3
A selection from my journal, penned on the morning of June 13th, on the subway straight from Jane’s mom’s apartment to work:
Dana’d never love me and yet I keep her around in my head. Miranda might, but she is a grown-up with a job and no friends.I do not like to use the apps. I use Instagram like a normal guy. I will regret blowing off Sasha Ngo [film major tried to fuck me in Human Rights class I never completed] and Aida [Olson] from hip-hop class probably for the rest of my life. Olivia dumped me over posting thats been my day one nightmare since i joined a HTTP forum in he 8th grade. Jane is not a feeling caring person but i think that can be good I want to take them to Clockwork and do shots and a beer 5 dollars
There’s a party for a shoe Donnie is doing with Merrells. It’s in an otherwise quiet cocktail bar on Mott Street. I bring Bart and Mena and thankfully not Jane because Miranda is here, on a leather couch in this done-up basement speaking with cupped hand into the ear of Beth Winkler, a New York prep school girl turned Nashville Radio Disney singer turned NYU film student and internet irony personality. On the same couch is Duff Benny, a backpack rapper/Rocket League pro, Brandon Wardell, who does something and the black girl who dies on the Dawson’s Creek remake. I wave at Miranda as we beeline to the bar, where the bartender is wearing head-to-toe earth tones and a Patagonia skullie (in July?)
“Isn’t this a Merrells party,” Bart says, enunciating through the sweet strings and harsh, muted breakbeats of a song straight off Pure Moods and pointing at the hat.
“Oh, I don’t work for them,” the bartender mumbles.
“Oh, I don't know why I figured you did-”
“What do you want?”
“I can’t hear you,” Bart says, fighting a casually cruel grin.
“What do you-”
“3 vodka sodas.”
There’s not much space in this basement so we stand by the bar for a moment before Mena slinks off to say hi to someone.
"She's not happy to be here," Bart says.
"Are you drunk?"
"I had a little in the Uber."
I don't remember that, but I sat upfront and kept my eyes closed the whole ride because I was coming down off of the expired Ritalin I found in my brother's room that I took to play video games.
"Hey, Beth! Say something racist!"
"Not here, Bart," she says. "How much time have you spent outside of the group DM today?"
"I don't understand the question."
Miranda walks up and we hug. "So this is what you've been up to?"
"Yeah, these Merrells are just flying off the shelves."
"Ha."
"They are, actually, it has been a hassle. What brings you here?"
"Fuck, it's a Tuesday night, I'm not working, why not. Beth, basically."
"How's the work going, the DJing?"
"Eh."
I laugh and swig my drink. It's actually somehow vodka and Sprite.
"Guess how we met," Bart is saying, arm looped through Beth's, who is earnestly smiling.
"Haha," Miranda, "How?"
"Yeah," Me, "I actually don't know."
"Reddit. Well, the subreddit dedicated to me."
I'm starting to think I never left my bed this morning.
"Anyway - Hi, sorry, I'm Beth Winkler."
"Uh, Joy Davies. I know you…"
"Ah, yes, the skateboarder. You posted, too! You’re username was like, Chuckklosterman-"
"We all went to school together," I say, dodging any inquiry into my inflammatory online habits.
"Private high school. And college? Ooh, Hudson Valley. That's really in right now, right?
"Bard is in, we just look like it. Very pretty, but like, it’s everyone who can’t afford Tivoli but thinks Hudson’s too fast. Fucking weekenders."
Beth laughs. "Yeah, my stepdad just got a place."
"It's literally hell. But I still have to go to school and, like serve these people at work."
"Wow, people like me?"
"Yeah, Beth."
"Oof, LOL, we love. Y'know, I always rent a Tesla-"
"Yeah-huh?" I say.
"Joy," Bart says, "stop doing class war with my beautiful internet friend." He's joking maybe. Clearly there's something on the table between them. Or I mean, I dunno. I can't find any deep understanding of people. I think Bart wants to fuck Beth, maybe again.
"Bart, Bart, it's okay, honey."
