Chapter 7

Maria and I were looking at houses. I don’t think that she actually comprehended the obscenity of my wealth until we started the process. We were sitting at the kitchen table, eating breakfast, and Maria said to me, “What about this house?”
She held in her hand the real estate page of the newspaper, and the house that she showed me was not particularly impressive. It was a lovely starter house, I suppose, for those who had recently broken into the ranks of the middle class, but the middle class can’t afford what it used to be able to, and while I wasn’t necessarily looking to purchase a mansion, a looming architectural monstrosity that was full of empty space and superfluous rooms, neither was I looking for the sort of three-bedroom house that my grandparents had used to raise seven children.
“Not to sound like I’m being a snob, darlin,’ but I was thinking about something a lot nicer.”
“Sidney, really look at it. It’s a great find: you’d be getting a lot for your money.”
“Okay, honey, but money really isn’t the issue here. I mean, I could afford to buy the house that I‘m living in now, if I really wanted to, and if the owner was selling.”
“Really? This house has to be worth, like four or five million dollars.”
“Yeah, I think it was appraised at five point three a little while ago.”
“And you could afford it?”
“I could afford to pay cash for it, darlin.’ I wasn’t kidding when I said that being a hack writer paid really well. There really isn’t a house in the paper that I couldn’t afford to buy.”
“I had no idea. I always assumed that you were comfortable, not…”
“I think the phrase that you’re looking for is ‘filthy, stinking, rich.’ I try not to make a big deal about it.”
“Huh. No offense, honey, but why don’t you wear nicer clothes?”
“Brand loyalty, mostly. You know how I have all those work pants? I started wearing them when I was in high school and was working construction. They last forever. They’re practically bulletproof. I figure the least I can do for a company that makes such excellent pants is keep wearing them, even though I can afford more expensive clothes. Besides, I’m really not that comfortable with all this money. I mean, I’ve been living with four other guys for the last couple of years. It’s not like I’m living a decadent life of ostentation. I mostly just do the same sort of things that I’ve always done.”
“I guess that makes sense. You should start dressing better anyway, though.”
“Only if you pick the clothes out for me, darlin.’ So, do you really want to start looking at houses?”
“Yes. I mean, the lease is almost up on my apartment, and I’m going to need someplace to stay.”
“You could always stay here while we’re looking.”
“Yeah, but I’m really excited about the prospect of having a house of my very own.”
“Very well. So what kind of house do you think that I should get?”
“I don’t really know. I mean, I had an idea, but apparently you want to get something a lot nicer.”
“Okay. So how big do you want it to be? Do you want it as big as this house, or do you want something smaller, or what?”
“Well, I think that if it were just the two of us, a house this big would be a little much. What would we do with three living rooms and seven bedrooms?”
“Yeah, I think you’re right. I think it ought to have at least a couple extra bedrooms, for guests, but it doesn’t need to be huge at all. I guess what we really ought to do is go look at houses. The real estate page isn’t very helpful at all.”
“At least it gives us somewhere to start.”
“That’s true, but I’m pretty sure that Carl knows at least one good real estate agent. I’m sure that we could get somebody else to do all the legwork. That way we can just enjoy each other’s company.” Maria smiled a loving smile, the sort that reminds you exactly what it is that you love about someone else.
Really, the smile was more than a smile, it was a single gesture that somehow managed to pack everything about her into a single brief moment. But there was also a little bit of timidity to the thing.
“What are you thinking?” I asked her, hoping to get to the bottom of the doubt that seemed to be creeping in around the edges.
“Nothing,” she said, in that particular way that women have of saying “nothing,” but meaning a whole plurality of nameless somethings, the likes of which men will probably never deduce without outside help.
“Come on, darlin.’ What is it?”
“Are you worried that this is moving too quickly? I mean, we’ve only been dating a few months, and we’re already moving in together.”
“Honestly, it doesn’t really worry me at all. We already spend almost all of our free time together, and you sleep here most nights. We get along. I really don’t think that living together will be a problem at all, just as far as us getting along goes.”
“And what about moving in together as a big step in our relationship? Do you worry about that?”
“Not at all, darlin.’ Listen, I love you, and I really think that this relationship is going someplace. I’m don’t think that moving in together is going to change the way that I feel about you, and I don’t think that it’s going to do anything but make our relationship better and stronger. And practically speaking, it makes a lot of sense. I’m at a point in my life where I want to buy my own house, but I absolutely don’t want to live alone. And it just so happens that I have a wonderful, beautiful, intelligent girlfriend whose lease is ending pretty soon, and I absolutely want you to be living with me instead of sharing a room in some dumpy apartment with pothead roommates who are strangely hostile to me, like they think that I’m stealing some family heirloom of theirs to hawk in pawnshop. But if you’re worried about it, we don’t have to move in together. I mean, this isn’t all about me by any means, and if you want to wait or feel like we’re moving too fast, that’s completely fine with me. Right now, making our relationship work is priority number one.” Never mind the fact that she was the one who brought up moving in together in the first place.
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. Does this mean that you don’t want to move in together? Like I said, I’m all right with it either way, but I’d kind of like to have an answer yes or no, if at all possible.”
“Honestly, honey, I’m really not sure. It’s not that I don’t love you, or that I think that anything is wrong with our relationship, but I’m a little overwhelmed by all the changes that are happening in my life. I mean, right now I’m a student who shares a room with another girl in a pretty small apartment, but if we move in together, by the time it will happen I’ll be done with school, living off of my boyfriend, hopefully working full time…I just don’t know if I’m ready to be that mature. It’s like we were talking about the other day, I’d like to feel like I have spontaneity and adventure left in my life. If we moved in together…I don’t know, it just seems like if we moved in together, we’d be living some sort of domestic cliché.”
