A Broken Record Has A Thousand Answers

“Oh God, that’s enough,” I said tipping the bottle back toward her. “That’s Gold, dude. You can smell it from the other room.” She just sort of shrugged and poured it into her Diet Coke until the dark and murky liquid curled toward the rim of her blue plastic cup. “How the hell can you drink that?”

She just laughed. “You get used to it.”

It took too much these days to get all of us drunk. So we just bought more. Or ate less. The alcohol soothed everything, including a hungry stomach. Last week, we sat around calculating how much we collectively spend on alcohol every month. When the number hit around 300 we stopped because we decided we plain didn’t want to know. That night we all decided we’d drink less. But then the next night came around; someone had a bad day, someone had a good one, someone hates their boss, someone wants to celebrate finishing Moby Dick, we all want to be together; we all want to curse the world. And alcohol is good for all of this.

“Hey, hook up some music, would ya?” Aaron told anyone but himself, squawking from his perch, hanging over the floral, garage-sale, living room chair.

Carli hopped over to the speakers, casually placed on the floor for lack of adequate shelving. She took another sip of her rum-reeking drink, turned on the stereo and spun the volume knob up. We were all really good at listening to music loud. As the night goes on, we’ll be singing and stumbling around in what some may call “a dance,” but is really more a drunken shuffle. Carli fell over on the couch next to me while Aaron grabbed another drink. We were really into playing Trouble after finding it for 75 cents at flea market in Kenosha. We put the board between us on the couch, leaned our heads together and flung our feet on the sharp, wooden armrests, four Converse tapping to Dillinger Four.

“I had to buy Head and Shoulders yesterday,” she said to me, tilting her head off my shoulder and looking up at me to see that I stopped moving my green peg and listened to her.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It was like seven bucks.”

“Jesus. Wasn’t there something cheaper?”

“Yeah,” she said sitting up, “but it said DANDRUFF SHAMPOO across the front and I didn’t really feel like checking out with a big fat loudspeaker shouting “I have Dandruff!” It was pretty pathetic. Like I give a shit what the bagboy at Dominick’s thinks? I’m not sixteen.”

I laughed and nodded and we went back to our game. I knew why she told me this. She was always telling me of these kind of self-effacing things. She liked to make fun of herself, partly because it deflected others from making fun of her and partly because she makes fun of everyone else and wants to level herself. She didn’t particularly feel like being a bitch.

We had almost assembled all four pegs into the Finish Line when Greg and Kat arrived. Carli got up to greet them and I kind of knew our cute moment of Trouble was over.

The game gets shoved back under the couch and conversation replaces it. A few more swallows of our drinks and our heads are lifted into the air. Greg’s telling us how Lifetime is coming to the Sub. We spend about thirty minutes deciding whether or not we should swing the fifteen plus alcohol for Lifetime. This is how we judge bands these days – are they worth cover? Maybe if we drink before we go and remember to take shorter showers and keep the lights off. Carli brings up Jenna’s wedding. We have to save up for that. That shiner of a wedding. Nobody thought Jenna would get married, especially not at twenty-five and especially not to north suburbs, preppie, Old Town loft-renting, car-owning, teeth whitener Brian Anderson.

“Oh yeah. How the hell are we ever going to afford that?” Aaron complains. “Are they at least having an open bar?”

“I’m not going if there’s not,” I complained

“I don’t think any of us are,” Greg agreed. “Besides, you can’t have a fancy fucking wedding without an open bar. It’s morally irresponsible.”

“Maybe we’ll catch fire before then,” Carli added wistfully. Her phone rang. It was on the other side of the couch. She had to reach over me get it, brushing her chest and shoulders up against me, offering a shy smile afterward. She didn’t mean to. After reading the caller-ID screen she walked into the kitchen to answer. We were, apparently, not privy to this conversation.

“Dan is coming over,” she said upon hanging up, trying to mute her giddy excitement. He was there quickly, shuffling in, carrying a vaguely uncomfortable self-consciousness. He shook everyone’s hands, introducing or reintroducing himself. Aaron took him to the kitchen to get a drink. I leaned into Carli and hissed, “So you invited the fat, emo skinhead?”

