“B.Y.O.B.” by Lilly Schneider

THE HOUSE

 

The house is not too near the university. No buses come this way. In the garage, on any given day, anywhere from one to a dozen bicycles lean unlocked against the wall, and instruments–acoustic and elec­tric guitars, hand drums, a black varnished ukulele, a dented trumpet, plastic kazoos–lie on the sagging couches, on the squares of dirty, dis­embodied carpet. Tom’s drum set, worth two thousand bucks, gleams gold and silver and glitter-flecked pearly white. The house is tucked back from the road in the rain forest–cedar trees and slick maples, blackberry brambles and ferns–and the garage door is always open, even in the constant rain; in the rain the open garage door makes a convenient roof under which it’s pleasant to smoke. This is Olympia, Washington, and though bikes get stolen downtown, though laptops and smartphones are lifted from unattended bags on campus, the five residents of this large rental house believe no one would think to steal out here in the hills, where it’s so peaceful, so green. When they have a party they move the bikes and clean the garage and divide the space into private hangout cells by tacking brightly printed textiles from the ceiling, gifts from those who’ve gone backpacking through Asia over school breaks. Someone will bake something to offer around, and it will be either delicious and decadent, or made from beets and seeds and not very good. Everyone will be generous with their drugs. Three of the residents are in a psychedelic rock band, and when they play they take the textiles down so the garage is open. They hand out the kazoos to the crowd, and the street outside is lined with cars a quarter mile in either direction.

Here the parties are always B.Y.O.B. That way everyone can have their preferred beverage; in this group, kegs, their connotations, are considered cheesy. The current residents are not responsible for the silver kegs tossed in the woods behind the house, half-sunk into dirt under toupees of thick moss. They all keep saying they’re going to bring them to  the recycling center to see if  they’re worth  money, but so far no one has because everyone is drunk when they say that and hungover when they remember having said it. Everyone thinks someone else should do it.

Inside the house, in the living room by the door, a watercolor sign reads, “No Shoes Please!!” Still, the sherbet-pink carpet is studded with pine needles, mottled with mud. A huge afghan knit in yellow, green, and red sags over a scuffed leather couch with smooshy cushions.

On this couch  sit  four  of the  house’s  residents.  Rose  is weeping into a balled up sweatshirt. Kyle has his head in his hands. Mikey stands and leans against the wall by the door as if he’s guarding it, pulling at his lower lip. Gilda stares at the coffee table, at the bright remnants of packaged snacks, Ho-Ho wrappers, Twinkie wrappers. A friendship bracelet, half finished, is taped to one end of the table, hanging off it like a tail. The three-foot bong that belongs to every­ one, sooty red glass swirled with clouded veins of yellow like fatty arteries, rises like the Washington Monument from a dirty city. If the EMTs saw it, they didn’t care. They were in a hurry, pounding through the house, shouting into walkie-talkies strapped across their chests. One of the police officers definitely saw it; he gave them all a look. But the EMTs and police officers are in Tom’s bedroom now, talking quietly.

Mikey speaks up. “Does anyone even have his parents’ number?” He is tall and leanly muscular. All his clothes have holes in them. He is the singer and lead guitarist of the psychedelic rock band. He makes speeches at the beginning of each show about letting the music enter you, flow through you, take you into the beyond. At the end of the show he makes speeches about how lucky they in the band feel to be part of this community, how music brings people together, music reminds us that we are in fact One, swaying to the same rhythm, a shared heartbeat.

No one has the number, but Rose raises her face to say that it’s probably stored in Tom’s cellphone.

“Will they call them for us?” Kyle asks.

“I’ll call them,” says Mikey.

“Mikey,” Gilda says without looking at him, “just shut up, for once.”

I’m offering–“

“This isn’t about you.”

“I–“

“Shut up,”Gilda says, “please,” and Rose wails for everyone to shut up, and everyone does.

