[CN]Chapter One We meet at the gloomily exotic Shun Lee bar, a black lacquer holdover from the 1980’s. Above the bar, papier mache monkeys with red eyes. Evil. Adorable. It depends on our moods, and how the Wayz are going down. My best friend and I got into Ccockney rhyming slang in college. Wayz. We can drink for Dayz. Hard Wayz means vodka, rum, scotch, tequila. Spirits. Soft Wayz means wine. And then there are the Ponders, that rhyme with wander, another bit of Cockney madness. Wander off to a city for no more, no less, than a long weekend. Friday morning through Monday night. Philly, Vegas, Baltimore, DC, Atlantic City, L.A., even London once. John Apple and I are both twenty-nine. Were it not for the Ponders, I might look my age. John—I call him Johnny Boy—looks good. Rugged, handsome. A devil when he smiles. He should sell canned ham. He once described himself to me as more rugged than handsome. Perhaps—--or maybe he’s just an inconsistent shaver, with great metabolism, and his ass looks good in jeans. I’m Murray Marks. The most Jewish name ever for a non-Jew. My parents bonded over Irish Catholic guilt and Ccamembert cheese at a dairy called Murray’s in Greenwich Village. Murray Camembert Marks. John rarely calls me anything other than Cheese. “Hey Cheese, ready for some pre-Ponder airport drinks?” “Don’t you mean Wayz?” I’ll ask coquettishly. “What Wayz are you drinking today?” asked Shun Lee’s wizened bartender, Jack, humoring our parlance in return for John’s heavy-handed gratuity. An immigrant from Shanghai, his thirty-years-running dumpling-and-egg-roll spiel landed his youngest son at Harvard. John’s alma mater. “Harvard is the best,” Jack will say. “Johnny knows this. Murray Marks doesn’t know this.” John hadn’t the heart to explain he’d dropped out. And I hadn’t the will to defend my school. Good old sprawling, faceless Boston University, where it was always February 12th. It was nine months into 1999. The last Ponder of the millennium was coming up. This was a Hard Wayz meeting. Vodka, splash of cranberry, lime. A pink drink which, multiplied by five, packed a wallop. Last time we met at Shun Lee, I produced two pieces of paper, on which were written Seattle and Vancouver. John chose Seattle. Tonight, he’d slap the two pieces of paper on the bar, and I would choose the Ponder destination. “You two are always traveling,” said Jack. “No good. It’s better to stay home.” My wife Florence might agree but she permits me these trips and allows me to miss work the Tuesday after a Ponder. I need it. We work together as attorneys, Florence and I. Real estate attorneys. Marks & Marks. I was the minority owner of our little law firm; Florence had invested her six-figure inheritance after her father’s death while I was the sweat equity guy.Some say real estate law is the bottom of the barrel of the legal profession, but it appeals to our love of dotted iI’s and crossed t’s. Although when I return from a Ponder, after Florence mans the office solo, she resents the hell out of me. But invariably lets me fuck her Monday night, wildly and well; perhaps because my dense exposure to Johnny Boy renders me more dangerous and more interesting. I think I adopt his swagger. It’s hard not to. “You know where I was, right?” asked John. “You know where I was when they disappeared into the sky.” His parents died in a plane crash when he was twelve and he rarely spoke of it. “Your parents?” I asked. “Yes, Cheese. Yes.” He’d been drinking before Shun Lee; I could tell. “The amusement park, right?” I asked. “Not a fucking amusement park. Disney World. Walt Disney World.” “Oh right, sorry.” “They flew me and Tîa down to Orlando in their jet. They only stayed over one night. Only went on one ride. Of course it had to be the Haunted Mansion. Ghosts in the waiting. Then on the flight home, they became the sky.” Tîa was his nanny. Only last year did John eulogize her amid all her Spanish-speaking friends at a Catholic church on Third Avenue. John paid for everything. Spoke from the heart (in English) about his beloved Ttîaía who, after the tragedy of the plane crash, dragged his ass over the finish line of life. “I still don’t know how she did it,” said John. “Five days with me at Disney World. She knew for five days about what had happened but was instucted by my uncle not to tell. It was her idea, in fact: let the boy have Mickey the Mouse before everything crumbles around him, pobre chico.” There was a big