She gave me the most sour look she could conjure up. A marked difference between her annoyed-but-joking sour looks. I watched her walk away and felt red with regret. I had probably permanently shattered the glowing image she had of me as the platonic best friend. She got up without saying anything and went into the kitchen to smile and pet the man I had just relentlessly word-murdered. He wasn’t fat, just big. He wasn’t a skinhead, he was just obviously trying to get ahead of the balding pattern. He wasn’t emo. Why would I even say that? Nobody in their mid-twenties should be accusing anybody of being emo. I’m not sixteen.

But I had spewed these words and now they stamped a bright ‘asshole’ on my forehead. All this permanently banned her to the kitchen and wrapped the two of them together. She was leaning against the cabinetry and he was inching his way closer to her, setting his drink down right by her side so that he couldn’t be any farther than elbow’s length. She was leaning her hips out toward him and he would bend his neck close to her lips when he couldn’t hear her. I was sloshing my drink back so I could hop into the kitchen for a convenient “just getting a drink” interruption.

Before I could swallow the remaining swigs, Aaron was waving me down; apparently he said something I was supposed to respond to. Everyone was now staring at me staring at the kitchen. It’s bad getting caught like that, it makes everything so fucking obvious.

“The show last week, dude?”

“Yeah?”

“It was good, yeah?”

“I guess. I had to be at work at like seven the next day, so I was pretty sober.” The words were sullenly sad, like extinguishing candles at a vigil. Everyone knew I hadn’t answered the question, and for about forty seconds we all came to terms with the fact that we should probably be sitting in a circle on fold-out chairs in the basement of the YMCA. I should be introducing myself and they should be responding “Hi, Will.”

Luckily none of these sputters of “should-bes” last long. A pass of the bottle and a refocus on the song playing and we’re all fine. But not tonight. Tonight Kat decided to ignore protocol.

“You know, we could all probably get out of this if we didn’t drink so much.”

“Get out of what?” Greg sneered.

“This bullshit life we live. We wouldn’t have to live on cigarette-strewn streets in Uptown. We wouldn’t have to worry about keeping the heat off in order to afford to go see live music. We could have cable and painted walls and computers that aren’t seven years old. We could afford to go to our friend’s wedding instead of cynically jeering her about an open bar. I could give my dog something better than Target dry food in used Cool-Whip bowls.”

Everyone shut up and stared at the floor except me. My eyes moved back to the kitchen where Carli and Dan were delightfully oblivious of our agonizing living room lecture. I was practically begging Jesus or Buddha or Krishna or Angelina Jolie to send Carli back in here because she would defend us. She would surely defend our poetic, drunken, mosh pits and Reckless Records, butter ‘n bread, cheap cigarettes and used jeans, circular, repetitive lifestyle.

Kat got up and declared that she was ‘only kidding really,’ tousled Aaron’s hair and went to the kitchen for more alcohol. ‘Good,’ we all thought, ‘drown that fucking mouth out.’ But the damage was done. Our heads all hung through our shoulders. Nobody wants to hear that shit, no matter how fucking useless a Lakeview apartment would be; or how little any dog cares about the bowls he’s eating out of; no matter how much we really don’t want to have real jobs and real lives and real credit scores; or how much we’d prefer to go to an Against Me! show than eat for the day; no matter how many times, over and over, sober or wasted, we’d choose our own lifestyle over all the other bullshit lifestyles society offers us, nobody wants to fucking hear that.

We all crawled into the kitchen so that we wouldn’t have to think about the words Kat had puked on the floor earlier.

“Who cares about that shit, Kat? Who needs it?” Carli retorted to the conversation Kat had dragged into the kitchen, our Green zone. “Is that really what you want?”

“I don’t know, man. I’m just saying,” Kat added doubtfully.

“Are you gonna start going to church too?”

“No, but don’t you think it gets to a point – “

“So you’re assuming this is what we’re going to do for the rest of our lives? We’re not gonna all eventually move on? Do something else? I still like living this. This is still the good life to me. I mean if you’re ready to move on, I guess that’s fine. But I didn’t think you’d go Jenna on me just yet.”

“Go Jenna?” Dan asked. Being new to the group he had yet to figure out all our hackneyed references.

“Our friend who’s getting married for real,” Carli informed him.

“’For real?’” he asked, air-quoting the phrase.

“’For real,’” she quoted back to him with an understood eye roll. He smiled and put his arm over her, like he was comforting someone who just lost a friend. The conversation was primed for new comments, a change in direction.

But Kat wouldn’t quit. This thought was nagging at her and she wouldn’t shut up until Carli had talked her out of it. “Are our lives so horrible we have to be drunk, drooling and mindless every night?”

