Sean Beaudoin - Welcome Thieves

Don’t miss Rick and Amy. Don’t miss Todd. Don’t miss Todd fucking around on Janet and Janet calling you after a couple wine coolers. Don’t miss Dylan, who’s waiting tables, don’t miss Sarah who’s waiting to hear from that college that makes you wait, don’t miss Fitz, who’s sitting on the plaid couch where he will happily wait forever.

Rue the curse of having reasonable, loving parents, how their lack of animus and neglect will forever limit you as an artist.

Volunteer to serve food to the homeless on weekends. Roll dirty soup pots across dirty parking lots. Secretly hate the hippie in charge, who bitches through his red beard and stew-dripped sandals, who yells at feral Rastas and drunken runaways for not recycling their spoons.

At the edge of the park talk to a sad-eyed Russian girl who’s actually bubbly and full of light. Listen to her lecture you about Moldova and how only a moron or American wouldn’t know where it was. Hold her hand even though you met twenty-two minutes ago. Be amazed how cool-weird she looks in a black bodysuit and green sunglasses. Tell her you’ve never really had a girlfriend even if it isn’t true. Think it makes you sound sensitive even though you’re an emotionless cipher who flashes glimpses of humanity only when marinated in cheap beer. Pretend that as long as you’re an intellectual, the sort of guy who can identify a Kandinsky or the frenzied strains of Glenn Gould, who reads three books a week even if two are crime fiction, then it’s okay.

Kiss her beneath a tree. Think even her lips seem vaguely Soviet. Keep calling her Olga, even though that’s not her name. Be pleasantly surprised that she tastes like coffee but not cigarettes. Buy her lunch. Buy her dinner. Buy her flat beer that costs fifty cents a mug at a bar called Murph’s filled with elderly Jamaican men. Be amazed that they don’t card you, even though you’re barely eighteen. Think you’ve made friends and forged valuable inroads between cultures by dialing up five bucks’ worth of Delfonics on the jukebox.

Follow Olga home that night. Find out that home is really the office of some nonprofit that helps return Israelis to Israel. Pull a battered suitcase from behind a desk. Listen to her brush her teeth in the water fountain. Lie on a couch sagging from a thousand passport-and-visa-awaiting asses. Let her get on top. Whisper her real name, Nadezhda, over and over like a talisman.

Tell the other busboys nothing happened even though Daryl says he can “smell it plain as day,” which he probably can, since the office had no shower.

See Nadezhda every night. Go to shows, to movies, to bars. Help her find an apartment. Overhear her roommates mock her accent. Refrain from calling them assholes. Don’t do the dishes as a form of protest. Let in the cat that hangs out in the alley, shut it in that blond girl’s room. Sit on the floor and watch Nadezhda take a nap while two different copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves bookend the collected Kathy Acker.

At the end of a shift get tipped out a dollar by the waitress with the ponytail pulled through her Orioles cap and decide maybe college is the thing after all. Buy a Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges , massively alphabetized, and be bored before you’re even through the As. Apply to three colleges that start with B, and also Cornell.

Get accepted to two.

Let your father pretend that’s not why he started talking to you again. Decide to major in film. Let your father pretend that’s not why he’s no longer talking to you again.

Have hoarse and whispery conversations with Nadezhda about maybe coming too. Rub her wrist through the hole in her sweater, wipe her nose, promise no matter what to be this close and this chaste, endlessly on the other end of a phone. Vow to disprove distance as a theory, across a thousand miles feel her ghost stomach pressed nakedly against yours. Promise to exchange mad letters, inexhaustible sentences, fragments of brilliance, declarations of proclamations of edicts, a compact signed each time in blood or even deeper.

Secretly decide that you want to go alone. That there’s no way you’re showing up in an unexplored city, the blank canvas of a new campus, saddled with something long-term. Love her, lust for her, think the word “besotted” without laughing at yourself and still fail to deny that loving her, lusting for her, thinking the word “besotted” without laughing at yourself is a knife, a cleft into the meat of you that makes you vulnerable, that makes you want to run barefoot in the dark and sweaty heat in one direction until you are at least two atlas pages away. Or 12 percent less a melodramatic asshole.

The night before you go listen to Nadezhda cry during Moonlighting. Be smoochy, then resigned, then annoyed. Her messy hair. Her red, crumpled face. Say no, you’re right, it’s not funny. Volunteer to grab dinner, come back to find her gone. Eat all the fries on principle. Fail to produce a clever relationship analogy about empty ketchup packets. Write it on a napkin anyway. Call her four times, no answer, no answer, no answer, angry roommate. Threaten an ass kicking you could deliver but won’t. Get more than a little drunk.

School. Take a slate of production classes. Quickly come to terms with what horseshit they are. Immediately accept that not a single person in the department will ever actually make a film. Immediately accept that all the professors gave up on L.A. after a few years, never did anything but unfinish screenplays and complain about traffic, moved home to teach nineteen-year-olds the rudiments of slapping together four minutes of underexposed film of a naked sophomore wearing a leather mask and call it a degree.

Switch majors. To Russian lit. After a week decide it’s too grim, too Gulagy. Snag the last spot in Intro to Syntactics and Pragmatics. Start quoting Roland Barthes. Use “Saussurean” in a sentence at a party. Fail to connect with Derrida over the course of six hundred pages. Connect to Coover in a single sentence. Question a friend’s signification. Vow to name your first daughter “Ferdinand.” Pretend to read Wittgenstein in the caf. Wear a beret, discard it. Wear scarves, discard them. Earring in, earring out. Crib a paper on Bertrand Russell’s years-long ménage à trois as it relates to sexual pragmatism in mathematical empiricism. Graduate.

Move to San Francisco, don’t get hired at an anarchist bookstore, don’t get hired by a video game developer, don’t get hired at a magazine to do rudimentary layout, and especially don’t bother to install one of the Netscape mailers that arrive on your doorstep every day, under the impression that ignoring the Internet is probably what the New York Dolls would do, a vital political statement but with 30 percent less eyeliner.

Decide chat rooms are a symbol for death. Decide cell phones are an emblem for death. Decide computers are a representation of death. Decide television is an allegory for death.

Two jobs, then a third. Bosses. Girls. That tall one with all the hair, later a Thai who likes Iggy Pop. Pin the arm back on to a suit. Go to a friend’s funeral, a guy who drank too much and fell down, randomly hit his head on the cement next to the grass next to the keg. Have your boots resoled. Pick out a new car, listen to the pitch, argue about the invoice, sign the papers, drive it away from the grinning Ukrainian salesman.

Send Nadezhda the money for a bus ticket. Let her yawn, act like she’s considering. Is she seeing someone? Maybe. Do they matter? Whose business is it? Plead then cajole then beg. In begging find something you didn’t know was there, a willingness to be humiliated (just another modality) and also not give a shit (purely lexical and without true meaning). Listen to her say yes. Melt with umwelt .