Honestly, if we lived in together, I was kind of hoping that we would both just stay at home all day, which isn’t a domestic cliché, as neither of us would be working, but rather living off of my absurdly large bank account and hopefully engaging in an even more absurd amount of sexual activity. At no time during the many hours that I have spent daydreaming about this possible future was a picket fence involved. Or even her cooking. I kind of planned on hiring a cook, and a maid, and a gardener.
“Well, if it’s going to freak you out, darlin,’ we shouldn’t do it. I mean, you were the one who brought it up in the first place, and it’s not like we won’t still spend time together. I absolutely, more than anything else, want you to be happy with our relationship.”
“Are you sure? I feel like kind of a bitch, bringing up moving in together, and now it seems like I’m backing out of it. I’m really not, I promise. I just need some more time to think about it.”
“It really is okay, hon. I don’t mind at all. Do you still want to help me pick out the house, though? And I guess furniture, too.”
“Yes, of course. God, I’ve never actually gotten to shop for a house or, you know, furniture that goes together to make a well-decorated room.”
“Good. I’m going to find out who Carl knows, and see if we can’t go check out some houses.”
“Okay.”

The first house that we looked at was four bedrooms, three-and-a-half baths, with parquet floors, a sunken whirlpool tub, a nice view, in a nice safe neighborhood, where everyone was rich, with luxury automobiles parked in their driveways and wives with fake breasts and fake fidelity and very small, irritating dogs. All of the lawns looked like putting greens. They were so perfect that I suspected that they had laid down artificial turf.
A woman stood on the lawn next door. She was shod in stilettos, and seemed desperate to hover above the ground for fear of sullying them. She was just standing, not doing anything at all, and something about her pose forced you to eye her from toes to head. Shapely calves sprouted from her feet, and they transitioned into thighs and buttocks tightly wrapped in skirt and that ebbed and flowed in such a fashion as to render the word “contours” fantastically erotic. Her unbuttoned blouse revealed freckled cleavage.
She had blank, brown eyes with faint crow’s feet that seemed to stem from worry, although what she had to worry about, I don’t know. Perhaps, in a delicious contrapasso, the worry lines had been caused by her fear of wrinkles.
I don’t think that she moved the entire time that we were outside, except to breath and blink. We went inside.
The living room of the house had a strange aversion of corners, and so the walls were joined by curves. It’s windows opened upon a tremendous view of the city, rolling hills and huddled buildings and the thin haze of car exhaust that hung over the whole affair. I imagine that the previous owner had spent a great deal of time standing at the window and laughing at the vulgar sprawl. Maybe he had often shouted, “I am Ozymandias, King of Kings!”
I would if I lived there.
The bathroom was very shiny, so much so that I began to doubt that anyone had ever used it. The bright work lacked so much as a water stain, and our images were reflected endlessly, warped by the shape of the metal in which our miniature copies abided. The floor and walls of the bathroom were tiled in glossy tan with exquisitely white grout. The shower was enclosed by transparent glass and had five showerheads.
“Look, honey,” I said to Maria. “It has a porno shower.”
The bedroom had a recess that ran the entire length of one wall at about shoulder-height. The real estate agent said it was a built-in bookshelf. The walls begged for abstract art.
The house was haunted by upper-class ennui. As far as hauntings go, I doubt it would have been particularly imposing. I don’t think that ennui is particularly inclined to rearrange furniture or brutally murder people or anything like that. It seems a little too apathetic for that sort of thing.
The second house was more or less the same thing, as was the third, and the fourth, and the fifth.
It was actually kind of spectacular, because it made me wonder exactly how many hard-scrabble people were fighting tooth and nail to earn such a house. I was touring the American Dream. It seemed like it lacked imagination. The houses were like diamond rings on corpulent fingers clutching at a homogenous aspiration, bland ornaments that hoped to dazzle the eye with their glitter and the expense of the thing, never mind that there was an endless supply of nearly identical baubles waiting to take their place on the controlled market. To see them was to listen to a prolonged monotone drone.
I began to get the impression that the real estate agent had a quite the glut of nearly identical houses with nearly identical neighbors and nearly identical views, but strangely divergent asking prices, and that he would attempt to show them all to us, until finally, punch drunk from an incessant barrage of homogeny, I caved in and bought one of the houses, only to sell it within a year, having become incredibly frustrated by its utter lack of character. Maria and I discussed it as we drove home one day.
“So what did you think about that one?” I asked her.
“Honestly?”
“Dear God, yes.”
“I couldn’t really tell it apart from all of the others.”
“I couldn’t either. Can you tell me something, honey? What is the difference between eggshell white and off white?”
“I think they’re slightly different shades of white.”
“So why was he making such a big deal about the accent wall that was eggshell white, in a room that was otherwise painted off white?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe our obvious boredom with the houses that he’s been showing us was inspiring acts of desperation. I feel like we should call him and tell him to find us something else to fucking look at. If I see one more identical house, I’m might kill him.”
“Yeah, we should call. I can’t believe that he hadn’t caught on already.”
“Yeah. Can you imagine me living in one of those neighborhoods? It would be like, executive and trophy wife, executive and trophy wife, guy who wears tee shirts and has a bunch of tattoos and just sits around all day, executive and trophy wife…Fuck, if I actually lived there, I’d probably buy a pellet gun and start sniping those little fucking yippy dogs.”
“That’s horrible. They were really cute.”