place in his heart for Disney. He read all the guidebooks. There were shelves of them in his bookcase. And while he hadn’t returned since he was a kid, he’d become an expert. It was probably the weirdest thing about John Apple, which is saying something. You’d think he’d be obsessed with old cars, or Howard Hughes, or collect crap from NASA. Nope. Disney. He swore to himself he’d return before turning thirty: “The greatest homecoming of my life.” “When did Tîa eventually tell you about your folks?” I asked. “You know what? I don’t remember.” “Drinks too much,” said Jack. “Johnny Bboy drinks too much and it hurts his memory. You need a good memory in this life. Murray Marks has a good memory but he eats too much and drinks too much.” True. I may be balding, round-faced, and pear-shaped, but I have a damn good recall system and also green eyes. Not hazel. Not blue graey, but truly green eyes. Like jade. It’s my best feature, and even Johnny Boy is jealous. I’m also well-endowed, and he’s jealous of that too. Florence was my prom date, and I’ve only ever been with her. “I love Florence,” John had said. “But with your dick, and those eyes, stepping out just once—”" “No.” ----- “Murray Marks never has vegetable dumplings, only pork. No good.” Jack doesn’t like me. I should mention that Florence, my wife, is Chinese. That did not go over well.: “Why?” Jack asked after meeting her many, many years before. “So many round eyes for you,” he snickered while Florence was in the ladies’ room. I’m not sure if it was due to his cultural disdain for females, or because I got one of his, or because of Florence’s demeanor. Conservative to the point of being brittle. A quality I happen to respect. She’s reliable, elegant, skinny. What’s not to like? I think John brings something out in her. A boozy inner life. “What electric dimples,” Florence once drunkenly admitted, but I wasn’t jealous. He brings out something in me too. “You ever been to Disney, Jack?” asked John. “Of course not.” Good for Jack. A principled if miserable man who misappraises vegetable dumplings. “Don’t you wish you could remember when you first heard about the plane crash?” I asked. “No, not really. Everything after that seminal Disney trip was a blur. Hey, Jack, another drink, please.” “Don’t you mean Wayz?” I asked. “Your little private language will get you in trouble, Cheese.” “Our little private language, Johnny Boy. Our language.” “What ther hHell are you sniffing?” he asked me. I have a rather keen sense of smell and can appear canine when, for instance: “Someone in the dinmig room is wearing jasminelavender, like the the night-blooming jasmine lavender that grows near the Bel Aire HotelHotel Bel-Air. Where, on vacation, Florence got drunk and flirted with a pretty young waitress. It was exhilarating, Johnny Boy.” “You guys should have, you know, had an experience with the pretty young waitress. Hey Jack, make it a double. No, in honor of what could have been, a tripletrio!” Is John Apple an alcoholic? Probably. Well, yes. But he goes on the wagon many times a year. Our Ccockney rhyming slang tried to relegate wagon to “being angry as a dragon” but Florence quashed that one. “Hell is someone else’s inside jokes,” she’d warned. Fair enough. SSo, no dragonning, just wagonning. I’m not such a huge drinker, except leading up to a Ponder, then during the trip, and a ramping down process for a week after. Actually I do have about 5-10five to ten bottles of wine a week. Although my real poison is rich food. Salt and butter. Were Florence and I to have a child, which we won’t, thank goodness, we’d name it Alfredo. Thus, the two-hundred-sixty-three263 pounds on my six-foot frame. I’m basically fat, but I know how to wear a suit and keep it all together. Florence doesn’t mind. Or she says she doesn’t. But I’ve seen her sneak a peek at John’s ass, which as I mentioned looks good in his perennially worn Levi’s. He buys a new old pair every year from some used clothing store in Paris. Thirty-two-inch waist. I’m a forty-six. Damn him. On our trips I wear my slacks and blazer, no tie. John wears his jeans, and usually a black turtleneck or black tee. His uniform of rebellion. Oh, and these yellow suede shoes from Italy. I own half a dozen black Florsheim loafers. Always shiny. Tassels. And, recently, I started wearing glasses at work, but never on a Ponder. One night, Florence, buzzed after sharing a bottle of wine, asked me to keep them on during