One of the policemen comes out, the one who had given the look before when he barged in and saw the bong. Now he holds his body carefully, stepping over a pair of dirty canvas shoes tossed on the floor, respecting the space of this house that is, for the moment, their home. His shoes squeak as he squats on the other side of the coffee table. He clears his throat.

And the look he wears now is far more frightening than the look he wore before. No police officer has ever looked at them like this, as a man in a war zone might look at his children: like he would do anything for life not to be as hard for them as it’s about to become.

 

GILDA

 

They move out of the house later that month. Gilda moves in with a couple of girls from around, Emma and Lu, whose last roommate dropped out to work on a farm. Emma’s kind of boring. She’s really into school, wants to be a social worker. Lu’s main thing is that she’s beautiful. Her black hair hangs to her waist. She wears short shorts even in winter, with ripped black tights and combat boots onto which she’s painted cherry blossoms. Emma and Lu feel terrible for Gilda, that is clear, and they will not speak against her when she leaves her dishes in the sink, the trash overflowing, loose papers all over the living room. When they speak, Gilda forgets what they say as soon as they’ve said it. When, from the nest of her bedroom, she hears movement in the apartment, she does not give a thought as to who it might be, what they might be doing. When she makes herself a bowl of brownie batter and eats the whole thing without a spoon, sitting dazed in front of Sesame Street, they observe her, concerned, skinny, healthy, both of them, and she doesn’t care. She cares that she gets each drop of batter. She scrapes the side of her hand along the curve of the mixing bowl and licks it on all sides, like a cartoon bear with a pawful of honey.

They are mysterious to her, or they are boring. She doesn’t under­stand how anyone with the means to eat constantly could possibly stop themselves. They must go around, she sees now, in constant hun­ger and suffering. Every day she recognizes and takes her opportu­nities for relief: Emma makes a pie, or it’s free guacamole Monday at Mama’s Taqueria, or she’s too tired after class to cook and ends up ordering a pizza and frosted dessert sticks. Emma’s lactose intolerant, and Lu doesn’t eat anything but rice and fruit. Gilda eats it all.

Gilda wears sweeping skirts, Egyptian eyeliner. Her combat boots are without cherry blossoms but she has threaded them with shoelac­es coated in purple sparkles. Her hair, for the moment , is pink. She has dressed like this since high school, and it has not cured her from feeling chronically overlooked. By her teachers, by her parents, by people she wants as friends, and by men she’d like to sleep with. There is some plainness to her, she fears, that cannot be disguised with any amount of color or flash.

Now she sees that death has put a flash upon her, but she doesn’t want it like this. People staring, whispering to their friends. Or not whispering. “She lived with that guy who OD’d on pills,” someone shouts in the middle of a crowd during a house show, and though ev­eryone who hears it looks around like something awful has been said, Gilda feels a flicker of rightness that might be called satisfaction. It’s true, is it not? Truer than the looks on their faces.

Gilda gives a book report to her publishing class with a ramen noodle snuggled like a pale worm against the chest of her brown sweater. After class, in the hallway, a boy takes her by the arm and quietly, with self-conscious gentleness, tells her about the noodle. Gilda looks down, picks the noodle off and flings it at a trash can, but it won’t come off of her fingers. She is still flinging as he walks away, but as soon as he turns the corner, she stops trying to get rid of it and puts it in her mouth, sweater fuzz and all, and swallows it.

The more Gilda eats, the more invisible she feels, safer. After a few months, her face looks different. This feels fitting, because a few months ago, Gilda knows,she was an entirely different person.

She walks down the hill in the afternoon to get ice cream at the by-the-ounce place. She will get all the toppings she likes. She  will get gummy worms that will turn hard from the cold and require tough chewing to release their sweetness. Oreo crumbles, hopefully chunky with white frosting. She will dig through the bowl with a spoon to the bottom where those good pieces are. Walnuts, peanuts, and strawberry syrup bright red and sticky like stage blood. The bay rolls out far below her, the tall bare trees like toothpicks in the dark water, waiting to be driven away on the trucks that are like a rainbow of hard candies flung along the shore. She knows it smells like diesel fuel down there, and dead fish, and wet wood, and stagnant salt water. Not very beautiful. But a young couple in windbreakers, seeing Gilda, crosses to her side of the street, and they want to know how to get down there, to the beach, to look at the big cut trees.