“Oh, I can’t believe you just said that! I swear to God, if you get one of those annoying little rat-fucking things, I will punch you right in your vagina.”
“You wouldn’t dare. That’s what you like best about me.”
“Shit. You’re absolutely right.”
“Oh, quit sulking and call the real estate guy and get him to find us something else to look at. Or I might punch him in the vagina.”
“Wow. That’s pretty savage, there, hon.”
“Will you just call him, already?”
The real estate agent’s name was Sandy, and he was a slender man who possessed a tremendous capacity for hygiene and dressed as if the sun rising and continued order of the world depended upon the quality of his outfit.
He always wore slacks or jeans with a button down shirt. It was actually kind of impressive, the number of variations he had on that one theme. I think that whoever had been designing the shirts had started creating unnecessary details in order to lend variety to this geriatric staple of the wardrobe.
How anyone looks at twenty vertically striped shirts and is impressed by the novelty of the one with the stripes on the breast pocket slanted to the side is beyond me.
He had a beard that perfectly conveyed the fact that he put a tremendous amount of effort into trimming his facial hair so that it looked like he had two days worth of stubble. He was one of those men who seems to play dodge ball with sexual orientation without ever conclusively acting as if he belonged to one side or the other. I suspect he would have made a spectacular double agent. He seemed vaguely homosexual, but the impression was so slight that you could never completely be sure, and I think that he may have mentioned that he had a girlfriend once.
To be completely honest, his sexual orientation was not even slightly pertinent to our interaction, but the very elusiveness of the thing had begun to cause me to obsess about it.
“Sandy Downs speaking.” He answered his phone in a voice that somehow managed to convey both the sense that he was overjoyed to talk to you and that he was a very busy man, and if you were just wasting his time you should get off the phone without speaking and carry on with your day before he was further inconvenienced.
“Hey, Sandy, it’s Sidney.”
“Oh, hi, Sidney. What can I do for you?”
“Listen, Maria and I were talking, and none of the houses that you showed us were really doing it for us. Is there any chance that you have something a little more eccentric that’s for sale?”
“Eccentric in what sort of way, Sidney?”
“Not to be overly vague, but I have no fucking idea. Just something that has a lot of character, and isn’t in a neighborhood where everyone drives the same luxury sedan and all of their wives go to the same plastic surgeon, and something in which there is absolutely no need to know the difference between eggshell white and off white. Do you have anything like that?”
“Oh, you want something a little edgier? Off the top of my head, there’s only one place that I can think of, and honestly, it would need a lot of work and it’s in a higher price range.”
“That’s okay. I have nothing but free time and money isn’t an object.”
“Okay. I can actually show it to you in half an hour.”
“Yeah, that’s fine.”
“Okay, just let me give you the address.”
“Oh, hold on a second, I have to get a pen. All right, hit me.”
He gave me the address.

“So, like I said, this place needs a lot of work. I was actually trying to get a developer to buy it, because it has a ton of potential if somebody really took the time to turn it into five or six lofts. It has a really retro feel to it.”
The piece of architecture to which Sandy was referring appeared to be one half of an aging brick warehouse building that sat right on the edge of the industrial district, where it met Little Ethiopia, a neighborhood teeming with excellent, delicious Ethiopian food, incense, and a large number of Rastafarian accessories.
Somehow, upon emigrating here, all of the Ethiopians managed to boil their culture down to nag champa, the colors red, green, and yellow, and Haile Selassie, or at least convey that impression to everyone with cordial smiles and the overuse of the moniker, “my friend.” Ethiopians are the most polite and hard-working ethnicity that I have ever encountered. The guy that I buy my cigarettes from has only taken like five days off in the last two years, and he works twelve or sixteen hours shifts. Incredible. Little Ethiopia was pressed up against the less glamorous end of the downtown bar strip.
There was nary a fake breast or undersized lap dog in sight. Nonetheless, I was a little skeptical. “Is this even zoned for residential use, Sandy?”
“Oh, yeah. About a year and a half ago, a bunch of developers got a couple blocks around here rezoned because they realized the sheer amount of square feet just languishing in all of these old factories and warehouses. They’ve converted five or six buildings into some pretty nice lofts, and the influx of people has led to a lot of bars and restaurants being built.”
“Huh.”
“I know, it looks a little rough on the outside, and honestly, it’s not a whole lot more polished on the inside, but it’s the best that I could do. You basically asked me to find a nice house in a shitty neighborhood, which is pretty impossible.”
“Fair enough. Let’s take a look at the inside.”
The inside was pretty Spartan, but it had basically limitless potential. The ceiling was beautiful, a rustic looking thing made out of timbers and wooden beams, with several large skylights. The floor was a slab of concrete pocked with the holes caused by bolts, which had apparently at some point in the past fastened machinery to the ground. There was a reception area in the front, and a small office overlooking the warehouse floor. Otherwise, it was essentially a giant, empty box with a wooden ceiling, some skylights, and centennial brick walls.
I was a little smitten.
“Sandy,” I said, “do you have any idea how much it would cost to put a couple stories inside here, and run electricity and plumbing to all the rooms that we would put in?”
“Not really. I just sell real estate, Sidney. I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m really not a do-it-yourself craftsmen sort of guy.”
“That’s fine. I was just wondering. What do you think about it, Maria?”
“It’s certainly different.”
“That it is. Try and picture this, though, hon. See that skylight above us?”
“Yes.”
“All right, now imagine that the second floor goes along that wall over there, and the third floor goes along that other wall so that the two floors are perpendicular to each other, with a big wooden spiral staircase at the corner where they meet. Or maybe just a regular staircase.
