Noah Cicero - Best Behavior

Two years before in the summer I sat with Hu on the roof of his apartment building. He lived in a different apartment then. He lived with four other men who he never spoke to. We sat on his roof for several hours talking about what ever came to us. He kept pretending that he would jump off the roof. I kept yelling to get away from the edge and that they would blame it on me and send me to prison. Eventually we got tired and went back to his closet room. It must have been 8 feet long and 5 feet wide. I sat down and took my shoes off. I had forgotten to put socks on and my feet smelled badly. It was a horrible smell, it was unbearable. There we were two writers; earlier in the day an Irish immigrant had declared us two of the best writers of our generation and all we could think about was how to get my feet to stop stinking.

I went to the bathroom and washed them off with his gay roommate's expensive shampoo. The smell went away a little. I went back in the small closet room and Hu sprayed female body spray on my feet. My feet smelled like watermelon. The whole thing was very strange considering there was a giant bear head in the corner of the room staring at us. I laid down on the floor and went to sleep. In the morning he made me a vegan smoothie that was purple.

While watching him walking around the room, making sure the two women from the magazine were well taken care of, and that everything was going smoothly. I looked at him and his tense face hoping one day he would get enough money writing and move out west and farm corn or beans. Or maybe he would move to a small town in Pennsylvania and play drums and relax. He probably never would though: work was his life. He was one of those people that died as soon as they stopped working.

John Walters was there; he was sitting outside on the fire escape smoking and drinking Pabst. He was acting carefree and totally apathetic to the world around him. Jason Bassini, a writer from Seattle who had grown up in Utah, was sitting on a stool drinking a beer. I went over to him and gave him a huge hug. We had spoken many times on Gmail chat. He was twenty-four and had graduated college two years before with a Psychology degree. He was short, very thin and Italian looking. Actually all the males were very skinny. I was the largest by a good fifty pounds. Jason was from a different place than Hu, John and I. He was from the west. He was from the deserts of Utah and the forests of Washington. He had grown up under big skies like Tom White. He had grown up amongst natural wonders, Mexicans, and Navajos.

Jason went to Catholic School when he was little. Jason Bassini was the only one of us raised with any religion. He never wrote or spoke about religion. There was no god for him. When he was bored, once every six months he would attend afternoon mass by himself. He would sit and kneel with the Latinos in Seattle saying his Hail Marys. He considered it a nice thing to do when he was really bored. You go someplace and perform an ancient ritual with people you don't know. Even though he didn't believe in god, Catholic mass seemed more worthwhile than Wal-Mart or Starbucks.

Jason's parents were both high level executives. He told me that one night on Gmail chat, “My parents are high level executives.”

I googled “high level executives.” It didn't supply any real information. Both of his parents were professional people that wanted him to be a professional person. Jason Bassini finished college by the time he was 22. He was showing signs of being a professional human being. His dad got him a job at his company writing for reality television in Seattle. Jason went there and didn't care. He left the job and started working in an office writing directions on how to work things. He sat for eight hours a day staring at a computer checking Facebook and writing long emails to a girl in Munich. None of the success and good things of life made him happy. He left there and got a job working at a coffee house. He rejected his parents by not taking part in the ambition game the corporate world supplies.

Jason seemed really nervous. He seemed absolutely terrified, but it didn't seem like he was terrified at what was going on in the apartment. It seemed like that was his natural demeanor, that of being terrified.

The other people in the room were the two photographers. I shook their hands and they told me their names. They had common names like Sarah and Jen. They told us that they were doing it for free. That they had to take photos like this of jackass writers to build a resume so that one day they could get a real job photographing the Mayor of New York or Tom Cruise. They didn't talk much.

