1999
The snow crunched underfoot as they made their way between the worn gray wooden fences and the torcheire style lights along the path. Fat white snowflakes lazily floated down in the still quiet between the tall pine trees and underneath the eaves and trampolines and decks surrounding the path. They laughed and cackled as they make their way under the dark rose horizon that cut off into whiteness fifty feet in every direction. The shadows crossed and they shuffled through the snow.
Faces red and laughing.
“Hand me the bottle opener.”
It was the fifth or… sixth, maybe seventh (?) bottle of Everett’s night and his face felt hot and burning, but he felt happy in a way that he had not felt in some time, despite his lightheadedness.
“If you want it, you can jump for it.”
“Fucking give me the bottle, Steve or I’ll fucking smash your balls against your pelvis with my fucking foot.”
“Haha, I’d like to see you try, Ev you fucking dickless wonder.”
Steve’s face seemed to be all mouth, the lower jaw much larger than the top of his head, somehow… as if his mouth had been slit on each side to make the opening wider to accommodate his oversized bright white teeth. He bobbed his head as he laughed, which he did, in a manner akin to a hyena or a jackal. He didn’t invite Steve to come to their work to drink beer and watch television while they waited for a prayer meeting that never happened to end, but Steve was Nick’s friend and Nick was his friend so if Nick brought Steve, as he often did, Steve wouldn’t be going home.
Well, no one was going “home” home tonight, at any rate.
Ev had volunteered his dad’s basement to Nick and as Steve had come to pick up Nick, naturally Nick would be along. They would watch his and Nick’s favorite movie of the moment, the worn VHS copy of THX 1138, and drunkenly consume chips and salsa if Steve didn’t say anything else stupid and if Ev didn’t decide to stand on Steve’s neck and stop the stupidity once and for all.
Steve.
Steve was the one who thought it was funny to fake stutter in front of Marc, a tall and goofy red headed kid who could barely get a word out and who spent most of his time conversing staring down at his shoes, and Steve was the one who thought it was a good idea to get high when he had the flu and vomit all over the side of Nick’s car, but that wasn’t why Ev loathed Steve. Steve had no style. Steve proved the old adage that “jocks and assholes still don’t know shit about aesthetic”. Steve was like the jock who wore baggy jeans and puffy skateboard shoes but who didn’t actually skateboard and instead, instead preferred football and pornography to anything that didn’t provide immediate gratification. Steve was the one who forced him and Nick to spend New Years at Steve’s friend Javier’s condo…. Javier a diminutive Mexican who had a pretty decent coke habit and who had invited Steve to what amounted to an orgy and had Steve take pictures while Javier made his way through several females and the whole affair still left Ev with a sick taste in his mouth at the thought, though Steve seemed to be quite amused by the incident, but by the way he licked his lips and chuckled, he couldn’t tell if Steve was being lustful or wistful or if he saw it more as beneath him. This same New Years party had a surprise that Steve somehow thought he would appreciate: dancers from a local “gentleman’s club” would be attending. When Ev found out, he called a taxicab and left of his own volition and Steve mocked him.
Steve memories were like stumbling in on your parents in the midst of… well, certainly not parenting, but somehow Steve memories were worse and Ev always shivered when he even thought of Steve or Steve’s escapades.
It wasn’t so much that Steve was evil or crude or that his morals seemed questionable at times (although he was really fucking filthy: his toilet was so dirty that the hair that had fallen over the seat gave the toilet an appearance of a five o clock shadow or the beard of some Hasidim). Other than once stealing their thirty pack of cheap lager, he hadn’t really hurt Ev and to Steve’s credit Steve thought that the potential for a sexual liason with what he called “hot strippers” was somehow a good thing. It was more that Steve always seemed to be there, fighting for shotgun or control of the stereo and it was that Steve seemed to always follow Nick.
