Justin Taylor: Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

They’re in her bed; it’s Saturday morning — about ten thirty. Her apartment is on East Ninth Street between C and D.

Tim’s nodding his head like he agrees with her. He doesn’t. He thinks they actually meant what they said while they were having sex last night: an unexpected call and response of I Love You and I Love You, Too.

Tim can’t remember who said it first and who replied. If he could only know that, he’s certain he’d have the key to the whole situation. At the very least he’d like to talk about the fact that it was said, but he can’t take the chance of saying “we” and then being told it was he who went first and that she was merely caught up in the moment, or worse, being nice. On the other hand if it was Natalie who said it first then maybe she’s waiting — secretly begging — for him to hold her to her words and save them both. Natalie, you are scared and that’s okay. Natalie, stop sabotaging the best thing that’s ever happened to either of us.

Tim: “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” and related platitudes.

God, he’s as bad as she is. Natalie can tell. In the larger karmic whatever sense, they totally deserve each other, or they would if they didn’t each deserve abject loneliness even more. Everyone gets what they’ve got coming, and when they don’t that just means that the injustice of undeserved suffering is in fact the very thing that’s deserved. Christ. This meta-analytical shit chatters away in Natalie’s head all day. She’s so smart that it’s actually disturbing — or else makes perfect sense — that she doesn’t have health insurance because she won’t stay at any job long enough to qualify. Or that she gets into these situations with guys like Tim. Oh, here we go, start ripping on him. All he ever did was whatever you wanted.

Yeah, well who says you can’t hold that against someone?

In case you can’t tell, Natalie’s having a little episode, but in her head of course. Real-life Natalie is sitting quietly in bed, speech long finished, sheet pulled up to her neck and naked beneath it, weirding Tim out with her silence, though it’s safe to say he wouldn’t be any less weirded out if he could somehow know what she’s thinking.

Tim’s dressed now, standing at the door. Natalie’s in a robe. It looks soft, well worn: comfort clothes. They have a quick, awkward good-bye kiss. It should feel like the end of something. It doesn’t, but it’s not exactly a beginning either. It just is, and then a second later it just was. Now Tim’s on the street. He should probably go home and get some work done, but fuck it.

Tim does freelance web design and plays in a cover band at a tourist trap in the West Village, an overpriced bar-restaurant his friend Ted owns. He’s not saving at all, but he’s been making rent every month and doing okay, which is more than he could have said not too long ago.

At Summer of Love, it’s always 1969, even though everyone knows the Summer of Love was ’67. Or, more to the point: precisely because nobody knows. Tim is a great guitar player, which is why he gets to play lead on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights, when Summer of Love has the Grateful Dead on the main stage, i.e., the dining room. They play two sets a night, like the real band used to, and they use authentic vintage set lists — except for dressing up, they make every attempt to re-create the original show. Of course Tim usually wears ruddy corduroys and a black tee shirt, so he actually is dressed up like Garcia, albeit nineties Garcia, but when people think Grateful Dead they think tie-dye so nobody gets the reference, or if anyone does it’s just like, Okay, so?

Tim’s favorite coffee shop is at the corner of Ninth and Avenue A. It’s called Harry Smith, and if that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the place odds are it isn’t for you, though try explaining that to the recent influx of yuppies. You can always tell an outsider because they call it Harry Smith ’s , as in, “Hey do you want to come meet me? Where are you? I’m like a block off St. Mark’s at Harry Smith’s, yeah, it’s like a coffee place. It’s a little smelly but I think they’ll let you plug in your laptop.”

That’s what Tim hears a girl saying into her cell phone as he opens the door and steps in.

They used to have a strict no-phone policy here. Whoever was working would walk up to you and ask nicely, once. If you gave them any shit it was the boot. Those were back in the days when a cell phone was considered a rude luxury, an ostentatious marker of caste. The no-phone sign is still up, but the rule hasn’t been enforced in years. The future is whatever you submit to. Someone should write that on a wall.

The shop’s heritage is scribbled on its walls in Sharpie, that latter-day chisel, that soot-tipped stick. Above the front door, where in Dante there’s that warning about abandoned hope, some prophet — alias unknown — has scribbled PUNX NOT DEAD ITS SLEEPING. And underneath that, in smaller letters, black Sharpie again, but clearly the work of a different hand: EVERYTHING HERE IS THE BEST THING EVER. Tim, passing beneath it, thinks the same thing he thinks every time he enters here: Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.

Is that a prayer or a joke? He isn’t sure. It doesn’t matter. By the time he stopped knowing what he believed, and later stopped believing in belief, he had been coming here so long there was no question of ever stopping coming here, because it’s a place that he knows and where he is known. Tim even worked here for a stretch, in ’02, when things got really really bad.

A heart-shaped funeral wreath — it’s giant — on a stand in the middle of the room. A white sash like a beauty queen’s cutting across it. The sash reads: R.I.P. HARRY SMITH.

“The fuck?” he says to Lisa, who started sometime after he quit but has now been here longer than he’s ever seen anyone stay. He thinks they even made her manager, though it isn’t the kind of place you’d think of as having a manager. Tim sizes her up, as if for the first time, as if he isn’t in here four, five times a week for the last like eight years. Lisa is a thickset twenty-something with streaks of bright pink in her chopped-at-the-ears hair and a pair of seriously inviting green eyes.

“Tell me everything,” he says. “Make this okay.”

“It sort of is. I don’t know. I mean business has been all right, like the numbers and stuff. Lionel and Sadie aren’t selling or anything, they’re just sort of — tired, of this, I guess, business model. They’re going to sort of re-do it like a family place. Like where they could bring their own kids, you know? But they’re keeping on everyone who wants to stay, or I think they are. I mean, I’m staying. I don’t know, we’ll see how it goes, I guess.”

Tim has known Lionel and Sadie a long time. Actually, Tim knew Sadie before she even met Lionel, though they never talk about those days anymore. He remembers when their first kid was born, the boy, and then the girl came along. He was happy for them, settling down, getting the things they wanted out of life, but it never occurred to him that their lives might ever impact his own. (Of course, their livelihood is his second home and they also employed him, but as far as he’s concerned that’s a whole other thing.) Tim doesn’t like to think of Harry Smith as having had an initial business model, much less a new one. It’s always felt more like a public resource — a state park, say — than a business.

Again, this is coming from someone who worked here.

Lisa hands Tim the iced chai soy latte that became his new drink two years ago when his trademark double red eyes started leaving him too shaky and heart-palpitated to read the alt weeklies.