“Right here, under the skylight would be the living room, so that we have a kind of atrium effect going on, and the kitchen could be right over there, and one of the guest bedrooms and a full bath. I’m pretty sure that we can put down whatever kind of flooring that we want to on this concrete, too, so that it would look a little more like a house and less like an industrial space. The second floor could be another two bedrooms and a full bath, and then the third floor could be the master bedroom and then a kind of library or study area or whatever right underneath the other skylight. We could have the second and third floor built so that they’re wooden beams that kind of match the ceiling, and have all the pipes and conduits exposed, but kind of tucked away in corners where it’s not so noticeable, to give the whole thing a really industrial look, but kind of softened by all of the wood.”
“I guess that sounds good. How much would all of that cost, though?”
“I can’t even begin to imagine. I might have to write a couple more books to rebuild my finances afterwards, but that’s only like two months worth of work.”
“I don’t know. I can’t really picture it, somehow.”
It was really too bad that she couldn’t, because in my mind, the empty box had become a fairly stylish place, with a comfortable interior that nevertheless retained the age and character of the place. I was fairly determined to buy the place and make my dream manifest itself as reality. I was practically jumping up and down with excitement.
“I think that it would work out really well.”
“Well, if that’s what you want, it’s fine with me. It’s your money, and you have pretty good taste about that sort of thing, so obviously do what you want. I guess it’s not really how I imagined owning a home would be, though.”
“That is true. But this way we’ll have a decent amount of room, and it’ll actually be somewhat architecturally interesting, but without the shitty cookie-cutter neighbors with identical houses and shit.”
“Okay, honey. I’ve never seen you this exited. You’re like a little kid on Christmas, practically.”
“Oh, you have no idea. I think I just peed a little, I‘m so excited.”
“Well, if you feel that strongly about it, I guess that I like it, too.
“Could you fake a little bit of excitement? If you do a really convincing job, I’ll watch whatever-the-fuck the name of that movie is with the girl who dies at the end, and I’ll cry right along with you. Like, tears streaming down my face, sobbing noisily crying.”
She smiled.
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, mister.”
“Just because I haven’t shown you my feminine side doesn’t mean that I don’t have one.”
“Uh huh. Just out of curiosity, what’s in the other half of the building?” Sandy, who had been trying desperately to make himself inconspicuous, and had developed something of a disgusted look, perhaps because he was getting dusty just standing in the place, perked up at the prospect of usefulness.
“Actually, next door is a bar and brewery.” I could not have been happier.
“Hon, it’s a match made in heaven. There’s literally a brewery next door. It will be the shortest drunk stumble home in the history of humankind.”
“Apparently we’re sold, Sandy.”
“I guess so.”
While considering this potential new home for myself, I had entered into something of a manic state, something akin to the way that a saint views their devotion to God, as if between myself and the empty industrial space there existed some sort of compact in which I would raise it up from its indecorous current state of affairs to create the masterpiece that currently existed only hypothetically within my mind, and in which it would provide me with shelter and satisfaction.
If looked at objectively, I suppose that this sentiment would have to be judged a little odd, having passed upon a queue of exquisitely manicured homes to purchase at greater expense a shabby box of brick and wood, with the implied expense of a significant amount of time and effort to transform the box into a home. Also, the concept that I had in my mind for the place was impractical, and I was as yet unsure as to whether it was physical possible to make this architectural Madonna manifest itself, or if the laws of physics and wit of engineers would prove insufficient to the task.
I can only hope to explain it in a tangential sort of way. When I was younger, I liked to think of myself as a sort of artist, and I whittled away my time writing short stories and drawing and painting and composing songs on my guitar, and while all of my efforts proved mediocre, I have never entirely shaken this false mantle from my shoulders. What I have actually proven quite good at is the mass production of commercially viable novels, with commercial viability defined as the process by which anything meaningful, profound, or true in a way that resonates within the human condition is systematically eradicated so that the vulgar masses will spend money to read things that in no way cause them to reevaluate their lives or their place in the world.
Nevertheless, I still have a tendency to gravitate towards works of fine literature, beautiful paintings and exquisite photography, and while I am incapable of producing such things, I nevertheless still yearn for that sort of achievement, and I suspect that the best that I will be able to do is live vicariously through the work of an architect and a crew of construction workers and engineers while they create for me the idea of a house that twirled cheekily into my head.
All in all, I would say that there is only the most tenuous thread of rationale by which to make sense of my irrational zeal. Maria certainly had trouble understanding my decision, although she was not antagonistic about it.
“I’ve really never seen you so excited,” she said to me on the drive home. “Who knew that you had such a passion for dilapidated old warehouses?”
I glanced over at her and smiled wryly.
“I sure as hell didn’t. To be honest, it caught me a little by surprise.”
“Huh. Well, hopefully you won’t regret the decision.”

James arrived home in a spectacular fit of drunkenness, which had been honed to a razor’s edge of misanthropy and malice by what seemed to be a fair amount of cocaine. The cocaine had convince him that he was impervious to the effects of alcohol, a thesis which had proven tragically untrue, as demonstrated by the poor state of his motor skills. Indeed, he was so drunk that the tide of alcohol had flooded far past his fine motor skills to erode his ability to walk and stand, and also an morals and ethics that he might have once had.
The scene was fairly reminiscent of the evening on which he had won the lottery, with a few exceptions. Although Andrew and Johnny were arguing about some trivial difference upon which Johnny engaged in a stance chosen primarily for its rhetorical superiority, and which appeared to be constantly migrating away from its starting point and towards victory, Maria was taking part, which moderated their hostility, and also their profanity.