sex. Once in a while she can really surprise you. ----- “I do remember Tîa and meI crying as the plane took off from Orlando,” said John, “but of course that was just because we hated to go back home. I think leaving Disney World is the saddest fucking thing that can happen to a human being.” “Johnny Boy, he curses too much when he drinks the hard drinks,” said Jack. “Sorry, Jack,” said John. The Shun Lee bar was rarely populated with anyone but us. Too dim for civilian Wayzers. The primates with the glowing red eyes. The intolerant bartender. But tonight two tourists wandered in with their laminated Streetwise maps of New York City. At least they were Streetwise maps—our map of choice on Ponders. “Can’t believe we’re getting tourist-balled tonight,” I said. Balled. Another neologism born of Ponders past. It was in Austin while John flirted with a saucy brunette after dinner that I dreamily placed a ball of butter in his espresso. “Why the hell did you just butter ball my coffee?” he’d asked. I loved it. Ball. What fun! And it was born. Even Florence once said,: “Murray, do not inside-joke-ball our place of work.” That saucy Texas brunette ended up in his Four Seasons bed. Soulless sex, he’d reported. One-night Ponder stands (and there were many, probably more than he let on) were never what he was after: “Seeing a stranger’s lipstick stain on a hotel pillow in the Harveyed a.m. is not for the faint of heart,” he’d said. “People can slug you with what they leave behind.” Harveyed. Nothing to do with Harvard. Instead Harvey Hanginstein. Rhymes with Frankenstein. God forgive us our little language. There was an actual Harvey named Harvey Harstein who frequented my parents’ bookstore. He appeared perpetually hungover, although we didn’t really know if he ever actually drank. Regardless, the man looked like an even more tattered version of that famous sepia image of James Joyce that was hung in the bookstore: fedora, wire-rim Ccoke-bottle glasses, stubby little graey moustache and goatee. According to us he was the embodiment of hangovers, Harvey, our patron saint in a wrinkly old Burberry trench coat that smelled of pre-war cigars. The day John explained to Harvey his pet moniker: “Hanginstein?” asked Harvey, thickly Yiddish. “Yes,” said John. “And bartenders we call Takensteins as they take our money and often our dignity.” “Are you anti–Ssemitic?” asked Harvey. “An awful lot of Steins.” “Of course not. Quite the contrary. I believe that the greatest contributions God has made to life as we know it are, in this order, the Jewish people and non-procreative sex. I might convert, if you’ll have me.” We aren’t sure what happened to the old man but he lives on in us, that’s for certain. On Ponders his name is spoken every damn morning. But our inside jokes should remain in the family of us two lest we anger-ball the generally non-Harveyed public. All true best friends have a secret language of one type or another. They are wise to keep it close to their chest. Safer that way. At least that’s John’s advice.: “No one likes to feel like an outsider.” ----- Before each and every Ponder John Apple would forecast finding the love of his life. You’d think he would have her by now. Ten years and seventeen Ponders. I once met a fascinating girl. MeI, Cheese, in San Francisco, got bought a drink by a Realtor with a glorious smile. And a soul. I guess she liked green eyes. Or our shared experience about the neat stacks of checks that pass hands at a closing. Broker’s fees, mansion tax, mortgage docs, title search, transfer documents, purchase agreement. My Rrealtor friend understood the artfulness of a closing. The signatures, so many signatures; at these closings I always use Parker pens that I gift to my clients just before the keys are handed over. And then there are all the thick dossiers, once executed, folded shut. I love that sound; it sounds complete. A passport opened, stamped, then closed. John didn’t have fun on that night of escrow talk. He was the romantic hero of these trips, and I was, happily mind you, the interlocutoer, the witness. But witness to exactly what? Three nights and four days of abandon. “I could really live here. I might live here. This. This could be my home,” he’d say of every city, then return home empty-handed and empty-hearted. It could be that we are too self-sufficient, or too intense, or too drunk? Or ate too many goddamn cheese fries the night before, before passing out at 