This is my 201st total post on Theoretically So and represents 41,000 Words (not including lists, updates, random emo crap). This post, Ben’s Shorts, marks major revisions of three earlier posts that I thought would be kind of fun to share. (Today’s earlier post on Los Angeles is another heavily revised, though still evolving story, that actually grew out of something that wasn’t posted here). As some of you know, this is all part of a larger project called Capital City Blues, which I’m trying to evolve into a collection of much tighter stories. I guess, simply: it’s a process.
Thanks to everyone who has been reading, who has sent emails, and/or may have made comments. As a professor of mine has said “I fear sucking much more than I fear criticism,” so really, if you have any reactions I’m always interested to hear them.
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1: Proximity
The first time Beth and I had lunch was on the Kennedy Center’s porch, overlooking the Potomac, on a blistering day in late June. There are metallic picnic tables set out on the concrete deck.
We picked a table in the shade to avoid scorching ourselves on the metal. The sun’s glare off of the white stone made everything difficult to look at. Everything baked.
I had packed a turkey sandwich on wheat bread, with tomato, spinach, mustard, and a slice of Muenster cheese. Beth had bought a tossed greens salad from the coffee shop under our office building. While she waited in line, I read a CityPaper by the door, trying to think of what we were going to talk about. I had been working for about three weeks, sitting in the cubical next to her, spending afternoons allocating and reallocating funds in my retirement account.
But Beth and I hadn’t talked much so far, and her invitation to lunch via a playful email—“Up for a bite al fresco, comrade?!”—had come as a surprise.
To this point, I had been eating by myself in the company “Common Room” every day, trying to catch up on things that I hadn’t read in college: Proust, Hamlet, a book called Pragmatist Aesthetics.
And I usually skipped “team drinking” after work. In the evenings I would go home on the number 31 bus, which rumbled up Wisconsin Avenue to the cheerful white twenty-something enclave of Glover Park, where I would greet my cheerful white twenty-something roommate Katie. I’d eat another sandwich for dinner because it was too hot to cook. Even this early in the summer the evening heat lasted long after the sun fell below the ginkgo trees and happy hours all over the city were ending. I would smoke three cigarettes on our steps and watch as cheerful white twenty-something girls went jogging past the house.
Beth sat down with a clang and I started unpacking my sandwich from its aluminum foil.
“So how do you like DC?” she asked.
She was rummaging in her enormous leather bag for something, taking out its contents as she searched. A green Dior sunglass case from which she extracted bulbous sunglasses. Lip gloss. A beaten up cell phone, a bottle of half-drunk Red B Vitamin Water, a brush. Watching the contents splayed out on the table, I felt intrusive, and paused to take a gooey bite of my sandwich.
A warm breeze convected off the concrete and slammed me in the face.
“I like DC okay so far,” I said taking a squishy bite of the sandwich. I tried to look pensive and stared with purpose out at the Potomac. The steeples of Georgetown stood behind a curtain of haze above the river. I glanced back at Beth and then looked down at the aluminum foil. I put down the sandwich and wiped my hands on my pants.
She had put on the sunglasses and was still searching her bag, now with two hands.
“Well it takes awhile to find what to do when you go out—you know, getting to know the neighborhoods and everything.”
I thought of what I had done the night before after dinner. A load of laundry: underwear and socks, followed by two episodes of the Discover Channel’s documentary Planet Earth (“Fresh Waters” and “Great Plains”). In bed, I Googled “how many cigarettes does it take to get cancer.”
“I guess I haven’t really gone out much yet,” I said.
Beth’s sunglasses covered much of her slight face but accented her cheeks as they angled to her chin. Every time I looked at her, it seemed as though she had just finished posing.
A quiet sophistication underlay everything she did. She left it in her footprints, and it hung in the air after every gesture. I caught it while she showed me how to put in the department code on our copy machine. When I sat behind her at her desk as she tried to figure out a billing contact. When she took me on a tour of the office cafeteria.
“Here is where we keep the cream cheese,” she had said, pulling open the refrigerator door with a grace that bordered on the cinematic.
It was getting hot even in the shade. I had forgotten to wash my undershirts, and I felt the sweat sliding down my back toward my pants.
