You First: A Joe Goldberg Prequel (You, #0)(101)

His phone rings again; it’s his mother.

“Joe, come on. Let’s get a drink. You don’t want my mom calling the cops.”

“Why do you let these girls chase you if you don’t want a girlfriend?”

“Because I can. Fuck, dude, why did the chicken cross the road?”

“To get to the other side, to find someone! And if you’re really not pining for Vail or any of these fucking girls…”

“I’m not.”

“Well, don’t you…Don’t you feel bad about hurting them?”

“Not my monkeys, not my circus.”

I never went to the circus. “Huh?”

“I’m trying to get my career going and that’s hard enough, and girls…It’s an outlet.”

“And you just plug in when you feel like it.”

“Goldberg,” he says. “Don’t even try with bullshit feminism. Maybe it’s ’cause you didn’t go to college…” Where guys learn to be dicks and girls learn to obsess over dicks. “But girls want it too, the bullshit. And one of these days, Vail will…Gimme a bump.”

I give him a bump. The phone rings. It is the Beanery. He is missed.

“The funny thing is, Goldberg…You don’t even like Vail. You like the chase.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true, kid. You’re using her. She’s using you. That’s the game. So yeah…Save the feminism for another night. If you cared about women, you’d let me talk to my fucking mom.”

“Who would disown you for good if she saw all these chats on your computer.”

“Are you shitting me? She’s my mom! First one to say that all these New York City girls are nowhere near good enough for her boy.”

It’s what Miranda said at the baby shower about the boy whose mommy told him he’s perfect. Mr. Mooney blames my mother for my “issues,” but is it ever on us?

“All right, Dick. If you don’t want Vail, why did you go to India with us?”

“Huh?”

He doesn’t remember and my God, to be a dick. “India. The first time we all hung out. Vail and I had plans, and you say you’re going to get Indian food and we go with you. Why?”

“I was hungry.” He laughs. “Goldberg, come on. You can’t still be into that chick…Her face is all right, but the body…She needs to go to the gym, even if it’s Curves. And she’s so…in her head. You call that sex? She lays there like she’s only doing it to tell Cynthia. And she thinks we’re all so stupid, the whole ‘I never show anyone my janky toe’ act and ‘the last guy I dated’ bit…Don’t you get it, G? She’s not capable of anything real. Maybe in ten years but who cares…Those tits aren’t the kind that hold up, kid.”

I never talked about women in the locker room in school, and I won’t do it now. I am losing my grip on him and his phone rings again. You. And somehow he just knows.

“That’s another thing. The calls…the babbling. She can never just chill. And India. Picture it from my end. She’s in my shop every day and I’m about to file a restraining order and then you walk in with your stinky flannel and your heart on your sleeves….”

“Sleeve. Singular.”

He rolls his eyes. “Dude, she didn’t even put you on the Evite for her birthday, let alone let you fucking hang with her.”

There was an Evite? “You don’t know anything about us.”

“Meanwhile she’s harping on me about the party, calling me nonstop, all ‘I didn’t see your RSVP, are you coming?’…Girls. I told you, Joe. If she was into you, she would’ve wanted to eat cake with you, not me and fifty other fucking douchebags.”

Memory Lane is too rough for me right now. I can’t help it. I break. “You could’ve mentioned that to me, maybe told her you’re not interested, maybe cut the fucking cord and come clean about…I’m a person. I’m a…”

I want to say more, but my voice is cracking, his phone is ringing. A 212 landline.

Cops?

“Your monkeys, your circus, Goldilocks. And you were right, what you said about girls…They are fucking hamsters…” I hate that I am the hamster who got a pellet, approval from Dr. Dick. “Not at first, though. You hit the bar and girls are wild. They’re out on the town, bendy li’l monkeys with legs for days, grabbing at your banana. You take that monkey home but next thing you know…Meta-fucking-morphosis. That wild monkey…It turned on you and it’s…a hamster.”

“Bullshit.”

“I know! Because what fucking kid wants a hamster? Hamsters aren’t fun. They’re just work. They don’t play with you. They just shit in that cage waiting for you to come back and come on…We’re supposed to respect that fucking hamster? That’s what I meant, kid. This shit you pulled with me…I been through worse. It’s nothing compared to the shit they pull on us.”

I give him a bump and I guess I am a little hypocritical. Or maybe I’m just afraid of jail.

“We are guilty of nothing, Goldberg. We hook up with monkeys and then they hamster up on us. So no, I don’t worry about Vail or any fucking girl…Not my monkeys, not my…Did you know I had a dog?”