You First: A Joe Goldberg Prequel (You, #0)(3)

Alas, no, and I pull Philip Roth out of my tote bag. RIP Goodbye, Columbus. “Do you have a check for me, Angus?”

He opens his robe, and I cover my eyes—Don’t look into the light, Carol Anne—but then I hear something snap. Spandex on skin and yep, the man is in a thong. The check was in that thong and it’s in my hands and can you catch herpes from pube DNA?

“Drink up, Jerry.” He spits at Columbus, and I can’t be such a pushover. Think, Joe, think.

“You know, Angus, if you really wanted to stick it to Philip Roth, you could hold on to the book, make a shit ton off it when he dies.”

He spits on the floor instead of the Roth, and did I do it? Did I save my literary hero? “Wow,” he says. “You Jews really do stick together, don’tcha?”

Mr. Mooney is right. A little bit of hope can do a whole lot of damage.

And then he’s talking, and there’s no way out. He tells me his quote-unquote sob story again, how once upon a time he was a promising young author so good that he dropped out of the MFA program at Columbia because why bother? He was a genius. He was writing a novel, of course. A good one, Jerry. Faulkner via the bastard son of Roth. His working title was The Twenty-Seventh Town, but then a guy by the name of Jonathan Franzen came along with his debut novel.

The Twenty-Seventh City.

It sounds like a lie, so it might be the truth—life makes no sense, ever—but it’s all coming together. If you don’t live your life, if you give up or freeze up, well, you wind up like this sad fucker. Flat on your back, wiping your ass with Philip Roth.

I do what I always do. I tell him to chin up. “You know, it’s not too late, Angus. You could finish your book. Find another title.”

He grunts. “Leave it alone, boychick.”

I leave it alone. And he rewards me by flicking the book into the fireplace like it’s one of his fucking cigarettes, and he’s up again. Up and at ’em.

“You don’t get it, Jerry. A man steals your title, your thunder, and your youth…. You can’t find another title. It’s over. See, it’s all connected. I lost my book. I lost my girl.” Here we go again. “A man doesn’t just get over a thing like Kelly Demon.” Her real last name is Damon, and she isn’t a thing. She’s a woman. “She was it. A dead ringer for Carolyn Bessette. I knew her too…Carolyn. See, she settled for John-John when I broke it off…. We all knew one another at Brown.” Sure, Angus, sure. “You can’t rewrite a first novel, and you can’t replace a girl like Kelly. She quit modeling to go to law school, Jimbo. It’s like that.”

“Wow,” I say, as if this made-up story is new to me. Amazing, the way life fucks with you. Angus is a bitter crackhead but I feel like the outcast, the freak. There are no Bessette-esque willowy demons in my midst, no great thing I started but never finished. He paws at his CD player and Frampton Comes Alive and Angus tears off his robe.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I killed my mother?”

Yes. “No shit?”

“Oh yeah,” he says. “She was in the hospital. Low sodium. I gave her a glass of water. Ten seconds later…”

He collapses onto the butter-soft sectional and cries like a little kid, like the boy who accidentally killed his mommy. This is where it’s impossible to really fully hate people. There’s a person in there, somewhere, and I’m glad I didn’t throw him in the fireplace.

“Buddy,” I begin. “Don’t give up. It’s what I tell myself, y’know? ‘Hope is the thing with feathers.’?”

He rubs his cheeks. Those famous gates of hell that burn incessantly aren’t in Turkmenistan. They are here in his skin, his pores. “Jimmy,” he says. “That thing you just said…”

“It’s Emily Dickinson.”

He rolls onto his backside. “Bullshit,” he says. “It was me.”



* * *



—

Outside, I breathe like my life depends on it. Out crack, in smog.

“Excuse me.”

It’s a girl, a pretty one.

My Portnoy comes alive. The thing with feathers is back, but I might be a little high on crack. I blink. I think. Just be a fucking person, you idiot.

“Me?”

She laughs. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Dimples? “Do you have a light?”

It’s always weird when they do this, when they talk to me like I’m a real person, and this is the whole problem.

I like it better on the subway when you can’t talk to the girls, girls, girls, when they can’t talk to you.

I study her face. Yes. She has dimples. “I could buy you one at the newsstand.”

The thing with feathers is dead. You don’t do that, idiot. You don’t offer to buy a girl a lighter, and she pulls out all at once.

“See you.”



* * *



—

See you.

As in fuck you.

Four hours later and I’m still thinking about her. The girl with no lighter.

Mr. Mooney is in his office, and we’re slow. Dead. He says I can close early and go home, but I don’t want to go home.

I want life. Love. Something.

That’s where Craig is such a good guy. He gets it. Sometimes you want to see if anyone out there is looking for you, and sometimes you want to be the captain of the ship. I sign into my account, and I use the same subject for every Missed Connection.