"Do you guys want another round," Miranda says, even though we're standing right by the bar.
"I'd take a beer," I say. Beth and Bart turn away in a huddle.
Miranda turns to the bar and I turn to Beth and Bart and Bart is saying "That Brandon guy is a capital-F f-word, with the -ot" and Beth "Don't start anything, he's friends with Caroline Polachek" and Bart says "Caroline Politik is a capital-F f-word, with the -ot."
"I know from personal experience that she is a straight."
Beth takes our group and a photographer friend to a pizza spot down the street. She offers to buy a pie but we cannot decide the toppings. Mena is adamant that meat not touch the pizza, Bart doesn't like veggie, so on and so forth.
Miranda and I mull by the door. "There's this party at Mendel's Beth was telling me about," she says. Then, eyes closed, "But I don't know about it."
"You don't want to go?"
"Well…“
"You'd rather go home. You'd rather have me come over."
Miranda gives a gummy grin. "You are reading my mind, Joy."
"Bart and Beth are gonna be so disappointed."
"Oh, they'll be fine. They've got catching up to do."
We head back to Merrells party, lacking pizza.
"Isn't this a Merrells party? Since when are they ‘internet, youth and celebrity.’"
"Hey, Mena."
She's carrying the remains of her cup, crushed in her hand, and with her other hand absentmindedly tucking the hem of her "Sexism's gay" embroidery crewneck down into her black polyester running skort.
"Uh," I continue, "I don't know, Rachel did the invites."
"What even is 'Donnie's?'"
"We sell t-shirts. Speaking of, that's… a shirt."
"Thank you," Mena says.
“Do you think Bart is going to rail that TV girl,” I say, regretting when I notice Mena’s eyebrows twitch.
“Bart is such a brat.”
“That’s his character tr-”
A bespectacled man in baggy capris and technical sandals has beckoned to our group as if to ask for a picture. Mena and I throw up peace signs. Beth points to the man’s cargo pants and says, “We’re matching!” Bart gives an empty stare. I think Miranda’s back is turned. The point-and-shoot flashes, and its photographer is gone as quickly as he came.
“Did he say who he worked for?” Mena, confused.
“Let’s hope Purple,” Bart, bouncy.
“Ew.” Beth. “More like Pedo Mag.”
“Hey, come on, it’d be funny-”
“No, Wardell’s coming over - Hiiii!”
At the bar, I see the kids from rag n bone pointing and giggling at us.
I wait out in front of Rust, alone, as Bart is in Sydney for the week. In my summer garb of a skate shop t-shirt, cotton elastic waistband shorts, a backpack cold with sweat and run-down, soggy sneakers, I watch Miranda’s Instagram story. Mena comes out and asks if I’ve seen this documentary about the privatization of public space.
“It’s at the IFC. There are skaters in it.”
“Are you okay?” I say. “Are you really trying to sit through 2 hours of an urbanism documentary just to hang out with me?”
“It’s not an invite--I’ve already seen it.”
We walk in the direction of the theater anyway. Mena stops to buy a magazine in a magazine shop and I spot “Once teenybop crooner, now mid-society layabout…” by Beth’s cropped face in the culture pages of the Vox Media sub-brand monthly I flip through.
“At least the rich, useless kids of New York City don’t pretend they’re gonna make something of themselves with the liberal arts education,” Mena says, as we continue toward West 4th.
“I'm in for like 20 thousand to those Soros freaks up there. I shoulda gone to Hunter and just been a moocher.”
“Soros is Bard, not… A moocher?”
“Mooching, the entourage. Couch-surfer”
“You’re mooching right now.”
“You sure think highly of yourself,” I say.
“Anyway, Beth’s nice. Are you still seeing Miranda?”
“Sometimes.”
“Wait, fuck, and that girl from LA-”
“Nonbinary,” I say. “They’re nonbinary…”
“What the hell, Joy, do you fuck now?”
“No, just two people. It’s only been a couple weeks. Just timing.”
“Don’t hurt anybody, now,” Mena says.