“So where do you live in the city?” I asked.
Beth leaned across the table and stared at me through her dark glasses.
“Wait, go like this,” she said, putting her index finger up to her front teeth, “You have something green caught in your teeth.”
“Oh, thanks. It’s probably spinach,” I said, and I stuck my nail straight into a monster wad of food.
“Let me see,” Beth said.
I ran my tongue over my teeth and smiled.
“Perfect.”
2: Self-Improvement
At house parties, conversations wallowed in conventions of self-improvement. They promised to run more, drink less, smoke only on Saturdays, wear a tie to work on Wednesdays. They promised to stay in touch with each other and put more effort into their work. They would stop stealing stationery from the supply closet. They would leave earlier in the morning to make sure that they were on time, and keep their resume updated for potential opportunities.
And yet, sometimes they would lay awake at night and think to themselves, “What will be sufficient?” They would count sheep. Count backwards. Count sheep jumping backwards over impossibly high fences. And they would dream about large formal meetings at restaurants, getting pieces of steak stuck in their throat. Choking and dying in a puddle of au jus.
Waking up in a pool of sweat, tangled in sheets they bought at Ikea—was this too conventional to notice? Had they been living out someone else’s outdated cliché aspiration? Did they even have ownership of the things that they despised in themselves?
Sometimes it felt unlikely.
Parties would turn into expeditions to bars elaborately coordinated via text message, cell phone, Facebook. Messages whirred around towers and bounced off satellites to ensure that they could all find each other at the same bar that they always went to on the same night every week. Some would leave surreptitiously together, but cabs complicated quick getaways. There were never enough cabs. Someone would come out for a cigarette.
“HEY! WHERE ARE YOU GOING OH MY GOD I’M SO DRUNK.”
“Nowhere, I guess,” they’d say.
“I’m really trying to run more,” Nathan would say to Ben. We should go together when I get through up in Baltimore.” He was rarely in town these days, commuting North for some gig at an adjunct office. He awoke at 5 am and rode his bike to Union Station. He took the MARC train an hour to Baltimore and bought a bagel and coffee, read the Post in the café, and walked to work. It had been a damp winter so far, and he huffed in the wet air off the harbor.
There were bouts of trying to find things to do. Real things. Things that seemed appropriately indicative of the cultural capital that they believed they had the right to possess. Emails would circulate about film festivals, theater festivals, art shows where the people would wear interesting scarves and talk about balls of wire or hair protruding from plaster objects in interesting ways.
“Hey everyone! Interested in checking out the ‘Fringe Festival! Any takers?”
They would see French films sometimes. They would meet for group dinners occasionally. But almost always, everyone would be exhausted after work. Or they would wake up too hungover to see and chug a liter of water and send a text message saying that they couldn’t make brunch. They just couldn’t’. They’d flake, fizzle, forget, and say, “maybe next time, I’m beat! But thanks for thinking of me.” They all liked being thought about at least.
Once football season was over, Sunday afternoons became gaping holes, so they bought books. Proust and Hemingway and collections of short stories that won awards.
But of course, that never worked.
Napping suddenly seemed like the only thing they could do on the weekends. They were old people with drinking habits and few hobbies. They felt uninteresting and fat.
And of course, they were poor. Not as poor as their friends in New York, who always cheerfully lauded the virtues of their self-righteous Brooklyn-based bohemian lives. Some of them shared bathrooms. None of them lived by themselves. They lived in Astoria or in co-ops in the Bronx. They rode the subway everywhere and when they came to visit DC they somehow seemed to wear more layers. Had acquired more scarves. Who could survive New York summers so bundled up and especially when they couldn’t afford air conditioning because they were poor.
So poor.
Higher salaries spared some of the people in DC from the nobility of poverty. Many of them lived in Arlington, in gargantuanly anonymous apartment complexes.
One time Ben rode home with Beth in a cab from Clarendon and she looked out at the buildings and said:
“These buildings give me the dark feeling.”
The lobbies were adorned with marble and uniformed security guards who lolled at their desks. The tiny one-bedroom apartments had thin walls and parquet floors.