The other major difference had to do with the state of James himself. James had been wandering off for several months now, without the slightest mention of his plans to anyone. He would return anonymously in the evening or early morning while we were all asleep, sometimes to bed down with a scrumptious little bit of feminine fluff who had been out trawling for a wealthy husband, sometimes to pass out on the couch. Once, he succumbed to exhaustion with his cheek pressed into his own vomit on the bathroom floor. Cocaine was usually involved in these little alcoholic walkabouts, and he seemed to be consuming it as though determined to jam his entire fortune up his nose, so that it would always be with him wherever he went.
I can’t speak for the rest of the house, but I had grown a little concerned about his behavior. James isn’t a particularly well-mannered drunk, and his newfound and unearned success had only served to roughen the social failings he originally possessed. On his best behavior, James was prone to starting fights, saying inappropriate and derogatory things to women, insulting bouncers and bartenders, prolific regurgitation, and general idiocy.
But he now felt insulated from consequence by his ridiculous wealth, and he behaved very badly. Further, while in his more indigent state he had often gone to the bar with the rest of us to provide physical defense and act as a buffer for his abrasiveness, he had recently abandoned this policy, as he no longer needed us to buy him drinks.
All in all, it seemed a recipe for mild calamity, and it seemed that calamity had chosen this particular evening to strike.
He had a rip in the knee of his jeans, and his shirttails were dirty and flapped loosely on his buttocks like a flag in a breeze. There was dried blood around his nostrils, with a faint smear across his upper lip whence more blood had been wiped away. There was a suspicious wet spot in the crotch of his pants, and although it had dried to the point that it would be impossible to prove anything, or even really discern whether it was actually damp or just a trick of the light, it seemed quite likely that he had pissed himself.
Silence fell over the room, and the general atmosphere was similar to the sinking feeling in your heart when you learned that someone’s loved one has died, and you are left alone with your inability to fully empathize with their loss or lessen the burden of that other person’s grief, no matter how much you might want to.
“What the fuck happened to you?” asked Johnny, spitting into the ever-present bottle of tobacco spit. “You look like you got your ass beat.”
James wobbled on his feet, for a moment appearing to be the pendulum of a metronome turned upside down.
“They wouldn’t fucking give me a shot,” James likely said, although it was difficult to definitively say. The garbled slur that he issued seemed to be somewhere in the neighborhood of that particular sentence, anyway.
“Gee, I wonder why?” said Andrew, acidly.
As he spoke, our doorbell rang, and I went downstairs to answer it. I found at the door a very irate Pakistani man, who informed me with a heavy accent and heavier scent of incense that James had not paid his fare, but had instead urinated on the cab and shouted profanity and racial slurs. The man also informed me that he was very, very upset, and that he was strongly tempted to call the cops. I informed him in a very apologetic tone that James would probably not pay the fare, but that I would be more than willing to pay him, and planned on throwing in an extravagant tip for the man’s trouble.
Thus ended the conversation.
About halfway through my chat with the driver, a spectacular clatter tumbled noisily down the stairs like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and it seemed entirely likely that the tumult was in fact a harbinger of war, famine, pestilence, and death. The cab driver seemed to grow increasingly nervous the longer the noise went on. I was getting a little anxious myself.
When the conversation ended, I hurried up the stairs to find out the reason for the commotion.
The scene upon my arrival was fairly chaotic. Maria was in the kitchen, her face frozen into a contorted mask of shock, a painful, contradictory expression that seemed to represent the battle between utter disbelief and a desire to burst into tears. It seemed as though the tears were slowly gaining grown, with a pace similar to the advance of any side during the First World War’s trench warfare. Carl was walking briskly but in a dignified manner over to the kitchen, presumably with the intent of comforting Maria.
Johnny and James had transformed from distinct individuals into a maelstrom of flying blows, doing their best to impersonate the cartoon ball of dust from which the occasional arm or leg made itself visible, and Andrew was shrieking incomprehensibly in a very high pitch while trying to separate the two of them.
The room was in disarray. The coffee table had been overturned, and several couch cushions lay sulkily on the floor. One of the lamps had fallen to the ground and broken. It seemed likely that further destruction would ensure unless someone intervened, so I grabbed Andrew by the scruff of his neck and hauled him out of the way, and then attempted to do the same with Johnny. This latter effort was hampered by the mutual determination of the combatants to attack each other.
Finally, having pushed Johnny back a pace, James landed a blow right on my nose, and I lost my temper. I immediately grabbed him by the front of his shirt and head-butted him twice in the face, finishing my aggression by snaking my right leg behind his ankle and throwing my shoulder into his chest, causing him to fall down.
He paused on the ground, dazed, and then began to struggle to his feet.
“If you fucking touch me I’m going to break your fucking nose and knock you the fuck out, you stupid, silly cunt. What the fuck?” I was shouting, and I paced a little while I tried to calm myself. “What the fuck are you thinking, James?”
James prudently chose to sway gently in one place, and Maria, having decided that the conflict was more or less over, decided to give in to the tears. Johnny was fuming behind me, with his fists clenched, so livid that he forgot himself and spat on the floor. He looked at the spittle and then took a cigarette from its pack, placing it in his mouth, where it remained for a few seconds while he tried to light it. His hands were shaking.
“It wasn’t my fault,” said a petulant James.
“Oh, yeah? Whose fault was it, you fucking alcoholic cokehead piece of shit? Did Johnny just decide that he was tired of domestic tranquility and didn’t like the fucking look on your face? Were you just standing there with that stupid fucking drunk look on your face and he leaped over the coffee table to punch you?”