"I'm on the rebound. I’ll get hurt."
We sit in the triangle-shaped park a block or so north of the theater. Mena flips through her magazine. City kids don’t do shit, someone argued at a party once or maybe it was the professor of that Human Rights class I took last semester that I got an incomplete in, explaining why her daughter would never attend Springer. We don’t. Everybody I know is on track to do some bullshit job in marketing or on the Hill in DC or at a startup or at Google or is literally dead from those one or two times they tried to get into dealing H or is in the Army and the people who don’t need to make any money will be unfulfilled emotionally until their art’s in galleries or they’ve played in Berlin a few times or their pop-up's out the red or they’ve got bylines in @nytimes, @theoutline, or @pitchfork. For a lot of people, this whole project of undergraduate education is propped on little more than, well, I can’t make do at home because I don’t have any skills, but my parents will pay for me to go figure it out, but oh no! - I figured out the wrong thing and now I’m gonna get booted off my scholarship or something. I picked schools based on assumed prestige, their financial aid offerings and the amount of sex and drugs I assumed I’d encounter. I’ll never have the connections to get one of those retail jobs with health insurance you get on Lafayette or anything more than a couple dollars over minimum wage working front-of-house at some corrupt art institution or back-of-house at a Brooklyn or South Bronx restaurant that need not exist. I am scared of the police, boisterous homeless men, the price of rent and the allure of opioids. Something that settles me is the thought of an adult autism diagnosis. I ask Mena if she minds if I smoke.
“Go ahead.”
Mena herself is some sort of empath Econ major at Oberlin. She’s only written for school publications and the Financial Times and wanted to submit to Jacobin before she heard they don’t compensate freelancers well or even publish undergrads. Her teeth are straight and she doesn’t drink much, but she mopes, constantly. Mena has a strained relationship with her father, who is one of those white guys who worked in Japan in the eighties and nineties. Her strongest motivation might be proving other people wrong.
“Something I’ve noticed,” she’s saying, “since that Merrells party is that it’s cool to dress on purpose like I dress, everyday,” the magazine’s pages fluttering when she points to an outfit of a denim skirt and a red cardigan.
“Clothes as phoney or semi-phoney cultural signifiers is back in a big way,” I say, “Just looking good is wack again.”
“I swear you said the same thing in 2014, when skating was cool.”
“Well, they were hot, and then they weren’t, and now they are again. Actually dressing up means you’re actually like, genuinely confident and normal, or in costume, or a tryhard, or just washed up. The Seth Cohens of the world wore zip-ups and skinny jeans for a reason, and the kids who did it to look like Seth Cohen were late, dumb jocks.”
“What are the cultural signifiers of dressing like me?”
“Honestly?”
“Yeah,” she says, “honest-to-god truth.”
“Like a pretentious but not smarmy college kid. Like, I was smart, well before I was stylish or suave or sexy or intriguing or put-together or beautiful, and now that I’m beautiful and intriguing I’m not gonna play catch-up with everything else.”
“Wow… I’m not sure you understand what a cultural signifier is, and I’m not sure whether to be like, offended or not.”
“Believe me, this is the only thing I understand,” I say.
“Uh. I think you might be projecting.”
“No, I think my baggage about self-presentation is tied much closer to my desire for sex appeal than yours.”
“Huh?” Mena says. “What’s that got to do with cultural signifiers,” she stammers. "You don't fucking read anything, you don't know anything-"
“I’m just speaking generally,” I say, pulling back a bit.
“I fucking… my life is so much more run on my desire for sex appeal than yours. You’re running a neckbeard!”
“... I guess I haven’t shaved in awhile.”
“I’m not one to harken to identity but that’s such a guy thing to say, it’s insane.”
Echoing Bart I say, “Why are you mad?”
“It’s like all I think about,” Mena mumbles. "It's awful."
“Anyway, excess is coming back, big. Do you want to get a drink or something?”
"Fuck off, Joy."
It’s nearly sundown when we double back toward Washington Square Park, before Mena offers to take a cab to Clockwork. “It’s by my house,” she says, her voice low. “Or we could just go to my house.”
