, throw back the entire thing without breathing once, which is just way too much. I shouldn't have done that. My stomach is sent into convulsions and all the cookies and burgers and the half-gallon of milk come belching out onto the pavement, and I swear that's the last time I ever eat one of Jeff Durman's mom's monster-chocolate chip sugar-glazed super cookies.