Tina said, “You’ve thought about this a lot, Cojo.”
“I got a gay cousin,” he said. “A homosexual. Lenny. He fucks men, and that’s not right and it makes me sick, but that’s not why he’s a fag. He’s a fag because whenever someone calls him fag, it’s me who ends up in a fight, not him. He’s a fag because he won’t stand up for himself. Imagine: your own cousin a fag like that. That’s how it is to be me. Not just one but two fags in the family—Lenny the homofag and don’t forget about Niles the regular fag who all he does is chase girls—but I’m the only one can say it, right? About how my family’s got some fags in it, I mean. Don’t you ever bring it up to me. It’s like a big secret, and tell the truth it makes me uncomfortable to talk about, so let’s just stop talking about it, okay?”
Joe was always talking to girls about Lenny. Sometimes Lenny had cancer and sometimes he was a retard. In 1999, he was usually Albanian. But there wasn’t any Lenny. I know all Joe’s cousins. So do the Christamestas. Lenny was fiction. But I didn’t say. If he did have a cousin Lenny, and this Lenny was a gay, Cojo would defend his cousin Lenny against people who called Lenny fag. So Cojo was telling a certain kind of truth. And it never really mattered to Tina, anyway. She’d just wanted to know Joe cared what she thought of him, and the effort it took him to come up with that bullshit about fags and assholes—that made it obvious he cared. And Joe is definitely crazy for Tina. He discusses it with me. All the things he wants to buy her. Vacations on islands with sailboats and mangos, fucking her on a hammock. They’d still never fucked, but they mashed pretty often. So often it was comfortable. So comfortable they started in the backseat of the car, which was not comfortable for me, sitting next to Nancy, who’s staring at the carton of patties in her lap while the sister gets mauled. I hit as many potholes as I could. The Ike’s got thousands.
Finally we arrived at the wrong barbecue. We were supposed to go to 514 Greenway and we went to 415. It was my fault. I wrote it down wrong when Sensei Mike told us at the dojo on Friday.
But 415 was raging. Fifty, forty people. Mostly middle-aged guys wearing Oxfords and sandals. Some of them had wives, but there weren’t any babies, which always spooks me a little, a barbecue without babies. Like if you ever had a father who shaved off his mustache.
It took us a few minutes of looking around for Sensei Mike before we noticed this banner hanging off the fence. It said HAPPY TENURE, PROFESSOR SCHINKl! By then, we all had bottles of beer in our hands. The beers tasted yeasty. They were from Belgium. That’s what set the whole thing off.
The four of us were half-sitting along the edge of the patio table, trying to decide if it was more polite to finish the beers there or take them with us to look for Sensei Mike’s house, when this guy came up and made a show of adjusting his sunglasses. First he just lowered them down the bridge of his nose so we could see one of his eyebrows raise up. But then he was squinting at us over the frames and he had a hand on his hip. He stayed that way for a couple of wheezy breaths, then tore the sunglasses off his face with the other hand and held them up in the air behind his ear like he was gonna swat us. Instead, he let the shades dangle and he said, “Hmmmmmm.” The sound of that got the attention of some other people. They weren’t crowding up or anything, but they were looking at us.
The guy said, “Hmmmmmm” again, but with more irritation than the first time. Like a whining, almost.
“How you doing?” Cojo said to him. Nancy leaned into me, but it was instinct, nothing to make a big deal of. Tina held her beer close. Cojo was smiling, which is not a good thing for him to do around people who don’t know him. His smile looks like he’s asking you to stop making him smile. It’s got no joy. It’s because of his smile that I retrieve the cars when we work the lot together. If customers tip, it’s usually on the way out.
Real slow and loud, the guy said, “How’s. your Belgian. beer?”
So the beer was his and he was attached to it in some sick way. Like fathers and the end-piece of the roast beef. He wasn’t anyone’s father, though, this guy. He was being a real prick about the beer is what he was, but it was the wrong barbecue and he was harmless so far. He was tofu in khakis. About as rough as a high school drama teacher. Still, he could’ve been Schinkl for all we knew, so he didn’t get hit.
