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.