Ev had met Nick in high school, when he had moved to town and they both had ended up as loners and they had basically grown up together, or as much growing up as can be done between sixteen and nineteen. They had both been ignored by the same girls and both had the same problems making friends, though they were, on some level, quite different. Nick was tall and Ev was short. Nick was into weed and hanging out at head shops while Ev preferred dusty stacks of books and records. Nick had not cared as much for hardcore punk that he loved, but they both could agree on some things musical and when Nick would stop playing 311 long enough, they would enjoy the Kinks or the Who or A Tribe Called Quest. So maybe… maybe Steve was a better friend of Nick’s. Maybe he was the outsider.
Steve had started tagging the wall of a tunnel going under the street, running ahead and starting with crude, fat letters.
“I’m calling this shit. Step back, fuckers, I’m gonna rip this shit up.”
Steve painted his fat lines and began tracing the big electric blue wetness with thin black lines, adding perspective and laughing as he less carefully spray painted a large breasted woman with a thick dark thatch between her crudely drawn, black legs.
“Haha.”
He ran through the tunnel as his laughter and footfalls echoed through the night.
“Why are you friends with him?”
Ev was drunk, that was sure and he wasn’t sure he had just said that out loud. He froze for a second and felt himself want to crawl back in, as if he could somehow reverse time and regain the feelings in his legs.
Nick turned to him, his long dark red hair falling around his pale face.
“What?”
“I’m sorry… I mean, nothing.”
Nick put his hand out and stopped Ev, pressing his palm into Ev’s chest.
“You asked me how I’m friends with Steve, dude, I fucking heard you.”
“Never mind. Sorry, forget I asked.”
“No, we should talk about this. I know you don’t really like Steve, and that you think you’re better than the rest of us because you’re going to the University and I’m at community college.”
“It’s not about that, I barely have the money for it as it is and besides, I’m not even in school now, my dad won’t let me go back this semester.”
“Whatever, you’re still going and you’ll still be going and Steve and I will be at the community college getting high on Steve’s shitty weed while you’re locked away in a library somewhere with books.”
“That doesn’t make any fucking sense, and yeah, I don’t like Steve. I don’t hate him, he just does stupid shit and then we have to clean up after him and he made us go to that fucking awful stripper party and that is just… eww, I mean what the hell, Nick, what is happening to you?”
Steve had run far down the path and they were standing there, there breath coming out in vaporous clouds, in the misty light. Ev wanted to hit Nick and yell at him and he felt his hands clenching. Fuck you, Nick I don’t know how I got into school, I didn’t fucking try and I’m sorry… I didn’t make myself this way, I’d rather be athletic and good looking than smart, so fuck you, you stupid asshole. Steve makes you worse, he brings out all the bad traits in you and I want to fucking kick his ass because of it. He wanted to feel his fist hit Nick’s face, to feel his hands hurt, to see Nicks blood on the white snow. Fuck, to see Steve’s blood on the white snow.
Ev didn’t move.
Nick let out a loud sigh.
“Damn it Ev, I didn’t mean to come down on you like that. Shit, I don’t know. Steve is my homey. We listen to the same music, we like the same movies, that’s just how it is. Maybe it’s you and I that aren’t really friends anymore. Fuck, I love you dude, but I don’t know what you’re saying half the time anyway.”
Nick shrugged his shoulders and shoved his hands into his pockets and kept going down the path as he stood there and the tears welled up in his eyes. They stung as they ran down his cheeks and his vision blurred as he watched Nick disappear.
“Wait, Nick, I think, I think I forgot my wallet, back in the supply room. I… I won’t be able to sleep unless I check.”
Nick turned around.
“Yeah, well I don’t really want to walk back to the church and besides, aren’t you opening it in the morning?”
It was actually Ev’s first Sunday morning off in months, the job, a janitor, was something that his father made him do on condition of him going back to school. ”Work for a semester and save some money and get this partying out of your system, then prove to me that you can handle school. I want you to go back, but I expect straight A’s and I don’t care how hard you think it is, but I’m not sending you to some liberal arts school to study drawing.” So here he was, walking home during the worst blizzard the region had seen in ten years and suddenly, he didn’t want to go home.