2 am2:00 a.m. in our respective hotel rooms. “Girls like healthy men,” I’d told him. “And these road trips are admirably toxic, but toxic nonetheless, Johnny Boy. Most women want nothing to do with a Ponder-afflicted man.” “You’ll see,” he’ll say. “One of these days. I can feel it. It will come to pass. She will come to pass.” A kid who loses his mother so early; I guess he’s always searching for the womb. Me? I’m comfortable just about everywhere. John says it’s my roly-poly form that positively melts into every seat in the world. Although, like John, I might be most at home during our trips. Our wanders, I mean Ponders. Inside our friendship, at a dark bar, in an alien city. Begging time that it should never end. John pays for the Ponders. We stay at the local Four Seasons. Fly business class. John’s parents were wealthy and he inherited it all then invested it all, presciently and perfectly. As a junior at Harvard he abandoned schooling for private investment. His expertise was tech; he’d worked at tThe Byte, Harvard’s computer repair shop, and had even been recruited by Apple computers Computer to come out west. Despite his ridiculous fortune, the things money could buy meant little to him. Sure, he owns a loft in Soho, but it has so little furniture, and unpacked suitcases from his move five years ago. It has a dart board (is it a sign of schizophrenia to play darts against yourself?) and a leather chair that belonged to Hemingway’s Paris, literally. And a bed. He sits in that chair, reads, divines, then goes to the gym. Then he’s at his local, holding court from four ’‘til he gets laid. “The tourists just ordered vegetable lo mein, smart,” said Jack. “How is CathleenKathy, Johnny Boy? You never should have left her,.” Hhe wagged his finger. John had married early and awfully to a five-foot-tall bottle blonde. The wispy-voiced gold-digger hawked her engagement ring for a fake one in order to afford a black sable coat that looked absurd on her diminutive if busty person. Still, Jack thought the world of her ersatz self and was devastated when John and I came to Shun Lee hours after the dissolution was final.: “Johnny Boy just divorced Marilyn Monroe. Stupid.” I think Jack cried that day. “As far as I know CathleenKathy’s fine, Jack,” said John. “Thanks for asking.” Now he was hunched over, on his BlackBberry, typing maniacally quickly. He was an early adopter of the thing, and got one for Florence and me as well, specifically for our Ponders. Communication was key. Where to meet. What to order if one of us was running late, which Wayz to order. We’d decided that the ubiquitous Nokia cellphone was less elegant than the BlackberryBlackBerry’s huge silent screen. Besides, pay phone Wayz still had a big place in our hearts. “Those typing machines are the devil,” said Jack. “They will take over your ghost.” “They’re the future,” said John. “Then future will be empty. There will be no ghosts in the future.” ----- John Apple can’t cry. He didn’t cry when he received the news that his parents died in the plane crash and he can’t remember the last time he cried since before that day. The only thing, he’d said that made him cry was, when he was a child, leaving freaking Disney World. “After that bout of post-partum despression, I have not shed a single tear,” he’d said. “Girls don’t like that. They can sniff out that failure to squirt a few,” I’d said. “Perhaps some feminine sixth sense confuses it with not being able to ejaculate.” “Well, one day, and I feel like it’s coming soon, a girl will be drawn to my emotional drought. She’ll be beautiful, and cry for us both, down her long dark lashes.” He had long lashes too. I watched them as he blinked at the dangling Shun Lee monkeys above. “You ever been in love, Jack?” he asked. “Ha!” scoffed Jack. I liked that Jack had no time for love. Disgruntled pragmatism is the only true religion. Were it not for Florence I would join his cult. “You know, I’ve never been to Disney,” I said. Florence and I did not have any children. By design. We’ve kicked around the idea of rescuing a greyhound but decided that we’re both too selfish to commit to the care of another animal, aside from one another. “If there were better restaurants and bars at Disney, I’d consider taking Florence for a day or something.” “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said John. “There are actually some incredibly inventive themed bars. You just have to invest in the