Simon Rich - Spoiled Brats - Stories

Dan shrugged. “I’m not on Facebook.”

He knelt over a manhole and yanked off the heavy metal lid.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you my new place.”

“I’ve never been in a sewer before,” I admitted.

Dan snorted. “Why am I not surprised?”

I followed him down the ladder, the rusted rungs scraping against my palms.

“So what’s it like living down here?” I asked.

“You mean, like, without a Whole Foods?”

I bit my lip. Sometimes, with Dan, it was safest not to speak at all.

He hopped off the ladder and landed with a sloshy thud. “You coming or what?”

I felt something bristly brush against my ankles. “Are there rats down here?”

“For now,” Dan said. “Once this place gets gentrified, who knows?”

“And you’re the only human?”

“Yes,” he said in a sarcastic schoolboy monotone. “I am the only human.”

“Cool!” I said. “Cool.”

I said goodbye mentally to my Ferragamos and leaped into the darkness. The water was icy, with the troubling consistency of stew. The smell was unimaginable, so pungent I could taste it. It was completely dark except for a small reddish flame; at some point, Dan had lit another cigarette.

“So this is the practice space,” Dan said as we waded through the muck. “And the bedroom’s over there, between those pipes.” He picked up a metal spike. “You hungry?”

I shook my head and watched as he jabbed the murky water with his weapon. Dan had never been an athlete and his thrusts were pretty clumsy. Eventually, though, after ten or fifteen minutes, I heard a squashing noise. He pulled his spike out of the water and smirked at his catch: a wriggling, screeching eel. The creature lunged for his face and he bashed its head against a pipe.

“Fucking eel,” he said. “Relax.”

He lifted the dangling creature to his mouth and bit a chunk out of its middle. Black blood spurted onto his skinny jeans.

“Want some?” he asked.

“That’s okay.”

“I could, like, put processed sugar on it or whatever, to make it taste like McDonald’s.”

“What?”

“Never mind,” Dan said. He was about to take another bite when the eel regained consciousness and lunged at his face again.

“Aaaaah!” Dan screamed as it bit into his flesh. “Aaaaaaaaaah!”

He flailed his arms as the eel thrashed around, its jagged teeth pressed into his cheek.

“Kill it!” he screamed. “Kill it!”

I grabbed Dan’s spike and tried to detach the eel from his face.

“Kill it!” Dan screamed. “Kill it! Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!”

“I’m trying!”

“Kill it!” Dan repeated. “Aaaaaaah! Kill it!”

I jabbed the spike into the monster’s yellow eyes. It shrieked and slithered down into the sewage. A rat dragged the carcass out of sight.

“Hey!” Dan shouted as the rodent ran off with his meal. “Hey!”

I looked up at my friend. His expression was impassive, but I could tell he was in pain. His bruised hands were trembling and he was bleeding from a large gash in his face.

If I wanted to get him out of the sewer, I was going to have to strategize.

“Dan,” I said cautiously, “I don’t know about this place.”

He cocked his chin. “What’s wrong with it?”

I hesitated. “It’s sort of… played out.”

“Played out?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It used to be chill? Now all anyone cares about is who’s got the newest eel. It’s turning into another Park Slope.”

Dan nodded slowly. “I guess it has gotten sort of bougie.”

“It’s totally bougie!” I said, rolling my eyes for emphasis. “Now come on, let’s go to that party.”

“There’s a party?”

“Yeah! It’s in this old brick building called Mount Sinai. It’s a pretty crazy scene. They’ve got all these beds set up. And people walking around in gowns. Lots of drugs.”

“Sounds pretty chill.”

He followed me up the ladder and I Ubered us to the ER.

“This is pretty cool,” he said as some orderlies cut off his clothing and sedated him.

“It’s cool,” I assured him.

A nurse dressed his wounds and slid some paper slippers on his feet.

“Nice kicks,” I said. Dan smiled proudly and drifted off to sleep.

Rip reached into his minifridge and pulled out a Four Loko. The government had banned the beverage months ago, claiming its high caffeine and alcohol content caused liver damage. But he’d saved one can to drink on a special occasion. And now, for the first time since graduating, he finally had something worth celebrating.

At 12:00 a.m. EST, he had officially achieved funding on Kickstarter for his jazz blog. Starting tomorrow, he’d be sticking it to the mainstream jazz media one post at a time.

His parents had offered to get him an internship at Jazz Masters Monthly (they were friends with the editor in chief). But Rip wasn’t interested in working for a soulless place like that. How could a corporate-owned magazine possibly be an authority on jazz? He’d done some digging online and found out that the same company that owned Jazz Masters Monthly owned Cat Fancy. Who gave a shit about cats?

“Their office is in midtown,” his mother told him over the phone. “So be sure to wear a suit.”

“I don’t own a suit,” Rip told her proudly.

“Buy one,” she begged. “Please, just put it on the card.”

Rip said he would but never got around to it. Instead, the night before the interview, he stayed up late jamming with Fish and Stinky. They’d been in an experimental acid trio at Brown called the Ketchup Dilemma, and even though they’d been out of school for five years, they still made jamming a priority. They were taking a break between songs to snort some Adderall when the answer to Rip’s problems suddenly popped into his head. He didn’t need to put on some suit and take the G to the L to Manhattan every day. He could start his own magazine, on the World Wide Fucking Web. At 4:00 a.m. he sent an email to the editor, canceling the interview and wishing him luck with his “corporate rag.” His friends laughed and cheered as he CC’d his parents and clicked Send. Forget being an intern for some monthly magazine. He was going to be the founder of a daily one.

Now, after sixty days of waiting, he’d finally raised the funds he needed to get started. He had six thousand dollars to pay the Web designer, one thousand to buy albums to review, and thirty-five hundred to make promotional T-shirts. He also had an ice-cold Four Loko in his hand. He reclined on his futon and poured the sour liquid down his throat. He was tired, but he didn’t want to sleep. He couldn’t wait for tomorrow.

Rip woke up with a horrible taste in his mouth. He opened the blinds and recoiled at the brightness of the sun. It was noon, if not later, and he was starving. He rummaged through the futon, found his phone, and called up Stinky.

“Breakfast?” he asked.

“It’s two p.m.,” Stinky said.

Rip laughed.

“So?”

“I’m at work.”

Rip was confused.

“When did you get a job?”

“I gotta go,” Stinky said. “That’s a client on the other line.”

“A client?” Rip stood up with excitement. “That mean you’re dealing again?”

“What? No. I’m in advertising.”

Rip felt his throat go dry.

“Stinky,” he said, “what’s going on?”

“It’s Stanley,” said Stinky. “And I’m sorry, but I have to go.”

Rip staggered into the bathroom and gasped. He’d never been able to grow a beard before; the hairs always came in unevenly. Now his entire face was covered in thick black fur. It was terrifying but also pretty cool. He looked sort of like the drummer from the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey. He was about to post a picture on Instagram when he noticed something disconcerting. The front of his beard was black and lush, but the sides were thinning and flecked with streaks of gray.