“No, I’m actually off. I don’t work until Monday… here…”
Ev handed Nick his house key.
“My dad won’t mind, just go into my room and keep it down, I will be back soon.”
Ev didn’t want to talk to Nick or Steve, instead he just wanted to curl up in bed and eat microwave burritos and read from the stack of science fiction novels he had just bought at a used bookstore… novelizations of Dr Who and Ringworld books by Larry Niven and it had occurred to him, as they stood there drunkenly arguing, that he may have been overzealous when pissing off of the roof of the church and that, perhaps, perhaps a yellow trail of frozen urine would greet the staunchly conservative septuagenerian parishioners of the church. At least if he went back, he could dump water on it and besides, besides… at least by then Nick and Steve would have passed out.
Ev knew that he wouldn’t sleep with something like that weighing over his head and he definitely wouldn’t sleep well with Nick and Steve around, but shit… he had already extended the invitation and it was cold and the roads were unplowed and covered in over a foot of snow.
Ev angrily shoved his hands back in his pockets and turned around, to stomp back down the path.
“All right, dude… we will see you at your place. Stay warm.”
Ev put on his headphones but didn’t turn on his MiniDisc player, instead just half watching the path while his mind was churning through thoughts and emotions. He felt nervous and shaky about the thought of getting fired over pissing on the cross and even worse about how his father would kick him out of the house and how he had little possessions or resources to speak of and hated depending on his friends.
This, Ev realized, as he stomped through the deepening snow and as the trail became more exposed and the wind blew harder, was just part of his problem.
He had lost Nick.
Perhaps they had never been friends, perhaps their difference in interests had made them doomed from the start. Maybe.
Ev still wanted to smack Nick and whip Steve, spank him with his belt like his father had, so that he would remember not to be such an… such an ass. But then again, maybe he was the oddball and Steve with his freewheeling sexual escapades and disdain for literature was the norm.
It was more than possible.
Still, Nick needed to not fuck up his life and Ev imagined how he would do that. Steve would live a boring life living in a shitty apartment, getting high and listening to Pink Floyd until Steve’s dad made him clean up his act, when Steve would become boring and suburban and his burnout phase that he called his “wild days” were behind him. Nick, of course, would go along for the ride and they would both be golf buddies or some stupid shit like that and hadn’t Nick once been the guy who wrote “Chomsky is God, Cocklicker” in permanent marker right next to the NRA bumper sticker on their youth pastor’s Mustang after a long talk he had had with the boys about the evils of alcohol and liberalism?
Ev was begining to imagine how he would get Nick back on track, and how Nick would soon be drinking boxed wine and watching Kurosawa and bitching about National Review and Ben Stein.
Ev would go back and poison Steve in his sleep… he’d find some way to kill someone while… no, no that was horrible. Whatever Steve was, he was a human being and there was no way he could just end his life. Steve was Steve and he didn’t deserve to die, that was lack of sleep and rage and childish violence. No… he’d sneak in and wake up Nick and tell Nick about this girl that Nick would like at school and get Nick to come to school and date this girl and then Steve, Steve could go on being Steve and Nick could be his cool best friend again. Yeah, that was it… or… maybe he would write a note and get Steve so drunk that he would sign it telling Nick about how he secretly loved him and how he couldn’t stop thinking about the outline of Nick’s legs and how he got an erection when he saw Nick dance without his shirt on… that would freak Nick out enough to not talk to Steve. Being gay was okay by Nick, but coming on to someone who wasn’t was a “no-no” to Nick and he knew this.
That would be his way out, a forged letter that… yeah, he’d put it in Nick’s jacket and Nick, knowing Nick, that is, would discover it sometime later when he went to look for a pen to sign a check.
Ev picked up his pace and hurried back to the office.
Of course, there were no golden icicles on the brown, wooden cross hanging on the front of the sanctuary, but he did put his keys into the worn black deadbolt and key in the combination code as he knocked the snow off of his feet.
Onto the computer.
