J. Lennon - The Funnies

“Where are we going?” I said.

“AJ’s.”

“In Princeton?”

“Mm-hmm.”

AJ’s was a pancake and coffeehouse on Nassau Street, known for its enormous variety and high prices. Still, it was always packed. When I was in college in Philly, I had a group of friends I went to Princeton with to see rock-and-roll shows: the campus eating clubs frequently hosted huge parties at which many of our favorite bands — loosely musical ratfaced outfits with gratuitously improbable names — exerted themselves. Afterward, since there were no bars in town, we would go to AJ’s to sober up. There was always a two o’clock rush there. I’d never been during the daytime.

As we passed through Hopewell, conversation inexorably turned to the Hopewell Head. Hopewell was notorious for a murder case that was cracked there in the 1980s. Apparently, a pimp from Atlantic City had killed one of his prostitutes; to cover up the crime, he cut her into pieces and scattered them around the state. The Head was discovered in a creek next to a Hopewell golf course, not far off the road.

“Remember the guy who found it?” Bitty said.

“He was a caddy or something.”

“I was on the debate team with him.”

I turned to her. She had produced a candy bar from somewhere and was eating it. “You were on the debate team?” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“What else did you do in high school that I don’t know about?”

She chuckled. “Lots.” She folded the wrapper over the end of the candy and stowed it under the seat. “Remember when the Badenochs’ old shed burned down?”

“Not really.”

“Pierce and I did that.”

“What!”

“We got drunk together and we went out trying to set things on fire. But it didn’t work. We didn’t have any kerosene or anything, and the matches kept going out. But that shed was like, it went up like a tinderbox.” She wiggled her fingers in the air, indicating flames.

I paused a moment to digest this. “Do you remember when Pierce set his flea circus on fire?”

Her jaw dropped, and she banged the steering wheel with both hands. “That happened?! Were you there?”

“So were you,” I said.

“All these years I thought I imagined that whole thing, it was so weird. Do you remember the tall guy with the hoop earrings?”

“Not the earrings.”

She shook her head. “Fuckin’-A,” she said, and from her tone I knew that it was a high school phrase she hadn’t used in years.

* * *

AJ’s was packed with bespectacled Asians, no doubt foreign students who couldn’t afford to go home for the summer. Their food battled for table space with rambling mounds of books and papers. The menu had two panels; on the left was the pancake list. Apple, Banana, Buckwheat, Buckwheat Apple, Buckwheat Banana, Buckwheat Blueberry, Buckwheat Pear, fifty pancakes long. The coffee list, on the other half of the menu, was similar. I ordered a cup of cherry-flavored coffee and buckwheat pear pancakes. Bitty got decaf and buttermilk cakes. The waiter looked familiar. He had a gaunt face and a strange beard: muttonchops reaching for a meticulous black checker of hair on his chin.

“Do you know that guy?” I asked Bitty.

“Nope. He’s cute, though.” I watched her eyes follow him across the room.

“So,” I said.

She smiled. “So.”

“How’s married life?”

She shrugged. “Dull. I guess.”

“Tell me a little about Mike,” I said. “How’d you meet?”

“How’d we meet,” she repeated, as if it were a peculiar and probing question. “Okay, I guess it was at a picnic. My friend Sheila got married to a guy named Steve, and Steve works with Mike, and they had a picnic and introduced us. We fooled around in the pool.”

“Neat,” I said.

“I suppose. He’s an odd one, that Mike.” I couldn’t read between the lines of this comment, which sounded like it was said about a mutual acquaintance of ours whom neither of us had seen in some time. Her face went mildly dreamy, and her eyes took to a shaft of sunlight, following dust motes through the air.

“How so?”

She shrugged. “Mysterious. Occasionally explosive. Sexually devious. Not that you want to know that.”

“Not exactly.”

“Do I love him?” she asked the hanging lamp over our table, as if this question had been posed. “I suppose I do. He asked me to marry him. It was a surprise. I said yes.”

Our coffee came. Bitty began to sip hers without preamble. I set to adjusting mine, sprinkling in a carefully measured spoonful of sugar, dripping in the cream. It was real cream, too, not milk. The smell of cherries rose as I stirred. I took a sip. Combined with the lingering flavor of toothpaste, which had not long ago been in my mouth, the coffee tasted exactly like cough syrup. I could not conceal my disappointment.

“Why would you order that?” Bitty said. I looked at her unadulterated decaf with envy.

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve got it,” she said suddenly.

“Why I ordered?”

“Who our waiter is.”

“Who?”

She waggled her finger at me. “Paul Crumb. That guy is Paul Crumb.”

I turned. Indeed, it was Paul Crumb. Paul was the valedictorian of my high school class, and had been roundly hated by almost everyone. He was generally considered a genius, and went to study particle physics at Caltech. Now, a dozen years later, he was pouring flavored coffee at AJ’s. We had all hung out with Paul at one time or another; he had a nice car and his older brother bought people beer, something Bobby would not have done for me if I had paid him double. I remembered my betrayal of Paul with agonizing clarity. I was one of a small group who set him up with an imaginary date, then spied on him as he waited on the street for half an hour, by himself. We had all been the victims of similar jokes, and since he was the only guy we knew more gullible than we were, we jumped at the chance. It was curiously unsatisfying. I never spoke to him again.

Paul Crumb brought us our pancakes. I smiled perfunctorily, Bitty generously. Paul didn’t smile back. I smothered the pancakes with syrup and took a bite. They were not entirely unappealing, tasting one moment like a breath of spring air, the next like a sofa cushion.

We couldn’t speak while eating, so I listened to the other people around us. To my right, two women were having what sounded like a business lunch. After a few minutes, it became clear that one was giving the other a color analysis, the kind that helped you get dressed in the morning. Are you a Winter? A Summer? I stole a few glances at the women. They were regular, thirtyish people, sort of attractive. Both were utterly rapt. The customer turned out to be an Autumn. “No offense,” said the analyst — whose clothes, I thought, were ill-fitting and strangely colored—“but that outfit is all wrong for you.” The customer nodded, looking down at her clothes as if she had just spilled something gluey and slightly toxic on herself.

For a minute I wanted to get up and stop them. I wanted to tell the customer woman that she looked fine and that there was no reason to pay for the other woman’s advice. Shame on you , I wanted to tell the analyst. But it became clear that they were both perfectly happy and having a good time, and it was none of my business. My mouth clogged up with pancake and I swallowed hard, suddenly lonely. I thought about my frequent breakfasts out with Amanda, and the great time we invariably had at them. I wondered what she was having for lunch: probably nothing. She didn’t eat when she was under stress.

Bitty paid our bill. It felt strange, accepting this from her; I used to buy her ice cream with the money I made raking yards, in exchange for her doing the household chores I was responsible for. But I had no money of my own, not until the strip was officially mine. I felt like the ne‘er-do-well prince of a deposed royal family.