You First: A Joe Goldberg Prequel (You, #0)(109)

“I say a lotta shit when I’m high.” Classic excuse and he rubs his neck. “You got a bump in there?”

I think I know why you like him. You are both in the same boat. He snorts cocaine to kill the love he withholds from you while you sit in all the bars guzzling cosmos to kill the love he won’t let you give to him.

I load his dog tag with a big fat line. “So how does it work? The producers who hear your ‘pitches’…They’re connected? You gonna call ’em up to take care of your ‘bitches’?”

“Just one,” he says. “Bitch.” And then he winks. “I’m kidding. It’s a joke.”

He does another line and then another and then he looks at me like it’s my fucking fault. “You need to call 911, Goldfuck. I think my neck is…Call ’em. Right fucking now.”

This is what you love. A selfish untrustworthy dog. They say if you love something, you set it free, and if it comes back, it’s…Sorry, but Sting is wrong. If you love something, you keep it safe. You’re in danger. One of these days this dog is gonna bite you, possibly kill you. I won’t steal you away in the middle of the night and whisk you off to a world without feral dogs. There’s no such place and you’d only howl at the moon. I tried everything. I built fences while you slept. You tore down every one and I went out there to build another. I can’t change the way you feel about this feral fuckwit, but I can domesticate him, or at least try to anyway. You’re lucky, Vail. Turns out my cancer is your cure. You love him more than you love me, and I love you more than I love myself.

I throw the dog a bone. “All right,” I say. “Interior…Pastis.”

“Fuck you, Goldberg.”

“The young stud walks into the restaurant. That’s you, Dick. You’re the stud. The love of your life is in a booth and she’s a ten…a total dime. She thinks you walk on water. She wants to be yours for life.”

“I need a doctor. Or a bump.”

“But there’s something else waiting for you at the bar. A producer who can single-handedly change your life. It’s Harvey Weinstein, and he’s there to see you.”

Dick does more coke. What else is new? “No,” he says. “Harvey would pick a hotel.”

Harvey, like they’re equals, and I will not be distracted. “The woman waves. She wants you. Harvey waves. He wants you. Where do you go? Who do you pick?”

“How about you go fuck with Vail, kid? She’s the one you’re mad at, not me. Fuck.”

I need him to focus and crackhead Angus did have a way of getting centered. I dig into my bag of tricks and load a pipe for Dick. He waves me off like he’s too good for it, but five seconds later, I am lighting him up. And just like that…the dickhead is a crackhead.

I walk back to my crummy little crate. “Okay, Dick. Interior, Pastis. Who do you pick? The girl of your dreams or the producer who claims he can make your dreams come true?”

“My neck. I think you hit a blood vessel.”

He sounds like Vagina with her hickey and I can’t. “Dick, come on. You know how it works. Our protagonist is facing a choice. What do you want more? Love or money?”

He bangs his head against the wall of the freezer, and then he chuckles. As if this is a movie. As if this warehouse isn’t real. “All right, fine,” he says. “Interior. Pastis. Lightning-paced cuts from the babe to the producer and the producer to the babe. Harvey all the way.”

I am the dog now, foaming at the mouth and calling bullshit. I really am rooting for you, Vail. Like Samantha clapping for Steve and his half-court-shot pipe dreams, I want Dick to realize what he has, what he could have. You!

“Oh, come on, Goldbars. I choose Harvey and the babes line up.”

“But we’re talking about the one….”

“No such thing.”

“Yes, there is. Vail…She’s yours. Christ, you know this and still you…Do you get it, you asshole? I would kill for her to feel that way about me. But you…”

He says you don’t love him and he says he doesn’t love you, and I get in his face. I make direct fucking eye contact, Frascatore-in-the-guidance-office level of direct.

“If you realize you’re the luckiest man alive, you walk out of here and you get the only thing that matters. You get the girl.”

His eyes aren’t eyes. They’re TVs in Poltergeist. “Joe, you need help.”

“You did it, Dick. You used me as a jealousy trap and it…it worked. She’s yours.”

He sticks his tongue out and laughs and you think I’m the child? I smack him.

“Dick, come on. Guy to guy. We know the deal. Love is the path to glory. If you would get with Vail for real…Harvey Weinstein would probably show up on your doorstep the next fucking day. The right girl, the girl who chooses you no matter what you do…You get that girl and everything falls into place…. Women make men, Dick. Literally.”

For a minute there, I think I got him. But then he wants more crack. A movie, even an indie, takes years to come together and every baby, even those nowhere Serendipity brats in their Polo shirts who are gonna end up doing the same thing as their dull dads, every baby needs months in the womb before coming into the warehouse of the world.

Life is precious. And the man you love is throwing it away to avoid being with you.