“Man, I’m fucking tired of your shit. You think you’re such fucking hot shit. But you’re not, motherfucker. Fuck! Just because I’m drunk doesn’t mean that I fucking started shit, you judgmental fuck.”
“Yeah, talk real sweet to me, honey, and see what happens.”
“No, fuck you! Fuck all of you! You fucking assholes have been judging me ever since the fucking day that I moved in, and you fucking patronize me, and you fucking treat me like shit. And now that I have some fucking money, you still expect me to fucking kiss your ass. Well, fuck you! I don’t need your fucking charity anymore and I sure as fuck don’t need this bullshit. I’m fucking leaving.” Having said his piece, he stormed out as effectively as he could with a mild concussion, several grams of cocaine, and God only knows how much alcohol pumping around inside his brain.
The room was silent, except for the sound of Maria softly crying and Carl murmuring comforting nonsense to try and sooth her.
“What the fuck happened, guys? I was seriously gone for like two minutes.” Johnny had begun to pace and he sucked through his cigarette like he was trying to strangle it.
“Man, fuck him. All I fucking did was tell him that I was still waiting for him to buy me a new fucking camera, and he just fucking flipped the fuck out. He started yelling about how he wasn’t my bitch, and that if I wanted a new camera I could go fuck myself and then limp down the street to the store to get it myself.”
“Really? He was that creative in telling you to fuck off?”
Johnny snorted a little burst of laughter, his normally uncouth but calm demeanor making a tentative return.
“Of course not. So that pissed me off, and I said, in one of my less diplomatic moments, that if he didn’t replace the fucking camera, I would beat his little bitch ass all the way to a prison cell and then hold him while a group of giant inmates gang raped him, and then laugh when the doctor stitched his asshole up. And I actually was that eloquent.”
“Diplomatic. I’m just going to assume that this is the point where he did his drunken best to leap across the room and beat your ass?”
“Yeah. Good guess.”
“Well, fuck, it wasn‘t rocket surgery.” I looked down at my feet and sighed. “Is everybody all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. That fucker hits like an anorexic eight year-old girl.”
“Andrew, you think that you’ll have any emotional scars from this unwarranted hostility?”
“No, I’m probably fine. And fuck you, by the way, for that little quip.”
“Hey, man. I was just trying to be sensitive. Carl, Maria, are you guys all right?”
Maria struggled successfully to regain her composure. There was only the slightest trace of tears in her voice when she spoke.
“I’ll be all right. That was just really intense. I can’t believe that he just attacked you like that, Johnny.”
“Yeah, well, James isn’t always the most mild-mannered of drunks. It happens.”
“I think that we should ask him to move out,” said Carl. “Don’t get me wrong, I like him, but this is just too much. He’s always drunk now, and always coked out, and he’s really disrespectful to people’s property. I don’t want to just throw him out on his ass, but I don’t want him to live here anymore. This is just too much.”
“I think Carl’s absolutely right,” said Andrew, “This is just ridiculous.”
“Here, here,” said Johnny. “Fuck him.”
“Well, I guess that’s settled then. I’m going to start cleaning up this mess, and I’ll talk to him the next time he comes home. If he comes home. I sure fucking hope that he doesn’t go to sleep all concussed and hammered drunk like that. That’s a fucking recipe for death.”
“He should be all right. You know he’s just going to go buy some coke and try and get laid at the dealer’s house. That’s what he’s been doing half the nights this week, anyway.”
“Really? I haven’t held more than a two sentence conversation with him in a couple weeks. And who hangs out at a coke dealer’s place? A pot dealer, I can see, but coke?”
“Don’t ask me.”

That night, I lay awake in bed, Maria curled with her head on my shoulder. I stared at the ceiling and my thoughts churned, while the walls were papered in moonlight and the migrating refraction of the headlights of cars driving in the road outside. Bile burned in my belly. What was I to do about James? He couldn’t live with us and continue carrying on the way that he had been, but if we threw him out, he would see it as abandonment. And what good is friendship if you leave your friends to twist in the wind at the moment that they most need our help?
It was a dilemma, and the most frustrating part was that the choice did not rest solely on my shoulders, but rather lay within that odd construction, consensus.

The next morning, after I had driven Maria to class, I sat down with Johnny, Andrew, and Carl to discuss the previous evenings events. Johnny was wearing the ubiquitous work pants and tee shirt for which he had such a penchant, Carl was dressed tidily in a suit and tie, and Andrew wore a sort of strange outfit that spoke clearly of an attempt to be avant garde without partaking in either the expense of that sort of fashion or the ridiculousness. It mingled stripes and solid blocks of color with a scarf that appeared to describe the particular sect of Islam to which Andrew subscribed. A beret sitting moodily atop his head, the cherry crowning a sundae that spoke of too much free time and also called to mind cigarette smoke and a sullen French existentialist rasping away about angst or being or consciousness like a man stricken by depression and palsy. They were strangely bashful.
It seemed that our joint emotion had been made manifest, and it hung between us like a cloud bearing rain or similar ill-auspiced phenomena.
Carl looked absently to his left and downward at his tapping foot, perhaps out of disdain for the tic, or perhaps from a simple reluctance to meet our eyes, as if the simple act of eye contact were enough to actualize the share thought lying dormant within us all. Johnny was smoking, and he flicked at the butt of his cigarette with his numb compulsively, repetitively, though there was no need to dispose of the ash. He swore in a low monotone when his fidgeting knocked the cherry out. Andrew shifted his gaze and his posture at frequent but irregular intervals, a marionette dancing on strings pulled by unpleasant thoughts.