“It's not by your house. You live in Tribeca.”
“And why wouldn’t you wanna…?”
“This is still a hypothetical,” I say, three White Claws in as the sun dips into New Jersey, “and not a come-on, right?” Mena’s place is nice, if a little hollow.
“I don’t know,” Mena says, standing at her kitchen island. “What would Bart think?”
“Is this about Bart?”
“Heh.”
“Is this about that guy from Israel?”
“No. It's about you and I having sex.”
“Mena, come on.”
“Joy, I haven’t done anything in nearly a year. And you’re negging me.”
“That’s okay.” I’m not sure what to do at this point. “I didn’t mean to.”
"I'm worried it'll just seal itself shut,” she says, a smile breaking through.
"I think that's normal for a bookish 19 year old."
"I am 20."
"Well, okay."
"Is it, and stop me if this is too far-"
"Too far?" I say. "Is this a whole bit then?"
She bulges her eyes out for a second with a slight groan. "I'm just talking to you about something Joy and it's not my fault if that's fun or exciting."
"Only a bit."
"Is it because I'm Sephardic and Japanese?"
"No, next question."
"What's your issue here?" She's gripping the counter-top.
"I'm a logical person," I say. "I'm not just some mess-around guy-"
"You so are!"
"I don't like being that way-"
"Don't you just want to try it out? Haven't you had the thought?"
"I don't know if it's the right choice, on our path as friends. We’re good friends, right?"
Mena smirks. "That's fucking-dude, that's fucking gay."
"Mena!"
She blows a raspberry.
"I'm gonna go, I think," I say.
"... That was so cruel, what you said in the park," she warbles, leaving the kitchenette.
I sigh.
Miranda has a car pick us up from the Bronx to drive out to the venue. “It’s on MillerCoors dime,” she says, applying eyeliner in her kitchen.
“I thought Big Beverage was out of dance music?” I am looking at her calendar again, the cat one, and she has marked down today as “club night.” Affixed below it on the pinboard is a flyer for a date since passed. “DJ greene” amidst other names, a Berlin address.
“You can’t believe everything you read on the internet,” she says.
I light a cigarette over the sink, as I need it, as I am indulging at the moment, with Miranda and in general. She’s got a gig later, a private party at Brooklyn Bowl, and we have scores of drink tickets and Bart is coming. I plan to get wasted, as I had a long day at work, and Jane won’t speak to me on account of something Tracy said, or so I figure, as they will not respond to my text messages. Mena is no longer mad at me, but I'm convinced I owe her something. My cat clawed me last night. Anyway, it is not a glamorous venue, Miranda said, but they are paying a pretty penny. She laughs when she says this. I am drinking a vodka soda out of a big plastic Yankee Stadium cup we got at a Yankees game a week or so prior. She is not drinking. Miranda’s roommate Katie is out of town for a wedding. The other night, I came by around 11 at night and she buzzed me in. Miranda was not home, and we looked at Katie’s notebook of tattoo flash. She has an apprenticeship in the East Village. I am drinking her vodka; she told Miranda it was okay.
“When does the car get here?” I say.
“8:30. Bart’ll meet us there?”
“Yes, he has list, right?”
“Of course, first and last.”
I run the water over my cigarette.
"USBs, keys, wallet, phone, ID, blah blah." Miranda sifts through her tan leather bag in the Uber.
"You had said you DJ," the driver, Kim, says.
"I've got a gig tonight, actually," Miranda says.
"In Williamsburg?"
"It's a corporate thing."
"Ah, so no bottle service."
"I think they're comping us a bowling lane."
"That's something. You ever fuck with Miami? With Lit, in Miami?"