concepts, drink steadily. The Adventurer’s Club might be the most lusciously anachronistic bar in the world.” “How do you know?” “Research. There are books just about the Adventurer’s Club and its past. The Imagineers are fucking gods.” “Always too much cursing with the hard drinks,” said Jack. “The hard Wayz,” I corrected. “Yeah, yeah, Murray Marks,” said Jack. “Why do you order twenty-four24 dumplings? Too much.” “I bring Florence leftovers.” “Chinese girls know enough not to eat cold dumplings.” Life is unbearable by and by, two dozen dumplings and then you die. Soon he’ll bring out the tray of pork dumplings. I’ll attack while John goes on about the adventure bar. He sure can talk, and I sure can eat Jack’s dumplings. Symbiosis. “So, where the hell are we going this year?” I asked. John looked up from his BlackberryBlackBerry, smiled his radiant devil smile. Look at all those white teeth. Perfection. And with that slammed down a single piece of paper. It made Jack jump. “Just one?” I asked. “No choice this year, my friend. Sorry about that.” He kept on beaming; it was a little unnerving. “Go ahead,” he said. “Wait: two more hard ones, Jack.” “A Harvard man should have better manners,” said Jack. “Please,” said John. “Even Murray Marks has better manners.” John pushed the scrap of paper over to me. “Every great adventure begins at a dark Chinese bar under papery monkeys with red eyes,” said John. “Given the truly evil glow of those eyes, you’d think we’d have gotten into some serious trouble during a Ponder. I believe that life has symbols. They’re everywhere. Some of them evil.” “Should I flip it over?” I asked. “Wait. Just wait a second. I want to remember this moment. Okay, go.” There was a circle, and atop, on either side, two small circles. “What is this?” “Let me see?” said Jack. “It’s just circles. Makes no sense. I’ll go get the dumplings. A Harvard man should not draw like a child.” “What does it mean?” I asked, turning it upside down, sideways. “Are they a planet and its moons? Space exploration?” “Those three circles are the universal symbol for Mickey Mouse. We are going to Walt Disney World, and this time, our lives will change.” “You’re crazy,” I said. “One day you’ll look at that piece of paper, and it will all come flooding back. Like Proust and his croissant.” “Madeleine,” I said. “So we’re going to go on rides and stuff?” My parents owned a bookstore in Cambridge called When I Die, after the Emily Dickinson poem. It’s where I met John, who would loiter away the afternoons on the couch across from the cash register reading and, napping. My folks adored John, took him in, cooked for him. My mom would clean his clothes. Who doesn’t like a handsome orphan? Johnny Boy slapped five twenties on the bar. “Did you know that my father almost transformed himself into an actual Paladin just before he died?” “Huh?” “He would have been the first modern man to do so since the Middle Ages and he almost made it, poor bastard, white suit and all. He had an idea about a new type of man. A true ascetic. Girls love true ascetics. Who fight for causes. Like love. Fight for what you love, Cheese.” He kissed me on the mouth, which he’d only done once before, after my wedding, then left. What the hell is a Paladin? And why are there judgmentalemental monkeys at a Chinese bar that is straight out of a nascent MTV video in which some mulleted band troubadours its way ironically, replacing drum sticks with chopsticks? But I love Shun Lee and its modernistic dimness. They dip their fortune cookies in choclate. An excess that renders the paper message inside moot. “Where’s Johnny Boy?” asked Jack. “He left.” “What do the circles mean?” “Disney World.” “A very bad place,” said Jack. “A very dangerous place.” I looked up at the monkeys, who were looking down at me.
[CN]Chapter One
We meet at the gloomily exotic Shun Lee bar, a black lacquer holdover from the 1980’s. Above the bar, papier mache monkeys with red eyes. Evil. Adorable. It depends on our moods, and how the Wayz are going down. My best friend and I got into Ccockney rhyming slang in college. Wayz. We can drink for Dayz. Hard Wayz means vodka, rum, scotch, tequila. Spirits. Soft Wayz means wine. And then there are the Ponders, that rhyme with wander, another bit of Cockney madness. Wander off to a city for no more, no less, than a long weekend. Friday morning through Monday night. Philly, Vegas, Baltimore, DC, Atlantic City, L.A., even London once.
