Super Sad True Love Story

honestly, how little I cared about all these difficult economic details! How desperately I wanted to forsake these facts, to open a smelly old book or to go down on a pretty young girl instead. Why couldn’t I have been born to a better world?

The National Guard was out in force at the Staten Island Ferry building. A crowd of poor office women wearing white sneakers, their groaning ankles covered with sheer hose, waited patiently to walk past a sandbagged checkpoint by the gate to the ferry. An American Restoration Authority sign warned us that “IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS CHECKPOINT (‘THE OBJECT’). BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF THE OBJECT AND IMPLIED CONSENT.”

Occasionally, some of us were pulled aside, and I worried about the otter flagging me in Rome, the asshole videotaping me on the plane, the asterisk that still appeared when my mighty credit score flashed on the Credit Poles, the continued disappearance of Nettie Fine (no response to my daily messages, and if they could get my American mama, what could they do to my actual parents?). Men in civilian clothes zapped our bodies and our apparati with what looked like a small tubular attachment of an old-school Electrolux vacuum cleaner and asked us both to deny and to imply consent to what they were doing to us. The passengers seemed to take the whole thing in stride, the Staten Island cool kids especially silent and deferential, shaking a little in their vintage hoodies. I overheard several young men of color whispering to one another “deee-ny and im-ply,” but the older women quickly shushed them with bites of “Restoration ’thority!” and “Punch you in the mouth, boy.”

Maybe it was Howard Shu’s doing, but somehow I got through the checkpoint without being stopped.

Once disembarked on the Staten Island side, I braced myself for a walk. The main drag, Victory Boulevard, ramps uphill with a San Franciscan vigor. These parts of Staten Island, St. George and Tompkinsville, were once completely off the grid. Immigrants used to wash up here from Poland, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and especially Mexico. They worked the storefronts of their respective ethnic restaurants and also ran dusty groceries, check-cashing places, and twenty-centavo-a-minute phone booths. Outside the stores, black men used to lounge in puffy jackets, tottering sleepily over milk crates. I remember this ’hood well, because when my buddies and I were right out of college we’d all take the ferry to raid this spicy Sri Lankan joint, where for nine bucks you could eat an insane shrimp pancake and some kind of ethereal red fish while baby roaches tried to clamber up your trouser leg and drink your beer. Now, of course, the Sri Lankan place, the roaches, the somnolent minorities were gone, replaced by half-man, half-wireless bohemians ramming their baby strollers up and down the hump of Victory Boulevard, while kids from nearby New Jersey cruised past the outrageously priced Victorians in their Hyundai rice rockets, wishing they could work Media or Credit.

Cervix is exactly what you would expect from yet another stupid Staten Island old man’s bar cleaned up and turned into a hangout for Media and Credit types, fake oily paintings from basement rec rooms of yore, hot women in their early twenties looking to supplement their electronic lives, so-so men in desperately cool clothes scratching the upper-thirty limit and pushing deep into the next decade. My boys fit the bill exactly. There they were, crowded around a table, their apparati out, speaking into their shirt collars while thumbing Content into their pearly devices, two curly, dusky heads completely lost to the world around them: Noah Weinberg and Vishnu Cohen-Clark, fellow alumni of what used to be called New York University, that indispensable local educator of bright-enough women and men, fellow romantic sufferers, fellow lovers of spicy words and endless arcana, fellow travelers down the under-lubricated craphole of life.

“My Nee-groes!” I cried. They did not hear me. “My Nee-groes!”

Noah jumped up, not in the way he used to back in school, with an ambitious sprinter’s leap, but quick enough to nearly upset the table. With that stupid, inevitable smile, those blazing teeth, that spinning, lying mouth, those gleaming enthusiast’s eyes, he turned the camera nozzle of his apparat my way to record my lumbering arrival. “Heads up, manitos, here he comes!” he shouted. “Get out your butt plugs and get ready to groove. This is a ‘Noah Weinberg Show!’ exclusive. The arrival of our personal number-one Nee-gro from a year of bullshit self-discovery in Rome, Italia. We’re streaming at you live, folks. He’s walking toward our table in real time! He’s got that goofy ‘Hey, I’m just one of the guys!’ smile. One hundred sixty pounds of Ashkenazi second-generation, ‘My parents are poor immigrants, so you gotta love me’ flava: Lenny ‘freak and geek’ Abramov!”