“You want one?” Cojo said. He said, “I think there’s one left in the cooler by the grill.”
The guy stared at Joe, just to let him know that he’d heard what Joe said but was ignoring him. Then he spun on Nancy. He said, “Is that ground chuck in your lap, young lady? Do you mean to wash down those patties of ground chuck with my imported. Belgian. beer?” He poked the meat.
I said, “Hey.”
“Hay’s for horses,” he said, the fucken creep.
A woman in the crowd—they were crowding up now—said, “Calm down, Byron.”
He poked the meat again, hard. Busted a hole in the plastic wrap. Nancy flinched and I had that fucker in an armlock before the meat hit the ground. Joe dumped out his beer and broke the bottle on the table edge. We moved in front of the Christamestas, like shields. I had Byron bent in front of me, huffing and puffing.
I didn’t want the girls to see us get beat down, but I thought about afterward, about Nancy holding my hands at my chest and wiping the blood from my face with disinfected cottonballs, how I could accidentally confess my love and not be held responsible since I’d have a serious concussion.
Byron said, “Let go.”
“You got a thin voice,” I told him.
I pulled his wrist back a couple degrees. His fingers danced around.
Every guy in that yard was creeping toward us, saying “Hey” and “Hey now.” There were too many of them, broken bottle or no. All we had left was wiseass tough-guy shit. “Hey,” they said. And Joe said, “Hay’s for horses,” and I forced a laugh through my teeth like I was supposed to. They kept creeping. Little baby steps. Tina whispered to Nancy, “Can we go? Let’s just go.”
“Just let go of me!” Byron said. “Let go of me!”
I said, “What!”
He shut his mouth and the crowd stopped moving. They stopped right behind where the patio met the grass. That’s when it occurred to me the reason they weren’t pummeling us was Byron. They didn’t want me to damage him. And that meant that I controlled them. I thought: We got a hostage. I thought: All we have to do is take him out the gate on the side of the house, get him to the car, then drop him in the street and drive off. I was gonna tell Joe, but then Nancy started talking.
“Do you guys know Sensei Mike?” she said.
This chubby drunk guy was wobbling at the front of the crowd. He said, “What?” But it sounded like “Whud?” That’s how I knew he was a lisper, even before he started lisping. Because he had adenoid problems. The first lisper I ever knew in grade school had adenoid problems. Brett Novak. He said his own name, “Bred Novag.” Mine he said, “Jag Gragow.” When people called him a lisper, I didn’t know what a lisper was, so I decided he was a lisper not just because of what he did to s sounds, but because of what he did to t sounds and k sounds, too. So I thought this chubby drunk guy was a lisper, because I used to be wrong about what a lisper was and so “lisper” is the first thing I think when I hear adenoid problems. But since the chubby guy turned out to be a lisper after all, my old wrongness made it so I was right. It was like if Nancy wore hot pink. The color would look sexy on her, and because it would look sexy on her, I’d say it was hot pink, and I’d be right, even though I didn’t know what I was saying. I’d be right because of an old misunderstanding.
“Sensei Mike?” said Nancy. “We came for Sensei Mike.” Her voice was trembling. I could’ve killed everybody.
The guy said, “Thenthaimigue? Ith that thome thort of thibboleth?”
This got laughs. The crowd thought it was very clever for the lisper to say a word like shibboleth to us.