John Apple and I are both twenty-nine. Were it not for the Ponders, I might look my age. John—I call him Johnny Boy—looks good. Rugged, handsome. A devil when he smiles. He should sell canned ham. He once described himself to me as more rugged than handsome. Perhaps—--or maybe he’s just an inconsistent shaver, with great metabolism, and his ass looks good in jeans. I’m Murray Marks. The most Jewish name ever for a non-Jew. My parents bonded over Irish Catholic guilt and Ccamembert cheese at a dairy called Murray’s in Greenwich Village. Murray Camembert Marks. John rarely calls me anything other than Cheese.
“Hey Cheese, ready for some pre-Ponder airport drinks?”
“Don’t you mean Wayz?” I’ll ask coquettishly.
“What Wayz are you drinking today?” asked Shun Lee’s wizened bartender, Jack, humoring our parlance in return for John’s heavy-handed gratuity.
An immigrant from Shanghai, his thirty-years-running dumpling-and-egg-roll spiel landed his youngest son at Harvard. John’s alma mater.
“Harvard is the best,” Jack will say. “Johnny knows this. Murray Marks doesn’t know this.”
John hadn’t the heart to explain he’d dropped out. And I hadn’t the will to defend my school. Good old sprawling, faceless Boston University, where it was always February 12th.
It was nine months into 1999. The last Ponder of the millennium was coming up. This was a Hard Wayz meeting. Vodka, splash of cranberry, lime. A pink drink which, multiplied by five, packed a wallop. Last time we met at Shun Lee, I produced two pieces of paper, on which were written Seattle and Vancouver. John chose Seattle. Tonight, he’d slap the two pieces of paper on the bar, and I would choose the Ponder destination.
“You two are always traveling,” said Jack. “No good. It’s better to stay home.”
My wife Florence might agree but she permits me these trips and allows me to miss work the Tuesday after a Ponder. I need it. We work together as attorneys, Florence and I. Real estate attorneys. Marks & Marks. I was the minority owner of our little law firm; Florence had invested her six-figure inheritance after her father’s death while I was the sweat equity guy.Some say real estate law is the bottom of the barrel of the legal profession, but it appeals to our love of dotted iI’s and crossed t’s. Although when I return from a Ponder, after Florence mans the office solo, she resents the hell out of me. But invariably lets me fuck her Monday night, wildly and well; perhaps because my dense exposure to Johnny Boy renders me more dangerous and more interesting. I think I adopt his swagger. It’s hard not to.
“You know where I was, right?” asked John. “You know where I was when they disappeared into the sky.”
His parents died in a plane crash when he was twelve and he rarely spoke of it.
“Your parents?” I asked.
“Yes, Cheese. Yes.”
He’d been drinking before Shun Lee; I could tell.
“The amusement park, right?” I asked.
“Not a fucking amusement park. Disney World. Walt Disney World.”
“Oh right, sorry.”
“They flew me and Tîa down to Orlando in their jet. They only stayed over one night. Only went on one ride. Of course it had to be the Haunted Mansion. Ghosts in the waiting. Then on the flight home, they became the sky.”
Tîa was his nanny. Only last year did John eulogize her amid all her Spanish-speaking friends at a Catholic church on Third Avenue. John paid for everything. Spoke from the heart (in English) about his beloved Ttîaía who, after the tragedy of the plane crash, dragged his ass over the finish line of life.
“I still don’t know how she did it,” said John. “Five days with me at Disney World. She knew for five days about what had happened but was instucted by my uncle not to tell. It was her idea, in fact: let the boy have Mickey the Mouse before everything crumbles around him, pobre chico.”
There was a big place in his heart for Disney. He read all the guidebooks. There were shelves of them in his bookcase. And while he hadn’t returned since he was a kid, he’d become an expert. It was probably the weirdest thing about John Apple, which is saying something. You’d think he’d be obsessed with old cars, or Howard Hughes, or collect crap from NASA. Nope. Disney. He swore to himself he’d return before turning thirty:
“The greatest homecoming of my life.”
“When did Tîa eventually tell you about your folks?” I asked.
“You know what? I don’t remember.”