Was this still the universal indication of success for twenty-somethings? How long had parquet been the material that signified financial security? Did they hear a rumor that Jennifer had bought a condo in Columbia Heights? Did someone say something about Charlie quitting his job and leaving for Africa to dig wells or shoot water buffalo?
Maybe they should drop out, disappear, find a new direction. Anything to get them away from their law firms, consulting shops, PR gigs, temp work, copying, coffee making, media buying, client entertaining, babysitting on the weekends. The very white collarness of their lives astounded them. They had 401(k) accounts with Fidelity. They owned stock in a Brazilian telecom company and had made a few speculative bets based on semi-inside information from friends who worked at the collapsing banks in New York. Now was the time to buy, apparently, while the bankers were swan-diving off of balconies and rooftops in the Financial District. They had medical benefits to navigate on their own, and they wouldn’t call their families for help with taxes anymore. Partly because they wanted to do it on their own and partly because they didn’t want anyone to know what they made.
Because saving was always an issue. They stuck to light watery cheap beers at bars. Sometimes they wouldn’t even go out. They’d buy generic brands of cereal at Safeway and use their discount cards. Some weeks, they just didn’t eat meat and actually suspected that some of their vegetarian friends just couldn’t afford chicken. Why else would all the leftie hipster kids who worked at HRC be vegetarians? It made more sense than ideology.
And then they would get depressed that they used single-ply toilet paper and more depressed that they were depressed about it. And they’d start to think about other cities, other jobs, other places.
The imperative to get out. Head to California (they didn’t realize immediately that even this narrative wasn’t their own—it belonged to their parents, their grandparents, the founding fathers of the whole fucking nation for God’s sake. A new twist on Manifest Destiny that seduced them with something like the promise of cheap wine and a life lived perpetually in the outdoors).
Need a change, need something new, need to take painting classes at the Corcoran. Need to date someone new. Need yoga. Need to spice up the commute with classical music. Need a new poet to read, a new belief to espouse. Need a new group of friends. Why am I always at the same house parties with the same people talking about self-improvement?
Because it’s comfortable, and not so bad. And there were people who loved it. They would always love it. They were optimists and it was working for them. Nothing to hold a grudge against. It was just a matter of taste and of perspective. If you change the latter, you could mold the former. And so they would settle on improving their perspective, even if they thought they were really unhappy. And this worked. It got them through the weeks, and soon it would be better, maybe in the spring they would reassess.
3: Distance
Ben checked the weather for Chicago.
“Bitterly Cold, Clear.”
He hit refresh. Checked it in a different zip code to ascertain the precise predictions for snow in Oak Park, Aurora, Waukeegan, and others of the outlying suburbs. He checked ski conditions for Alta in Utah and Bear Valley in California, astounded at the predicted totals of snowfall for the coming 24 hours. Feet and feet of snow. Even DC, which astounded him. He remembered rainy winters and shrugging into flu-inducing 40-degree temperatures
All around the country, the snow fell in blankets. Everywhere except in Chicago, where the wind howled and the temperature held steadily in the “Too Balls-Ass Cold to Snow” range. Instead, snow blew upwards from the ground and off of the trees. It swirled in tornado-like spirals and fell back to the ground in different piles.
Ben sat at his desk in his boxer shorts and a Santa hat, the thermostat to his apartment set at a balmy eighty-five degrees. He had put a Christmas mix on the stereo and the music wandered in from the living room.
He updated his Facebook profile and clicked through a few photo albums of friends from elementary school. Some were already married. Was this really possible? His mother said that she had run into Barbara Snyder, selling shoes in the mall last month. She was studying at night for a pharmacy degree. Ben had sighed audibly on the phone and told his mother that he had to go do some reading.
After checking the long-range forecast for Maui, he searched “Haleakala Volcano” on Wikipedia and read about dormant volcanoes and poured himself a glass of bourbon, wondering if it might be possible to write about anything that didn’t in some way involve natural disasters. He drank the glass of bourbon and clicked through some articles about sulfur particles and global cooling. Some wingnut in Kansas had an idea to pump sulfur into the atmosphere with a hose lifted by giant helium balloons.
He poured himself another bourbon and sat back in his chair. Stared at the screen for a second and then threw the glass back and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The radiator pipes clanked and groaned in the walls.
