You First: A Joe Goldberg Prequel (You, #0)(19)

I lived on cold pizza for three days in the cage. A cage in a basement that I still sleep in when the cardboard walls are too thin and I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?

My body turns on me. You make a face. “Whoa.”

I farted at the table. I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t I kill me? “Sorry.”

My bowels are like me. Inexperienced and failing. I can’t blame money. This is New York Fucking City and there is good cheap food everywhere. But who wants to try new things alone? It’s me. Always just me. I lay my napkin on the table. The two of you are comparing your parents and their tech skills. I don’t belong here with you and I never will. I can’t keep up with you, Vail. I can’t catch up with you. My intestines are too stringy, too weak. I tasted the matar paneer. I tried the masala dosa, and when you insisted, I took a nice big heap of that Hyderabadi biryani.

And now I’m not just the young dud in the oversize old-man flannel. My insides turn over—I’m gonna shit my fucking pants, I really am—and Dick raises another tiny glass of Jim Henson and why isn’t he about to puke? “The shitter’s downstairs, killer.”

You grab at your bag. “I might have a TUMS.”

I can’t risk responding to either fucking one of you. I walk fast, bumping into the waiter and the curtains. I am that guy no one wants to be, that guy no woman wants to be with. I am not NYC Bookstore Babe. I’m a soft scrawny soft sad sack who gets the runs in public. Ugly and unworldly. Weak with no pitches or future prospects or exciting fucking stories, a letdown of a fuck-up who’s never been to the airport, let alone been on a plane.

I hear your voice when I hit the stairs. “Feel better, Cusack!”

And I know: It’s the last thing you’ll ever say to me.





7


It’s another dreary Dylan day in the shop. “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” on repeat. Lonesome, Vail. Worse than lonely. Lonely I can do. Lonely is fuck everyone I just wanna chill with my typewriters. Lonesome is a first for me. It’s about you. I don’t want to be alone, checking my lousy non-folding Nokia for the ninth time in ten minutes. The phone, the computer, the Dylan, they’re all just torture devices. Empty crack pipes that provide active constant fucking confirmation that you aren’t lonesome without me.

I snap the rubber band on my wrist. This “psychologist” in a self-help book said it helps to control your mind. The pain of the rubber band makes you stop being a whiny baby. Such a crock of shit, Vail, not that you care. When I left India without saying goodbye, I knew you wouldn’t call. You proved me right. You didn’t. It’s so January in the shop, in my heart. I am living on bananas and coffee in blue-and-white Greek cups and I’m down on myself. Aware of all the people who are good at being who they are, deciding what they want and hatching a plan to get it. Where did I go wrong with you? How? When?

“Boo-hoo, Joseph.”

It’s Mr. Mooney. He caught me slouching again. “Sorry.”

“They’re all one cunt, Joseph.”

I hate the c-word. My dad used it too much, and I hate that I still want you. I barely know you, I know, but it’s how dealers get people hooked. They give you a taste. You’re the closest I ever came to a girlfriend, and you’re gone. Mooney tells me there’s a customer and it’s that woman from another century, a few days ago, the one who left with Lucinda Rosenfeld.

“Hey,” she says. “I ate this book up. You have to thank your girlfriend for the rec.”

Impossible. I don’t have a girlfriend. Never did. “Sure thing.”

I ring her up—more Lucinda—and then Mooney is in my face again. An adult in Charlie Brown. I can’t hear him. I can only see my Moleskine, the way it mocks me on the counter.

“Are you listening, Joseph?” He groans. “Walk with me.”

I follow him to the back, to his ashtray of an office. It’s more bad news. Angus Kaplan is on the hunt again. He bought six signed copies of The Corrections. Mooney shakes his head. “That bastard Philistine…. He’s the enemy of America, Joseph. Not those religious fanatics. Men like Angus, blue bloods with money who buy books the way their fathers buy stocks…”

I can’t do it, Vail. I can’t handle another lecture about the downfall of civili-fucking-zation from Mooney. I tell him he should start a blog, and he scowls.

“Stop it, Joseph.”

“Sorry. I just mean, what’s the point? Angus is an asshole, but we wouldn’t be in business without that asshole.”

“Joseph, don’t lecture me.”

“Just saying…At least he plays the game. At least he bought the books.”

Unlike you and that pink shirt. You didn’t put money into me. Were you always going to disappear? I pick up my cell phone, and Mooney coughs. I put the phone down.

“Don’t be impatient with me, Joseph. Don’t be smart.”

I’m not smart. I’m stupid. If I were smart, I would know how to digest Indian food. “Sorry.”

“The man is a crackhead. But because of his money, money he did not properly earn, we don’t refer to that louse as a crackhead. We refer to him as an eccentric.”

Mooney slaps a Post-it on the counter. There are digits on the blue Post-it, six of them, and the idea of drowning in that sinking living room makes me miss you even more.