Text editor.
Nick,
I don’t know how to say this, man, I… look if you don’t know what I’m saying or if you don’t know how I feel, it’s cool… I’d just rather have you know, okay? It has been burning in my heart for sometime and I just have to let it out. I love you. I really love you. I don’t mean like a friend or like a brother, I mean… you know what I mean. Don’t be afraid, I’m scared too, I just can’t watch you fall asleep again and not tell you that I see your thick ropy arms and I just want to curl up inside them and I want to feel your hot breath on my neck. Really, I now it sounds… well, gay, but shit man, I can’t help it. I just want to make love to you and lick you up and down. I want to make you see god. Don’t hate me dude, I just couldn’t live anymore without telling you.
Steve
Should he fake Steve’s signature? No… Steve could type but he wouldn’t sign it. He would just write it, and Nick would just… Wait, would Nick believe him?
Hard to say.
Maybe he would. Ev knew Nick, though, he knew that Nick was an advocate of gay rights in the abstract,but deathly afraid of homosexuals in real life and that the thought of male to male intimacy disturbed him. Hell, Nick didn’t even like to hug his friends, no matter how drunk he was.
The printer was dot matrix and embarrassingly loud and slow as molasses on a cold day and he had to print two copies, just in case, in case one got wet or wrinkled. He felt evil. He felt good. He felt… really fucking drunk. Ev pulled his last beer out of his pocket and chugged the rest as he sloppily raced back home. The more he drank the more it seemed like a good idea and the cold did not assuage him. If it didn’t work he could play it off as a prank, in the same way that Steve had once tried to kick his door in and broken the frame and called it a “prank”.
The wind swirled the snow into little curlicues as it blew across the rooftops of the houses along the path. His feet hurt him, his sneakers were not the best choice in the deep snow, though he tried to follow their tracks. In the forty minutes since he left them the snow had begun to fall harder and he felt the beer bottle stick to the yarn of his cheap child sized gloves.
His breath grew heavy.
Ev finished the beer, and cursed himself as he heard his breathing deepen and grow louder in volume. He was walking uphill now, closer to home, but he always felt that the universe had betrayed him and that his body was somehow inferior to the others… Steve, with his jockish physique never panted when they ran wild through alleyways, tagging up dumpsters. Steve never got winded when he pulled some ridiculous prank, like the time they knocked over the portable chemical toilet and the blue wash of waste dripped all over the parking lot at the skate park.
He slowed down and began to regret his plan.
Steve was crass and crude, but Steve had actually been fun. I mean, that was a great prank.
He stopped, just shy of the house, the lights from the basement the only lights being on as his father was probably similarly stuck at his office where he would no doubt sleep, being the pragmatic man that he was and having done that numerous times before.
He felt conflicted.
Steve was a flesh and blood human being with just as much right to exist as he had and Steve was not the devil. Yeah, he had bad taste and didn’t understand that others could want something different, but he was human and he had feelings and maybe, maybe Nick really didn’t like Steve more. Maybe Nick didn’t want to be like Steve. Maybe Nick was just passive and Nick just hung out with whoever wanted to spend time with him and didn’t realize that their influence affected him.
But Steve was a misogynist who had once tried to show Ev’s sister his penis and who had joked about group sex and who thought it was okay to mock others for things they could not control, from the fat kids to the mentally handicapped. Steve was a fucking wanker and if Nick ended up like him, the world would be a worse place.
Ev suddenly remembered that Steve would listen to bands like Gorilla Biscuits and Refused and Bad Brains and then make casual asides involving the words “nigger” and “faggot” as if he didn’t understand the words, but just cared for the loud, fast music. Steve maybe didn’t get that this was offensive and inconsistent with what these bands were actually saying, but Steve needed to grow up and quit being such an ass and Ev would be fucking damned if he let Nick turn out that way: as some asshole who just grabs the most surface obvious things and who doesn’t appreciate what lies beneath: the substance of things, the weighty, good and important things in the world.