The venue is strange. The DJ booth sits elevated over an elongated dance floor, a huge space, one where a squint through your eyelashes would convince you that you were somewhere more fun. A stage is at the other end, for guitar bands or whatever. Adjacent to the dance floor are 8 bowling lanes. Art video loops on huge flatscreens that speckle the venue. Coming back in from the smoking area, I wave two drink tickets and two dollars at a bartender and get a Sixpoint and a rum and coke. Beth, Mena and Bart have a booth in the VIP section; it’s the only occupied table in there. Beth pulls on her Juul, exhaling no vapor after a moment. Mena pokes Bart in the ribs. He flinches.
“Miranda’s in the bathroom,” Beth says.
“How you holding up?” I say.
“Well, it’s no Up&Down.”
"Yeah, it's a bowling alley."
Bart's friend Myra is here, not with us. I spot her coming out of the bathrooms with a guy. They look done-up, like they're older than 22. She's got her hair up; there are laugh lines I didn't notice when we met, acne scars.
We make eye contact and her eyes bulge. She spins around in front of her date, and they head off to the main room.
I don't mention this to anyone. She's probably being aloof for a good reason. I'd assumed she was our age, but I guess there's no reason that'd have to be true.
Miranda and I ready to leave around 3. Mena's already off in a cab.
"They still serving drinks?" Beth asks, standing by the DJ booth.
"No…" says Bart, "but my homie says Nowadays is popping right now, and he could get us in."
"They have a door policy there?"
"You can't pay cover after a certain time, or something. Let's just go."
"Whatever you say, mister." I can see in Beth's jaw that she's gnashing her teeth. "I gotta go to the bathroom," she says. Bart nods. "You wanna come?" she says to me and Miranda.
Bart is quick to say, "He's good, he doesn't mess with anything." I nod.
"I would," Miranda says, "but I'm trying to head in early tonight. I'm pooped."
"Well, if we don't see you, thanks for inviting us. You had a great set."
"Of course, Beth. Stay safe."
Later, as we wait in the heat outside for a car, I observe that Beth was sweet tonight.
"She's nice when she's high."
Myra walks up with her boy. He's a little too close when he says, "Great job, greene" to which Miranda says thanks and I grunt uh huh. As I watch this guy closely, the film scholar whispers in my ear. "Bart's fucked," she says.
"Huh?"
"Take care of him." She begins to smile, but it's unnatural and I don't like her eyes.
"What the fu… what are you talking about?" They walk off. "What was that?" I say.
"That guy was nice."
"I know that girl, she's being weird."
Rachel at work asks me if I know Myra Franken. I look up from my phone and the counter to say “Does she have short hair,” and notice the girl lurking behind a row of clothes.
“She was crazy. I know her from middle school,” Rachel is saying, when I call out to Myra.
“Excuse me, can I ask you a question?”
“I work for some people,” Myra says, over a cigarette behind the store.
“What does that mean?” I say.
“Private equity. Lobbies. Lotta money involved.”
“So you’re a real estate agent.”
“No.” Myra blows dark hair from her face and continues. “Bart’s parents are worth a lot to a lot of people. Their projects.”
“Bart's parents? Their movies?”
“More than that. I can’t say much more.”
“And Bart?” I gulp. “So you’re Michael Clayton.”
“Do you remember May 2016? Riverside Park? About two in the morning?”
“Yeah, we were finishing high school, there were parties-”
“What happened to Bart?” Myra is impatient.
“I don’t- there was a thing at his place-”
“He crashed a Citibike into a patrol car.”
“Oh yeah! I remember that. He had an arm cast at prom-”
“Bart was at fault, and the officer was permanently disabled - blinded in one eye by shattered glass.”
I gulp again. “Well, uh, Kanye was at fault in his accident, too.”
“You don’t remember,” Myra says. “It was squashed in the press.”
“By Bart’s parents?”
“Not directly,” she says.
“By the people you work for.”
She nods. Myra explains that Bart’s wellbeing is the bargaining chip in a pissing match between the PR departments of billion dollar holding companies. While she talks, I notice what looks like the outline of a pistol in her New Yorker tote. Myra is not Bart’s guardian angel, but her salary depends on the thwarting of plots of opposing parties, while Bart and his family stay none the wiser. No, she grumbles, no killings, but an agent has already been dispatched.