“Drinks too much,” said Jack. “Johnny Bboy drinks too much and it hurts his memory. You need a good memory in this life. Murray Marks has a good memory but he eats too much and drinks too much.”
True. I may be balding, round-faced, and pear-shaped, but I have a damn good recall system and also green eyes. Not hazel. Not blue graey, but truly green eyes. Like jade. It’s my best feature, and even Johnny Boy is jealous. I’m also well-endowed, and he’s jealous of that too. Florence was my prom date, and I’ve only ever been with her.
“I love Florence,” John had said. “But with your dick, and those eyes, stepping out just once—”"
“No.”
-----
“Murray Marks never has vegetable dumplings, only pork. No good.”
Jack doesn’t like me. I should mention that Florence, my wife, is Chinese. That did not go over well.:
“Why?” Jack asked after meeting her many, many years before. “So many round eyes for you,” he snickered while Florence was in the ladies’ room.
I’m not sure if it was due to his cultural disdain for females, or because I got one of his, or because of Florence’s demeanor. Conservative to the point of being brittle. A quality I happen to respect. She’s reliable, elegant, skinny. What’s not to like? I think John brings something out in her. A boozy inner life.
“What electric dimples,” Florence once drunkenly admitted, but I wasn’t jealous. He brings out something in me too.
“You ever been to Disney, Jack?” asked John.
“Of course not.”
Good for Jack. A principled if miserable man who misappraises vegetable dumplings.
“Don’t you wish you could remember when you first heard about the plane crash?” I asked.
“No, not really. Everything after that seminal Disney trip was a blur. Hey, Jack, another drink, please.”
“Don’t you mean Wayz?” I asked.
“Your little private language will get you in trouble, Cheese.”
“Our little private language, Johnny Boy. Our language.”
“What ther hHell are you sniffing?” he asked me.
I have a rather keen sense of smell and can appear canine when, for instance:
“Someone in the dinmig room is wearing jasminelavender, like the the night-blooming jasmine lavender that grows near the Bel Aire HotelHotel Bel-Air. Where, on vacation, Florence got drunk and flirted with a pretty young waitress. It was exhilarating, Johnny Boy.”
“You guys should have, you know, had an experience with the pretty young waitress. Hey Jack, make it a double. No, in honor of what could have been, a tripletrio!”
Is John Apple an alcoholic? Probably. Well, yes. But he goes on the wagon many times a year. Our Ccockney rhyming slang tried to relegate wagon to “being angry as a dragon” but Florence quashed that one.
“Hell is someone else’s inside jokes,” she’d warned.
Fair enough. SSo, no dragonning, just wagonning. I’m not such a huge drinker, except leading up to a Ponder, then during the trip, and a ramping down process for a week after.
Actually I do have about 5-10five to ten bottles of wine a week. Although my real poison is rich food. Salt and butter. Were Florence and I to have a child, which we won’t, thank goodness, we’d name it Alfredo. Thus, the two-hundred-sixty-three263 pounds on my six-foot frame. I’m basically fat, but I know how to wear a suit and keep it all together. Florence doesn’t mind. Or she says she doesn’t. But I’ve seen her sneak a peek at John’s ass, which as I mentioned looks good in his perennially worn Levi’s. He buys a new old pair every year from some used clothing store in Paris. Thirty-two-inch waist. I’m a forty-six. Damn him.
On our trips I wear my slacks and blazer, no tie. John wears his jeans, and usually a black turtleneck or black tee. His uniform of rebellion. Oh, and these yellow suede shoes from Italy. I own half a dozen black Florsheim loafers. Always shiny. Tassels. And, recently, I started wearing glasses at work, but never on a Ponder. One night, Florence, buzzed after sharing a bottle of wine, asked me to keep them on during sex. Once in a while she can really surprise you.
-----
“I do remember Tîa and meI crying as the plane took off from Orlando,” said John, “but of course that was just because we hated to go back home. I think leaving Disney World is the saddest fucking thing that can happen to a human being.”
“Johnny Boy, he curses too much when he drinks the hard drinks,” said Jack.
“Sorry, Jack,” said John.