But fuck them for thinking I don’t know shibboleth. Some people don’t, but I do. It’s from t
he Old Testament. In CCD they told us we shouldn’t read the Old Testament till we were older because it was violent and confusing and totally Christless, so I read some of it (I skipped Leviticus and quit at Kings). The part with shibboleth is in Judges: There were the Ephrathites who were these people who couldn’t make the sound sh. They were at war with the Gileadites. The Gileadites controlled all the crossings of the Jordan River, and the main thing they didn’t want was for the Ephrathites to get across the river. The problem was the Ephrathites looked exactly like the Gileadites and spoke the same language, too, so if an Ephrathite came to one of the crossings, the Gileadites had almost no way of telling that he was an Ephrathite. Not until Jephthah, who was the leader of the Gileadites, remembered how Ephrathites couldn’t make the sh sound—that’s when he came up with the idea to make everyone who wanted to cross the river say the word shibboleth. If they could say “Shibboleth,” they could pass, but if they couldn’t say it, it meant they were an enemy and they got slain. So shibboleth was this code word, but it didn’t work like a normal code word. A normal code word is a secret—you have to prove you know what it is. Shibboleth, though—it wasn’t any secret. Jephthah would tell you what it was. What mattered was how you said it. How you said it is what saved your life, or ended it.
I said to the lisper, “I know what’s a shibboleth, and Sensei Mike’s no shibboleth. And you’re no Jephthah, either.” It came out wormy and know-it-all sounding. I sounded like I cared what they thought of me. Maybe I did. I don’t think so, though.
“Are you jogueing?” he said. “Whud gind of brude are you? Do you offden find yourthelf engaging in meda-converthathions?” He pronounced the t in often, the prick, and on top of it, he turned it into a fucken d.
All those guys laughed anyway. It was funnier to them than the shibboleth joke. It was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.
And I was sick of getting laughed at. And I was sick of people asking me questions that weren’t questions.
I pulled on Byron’s arm and he moaned. Cojo slapped him on the chops and the lisper stepped back into the crowd to hide.
The crowd started shifting. But not forward. Not in any direction really, not for too long. It swelled in one place and thinned in another, like a water balloon in a fist. It was in my fist.
I saw the lisper’s head craned up over the shoulder of a guy who’d snuck to the front, and that’s when I knew.
They didn’t stop creeping up at the patio because they were scared of what I’d do to their friend and his arm. They stopped at the patio to give us space. They stopped at the patio so I could do whatever I’d do to Byron and they could watch.
I said to Nancy, “You and Tina go get the car, okay?”
Nancy reached in my pocket for the keys and whispered, “Be careful.” Then Tina kissed Joe. The girls ran off. It could’ve been a war movie. It could’ve been Joe and I going to the front in some high-drama war movie. It was a little hammy, but that didn’t bother me.
As soon as I was sure the girls were clear, I asked Joe, with my eyes and eyebrows, if he thought we should run for it.
He told me with his shoulders and his chin that he thought it was a good idea.
Then I got an inspiration. I started yelling at the top of my lungs: “AHHHHHH!”
The whole crowd went pop-eyed and stepped back and stepped back and kept stepping back. I got a huge lung capacity. I think I yelled for about a minute. I yelled till my throat bled and I couldn’t yell anymore. Then I dropped Byron, and we took off.
Nancy was just pulling out of the parking spot when we got to the car. Some of the sickos from the barbecue ran out onto the street, and one of them was shouting, “We’ll call the police!”
We still didn’t know Sensei Mike’s right address and the girls decided it was probably better to get out of Glen Ellyn, so we headed back to Chicago. When we got to the Christamesta house, Tina and Joe went inside and I followed Nancy around the neighborhood on foot, not saying anything. I don’t know how long that lasted. It was dark, though. We ended up at the park at Iowa and Rockwell, under the tornado slide, sitting in pebbles, our backs against the ladder. Nancy opened her purse and pulled out a Belgian beer. I popped it with my lighter and gave it to her. She sipped and gave it back. I sipped and gave it back.
I’ve told a lot of girls I was in love with them. There’s some crack-ass wisdom about it being easier to say when you don’t mean it, but that’s not why I didn’t say it to Nancy. I didn’t say it because every time I’ve said it, I meant it. If I said it again, it would be like all those other times, and all those other times—it went away. And silence wasn’t any holier than saying it. Just more drama for its own sake. All of it’s been done before. It’s been in TV shows and comic books and it’s how your parents met. And there’s nothing wrong with drama, I don’t think. And there’s nothing wrong with drama for its own sake, either. What’s wrong is drama that doesn’t know it’s drama. And what’s wrong is doing the same thing everyone else does and thinking you’re original, thinking you’re unpredictable.