“That guy who fell from the Manhattan Bridge?”
Myra’s eyes widen. “No, that was a bike courier, a graffiti artist, he slipped-”
“Jesus Christ, sorry. I just read about a fucking guy falling from the bridge one night, late, like early morning. I was leaving my friend’s house in Tribeca and taking a walk through Chinatown and saw the ambulances. And then I never read anything about it afterward.”
“Joy, look, you didn’t see anything.”
“I saw something, dude. Did you kill a guy over a Marvel movie?”
A beat. “Not a Marvel movie.”
“You’ll kill me if I tell anyone, huh?” I puff out my chest a bit, but I’m petrified.
“It won’t go anywhere. It can’t.”
“Who says?”
“No one will cover it, no social media platform will sanction any information about it for longer than an hour. No codes or secret messages will work. No wheatpastes, no Turk 128 stuff, nothing. No Al-Jazeera, no Reddit, no Young Turks, no Hacker News, no Gawker.”
“Gawker’s over.”
“That’s the idea. Look, Joy, this knowledge will wreck you. And anything you do with it puts Bart in harm’s way.”
“Are his parents running for office someplace?”
“No.”
“They just direct kids movies, then.”
“Expensive kids movies.”
"Alright, I gotta get back to-"
Myra grips my arm. "Take my card," she says. I do, looking back into the store. Myra's gone off when I look back, slipping through a crowd getting off a bus.
Bart met this girl at a Barcade. Christ.
Bart and I have been waiting at this handrail spot in East New York for almost an hour. "Do you think he's up yet," he asks again, about Stills, the 17 year old who told Bart he'd film a trick here.
"Kid's probably still drunk," I say.
"And you don't got anything, huh."
I look up at the set of stairs. 10, paved-brick run up, round rail with a kink at the end. I chuckle. "Fuck no."
"Is this thing a kick-out?"
"We've been here awhile, but it's a school, there shouldn't be anyone here on Saturday."
"I wonder then," Bart says, "what that van that's been circling the block is doing."
"Van?"
He points. A van, marred with three spray-painted letters, sits at a red light on the other end of the school. "I guess they would have come over by now," Bart says.
"That's… that's weird."
"You think we're being watched?" He laughs. "God, I need to up my meds."
"It's just a van, I'm sure." 'Course, I wasn't, but what sort of cruel luck would validate Myra's clearly manic ramblings at the store so soon after them?
"You want to call a rain check, have a beer at mine? I'm thinking I told him Sunday."
I toss my board over the bent passenger seat of Bart's coupe. He hands me his camera bag and I place it softly beside it.
"You hear the new Thugger?" Bart says. I'm flicking through my wallet for that card as I grunt a yes.
"What's that you got there?"
I stop. "Oh… fucking… that girl Myra came by my job and gave me her number."
"She gave you a card? Business or pleasure?" He laughs.
"No idea… she ever tell you what she does for money?"
"Film soundtracks… Model wrangler or something, right? I knew she'd be into you, dude.”
"I don't know if I'm into her…"
"You know what I mean. She’s your type. Upfront and mysterious. Fit."
Bart doesn't have anything quality, so I settle for a Bud Light Seltzer while Bart waits for a case of some local brewery. I swear I saw the van again on the Williamsburg Bridge, but I don't mention it.
"I think Beth's scheming or something."
"You haven't fucked?"
"Nah," he says, "well, I got head in a car once but that don't count, y'know. But I mean, I think she's trying to take me out or something. Like, for the paps."
"Paparazzi?"
"She's famous, my parents are famous, y'know."
"But not the club shit."
"No, like a dinner date or something. A premiere."
"I mean, you've been to a million of those. What, did her PR people call you or something-"
"No, Joy, I think she likes me, man."
"Beth's cool. Damn, Bart Winkler."
"It's Castiglione." He walks off into the kitchen.
"Where are those beers," I mumble.
Mena calls, asks what I'm doing. "Gimme a sec," I say, muting my phone. "Bart, you wanna do something with Mena?"