Gilda knows how to get there, but she peers at them as if they’ve asked directions to Jupiter, astonished by their eagerness, by the firm­ness of their desire to undertake this useless journey. What can they expect to find down there? What do they think will happen? What will change? How simple they are, she thinks, and as the directions fall from her mouth she looks at their hands, entwined and playing a game while they nod to her, fingers rolling around each other before interlacing, squeezing, and rolling over again. She watches as they stumble down the hill, their movement compromised by their refusal to let go of each other’s hands, their laughter when they almost trip and tumble, headed to the beach, which as far as she is concerned is as terrible as any place, and smells of death, and doesn’t have any shelter, and besides, there is no food there, and you will leave hungry.

 

KYLE

 

Dear Mike,

 

Hello and I hope you’re doing good man. You are probably surprised to hear from me, or maybe not haha. First off let me say that I really hope you are doing well down there. Before I came here I was seeing your art on facebook–stuff’s awesome man and I’m really proud of you going for it like that. I keep meaning to give your album a listen and I will soon when I get out of here! (Theres no internet here) anyway I miss you guys and have been thinking a lot about the Atlas Street days. Its been a long time. Well three times the charm haha. The people are ok here and this time my therapist is actually really cool. His name’s Mel, and he’s pretty young and a really awesome guy. He suggested I write apologies to people and everything but obviously I’ve done that before, but he suggested something new and I hope its ok with you, and if its not you can stop reading this letter and that’s ok with me, I understand. Since I wrote you already last time you are probably wondering why I am writing again (besides because we go way back.)

Well this was Mel’s idea like I said. If its ok with you I would like to write out some apologies I have to make to Tom. Like I said, no pressure if this seems weird to you and you can just throw this letter away. But people don’t write letters very much these days so maybe you would want to keep it. I guess I’ll just make a list. Thanks again if you read it (and ok if not.) If l am to be honest this is a hard thing to do. But if there is one dude who could maybe read it and maybe actually not judge me for this shit it would be you. So here goes.

 

1. (The worst one) When you died I went into your bedroom and took your whole stash. Your hiding spot worked man. The cops didn’t find it. But I didn’t do them, in fact I sold them (for like $300.) But I did probably buy a bunch of the same shit back with the money, so I guess it ‘s all the same. I’m really so sorry and I felt like such a piece of shit about that for so long and still do. Like I was disturbing your peace and it wasn’t right.

 

2. Well maybe this is worst, hooking up with Rose after you died. Like nine months after, we were both all fucked up on coke too. Even though you weren’t there I felt really bad and I know she did too. If it would make you feel any better we basically stopped being friends after that and that is something I really regret. I should have been strong and been a friend to her. That was one of the times when I se­riously wanted to kill myself, I’m so sorry. Its possible you don’t know this (but maybe you do) that when you died so much shit happened, our community was in pain and lots of people were really bad, and even though I am not half the person you are and people wouldn’t miss me as much I kept knowing that I couldn’t do that and that’s why I am back here now trying to get clean. I know you would nev­er have left all of us behind on purpose man. Some people think it wasn’t a mistake, Rose for example. But I know you would never do that to your friends. It was one mistake that could have been avoided, and I was your roommate and should have been more careful. I feel so fucking bad about that now. I didn’t pull you out of it or notice you were out of control. I miss you so fucking much I don’t know what to do.

I guess I sort of forgot about the list I was making haha. I guess I have a lot to be sorry for. So 2 is actually 2 through 6 or something. I don’t know. I hope you can hear me man. I bet you’re skinny dipping with some really hot angels up there!