I waved to Noah, and then, hesitantly, to his apparat. Vishnu came at me with open arms and with nothing but joy on his face, a man possessed of roughly the same short-to-average height (five foot nine) and moral values as myself, a man whose choice in women-a tempered, bright young Korean girl named Grace who also happens to be a dear friend of mine-I can only second. “Lenny,” he said, lingering over the two syllables of my name, as if they mattered. “We missed you, buddy.” Those simple words made me tear up and stammer something mildly embarrassing into Vishnu’s ear. He had on the same SUK DIK bodysuit as my young co-worker at Post-Human Services, although his muzzle was gray and unshaven and his eyes looked tired and ITP, lending him a proper age. The three of us hugged one another close, in a kind of overdone way, touching buttocks and flailing at each other genitally. We all grew up with a fairly tense idea of male friendship, for which the permissive times now allowed us to compensate, and often I wished that our crude words and endless posturing were code for affection and understanding. In some male societies, slang and ritualistic embraces form the entire culture, along with the occasional call to take up the spear.

As I hugged each boy and patted him on the shoulder, I noticed that we were surreptitiously sniffing one another for signs of decay, and that Vishnu and Noah were wearing some kind of spicy deodorant, perhaps as a way to mask their changing scent. We had each embarked on our very late thirties, a time when the bravado of youth and the promise of glorious exploits that had once held us together would begin to fade, as our bodies began to shed, slacken, and shrink. We were still as friendly and caring as any group of men could be, but I surmised that even the shuffle toward extinction would prove competitive for us, that some of us might shuffle faster than others.

“Harm Reduction time,” Vishnu said. I still couldn’t figure out what the hell Harm Reduction meant, although the youth in the Eternity Lounge couldn’t shut up about it. “What does the wandering Jew-Nee-gro want? Leffe Brune or Leffe Blonde?”

“Blonde me,” I said, tossing a twenty-dollar bill bearing the silver authenticity stripe and the holographic words “Backed by Zhongguo Renmin Yinhang/People’s Bank of China,” hoping the drinks were unpegged to the yuan, so that I could collect some serious change. The money was promptly thrown back at me, and I enjoyed Vishnu’s kind smile.

“Nee-gro, please,” he said.

Noah took an orator’s deep, rehearsed breath. “Okay, putas and huevons. I’m still streaming right at you. Eight p.m. on the dot. It’s Rubenstein time in America. It’s a motherfucking Bipartisan evening here in the People’s Republic of Staten Island, and Lenny Abramov has just ordered a Belgian beer for seven yuan-pegged dollars.”

Noah aimed his apparat’s camera nozzle at me, marking me as the subject for his evening news segment. “The Nee-gro must tell all,” Noah said. “The returning Nee-gro must eh-jew-muh-cate our viewers. Start with the women you’ve done in Italy.” He switched to a falsetto voice: “‘Fuck-ah me-ah, Leonardo! Fuck-ah me now-ah, you beeg-ah heeb-ah!’ Then give us the pasta lowdown. Verbal at me, Lenny. Shoot me an Image of a lonely Abramov slurping up noodles at the neighborhood trat. Then the whole return-of-the-prodigal- Nee-gro shit. What’s it like to be a gentle, unsuspecting Lenny Abramov just back to Rubenstein’s one-party America?”

Noah hadn’t always been this angry and caustic, but there was something disproportionate about his efforts these days, as if he could no longer keep track of how his personal decline paralleled that of our culture and state. Before the publishing industry folded, he had published a novel, one of the last that you could actually go out and buy in a Media store. Lately he did “The Noah Weinberg Show!,” which had a grand total of six sponsors, whom he struggled to mention casually throughout his rants-a medium-sized escort service in Queens, several ThaiSnak franchises in Brownstone Brooklyn, a former Bipartisan politician who now ran security consulting for Wapachung Contingency, the well-armed security division of my employer, and I can’t remember the rest. The show got hit about fifteen thousand times a day, which put him somewhere in the lower-middle echelon of Media professionals. His girlfriend, Amy Greenberg, is a pretty well-known Mediawhore who spends about seven hours a day streaming about her weight. As for Vishnu, my buddy does Debt Bombing for ColgatePalmoliveYum!BrandsViacomCredit, hanging around street corners and zapping people’s apparati with Images of themselves taking on more debt.