Two women sat in the room. One was a pretty Asian girl who was supposed to be a girl named Charlotte Chofu. Charlotte Chofu was a writer from South Carolina that Hu had made friends with. I had never read her writing. Charlotte couldn't show up so Hu got a stand in. There was also another stand in, a little white girl wearing a Burger King shirt. She was standing in for Leslie Heaney. Leslie was in the mental ward for bi-polar disorder. According to Hu she was walking down the street in Williamsburg, crying, talking to invisible people. She kept saying things that did not correspond with reality and everyone became worried. Leslie got on a bus and went back to her hometown in Pennsylvania and the voices did not stop. Her parents brought her to the mental ward three weeks earlier. She was cutting herself and screaming at everyone about how much they suck. Everyone assumed they didn't suck and that she was nuts. In the mental ward they gave her medication which took the voices away. Leslie was a great writer and person. Her mind was quick and decisive. She was half black and half Irish but looked completely white with bright red hair. But strangely she had no freckles, her lips were full, and her behind was very pronounced. She wrote poems about emotional collapse. She was in a constant state of emotional collapse. She was not comfortable on the planet earth.

Leslie Heaney's stand-in had something wrong with her. Her hair was matted; her face was in a constant snarl and she seemed like she might have a pill addiction. She was from Queens and had found John Walters on the Internet. No one told me either of the stand-ins' real names. No one told the photographers that the two women were not the actual women they were supposed to be photographing. The Asian woman was very nice and responsible. She took being somebody else for the sake of a prank seriously. The little white girl made funny comments and looked like she wanted to lie down.

Petra stood behind the kitchen counter drinking a beer videotaping everything. She liked being there; it was a real New York scene. There were photographers, writers, and pretty people.

There was a lot of ego in the room. Hu, Jason, John and I were that kid in high school and in our hometowns who were the smartest. We weren't the best at math or valedictorians, but we were that person and most of the time the only person that recognized how absurd everything was. How irrational modern living really is. We were all very lonely people. We had no connection to the mainstream, to the realities of people consumed with television, sports, the purchasing of expensive products for the sake of telling people the price, ambition without reason. Our alienation even went to the lower classes, none of us went to prison, none of us did hard drugs; none of us cared about what other people did. We were on the outside, we weren't looking in. But to get things in life, like food, shelter, and bank accounts you have to go into society and you have to deal with those who belong to the mainstream. All of it seemed unbearable to us. From the lowest crack head to the head of corporations. You were born one day, from some random person living in some random place, you grew in a certain location with that woman and sometimes a man telling you how to live, you get to school and they teach you math, how to read, some history and civics. The television notifies you what to wear and eat. You have indoor heating and plumbing. Nothing happens. Nothing is exciting at all. You go to Olive Garden and peacefully eat your food. You go to Disney Land and everything is clean and nice. You watch Smokey and The Bandit on a lazy Saturday afternoon. You play hide and go seek with your neighbors. Nobody fights, nobody kills each other. Nobody asks you to do anything. There's a lot of food and if you don't have any money the government will give you a food card. In the summer you ride bikes with your friends around the neighborhood. You ride down to the pharmacy and pick up candy and baseball cards. You make ramps made out of discarded wood and jump the ramps. You get a little older and smoke weed in your friend's basement. It seems exciting for a while but it fades. You find somebody to have sex with and you lose your virginity; you eventually find out that your sex life will never match the sex that takes place on the Internet. You realize that serial monogamy is your destiny and that makes things even more boring. You graduate high school and they notify you that you must find a place in the modern economy. The modern economy offers a limitless amount of jobs that are boring. All the jobs are boring from construction worker to office worker to lawyer. Some make more money than others; you assume if you make more money perhaps you will be able to purchase excitement. You purchase a vacation to the Rocky Mountains but then you realize that the original Europeans who went to the Rocky Mountains got there in wagons which took months and while they were traveling they had to fight Indians, kill their own food and search for water. You did it in a car in two days and fought no Indians. You start to become overwhelmed with the nothingness. You realize the purpose of alcohol. You spend your days reading Richard Yates instead of trying to make friends and do anything constructive with your life. You eventually end up in New York City with other like-minded individuals living a generalized meaningless of trying to pass the time while nothing happens.