I said, “Maybe it’s cause he wanted racing stri—” and the sound cut off. My throat was killing me from the yelling and it closed up.
Nancy said, “Your voice is broken.”
And that was an unexpected way to put it, drama or no.
I swigged the beer again and told her, all raspy, “Maybe it’s racing stripes. The guy wanted racing stripes.”
“What?” she said.
“Don’t ‘what’ me,” I said. I gulped more beer. I said, “He wanted to paint racing stripes and the city wouldn’t let him. There’s a code against painting stripes on city vehicles. So every day he ties the balloons on the grille. And maybe that’s a half-ass way to have racing stripes, but then maybe he figures stripes on a garbage truck aren’t really racing stripes to begin with, so he doesn’t mind using balloons. Or maybe he does mind, but he keeps it to himself because he’s not a complainer. Maybe he just keeps tying balloons on the grille, telling himself they’re as good as racing stripes, and maybe one day they will be.”
“That’s a sad story,” Nancy said. She carved SAD! in the pebbles with the bottle of beer.
“How’s it sad?” I said.
Under SAD! she carved a circle with an upside-down smile.
“It’s not sad,” I said.
She said, “I don’t believe that.”
“But I’m telling you,” I said.
She said, “Then I don’t believe you, Jack.”
And did I kiss her then? Did Nancy Christamesta close her eyes and tilt her head back, away from the moon? Did she open her mouth? Did she open it just a little, just enough so I could feel her breath on my chin before she would kiss me and then did I finally kiss her?
Fuck you.
Acknowledgments
Many of the stories in here were begun—and a couple or three of them finished—while I attended the Syracuse University MFA Program in Creative Writing. My time there was invaluable to me, and to this collection. It was also inexpressibly joyful. Thank you, teachers: George Saunders, Arthur Flowers, Mary Karr, Mary Gaitskill, Christopher Kennedy, Mary Caponegro, and Brooks Haxton. And thank you, early readers, workshopmates, and alumni pallies: Christian TeBordo, Salvador Plascencia, Eric Rosenblum, Phil LaMarche, Thomas Yagoda, Erin Brooks Worley, Keith Gessen, Ellen Litman, Laura Farmer, Miciah Bay Gault, Stephanie Carpenter, Rebecca Curtis, Adam Desnoyers, Jeff Parker, Nina Shope, Christian Moody, Sarah Harwell, Courtney Queeney, Chris Narozny, Christopher Boucher, and Daniel Torday.
Thank you, Eli Horowitz, for always showing me—or at least trying to show me—what I’ve been failing to see. This book is better than it was before you read it.
Thank you, Adam Krefman, Juliet Litman, Michelle Quint, and the rest of the McSweeney’ses for all the energy you’ve put into making this and the last one happen.
Thank you to the editors of those publications in which stories from this book originally appeared: Jodee Stanley, Jordan Ba
ss, Rob Spillman, Danit Brown, Elizabeth Hodges, and Michael Archer.
Thank you, Adam Novy and Sid Feldman, for not telling me to go away when I was young and annoying(er) and didn’t know what to read.
Thank you, family, Atara and Lanny and Paula and Rachel Levin, for way too much to even pretend to begin to name—for all those things that make you the second-hardest people in the world for me to properly thank.
Thank you, Leslie Lockett, Leslie Lockett, Leslie Lockett, Leslie Lockett, Leslie Lockett, Leslie Lockett, Leslie Lockett.
About the Author
Adam Levin is the author of the novel The Instructions, a finalist for the 2010 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and winner of both the 2011 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the inaugural Indie Booksellers Choice Award. For his short stories, Levin has won the Summer Literary Seminars Fiction Contest, as well as the Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize. His fiction has appeared in publications including Tin House, Esquire, and New England Review. He lives in Chicago, where he teaches Creative Writing at the School of the Art Institute.