Ok well I  better go. Thanks Mikey for reading this (if you did.) I thought I would be out of here in 6 wks. but it looks like actually longer this time, oh well. Maybe I will see you on the other side. I hope you are doing good man.

 

Much love, your friend,

 

K-Money

 

ROSE 

 

From the front yard where he is on his knees planting tulips, his rap-blasting headphones clamped to the sides of his head, he can see Rose’s mother washing dishes through the kitchen window. She works steadily, with an almost remarkable lack of expression on her face, as if she has not a thought in her head, nor a feeling in her heart. She is still like this when he finishes getting the tulip bulbs in the ground and goes to the side of the house to sit on the weathered bench there, a church pew they pulled out of some historic neigh­borhood church before it got destroyed. He smokes a cigarette in the late August heat. Rose’s mother doesn’t love that he smokes cigarettes on the property, but after all it’s not against the law. Rose’s black Saab is in the driveway, and on windless days like today there’s a strong chance the smoke will sail right up into her open window. Sure enough, in less than a minute she comes trotting around the corner in a toothpaste-green terrycloth onesie, her pale legs long and slim as lily stems, her shining dark hair pulled back and so much lively yearning in her face it is impossible to believe she’s the daughter of that woman in the house.

She is quitting cigarettes, which means she doesn’t buy them but will smoke his freely. She is twenty-eight years old and has lived in her parents’ house since she dropped out of college. He is nineteen. She amazes him. She has done so many interesting things. She has worked in coffee shops across Seattle. She has worked at the baseball stadium , ferrying cocktails and prime rib to rich people in the private boxes above home plate. She has had an internship, something about graphic design, in the second-tallest building in Seattle: the view was incredible, and she was so disappointed when the internship did not turn into an even part-time job. She can hula-hoop indefinitely; she’d show him, she teases, except that the hula hoops are absolutely buried in the garage. In college she played bass in a psychedelic rock band. After she dropped out, her parents bought her a two-week trip to Paris. She loved it and said fuck it to the return ticket and spent three months backpacking in  Europe, living on wine and shoplifted candy bars. For a skinny girl her breasts are enormous, and he wonders if her parents bought those for her, too. He tries not to stare at them. He watches how she makes the smoke come out of her mouth slow and thick, sort of holding it in place with her lips, as if the smoke is a cottony piece of something he could pick from the air and stow in his pocket to look at later. He’s kind of seeing this other chick more his own age right now, but Rose is his number one jack-off fantasy of the summer.

But there is a man in her life, of course, already. Stupid Steven. He’s never seen the guy, but Rose talks about him a lot.

She is talking about him today. Complaining. Tapping her ciga­rette constantly, even when there’s barely a lash of ash over its glow­ing orange eye.

Apparently she and Steven were supposed to meet at this Thai place last night, but Steven was half an hour late, and then when he got there, he was all pissy because he’d already eaten, and he kept complaining about how much time she was taking eating her Buddha Bowl. When she finished he insisted on paying, but later that night, he said how stupid it was for him to pay when he didn’t even eat anything, and she said well she never asked him to pay, did she, and why did he eat before in the first place, when they had dinner plans? And then he said, so sorry, he didn’t realize he had to check in with her every time he felt like eating something . . . and it ended up the way all their arguments end up, with Steven yelling that he might as well go ahead and kill himself because he knows, he knows  he’s such a piece of shit.

She asks for another cigarette. When she leans towards the light­er, her jutting collarbones are so close to him he could take them between his lips without hardly moving.

“So what did you do?” he asks her.

“About Steven?”she says. She doesn’t continue. She leans back on the bench, looking like someone who has resigned herself to a long wait at a bus stop.

The tulips are planted, the privet hedge pruned. The flower garden is in good shape for fall and the lawn is mowed and  weeded. They will need his services less and less as the days get colder, and when the October rains come they won’t need him at all. The afternoon is weighted with the finality of the summer, and every living creature feels it, the hopping birds, the squirrels streaming up and down the tree trunks, the children madly pedaling their bikes under the yel­lowing leaves of the maple trees on the sidewalk. This is perhaps why today he is finally brave enough to say, “Why do you waste your time with that guy?”