“Who’s drooling,” Carli snapped.

“Seriously.”

“Seriously, Kat, come on. Who did you hang out with today that’s making you spew this shit? Were you with your parents? Your older brother came to town…is that it? Run into some old self-righteous friends that strut Michigan Avenue and operate on Red Bull and ego?

“No. Nobody. I just got to thinking.”

“We all have those days, Kat,” Carli replied, pouring herself another drink.

“You should really cut it,” Greg said to her. “You’re gonna get too drunk.”

“I’m used to it,” she replied.

“We’re all so fucking used to it,” I muttered. The whole night went jade.

There was more chatter, more music, more singing and dancing and spilled drinks and Trouble. By two, we scarfed our necks and stumbled out Aaron’s door into the dead winter night. A few drunken refrains and trips over the lips of sidewalks later, we were dragging ourselves up millions of steps, up to the red line. Dan, Kat and Greg were heading south. Carli and I were heading north. We shouted obscene phrases at each other from across the platform, until the southbound train came. They all made sloppy faces through the glass. Except Dan, who smiled at her. She smiled back. The blissful joy of mutual affection realized. And they disappeared in a silver steel box.

And then it was just me and Carli, huddled on an aging wood bench under weird orange lights. She leaned her bobbling head onto my shoulder. Her jacket was falling off of her, letting the cool night air whip across her open-necked shirt. But she didn’t care.

“Doyouthink that, maybe, what, what Kat said is true?” I asked her, in a sorry slur of words. “That we’re all just pathetic drunks?”

“We’re all pathetic, Will.”

“Then maybe we should stop drinking so much. We always talk about – “

“That’s not what I meant.”

We could hear the El rumbling off in the distance, pulling itself closer toward the station. We stayed in a haze on the bench, even as the train flooded to a slushy stop in front of us. When the doors slid open, we pulled ourselves off the bench and wandered inside. We threw ourselves onto some backwards-facing chairs. The train made its signature sing-song noise, “Doors closing.” They shut. The train started, and glided away.

This One Isn't As Good...

In My Opinion. But Maybe It Is. I Don't Know. Read and Compare.

It was a squirming, writhing pink bit of life. It stood out from the cotton blanket underneath it only because it was moving so intensely. He looked down on it, lying in its crib. It grabbed and kicked at the air, wanting nothing more than to free itself from the plastic prison. It wasn’t the bars that kept it in – but the mere reality that it couldn’t get up off its back. It didn’t have the strength to free itself. So it wriggled and screamed and cried itself into exhaustion. After several minutes of hesitation, he reached into the crib and pulled the child out. At first he held it with his hands, but upon catching its bright, wide eyes he carefully placed it against his blue jean shirt. The warmth the child produced alarmed him and almost caused him to drop it back in its crib. But he had been through this with the others and quickly calmed himself. Its head bobbled about, trying to find a place against its father’s shoulder. He waited, frozen stiff in place until the child rested its head and moved its tiny thumb into its little wet mouth. He sighed a large breath and closed his eyes, hoping that indescribable bond would instantly forge between him and the child. He was hoping that the child’s warmth would be more than body heat, that this feeling his wife had described would fill him. So he held it closer to him and wrapped his arms tighter around it. He could feel the fuzzy texture of its footed pajamas, feel it’s miniature legs as they slipped together and apart again, he could feel the fluffy hair on the round head and the soft skin on the back of its neck. But he could not feel that feeling.

His heart sank deep into his chest. He tried to ignore it and concentrate on getting the baby to sleep. So he rubbed its back and swayed slowly to and fro, but he couldn’t ignore the way his heart hurt. He had never believed in the heart in an emotional way before. It was an organ before – but now, after all these years, it was pain. It had a certain emotional excrement. He couldn’t quite figure out what the two had to do with each other, but somehow that place in his chest where his heart beat was inextricably tied to this feeling. It was safe to say he had never felt love. Love was something he saw, something he said, someway he acted. Love meant something, but he never felt love in his chest the way he felt this pain. One could not call him cold for this. He wanted desperately to feel love, especially for his children. But he never could. Love would have kept him there. Love would have outweighed the responsibilities and the struggles and the late nights and the chores and the dirty diapers and the constant nagging. But between him and his children there was nothing. He had always known he didn’t love the children’s mothers. He had been through that struggle long ago and discovered it was impossible to love a real woman. He only loved their original incarnations, when he first met them and they still pretended with all their makeup and high heels– when they never farted or complained and flirted with their eyes, when there was late night conversations and trips to the beach. Then came the nagging and the constant requests for jewelry. The stories would repeat themselves and the bitching about work would start. And then the red hot intense regret for having said “I love you,” would appear. Because then he realized that he didn’t love them at all. And then one of them got pregnant. After years of the women, he was excited for years of children. If ever a man could love another – it would be his own child.

