Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

BANANAS AND CIGARETTES 80,000 YEARS OF COMMERCE • PEOPLE HAVE PETS • WHAT ELECTRONIC MUSIC CONFERENCES MIGHT BE LIKE • PLACES NOT TO HAVE SEX • NICE EVENINGS • FUCK THE PAST TENSE • THE WORLD IS A RIDE • REALLY GOOD COFFEE • THE LIGHTBRINGER

Billy Ridgeway walks into a bar with a banana in his hand.

It’s November, and gloom has settled over Brooklyn, but this bar generates its own warmth, running forced heat over a narrow room crammed full of humans. A clientele mashed into intimate proximity by shared need, if not exactly by fellow feeling. They drink together. Someone picks out old L.A. hardcore songs on the jukebox to correct for the sins of the person who picked out a block of Texas swing. Someone else picks out masterpieces of East Coast hip-hop to correct for the sins of the person who picked out the block of hardcore songs. They generate friction, these off-duty waitresses and delivery guys and dog walkers. They rub elbows and bellies and backs, and together they hold winter and its wolves at bay.

Billy finds Anil Mallick at the end of the bar, where he is managing to defend two stools against the throng through some combination of fast talk and physical maneuverings. Anil is a chubby guy who wears half-moon spectacles and favors tweedy blazers; his round head is topped with a sumptuous mass of lanky curls; he works in the kitchen at a sandwich shop, but anyone here, in this bar, could mistake him for a kinda hot young academic. Anil is Billy’s coworker and oldest friend, and Anil, tonight, is testy.

“I thought you were just going to get cash,” says Anil. “You’ve been gone for”—he checks his watch—“twenty-two minutes.”

“Yeah, sorry,” Billy says.

Anil regards this apology. “There’s a bank literally two doors down from here,” he says.

“Yeah, I just — got distracted.” Billy puts the banana on the gouged bar, between them. “Take a look at this.”

“A banana,” Anil says.

“Right, but, where did it come from?”

Anil blinks.

“I mean, yes,” Billy says. “It’s a banana. We get bananas from, what, from the bodega.”

“Sure,” Anil says, patiently. He sips his Scotch. “Like a lottery ticket. Or cigarettes.”

“Well, sure,” Billy says. “Except a banana isn’t like a lottery ticket or cigarettes. I mean — it has to grow .”

“Cigarettes grow,” Anil says.

“Yeah, but — hear me out.”

“I am hearing you out.”

“We live in Brooklyn ,” Billy tries. “It’s the middle of November . And yet we can go into any corner store and buy a banana . Where do they come from? Who grew them? I mean, I go into the store to hit the ATM, and I see these bananas sitting there, and I just stand there for a second, in the store, looking at them, and I’m thinking about, like, Costa Rica or Ecuador or some shit and it’s just — I’m sorry, but it’s just blowing my mind a little.”

“This took twenty minutes?” Anil says.

“I thought that you, of all people, would appreciate the fundamental weirdness of the whole thing.”

“You left me here for twenty-two minutes,” Anil says. “Are you asking me to believe that you spent a significant portion of those twenty-two minutes staring at a banana in some kind of trance? Forcing the better-adjusted members of our fair city to steer around you to complete their own humble transactions?”

Billy frowns. “Admit that it’s weird,” he says.

“It’s not weird! It’s normal. Humanity has at least eighty thousand years of commerce under its collective belt; the details of that should no longer seem opaque to you. You want to talk weird? Open a newspaper. Last week? You see that thing about the Starbucks in Midtown that disappeared? They think the employees went on the run together, stole everything out of it to sell on the black market or something. That’s weird. The shit that happens to you is not weird.”

“Commerce is weird,” Billy says. “I mean, think about it. People buy things.”

“And I ,” Anil says, “am buying you a drink. Put that goddamn banana away.”

Here’s the thing about Billy. Bananas are not the only things that get him going. It can be anything. Just a week ago he was on the subway, sitting across from a woman with a tiny dog in her purse, and as he watched her tickle the little goatish beard under its chin he made the mistake of beginning to think about the very existence of dogs in general. People have pets. He repeated it. People have pets . It began to become odd; the very concept of pet began to slide out of his grasp. How did it get to the point, he wondered, where we began to keep animals as, like, accessories? He spent the rest of the ride staring at the dog, thinking basically: Holy shit, human beings, the shit they come up with . When he got back to his apartment he looked up dog in Wikipedia and from there started opening tabs and lost the rest of the day. By midnight, he had drifted to looking at videos of fighting Madagascar cockroaches, actually developing opinions on the cockroach-fight-video genre . He was cold. He was alone. He was uncertain as to what exactly had happened.

It had long been like this.

Blame his father: Keith Ridgeway, a pipe-smoking antiquarian bookseller, who had filled the entire first floor of the family’s gabled three-story Victorian house with books. Billy had spent his formative years wandering among heaped codices, studies and catalogs and compendia, brochures and pamphlets, extended inquiries into every conceivable topic. From the very existence of these books he learned one primary truth: that everything in the world was enveloped in great skeins of mystery into which one could bravely probe but which one could never fully untangle.

Blame his mother: Brigid Ridgeway, a professor of medieval studies at the local university, who tied her red hair in a long braid and kept a collection of a dozen swords in a restored barn at the rear of the property. Billy remembers her standing in the sun-drenched open space of the barn, on Sunday mornings, practicing thrusts and parries, grunting and sweating, her heavy feet thudding on hard wood. Afterward she would spend hours at a workbench making chain mail. For fun. When Billy thinks back on her, he remembers her looking him in the face and telling him that she loved him, that he was special. Special and unique. From this, he learned a lesson that she may not have intended: that his differences were his merits. She loved him, he believes, because he wasn’t normal, he wasn’t a boy who was rambunctious and active and courageous, but rather a boy who was dreamy and inquisitive and delicate.

But now he is thirty, and his mother is dead and his father has drawn back into some sort of isolating crankdom that Billy doesn’t quite understand. And when Billy checks in with his peers, when he looks at pictures of their kids on the computer, he notes that they’ve all begun to amass some share of money or power or career advantage or relationship stability. Then he looks at himself. He’s barely managed to amass a goatee. He’s unmarried. He’s skinny. His mess of strawberry-blond hair is not quite receding, but it is thinning enough that it generates some small anxiety when he checks on it in the mirror. He makes $12.50 an hour at a sandwich shop run by an angry Greek. He’s still writing, yes, but what does he have to show for an entire adult life pursuing his quote-unquote craft? Half a novel, plus some short stories (gathered into an unsellable collection that in a fit of self-abnegation he decided to entitle Juvenilia ). These moments of accounting lead him to understand that somehow he is exactly the same as he’s ever been: curious, confused, poking out an existence from which can be derived no clear utility. And in these moments Billy wonders if maybe he wasn’t wrong about believing that his differences constituted his merits. On certain days he wonders if he, in fact, has any merits whatsoever.