It was getting cold and Ev was feeling tired and no amount of drunkenness seemed to warm him or calm him down.
He would plant the letter and be rid of Steve forever and he cackled, in a thick black mustache nineteenth century villain sort of way.
He nodded to himself and began to make his way up the icy driveway, slipping and nearly falling only to catch his balance at the last second. He stomped his boots off on the front porch and opened the door.
Ev stood for a second in the foyer, letting the snow drip off of his jeans and his jacket, standing there in the dark. He kicked his sneakers off and tossed his jacket on the ground and stood, for a moment, over the heating vent while the hot air warmed his frozen feet.
He was going to leave this note and Steve and Nick would not be friends anymore and Nick would be cool again, right? Right?
Ev made his way down to the basement to go to bed, cautiously stepping on the dark brown carpet, afraid to wake Steve and Nick. Even if he was going to frame Steve as Nick’s long term stalker, he didn’t want to wake anyone. Call it protestant kindness.
He put his hand on the doorknob and paused.
Maybe I shouldn’t do this.
Ev fought the urge to quit, the urge he was familiar with, from school to girls to, well everything… he always gave up if it wasn’t easy and maybe… it dawned on him.
He was failing in school because he just didn’t care to try when it got hard. He was a virgin and, worse, single and damned to bachelorhood because he was afraid to be rejected, afraid to tell girls how he felt. He was a saint to no one, because his “good deeds” were all quiet and, oddly, cowardly. It wasn’t bad to not advertise his grace, but sometimes he needed to tell people, like the kid Marc, to stand up for themselves and that he wouldn’t always be there for him.
Steve’s letter and framing Steve was something he had to do, even if it backfired and fuck it, he might just tell Nick it was a joke and Nick probably wouldn’t care.
Probably.
It didn’t matter. Ev had been a coward for too long and wasn’t going to let Nick become some jerk more concerned with his handicap on a par four than… well… than art, than life. Sure this was kind of passive-aggressive, but it was the hardest most ballsy thing Ev had done in years and it was about fucking time.
Ev silently twisted the knob and then he opened the door.
Ev couldn’t recall later what he saw first, or even what he saw. He never told a soul what he saw Nick and Steve doing. He didn’t tell Nick that he even knew, not even years later when Nick and he had drifted apart and reunited at an In and Out burger by UCLA for a quick dinner when they discovered that as adults they didn’t like who each other had become over cheese fries and heartburn burgers. Maybe Ev should have, because Nick would become an ultraconservative bigot and that would be ironic, considering what Ev saw that night.
What Ev remembered was this: Steve’s back was facing the door way and his back was… sans shirt and dripping with little beads of sweat. His pants were around his ankles and… and Nick’s were too. Nick was leaning against the wall and Steve had his hands placed firmly next to Nicks, pulling one off to stroke Nicks chest as they… as they made love, or fucked, or whatever they would want to call it.
The letter seemed sort of pointless.
Ev closed the door carefully.
He backed away and stood there stunned and breathless.
It was at that moment that Ev let Nick go or at least decided to let Nick go. He sort of gave up the stress and stomach aches over losing his best friend or at least vowed to and… well, maybe this was better. Maybe he had felt too strongly for Nick, I mean what sort of man has a best friend anyway? Did Hemmingway need a homey? Didn’t Sal Paradise roll alone as often as he rolled around with Carlo Marx?
Sure it was rude and bizarre that Nick and Steve had decided to… well, whatever they had decided to do, but… hell, maybe they had been doing this all along and Ev had missed it. Oh well. Ev believed in love and didn’t want to stop it. Being a nineteen year old wimp didn’t stop that, it probably only reinforced his notions of romance.
Flowers and chocolates and passionate love by the fire.
He would sleep on the couch and the letter, both copies would end up being washed with his jeans the following day and never be seen again…
Wait, did he delete the file from his boss’s desktop?
Shit.
Ev climbed back up the stairs, feeling even more tired and drunken than before and he put his boots back on.
“I’m never going to get any fucking sleep.”