“So did you decide when you’re flying in?” his mother had asked, the tone notably more frantic tonight than it had been the last time they talked. “You know, your father really wants to see you.”
“I’ll let you know as soon as I book the flight.” Ben was rubbing the same spot on his forehead in small circles. It felt as though he would put a hole in the front of his head.
“Okay. Good. We just,” she paused. “You know, we worry, and we’re looking forward to seeing you. That’s all.”
He got an email a few minutes after they hung up.
i miss the man ure becoming make sure to tell us when u fly in yaaaay!!! miss u a ton and can’t wait to see u my favorite Chicago bear luv mama bear
Walls that seemed to close in. Everyone had left town for celebrations with their families, and the weight of the apartment’s thick heated air pressed inward. From somewhere came the sound of dogs barking to the tune of Jingle Bells.
In a sweeping move he stood up and went to the closet. He put on long underwear and a pair of wool pants. He took off the Santa hat and put on a clean undershirt, a red flannel, and a thick wool sweater. Walking over to his dresser, he pulled out a pair of ski socks and dug around for his big winter hat. He was already beginning to sweat. The layers were piling up, but the wind was howling and he knew that he would need every scrap of fabric on his shoulders. He wrapped his face in a scarf and found his pair of mittens stuck in the couch cushions in the living room.
Before he walked out the door, he stared at himself in the mirror, bundled and swaying slightly. His body puffed with the layers and his mittens hung limply at his side. He looked like a very tall child, ready to play in the snow.
The cold pierced through the long underwear when he pushed through the outer door of his building. Ice crystals danced in the otherwise dry air. For a moment he thought that he would be totally warm, even standing still. He smelled the bourbon on his scarf and his eyes teared up. In the silent darkness of the street, the edges of light posts and crystalline tree limbs blurred and fogged. The lights had halos around them and the frozen puddles appeared rimmed with white dust—flurries or chopped up ice leftover from previous storms.
The muffled sound of the wind through his hat reminded him to start moving. The sharp tingle on his exposed cheeks tightened the muscles. Ben walked down the block and turned left toward Lake Michigan. A few people were about, bouncing jauntily in snow boots and down jackets from the commuter rail station. Above, a lit train clanged and shrugged into the cold.
Ben walked down 57th Street, crossing Stony Island Parkway and South Hyde Park Boulevard. A few cars whizzed by on Lake Shore Drive, shivering around the turns.
He walked beneath Lake Shore Drive to the 57th Street Beach where the lake opened up and sprawled in front of him. He caught his breath. The wind whirled and slammed into the shore, braced by growing spidery patches of ice that reached out into the black expanse. Across the lake to the southeast, he could see white smoke against the dark sky pouring from the lighted stacks in Gary, Indiana in the distance.
How ridiculous he must look, Ben thought to himself. A black mound sitting on the hardened sand of a winter lake beach, staring at Indiana in the dark. He had been sitting in his underwear, not twenty minutes before, listening to dogs barking Christmas carols and drinking bourbon. He had been searching social networks and reading about dormant volcanoes.
And now, of his own accord, he sat in frigid wind chills of the icy lake, staring.
What am I supposed to think about, he thought to himself. Thinking about what he should think about seemed an inadequate thing to think about. So he thought instead about what it would look like if a volcano were exploding out there over the shores of Gary. Which he thought sounded vaguely mythic: the Shores of Gary—like an Irish rune.
“The Shores of Gary,” he brogued to himself. “The Shores of Gary.”
Something satisfyingly mysterious about the industry of the place. Its smokestacks and its gray air, which on clear days over the lake, wrapped the city in a shroud.
His ass started to get cold, so Ben stood up. He walked up the path to Promontory Point. To the North, the Chicago skyline glowed in frozen pinks and purples and dots of luminescent white, the colors reflecting off the lake and the ice, brightening the sky in the distance. He stood, looking at the skyline. Alone and with his hands in his pockets. There, across the silent miles to the Loop, a million people shuffled around in the streets and on the higher-up floors of blackened steel skyscrapers. Waiting for the El and looking up articles about volcanoes. Drinking bourbon and sitting in their underwear, making preparations to brave the elements.
He stared a moment longer at the skyline and looped back around the walkway, sliding over patches of ice.