The child came. A daughter. And yet he did not love her. He tried to talk about this with the girl’s mother and she told him that he would learn to love the child. That he better learn to love the child. But months passed and he never learned. The little girl was nothing but a blinking crying eating pooping breathing cooing rolling smiling screaming needing thing. It was to him an itch. It had only to be scratched and he felt nothing more than that. He resigned himself to live this way, loving neither his girlfriend nor his child. But then he watched her with the baby. He watched her love it and hold it and pet it sweetly and he realized that he would never feel that – only that he needed to. More months passed and the need to feel that love consumed him. He wanted to love the child, feel connected to his child. And yet he never did. So one night he left. And that was all.

The experience changed him though. His life was now in total pursuit of love. When he found a woman he believed he loved, he quickly proposed and they wed and started a family. This, his first real wife, kept him constantly connected to the baby. He went to all her doctor appointments, read all the literature, attended la maze classes, and stayed in the delivery room when the child was born. He was even there when the nurse handed his wife the child. She held it, wrapped in its little pink blanket and smiled up at him. He placed his arms around her and smiled back, waiting for her to pull the blanket away from its face, so he could look into its brand new eyes. When she did, he looked down on it and saw – to his complete horror – that it was wearing the same face as his first daughter. And he knew instantly that he did not love her and never would. His wife never understood why he filed for divorce, but she quickly realized that she had no choice in the matter, because one night he left. And that was all.

The room was reflecting deep blue now. The sun was completely gone from the world outside the windows and the night had crept in and filled the house. It was distantly quiet, except for the rhythmic breathing of his first son against his chest. He had been holding the child for nearly an hour now, and still, the child was just a being that clung to him. Perhaps this is all there is, he thought. Perhaps love is all an illusion and he is the only one who knows it. Perhaps love is left to the young and he was too old now. Perhaps love was something that had to be earned. Perhaps his heart can only feel pain and he can’t feel love in the same way. Perhaps love is only something you can see, something you can say, someway you can act. Perhaps love is not at all something that can be. Perhaps this is love.

He lay the tiny boy back in its bed. He stood over it, watching it again. It wasn’t moving anymore. Now it was just a still, quiet thing, blending inherently into all the other still, quiet things in the room. Without the warmth of this child against his chest, he didn’t feel anything at all toward it. And the warmth was quickly cooling. He walked towards the door, his large white sneakers swishing against the carpet. He pushed the shiny gold handle down and the door was released from its shell in the wall. He passed through the hole and out into the empty hall. He peered into his own bedroom and saw his wife sleeping inside the wide white bed. He then instantly glanced down the hall to the front door. The streetlights from outside painted the floor like the white lines outlining a road. He began slowly churning towards them, the warm lights, like a mosquito into a zapper. When he reached the door he looked outside at a world of possibilities. He grabbed for the door handle and gripped it tight so that his knuckles turned white. He squeezed it so desperately he could feel tiny beads of sweat forming in the palm of his hands. Pain began flowing through each finger in his clenched claw. He turned the knob and ripped the door open. Only it didn’t open. His hand flew off the knob, but the door remained in the wall, bolted by the lock. He turned away from the windows and threw his back against the door. He caught his breath and looked at his world. A dark hallway. And that was all.

He moved away from the door and back to the bedroom he shared with his wife. He used his feet to remove his shoes, one at a time. He didn’t even bother to take his clothes off. He just pulled the blanket off the bed and slipped inside its warm pocket. He shuffled over to the side his wife was sleeping on and wrapped his arms around her, wishing only for the connection body heat provides. She breathed in and quietly moaned. “I love you,” she whispered into the blueness. The pain returned to his heart. To her, this was love. But he could not bring himself to respond in like. So he closed his eyes and fell into a deep sleep.


Her eyes flew open. She held her breath and waited for his response. It did not come. She breathed in the air, the void, the space where she should have heard “I love you too,” and it made her sick. And so she lay awake for many hours wondering, “Is that all?”