You First: A Joe Goldberg Prequel (You, #0)(5)

Poor Angus will never get clean. He can carry the rocks in his pocket—there is no escape for a crackhead—but I have a shot at a good life.

The computer is my drug, and it’s not a mobile phone or a lighter or a crack pipe.

I can’t fit one in my pocket.

I can kick it—Yes I can—and I kill it on the floor. I am clean and sober, pushing Lucinda Rosenfeld on a woman going through a divorce. Time for my lunch break and it feels good to be out in the world. I duck into a proper old-school coffee shop, the kinda place that won’t fold and turn into an internet café. I open my Bukowski, but the guy in the chair next to me grunts. “Unbelievable, right? Get a room, lady.”

He’s irate because a woman is nursing her baby. In a better society, it would be legal for me to kick him in the nuts. In this shitty world, best I can do is ignore him. It’s oddly soothing to me, the mother in agony with the baby that won’t latch on. The poor woman is spent, apologizing to everyone as if she did something wrong. The jerk next to me storms out—I bet his mother didn’t love him either—and I stay where I am. It’s a game, like baseball or hockey, and finally, the guy scores! He latches onto that breast, and his mother sighs in relief.

I look down at my Bukowski. The old me would have crushed it, but I can’t do it. I can’t open my mouth, or my soul. I can’t latch onto words on paper, especially when I spy a single, lonely computer in the back of this old-school café. It’s calling my name, and that’s okay. You’re not supposed to quit anything cold fucking turkey. I’m allowed. I’m not “addicted.” If I was a real addict, I wouldn’t stop to tell the new mom that her kid’s a keeper.

She needed that, and she looks up at me, into me. God, I love women, I really do. “Thanks,” she says. “Thanks for not being a jerk. I mean, what am I supposed to do?”

I make my way to the back—computers are like porn, they hide them—and I sit at the desk. It felt good to lift that lady’s spirits. We all need someone to tell us that we’re not the worst person in the coffee shop. All babies starve without milk. Not just me.

I know what to expect from my Hotmail by now…. Coldmail. That’s what I get. And that’s okay. Life is long. I’ll do better. I’ll check Missed Connections one more time, and then I’ll take a few days off. Learn to read again. Make a woman who’s not a new mom smile.

But then I find my milk.





You: NYC Bookstore Babe, touchable brown hair, brown eyes, twinkling




The milk hits like heroin, like crack fumes. This is a first, the kind of high you spend the rest of your life chasing. Kafka shit where I metamorphosize all at once. My jeans fit! My head fits! I touch the mouse but I can’t push it. What if I jumped the gun? What if you went into some other fucking bookstore and want some other fucking guy with touchable brown hair? I want to be your NYC Bookstore Babe. I have to be your NYC Bookstore Babe. I am your NYC Bookstore Babe, assuming this note is for me…

Is it?

It’s a little scary. I am all in. I want you even though I don’t know who you are. Even though you might not want me. But that’s love, isn’t it? Unconditional and pure. Simple as the black font on the white background of a Missed Fucking Connection. It’s not just me anymore. Now there’s someone else. You. You’re not in my head. You’re not girls, girls, girls. You exist. You walk into bookstores and you turn to Craig for help, but you might be after some other guy in Brooklyn or some shit. I could bail on you. Unplug the computer and throw it out the window, but no. I can’t do that to you. Us. You have hope in you. Passion. You wrote a message, and you put it in the bottle and I am not some boy on the beach who happened to find the bottle in the tide. I am the prince who was built to open your bottle and drink every last drop.





2


It’s crazy, the way life goes. I kinda wanna get out the phone book and see if Miss Frascatore is still alive. She was my guidance counselor in second grade. She was like one of those happy adults on Sesame Fucking Street. This one time, my mom sent me to school with a black eye. My teacher Mrs. Prince—big breasts, the kind that scream over-the-shoulder boulder holder—sent me to Miss Frascatore. A tiny person in a sweater with fucking candy canes and lights, the kind of thing a kid wears. Anyway, I was sent to her a lot back in the day. She always acted happy to see me. Sitting on the floor, smiling at me like I was some go-lucky kid with a belly full of homemade apple pie.

“Wanna know a secret, Joe? A really good secret…”

I gave her nothing. Most adults hate that shit. They want the kid from the Life cereal commercial. But Miss Frascatore took off her big glasses and clamped her hands over her eyes, and she smiled like she was watching a movie in her head, something funny, something like Porky’s.

“Try it,” she said. “See, Joey, there’s a dirty little secret that most grown-ups don’t want to tell you. Trusting someone feels good. I am choosing to set you free, to believe that you won’t hurt me, and again…it’s fun, Joe. It makes you feel good to be—”

I slammed the door on the way out. I was a fucked-up little dude, and she was the original Little Red Corvette. Too much, too fast. I wasn’t a monster. I felt bad. The next day, I asked my teacher if I could go see her, and my teacher said no.