“So, do we kick him out?” I asked, breaking the silence.
I was subjected to a mutual gaze of antipathy, my punishment for forcing the subject into the open, for forcing the reality of the enmity in which we held James’ misbehavior and exposing the sad assumption that it would be a long while before James attempted even the slightest recompense. Silence and meaningful gazes were the only response I was given.
“Or do we write last night off as Johnny and James both misbehaving, give James a lecture, and let him stay? Because I really don’t think that he’s going to magically become well-behaved, and honestly, I think he might be at the higher end of the spiral right now. I don’t want to live with him when he’s hitting rock bottom, and I don’t think that any of you do, either.”
Johnny sighed out a plume a smoke and shifted in his seat.
“You’re right. I think he will get worse.”
“I just don’t want to live with someone who might attack me for no reason,” said Andrew.
“I’ve already made my opinion known,” said Carl, in calm tones, as if he had in some way measured each syllable against its peers and whittled them down to the same size, so that there was equality of possession akin to that of a functional communism, in which everyone is equally poor. After their initial façade of conviction, the anemic phonemes seemed to dissipate on the instant, like a note from a guitar when stifled by someone’s hand.
“Well, I guess that’s settled, then. Who wants to tell him?”
They all looked away.
“Okay. I’ll tell him.”
I lit a cigarette and walked down the stairs and out the front door. It was a lovely day, sort of an arithmetical mean derived only from days of clear skies and warm weather, with a slight breeze lapping my face.
James was lying on the front lawn, snoring loudly, his clothing stained by grass and blood and dirt, his face bearing the hallmarks of the previous evening’s abuse, but they seemed like stage make-up, a superficial bit of battering that ought to rub off in a moment, almost as if the rough wear were separated by a razor’s edge of space from his face, which was composed into a scene of great peace and tranquility. It was so peaceful of an expression that the sullying marks of life and choice did not seem associated with the expression, as if he partook in some purer form of calm that transcended his material existence.
For a moment, I almost couldn’t go through with the thing, because that peaceful face was an icon of my friend James, a bitter, mulish man whose cup was nevertheless overflowing with compassion and loyalty and generosity.
When he had nothing, he was more than willing to share what he had, and now that he possessed much, he possessed the same willingness, but the fiscal wealth could not be spread around without also spreading the lurid sickness that wormed, convoluted and meandering, throughout the wealth.
Wealthy, but still impoverished, with his poverty lying in the glut of irresponsibility, selfishness, foolishness, and above all, the callow self-congratulation so common to those who bask in a fortune unearned. There are some for whom wealth is a spiritual burden that will never be shaken-off, for they do not see that money is simply the ability to buy things, and is insufficient to add starch to a character, is a poor substitute for tribulation and self-knowledge and humility. In the end, wealth gives someone means, but it cannot create someone from scratch, and those who think that it does bear only the most trivial resemblance to human beings.
In the end, this tide of qualification drowned the brief perception of those merits which had somehow been lost in the shuffle, though they should have been tightly clasped valuables.
I grabbed the garden hose and sprayed him down.
He woke spluttering, his mind fighting blindly, flailing its limbs in a dark sack in which there was no sense of direction, until finally he found his bearings.
“Did I fucking sleep in the yard?” he asked, the question slipping out absently, as if it were merely a minor tributary to the important act of rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “I feel like shit.”
“I bet you do. You had a rough night last night.”
Looking down upon him during this low moment, I felt only pity. He was like an ape wearing a business suit and carrying a briefcase: all of the pantomime in the world would be insufficient to transform the ape into a businessman, but it nevertheless thought that the activity was great fun, that simply wearing the clothes of a businessman made him a business man.
So it was with James. The foundation to all of his thoughts and actions was the assumption that simply living for a certain period of years entitled him to the respect due to an adult, although he had never held a serious job, had never been employed for longer than five consecutive months, had never demonstrated perseverance or courage, but rather seemed a bit of cottonwood fluff bouncing about on the wind of his whimsy. Maturity, respect, integrity: abstract nouns are never quantities but rather qualities, and you do not earn the right to pin the appellations upon your shoulders like medals by living for a certain number of years or through a certain number of correct actions.
Rather they are qualities that describe something fundamental to yourself, so that if they were removed from you the gnarled and stricken thing that remained would be the visage of a stranger. This is something that James has never learned.
“Do you remember any of it?”
“The last thing that I remember is being inside Charlie’s. I have no idea what the fuck happened after that.”
“Well, let me tell you. First, if you didn’t get kicked out of Charlie’s, you got kicked out of some other bar. Then you took a cab home. Instead of paying the driver, you pissed on his cab and shouted racial slurs at him. Then you came inside, where you attacked Johnny. After I sorted things out with the cab driver, I had to come upstairs and break up the fight, at which point you insulted all of us, told us to fuck ourselves, and left. I don’t know what you did after that. You might just have come straight here and passed out.” The tone of my voice was scabrous, a fibrous husk of cold that frayed here and there along its length to reveal the welling, boiling anger that was clawing to get out, like the devil inside all of us.
A brief uncertainty flickered across James’ bloodshot eyes, and his face was like a television advertisement for industrial machinery, presenting a beautified image of greasy cogs grumbling away upon each other, dirty interstices and a stark utility that loomed immense like guil for a Catholic. Behind this lamed confidence, there was the sort of tremendous foreboding that inspires daily attendance at mass and rosary beads bespeaking erosion.
After a moment, it seemed that the cogs had run their course, and he had some inkling of our collective displeasure. His face set itself petulantly, but it could not hide the bit of fear whimpering in the back alleys of his eyes like a starving dog.