She turns to him, shocked. “You’ve never even met him,”she says.

“I know he doesn’t treat you like you deserve, though.”

Rose bites her lip.

“He’s bullying you,” he says. “He’s bluffing.”

The chick he’s kind of seeing would definitely never put up with that shit, and she’s not even as hot as you are, he wants to add. You’re way too sensitive, he wants to say, but she starts crying before he can say it. Shit!

“Man. I’m sorry,” he says.

“It’s fine.”

“I didn’t mean to get you all sad.”

“No,” she says, wiping her eyes. “I made him sound way worse than he is. I was just venting. He’s really great, actually.”

“Okay,” he says.

“But we can make out if you want.”

He cannot believe this.

She takes his face in her hands and pulls him toward her.

He bikes home that evening in the first true dark of twilight, the bag of gardening tools strapped above the tire clattering when he goes over bumps in the road. As he pedals across the Fremont Bridge, all the colored lights of the city scattered around the land below him, he feels wonderfully free. If the mother calls him again for his ser­vices he will say he’s going back to school, or he broke his leg, or something.

You don’t have to live that long to know when a kiss isn’t right. It was technically good, but it wasn’t anything special. Not like he’d dreamed it would be. When they pulled apart after a minute, some thread between them had broken. Both could feel it. He looked at her and he thought, this girl is a headcase. Nothing bad has ever hap­pened to her in her whole life, but she’s nuts.

He bombs down the hills of the city. He’s gotta go home and text that girl of his, see if she’s in the mood to kill time.

 

MIKEY

 

This new sculpture: it’s the most exciting piece of art he’s ever made. He’s hard and good in love with it, and he’s scared, because what if it doesn’t work out, and he’s left sprawling, stupid, again? But he’s more scared not to cling to a love so hard and good, and everything else is falling into place, in the way it almost never does, the way he’s hoped it could forever, so he falls with it. He pulls the blinds in his studio and forgets about time. Sometimes he flings himself onto the futon in the back of the room for a mangled rest. He takes one long sleep and several short. Wonders how many days is that. Sometime between the long sleep and the granite stage, when he stares for an hour at a sample piece of polished, richly glittering granite from the collection amassed in remodeling the kitchen, he is aware, in a state of ecstatic vagueness, of the face of his wife, her round hips rolling under the tightly knotted red silk robe she wears in the late evenings, but he cannot look away from his sculpture. Later, wearing daytime clothes, she brings him some green tea. He doesn’t touch it because he doesn’t need it for his sculpture. He is rolling eight hundred little terracotta spikes and he feels fantastic. Now he stands in the middle of the room biting his nails and putting the spikes around the smaller spire of the thing in his head. He can’t think about this sculpture another minute. He should have hated it all along, never should have loved–yes, now he hates the thing completely.

Searching for a window of escape, he locates a slip of paper he has scribbled something on: “Heat broken Heart broken.” God, what is this shit? What has he been doing with his life? Then he discovers the mug of green tea. It’s long gone cold but he bolts it like a tonic, and runs down the stairs into the street and all the way to Merceda Beach, which is just the sort of trashy, smelly, end-of-the-line place he feels he belongs.

But it’s beautiful–sunset and beautiful–one of those really orange sunsets, the people glowing like plums and peaches in the sun, so soft, ripely alive in the golden light of a sky of creamed fire. A surfer standing stoned in the sand scratches  at his wet­ly tangled head. He is as old as the sky and as new as the clouds splashed across it. Mikey perceives that he is not as soft and sweet and creamsicle-colored as all these beautiful people out here, to say nothing of the sky. He feels like if someone were to bend down and remind him he doesn’t belong out here in all this heartbreaking beauty, he would believe them. He would hurry home and kiss his children and crawl into bed with his wife, a woman he doesn’t de­serve. Because he has been so foolish. He’s fallen into believing he can actually offer something of value to a world with a sky like this. Mikey turns his back to the sea. The street side hotels rear up face­lessly white before him, and before them the boardwalk, the shops that sell sarongs and T-shirts, the jugglers and the painted people who stand like statues for small change, the hot dog stands and ice cream shacks, the busking musicians, the waddling gulls, and all the people, and all the new shadows sprouting up in the floodlit night.