"I gotta thing later," he says from the kitchen. "Tell her to come over if she wants, whatever."
Bart walks back in with a tall glass of brown liquid. "Brass monkey," he says. “From last night. Mena'll be here in like 30."
"She'll be so stoked about Beth,” I say.
"Fuck off, Joy." He laughs again. "She's a grown-up." He hands me the glass bottle. I take a swig.
"She's why I'd never let my kid skip a grade,” I say. “No, sorry, that's cruel."
"Ouch. You know, she told me you guys had an argument."
She tried to fuck me. "Yeah, I said something, something about her not having sex or something and then she tried to- I mean, it was mean or whatever."
"She was seeing that Jewish guy, right?”
"Yeah, you."
"Alright, deflection section over here."
"That girl is a bundle of anger or something."
He drinks, harrumphs, and says, "I don't think you like girls."
"Where are those fucking beers, man?"
I go down for them when they arrive. Bart's pissed and has his head down in his Mac, looking at video drafts. I see Mena talking to the doorman in the lobby.
"Oh, look, there's Joy. We're friends with Bart."
Doorman nods and says alright.
I forgot to ask Bart so I tip the delivery guy out of my own wallet and take the bag. Mena and I take the elevator back up.
"How's it going," I say.
"Work was boring, I guess."
Bart says he got the tip on his card. Beth's coming over later, he says. That's cool, Mena says. We could have a party or something.
I text Myra, I was out skating with Bart today an I think a van was following us.
I take a beer and a seltzer from the fridge and down the seltzer before I close the door.
Beth comes over with some friends and a bottle and she's really down to Earth for a celebrity. We don't spar like we did at that party. She’s clearly one of us, not like me or anything, but a young person with an Internet problem and a sex problem and nearly a drug problem. Beth speaks kindly about her work; she comes to the defense of a director she worked with, maligned for apparent child molestation. Of course, she made a lot of money on that show, so she understands why she might have missed stuff. “I am not into film school,” Beth says. “I wanna work. Learn on the job.” Her friends are inbetweeners: a model who either snaked me at that new skate park in Harlem last week or walked in a show I watched online that summer I dated the Vogue intern, and a Media Matters for America junior correspondent who privately dates women but only reports on gay issues. They are around my age, but it turns out Beth is like 25. I had figured she was older, given she played a middle schooler in 2007’s “Front Bunker,” a show I watched a lot in middle school. She also plays a girl who fucks the main guy in a flashback on the last season of “Californication,” but I have not returned to that since I met her; I'm surprised I remember that at all.
I don't remember inviting Jane but they show up and sulk over a drink for a bit.
"You went to school with these guys?"
"Keep your voice down, geez. And no."
Jane wryly smiles. "Do you want to get out of here - there's a picture of his parents with Bill Clinton in the foyer."
"In the front… room? That's a foyer?"
"How much do these freaks make, man?"
"I gotta get you out of here."
"You can smoke on the balcony, you know that," Bart's saying, but we head out anyway.
Soon, we're in the park, where Jane pulls me behind a bush. "Park's closed," I say.
"What's your problem, Joy?"
"I'm a drunk, I guess. I think I met a Fed the other day-"
"You are definitely drunk."
"-I think I fuck too much, definitely. I was thinking about fucking when a fucking… agent of chaos was explaining-"
"Too much?"
"-Like I totally get how guys got tricked by Mossad, or Ghislaine Maxwell-"
"She was Mossad, Joy."
"-I left my board back at Bart's-"
"Let's just fuck, okay, than you can go get your board, skater."
"-Of course, now I'm fucking in a bush."
Jane gets a cab on 5th Avenue. Upstairs, Beth's by the door, cradling Bart's cat.
"She's a sweetie, isn't she?"
"Uh-huh."
The Purple guy with the glasses is on the couch with Bart. "Hey, if it's got tobacco, it's gotta be outside," Bart says.
"No, it's not spliff," he says.
Next chapter, as usual, is behind the paywall. Toodles!