James had few friends, and most of them lived in our house.
He was the sort of person to whom friendship is always a precious thing, because his disposition is a mercurial thing that swings between a cloying amiability and an uncomfortable and abrasive state that is almost palpable, a pressure that pushes at sensibilities and courtesy from odd angles and with too great a force. There is something about his character that is like someone on crutches, who is not wholly independent, with an injury that reminds the viewer uncomfortably of their own fallibility, and to whom the surroundings are a series of handholds or places to lean the crutches. He gazes through rapacious eyes that are always judging advantage, and though his intentions are good, there is a sense in which they are written too plainly. When he speaks to you, you cannot help but notice the detailed account he has taken of your utility, and it seems as though that account takes too lightly the worth of that kernel of self that we all hold in such high esteem, and is generally disinterested in the knowledge of that kernel.
Thus, he often is seen as slightly vulgar, craven in some fashion that eludes cognizance, in some way desperate for guidance, and the few people who ignore this dissonance to his personality take note of his laudable aspects while the rest of his acquaintances view his friends as gamblers. Our goodwill meant a great deal to him, because for him, our loss would be to him like the sacrifice of the poor woman who tithed what little she had, but there was no promise of salvation inherent to this sacrifice for James.
“So you guys are pretty mad at me, then?” Despite himself, there was a defensive sort of stubbornness to the set of his lips.
“I had to break up a fistfight between you and Johnny, man. Seriously, what the fuck?”
“Come on. Johnny has been riding me since I fucking moved in. It’s just one patronizing comment after another. It was only a matter of time before something snapped and I started throwing punches.”
With this comment, all of his mulish conviction in morality as defined by James’ self-interest gave an elaborate flourish and joined the conversation as a major participant.
“Right, because it would be so hard to just tell him to fuck off, and carry on with your day? Seriously, you can’t get in a fight with one of us and expect us to be all right with it.”
“So what are you saying, exactly?”
“You have to move out, dude.”
“Why? Because I got in a fight with Johnny? Johnny’s an asshole.”
“Yeah, he usually is, but that doesn’t change the fact that now that we’re adults, we use big-boy words and talk things out instead of punching somebody and stealing their milk or something. And what about how much you’ve been drinking? And all the coke that you’ve been doing? You’re fucking falling apart, man, and we don’t want you to drag us with you while you fucking collapse. We don’t want to deal with that shit. You have to get your shit together.”
“So now you’re my fucking mother? What does it matter how much I drink, and what drugs I do? Fuck you, you judgmental prick.”
“It’s exactly this kind of attitude that’s the fucking problem. At the end of the day, you know that we wouldn’t give a fuck, but you don’t fucking care at all that you’re being an ass and making us all miserable. You don’t want to fucking change, because you think that we should just stand by and take whatever it is that you decide to do, and that’s not the case. Not when you’re getting in fights and breaking shit. And really, even if you changed my mind, it wouldn’t fucking matter because everyone else wants you to move the fuck out. You’ve got two weeks to find a new place, man. Don’t make this more miserable than it already is.”
“Fine. You guys are real assholes, you know? The sort of friends who stick by you as long as you‘re down on your knees gargling their fucking cock, but get up and try and do your own thing and they fucking exile you. Fucking faggots.”
“Maybe so.”
After he left, I found it impossible to escape the memory of the conversation, and there was a doubt that nagging in some obscure corner of my mind that would not subside. What kind of friends were we, that we cast out our friend who needed our help and support, simply because he inconvenienced our comfort?
The conversation made real the change that had been evolving slowly in my life, the series of mutating actions that were inconsequential when viewed individually but as a sum congealed into an important transmutation, the sort of change in epoch that lends credence to the idea of time as progress along a checklist, as if life were a hierarchy in which I was wafting upward like a falcon on an updraft, rising up though I held my wings still.
Life is like a pointillist painting, and it is only through retrospect that the full scope of the thing reveals itself: at the time of decision, all that we notice are grubby little banal details, tedious choices. It is in this principle that the mystery of the future lies.
Although I have criticized James for falling prey to the illusion that the ornaments with which we surround ourselves justify our being, there is also a sense in which we define the shape of our character extrinsically. And not just in the abstract sense of Sartre’s argument that consciousness is given unity over time through the perception of objects separate to it, but in a simpler, more tangible sense, inasmuch as we can never cease to be the nexus point defined by its relationship to things outside of itself.
Although we possess our volition, we are defined by our families, our friends, our car, our house, and we malleably change our shape to fit the mold of circumstance. But with each change in circumstance, the reflective person must wonder if the reorganization of our periphery is not in fact the reorganization of our core, if there is nothing more profound than that part of us which is constantly touching our surroundings, and that by changing our surroundings we change the entirety of our soul.
This conversation brought home the full nature of the change that was occurring in my life, the dissolution of myself as a single male living with friends, more or less untouched by responsibility, enjoying a sort of fraternal solidarity and living with a carefree mind. The tangle of relationships between myself and my roommates were extending, changing shape as the tight knots and intricate turns stretched to accommodate the enlarged distance, and I feared that they would become tenuous threads snapped by the passing breeze. Change is always cataclysmic, whether it takes the form of graceful good fortune extending one elongated leg in your direction, or catharsis followed by a plummet to that level on which the wheel of fortune grinds you to powder, because change forces a person to step back from themselves and examine the exact nature of the strange creature before them, to evaluate which of their qualities are invaluable, and to foretell how they might preserve these coveted characteristics.
If I had been asked to press onward at that moment, I would have done so in mincing, timorous steps.