You First: A Joe Goldberg Prequel (You, #0)(2)

Well, not all of us. Certainly not Angus Fucking Kaplan.

Of course he lives in a penthouse on the Upper West Side. The kind of place protected by soulless, scowling stone fucking gargoyles. Angus is a gargoyle. A crackhead who gets a pass in this world because he can afford a high-end crack den. A book buyer who burns the books in his fireplace. Everything about this is wrong, but it’s like Mr. Mooney says. That’s capitalism, Joseph. I am delivering Angus a signed first edition of Goodbye, Columbus. I could do something to save this book’s life. Throw Angus in the fireplace. Punch his lights out.

But it’s the same way with the girls on the subway. It’s all in my motherfucking head, fantasies on my Moleskine as more foreskin goes untouched. Use it or lose it. I am losing it. I don’t do stuff. I just think about doing stuff. And the whole point of being here is that you gotta live. Do something. Be something. Fuck someone. Pick a life and live it or you die in your head.

I press his buzzer.

“Yes?”

“Hey, Angus. It’s Joe.”

“Who?”

“Joe from the bookstore.”

“I don’t know a Joe.”

EVERYONE KNOWS A JOE. “Angus, I got your Philip Roth.”

He laughs. I hear it now. The flick of a Bic. I can almost smell the fumes. Real actual crack. He coughs and he belches, and he sighs. “Come on up, Jimbo.”

Gargoyles are nipping at my legs, and I don’t like the way I look in the lobby mirror. My head is too big for my body, or my body is too small for my head. I’m in the elevator, trying not to cry, and I can’t go on like this. Malleable. Alone. Collecting typewriters and living in a four-by-ten room with cardboard walls. Yep, I got screwed. These NYU kids Chad and Hauser put out an ad for a cheap room “in the village.” They seemed nice enough on the phone, so I said yes, sight unseen. Turns out that by “village,” they meant Stuyvesant Town, a concrete mini-city in the far east. I don’t have a window and I sleep in a “converted pod” that Dumb and Dumber rigged with cardboard and duct tape. I went from one Stuy to another. No privacy. A cloak of shame that I can’t fucking shake. My jeans feel good at home but here I am tugging at them. Nothing fits, not really. I haven’t touched a girl in centuries. I jerk off in the shower, on the sofa that isn’t mine, in the basement of the bookshop. Dumb and Dumber made an innocent mistake, but maybe I am Dumbest. I threw my fate in Craig’s hands, sight unfucking seen. Who does that?

“Jimbo!”

“It’s Joe.”

Even for Angus, this is bad. He’s in a red-and-blue silk robe, and the belt doesn’t belong. It’s black. There’s a wad of chewing gum stuck to the chest hair by his left nipple, and I shouldn’t see his nipple. This can’t be the only nipple I see every week.

He laughs. “Oh, don’t worry about my eye, Jerry. Just a blood vessel. Come on in.”

I didn’t even notice his eye, because I try not to go there. The darkness of this penthouse. The long walk down the hall, a trail of septic breadcrumbs, cracked fucking crack pipes and vomit, and is that piss? That is piss. A chew toy for a dog—Angus doesn’t have a dog—and I want to run. Flee. Live.

He rocks back and forth on his hairy-toed feet. “Hear that?”

“Peter Frampton, right?”

“Oh yes, Jake. That’s my boy.”

And then we’re moving again, down the hall and past the foyer—more crack pipes and a bag of blow—and Angus pulls a Heineken out of his pocket and tosses it. I catch it, but this is new. This is not how we do this. “Thanks, Angus.”

“Drink it.”

“It’s already open.”

“Oh, relax, Jimbo, I’m clean. You’re not gonna get cooties.”

I do not sip the Heinie, and he grabs his fucking pipe. “So, you’re never gonna believe this, Jack.”

People who sell you on their stories before they tell you their stories are allergic to the truth. I clutch my Heinie. “What’s up? And, Angus, I can’t stay that long today.”

He rolls a joint and rolls his eyes and jacks up the volume on the sound system and I tune it out. Him and Peter Frampton. I’ve been delivering books to this crackhead heir for eleven months. He lives up here with his butter-soft sectional in his sunken living room, sitting around putting out cigarettes on his own fucking carpet. He has the view everybody wants—Central Park is his living, breathing painting—but I’ve never seen it from up here because he never opens his blackout curtains. Everywhere I look there are books. Rare books. Special books. Signed books. All of them molested and abused by Angus and his crackhead friends. Bloodied and torn. Caked with leftover cocaine.

Angus is on the move. Stomping and smoking and ranting. The fireplace is on. The sunken living room is sinking, and I’m going down with it. Drowning from the contact high.

“All right,” he says. “Gimme that goddamn…Are you Jewish? Never mind.”

I should be used to it by now. Angus Kaplan is a rich man. Rich people do and say whatever they want. The last time I was here he told me that his slutty mother had a fling with Philip Roth, that Roth is his biological fucking father. Yeah fucking right and so help me God if I wind up like him, lying to myself and anyone paid to listen about where I come from. Chills, but the thing with feathers is strong. I always want Angus to change. Grow. Do the right thing.