Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

They still logged in nightly to the Knitting Room, zapped e-mails back and forth with ridiculous frequency, and sometimes met in pairs for lunch or a quick drink; but it was undeniable: forces of nature and time had started pulling at their closed little chat room. 1450SAT, for example, had left an array of fellowships and graduate school offers on the table, turned his back on all subjects that involved stress or competition, and was way down in Orange County, working entry-level tech support for a medical distribution company. DOMINATR69, by contrast, was stuck in the gray town of Covina, a half hour east of Los Angeles; Bing had pulled strings and got DOM freelance work as an inker and background man with his comic book house, but the gigs were sporadic, and the comic house had neither the money nor the interest in DOM for a full-time hire, so DOM lived at home and ran the stock room in his dad's furniture shop and spent a lot of time complaining about his dead-end life. Meanwhile, nobody knew KC_FTT_B's deal, he'd been bumbling around Venice Beach for a while, flopping from one McJob to another. It was hard to keep track of him. Then again, logistically, it was difficult for all four of them to get together that much anymore, what with the Southern California freeway system being what it was. They still tried, doing what they could, meeting up to see big summer action movie blockbusters on opening day, spending designated nights in the furniture store, where they smoked fifty-cent cigars, passed around a five-dollar jug of wine, and played nickel-ante seven-card stud. And on the first Saturday night of each month, they all met up, it was set in stone, even if the back room of the store was unavailable, and they didn't do anything more than drive around and pass round an open container of alcohol and catch up on one another's problems.

The nights weren't necessarily friendly. The polemical, argumentative free-for-all nature of the chat room usually translated into a fair share of face-to-face rants. Each Knitter consistently judged his friends, weighing their respective stories and successes (and lacks thereof) as if the progress of a peer reflected on everyone else's personal well-being. At the same time, exchanges took place that were every bit as thoughtful as they were ridiculous; the Knitters still made one another laugh, still held a mutual, genuine affection for one another; the chat room was a major part of their lives and, even now, remained a refuge for them, though it was obvious that each participant felt conflicted about his involvement, felt constrained, a bit trapped. Sometimes things crossed the line, jibes became uncomfortably personal. Nonetheless, when the Knitters were like fifty and they looked back on their time in college and the years afterward, while it was true, there wouldn't be a whole lot of warm and fuzzy feelings, while a lot of their memories would be gruesome, tinged with regrets and bitterness, it would be stuff like driving around with one another and the endless hours they wasted online, crap that in another light might be seen as boring and pointless, this, each Knitter had to know, is what they'd remember. It was sappy and it wasn't the kind of thing that you could admit without getting ragged on, but this didn't make it any less true. So when that first Saturday of the month rolled around, Bing did not think twice about cutting his meal with his housemates short, found himself counting the hours until Go Time.

One week before Bing left for Vegas, after far too long a wait, the esoteric stylings of a posse of self-described old-school gangsta Negroes did indeed thump from up the road, signaling the arrival of DOMINATR69’ s Kia. Bing was two steps out of the door when the first wolf whistle hit. A call of Looking smooth served as confirmation, his clothing would be the night's prime source for humor.

The car was supposed to be a compact hatchback, but that was just the sadistic joke of some ambitious junior marketing exec. DOM's Kia was a tin can, cramped with bodies and an opened bottle of Jäger, with arguments and insults and rat-assing. One unseen Knitter pretended to adjust the collar of Bing's cabana shirt; another poked at the shirt's fabric and made sizzling sounds and then poured some beer on Bing to put out the imaginary fire. “Only thing missing is the cape,” someone said, causing much laughter, with 1450, the asthmatic among them, breaking into a coughing fit, leaning over, taking a few deep breaths into a paper bag.

Nightclubs that advertised on the radio had too high a guy-to-girl ratio, so they were out. Franchises like Ruby Tuesday were ridiculous and not worth considering. And ixnay on the ipsterhay arsbay, because (A) the Knitters did not know how to find them and (B) even if they did, there was no way past the velvet ropes. A disagreement spread as to whether velvet ropes were even used at hipster bars, whether they were passé. Prospective destinations were shot down; arguments came and went, and it wasn't long before one of DOM and Bing's most favorite and longest-running gimmicks commenced, and the overblown language of kung fu subtitles took over. (“Foolish mortal, you have walked into my trap, prepare to be destroyed”; “Your powers are no match for me! I welcome the opportunity to squash you in my manly hands.”) This did not last long, either, for the jibes were quickly drowned out by the sound of feedback and guitars, the rest of the crew shouting lyrics— “All I wanted was a Pepsi, just one Pepsi, AND SHE WOULDN’T GIVE IT TO ME”; “You'll take my life but I'll take yours too; You'll fire your musket but I'll run you through”; “FUCK THA POLICE. Comin’ straight from the underground. Young nigga got it bad cuz I'm brown.” By the time the tape flipped to the B side, everyone was winded and a little hoarse. Bing took control, announcing, with appropriate gravity: My brothers, the time has come to go find ourselves some poon.

Hermosa Beach. A bar with a packed outdoor patio. The Knitters stayed in the car for a while, killing the bottle in a rising and tense silence. Among them, there were known dry spells. Bad stretches. Streaks of involuntary celibacy. It was more than possible that half of the members of the Knitting Room were virgins; and even if they weren't, Bing was relatively sure that the other Knitters were on streaks far longer than his, although this wasn't real consolation. Rather, it was more like winning the gold medal at the Special Olympics: you won the gold medal, fine, but then again, you were still retarded. Eventually the group could not avoid it any longer, and they paid the cover, and stumbled into the dark, packed bar, and the beer commercial that was in progress: cliques of tan and beautiful bodies grouped off with other gorgeous creatures, everyone chatting amiably, as if they all had been best friends with one another for the entirety of their beautiful lifetimes.

1450SAT immediately faded into the shadows. DOMINATR69 scowled and got intense and scary-looking. KC_FTT_B was too blitzed to do more than pinch asses. What the guy with the thunderous voice from the movie trailers would call a time of crisis. “When courage was at a premium and tyranny ruled the countryside,” he would say, “one man would step forward: Beiderbixxe the Fearless. Beiderbixxe the Conqueror.”

Tucking in his shirt so that his flab was not so obvious, rolling up his sleeves so as to showcase his burgeoning pythons, he made his way, ever so shakily, toward a gaggle of females, each of whom possessed singularly incomparable beauty.

Intuition told Bing that women like these knew what guys were really after; that by talking to him, they'd only be humoring him, or worse, humoring themselves. But wholesale amounts of alcohol flooded intuition. Liquid courage was still courage, wasn't it?