Justin Taylor - Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

I grip his shoulder in a guy way, briefly, but dig into the muscle to really feel it, like testing a melon or a cut of meat at the grocery store. There’s some give, then tautness — that’s him flexing. More or less what I had imagined he felt like, but it’s good to know for sure. For a second I’m convinced that he’s figured us out, but he downs the last of his gin and tonic, hands me the empty glass, eyes Andrea. “Have another drink,” I say, and he laughs.

I go to the kitchen and pour another round, but insist we all also take a shot, and Brendan visibly crosses some line, so I push him backward and he falls into Andrea, all of us laughing, and she says we should think of something fun to do.

Me and Andrea have a little aside while Brendan is drunkenly browsing the stuff on my bedroom walls. Or maybe that’s him trying to stay standing, or maybe that’s him on the bed. I want to try Conrad. She thinks this is insane, even cheesy, which I think is unfair, but you can’t culture a pissy drunk, so it’s old Bataille. We sit down in a little row on the edge of my bed, Brendan, our Marcelle, in the middle. We’re basically holding him upright.

I grew up very much alone, and as far back as I recall I was frightened of anything sexual…and the next day there were such dark rings around my eyes…so bluntly craved any upheaval…I ought to say, nevertheless, that we waited a long time…Simone’s ass, raised aloft, did strike me as an all-powerful entreaty…Only now did we tear loose from our extravagant embrace to hurl ourselves upon a self-abandoned body…Marcelle, who no longer hid anything but her sobs…

I steal peeks of what is going on over there, getting hot myself, waiting for Andrea to make a move. She takes Brendan’s hand and places it on top of my crotch, where it sort of strokes while I keep reading —We understood one another, Simone and I, and we were certain…I ought to say that we were all very drunk and completely bowled over by what was going on…“You’re totally insane, little man,” she cried, “I’m not interested — here, in a bed like this, like a housewife and mother! I’ll only do it with Marcelle!” —then Andrea and I clasp hands around Brendan’s cock, which at some point came out of his pants, which are in a bunch at his feet. Then she pulls her hand back. She stands up. I grab her by her wrist and swing her back toward the bed. She goes easy and sort of gets flung at Brendan, who is mostly insensible. She lands in a sexy sprawl, knocking him backward, pressing his cock between their bodies. I pull her back upright, holding her against my body, pulling her shirt up and her bra down. “Nice,” the skater says, or really croaks, and she kicks him hard. I knock her down, tear at her clothing. It comes off easily enough, without her help I mean, and I’m glad to feel the wet heat radiating off her as I get her pants off. The underwear is expensive, frilly, and this disappoints or provokes me. When she’s naked the tattoos lose their enormous power, and for a long terrible moment I realize (again) that this was better to dream about than to live through and I wish that it was over or that I would die suddenly but I force myself to unrealize that thing so it is no longer a fact or a truth but just one more of the jewels flashing in the night of time and force her facedown so I can take her from behind while Brendan half-heartedly grabs at my balls and after I pull out he licks me clean, and I think of Writing “I am a Rapest” (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked and I want him to have her, too, but he can’t get very hard so I sort of guide him in and out for a little while but then give up and having accepted the situation without even trying to fathom the mystery we curl up together at the far end of my bed and he passes out while Andrea wipes herself off and gathers her clothing and I watch her get dressed and I watch her as she walks out of my bedroom and I let her go, but then I sort of realize something and jump up from the bed and run after her and catch her in the living room, right by the front door, which is open, the doorway frames us and the yellow porch light makes a sickly bath, the collar of her shirt all stretched to ruin and her face puffy and I’m naked and who knows what I look like and I say, “What just happened?” even though by a sort of shared modesty, Simone and I had always avoided talking about the most important objects of our obsessions and my voice sounds fucked up, like it’s too flat or maybe too emotional, so I try to put it another way: “That was what you wanted, right?”

Riot’s moseying down East Fourth Street, past the KGB Bar, eating a burrito he found wrapped in tin foil in a garbage can at the corner of Third Avenue. He’s filthy and thin. The burrito’s beef so he doesn’t want to be seen with it, because even though he’s personally freegan the crowd at the benches in Tompkins Square includes several hardcore vegans who will all give him shit, and frankly he isn’t in the mood. So he’s dawdling. Not like he’s in some hurry.

Riot wears an eye patch and a grungy white leather jacket he found in a giveaway box at the Bowery Mission and subsequently augmented — in Sharpie, it should go without saying — so his favorite bands (Black Flag, Choking Victim, etc.) are represented up and down the sleeves. The whole back of the thing is given over to one single statement: 9/11 WAS A REICHSTAG, a subject that he is prepared to talk about for as long as you are prepared to listen, and then some. Actually, it’s pretty convincing until he gets into this tired shit about the International Jewish Conspiracy. Yeah man, we know all about the Israel connection.

Now he’s at the southwest corner of East Fourth and First. He finishes the burrito, balls the foil up in his palm, tosses the ball into a green metal garbage can identical to the can he pulled the meal out of mere minutes ago, crosses First against the light, causing several cab drivers and one tricked-out SUV to honk at him. At these receding vehicles he flips birds — one after another until each is accounted for. The light changes, he crosses north on Fourth against that light, and then starts east again. When he hits Avenue A he turns back north and when he gets to St. Mark’s Place he decides that maybe he still doesn’t really want to go hang out with the kids in the park. What he really wants — check that, needs —is a bathroom.

Is it possible that the burrito, so recently regarded as a godsend, is in fact to blame?

“Hey bro,” he says to an older woman leading a wheezing pug. “Could you help me out real quick? I’m trying to take the train out to the island and see my grandma, but I’m a little short.” The woman walks on without regarding him. Now his insides are clenching. He feels sweat form on his brow. The street is bereft of pedestrians, save a few people who look too much like himself to be worth approaching.

Wait.

There’s one pocket he didn’t check. The little one where he sometimes…yes! It’s paper. A fiver, in fact. Well glory be.

Tim, thirty-one, was just starting a relationship with Kim, when his long-time friend Natalie, twenty-nine, told him she was maybe finally ready to give him and her the real chance they’d both always sort of known he secretly believed they had. So even though the Kim thing looked promising, he broke it off. He is questioning this decision now, because after about six weeks with Natalie it’s becoming clear that there was a lot more emphasis on that “maybe” than he had counted on. In fact, if he’s not mistaken, he’s actually being broken up with by her right now. She’s in the middle of a long monologue about how they never should have risked something so precious and rare as the true connection they’ve always had, and how some things are better than sex, even if it isn’t “cool” to say so, and what they need to do now is start figuring out how to get back to the way things were before. Let’s be adults about this.