A tall girl about college age, blonde, in red-framed sunglasses, sits in a lawn chair on the boardwalk, so absorbed in plunking at a ukulele it seems as if she doesn’t know she’s in public. She doesn’t have a cup out in front of her or anything. She’s just messing around. She’s not playing music, she’s playing with music. Mikey is amazed to witness how apparently pleasant and peaceful her art-making is. Music can be like that, he remembers. He hasn’t played in a long time.

He stops and watches her, the river of people streaming behind him, the tide rolling out before him, the sun a brilliant drop of hot wax sliding down to the edge of the horizon. She doesn’t notice him. He doesn’t want her to. The sun is ready to disappear.

And just as it slips out of reach over the ocean he hears her play a song of his own, a song he and Tom wrote long ago.

His nose floods with the smells of the garage: mildew, incense, ashtrays, weed, the sweetly aged sweat of his guitar strap. He can feel the strap cutting into his shoulder, the good, hard bite of the steel strings sinking into his callused fingers. Rose nods as she plays, that funny bouffant headband she wears bobbing like a quail feather on her head, the familiar wrinkle of concentration on her lovely face. Like an accompanying choir the hush of rain sings to them with love in the woods outside, raindrops clatter on the open garage door, and beneath the door a few figures stand with hoods up or hats on, shiver­ing, smoking, watching them rehearse. Gilda is dancing, shaking her green and blue hair all around, and Kyle is trying to get a short girl to dance with him, and Mikey is goo, melted into the music, safe to melt with the steady heartbeat of Tom on drums behind him, Tom twisting and thrashing and gasping on his gold and silver throne. Mikey looks back at Tom to smile at him and see the reassurance of that broad smile, and there is a boy sitting there at the drums, but it isn’t Tom. It’s some stranger with a face as plain as pudding.

And then he remembers.

The chords change. The air smells of hot dogs, of salt. The girl is playing something entirely different now. A song of her own, or someone else’s, but not his. It was just those few seconds, a few notes played just so, not the whole song, but a mystically reclaimed shred of it. The girl has somehow conducted the notes right through her, like some kind of bizarre cosmic lightning rod. He used to believe in stuff like this. Now he doesn’t believe or disbelieve. Either way he will forget again, will possibly never feel this loss again–it’s closing over already, like mud over a dropped stone, and he lets this happen, being both the mud and the stone, being helpless.

The sun is gone and Mikey is exhausted. It’s time to give up and go home. Right now his wife will be making dinner for him and the kids. It could be Mongolian beef. Or corn chowder. Before dinner his children take turns setting the table and sweeping the floor, and it’s his job to make the salad. How many dinners  has he missed? Who has made the salad for his family? His noblest work will be this salad. He won’t go to the sculpture tonight. Tonight he will make nothing more than salad. He does that very well. Tom is not stuck in a grid of days anymore, but Mikey is. The best he can do is go home.

He moves back down the boardwalk. The air will grow colder. The girl will leave for her own home, wherever that is. There’s beer for sale, and cocktails in plastic cups you can take along with you, anything you like. The  mood is changing. The boardwalk will fill with strang­ers sharing this narrow plank that extends along the brightly lighted beach until it ends somewhere in darkness, and they may smile and say Sorry and Beautiful night isn’t it and Whoops! when they brush elbows, but they will keep going. They must. It is a strange and dis­comfiting miracle to all be here together, right here, right now, living, thirsting creatures with nowhere to go but on.