The Shun Lee bar was rarely populated with anyone but us. Too dim for civilian Wayzers. The primates with the glowing red eyes. The intolerant bartender. But tonight two tourists wandered in with their laminated Streetwise maps of New York City. At least they were Streetwise maps—our map of choice on Ponders.
“Can’t believe we’re getting tourist-balled tonight,” I said.
Balled. Another neologism born of Ponders past. It was in Austin while John flirted with a saucy brunette after dinner that I dreamily placed a ball of butter in his espresso.
“Why the hell did you just butter ball my coffee?” he’d asked.
I loved it. Ball. What fun! And it was born. Even Florence once said,:
“Murray, do not inside-joke-ball our place of work.”
That saucy Texas brunette ended up in his Four Seasons bed. Soulless sex, he’d reported. One-night Ponder stands (and there were many, probably more than he let on) were never what he was after:
“Seeing a stranger’s lipstick stain on a hotel pillow in the Harveyed a.m. is not for the faint of heart,” he’d said. “People can slug you with what they leave behind.”
Harveyed. Nothing to do with Harvard. Instead Harvey Hanginstein. Rhymes with Frankenstein. God forgive us our little language. There was an actual Harvey named Harvey Harstein who frequented my parents’ bookstore. He appeared perpetually hungover, although we didn’t really know if he ever actually drank. Regardless, the man looked like an even more tattered version of that famous sepia image of James Joyce that was hung in the bookstore: fedora, wire-rim Ccoke-bottle glasses, stubby little graey moustache and goatee. According to us he was the embodiment of hangovers, Harvey, our patron saint in a wrinkly old Burberry trench coat that smelled of pre-war cigars. The day John explained to Harvey his pet moniker:
“Hanginstein?” asked Harvey, thickly Yiddish.
“Yes,” said John. “And bartenders we call Takensteins as they take our money and often our dignity.”
“Are you anti–Ssemitic?” asked Harvey. “An awful lot of Steins.”
“Of course not. Quite the contrary. I believe that the greatest contributions God has made to life as we know it are, in this order, the Jewish people and non-procreative sex. I might convert, if you’ll have me.”
We aren’t sure what happened to the old man but he lives on in us, that’s for certain. On Ponders his name is spoken every damn morning. But our inside jokes should remain in the family of us two lest we anger-ball the generally non-Harveyed public. All true best friends have a secret language of one type or another. They are wise to keep it close to their chest. Safer that way. At least that’s John’s advice.:
“No one likes to feel like an outsider.”
-----
Before each and every Ponder John Apple would forecast finding the love of his life. You’d think he would have her by now. Ten years and seventeen Ponders. I once met a fascinating girl. MeI, Cheese, in San Francisco, got bought a drink by a Realtor with a glorious smile. And a soul. I guess she liked green eyes. Or our shared experience about the neat stacks of checks that pass hands at a closing. Broker’s fees, mansion tax, mortgage docs, title search, transfer documents, purchase agreement. My Rrealtor friend understood the artfulness of a closing. The signatures, so many signatures; at these closings I always use Parker pens that I gift to my clients just before the keys are handed over. And then there are all the thick dossiers, once executed, folded shut. I love that sound; it sounds complete. A passport opened, stamped, then closed. John didn’t have fun on that night of escrow talk. He was the romantic hero of these trips, and I was, happily mind you, the interlocutoer, the witness. But witness to exactly what? Three nights and four days of abandon.
“I could really live here. I might live here. This. This could be my home,” he’d say of every city, then return home empty-handed and empty-hearted.
It could be that we are too self-sufficient, or too intense, or too drunk? Or ate too many goddamn cheese fries the night before, before passing out at 2 am2:00 a.m. in our respective hotel rooms.
“Girls like healthy men,” I’d told him. “And these road trips are admirably toxic, but toxic nonetheless, Johnny Boy. Most women want nothing to do with a Ponder-afflicted man.”
“You’ll see,” he’ll say. “One of these days. I can feel it. It will come to pass. She will come to pass.”
A kid who loses his mother so early; I guess he’s always searching for the womb. Me? I’m comfortable just about everywhere. John says it’s my roly-poly form that positively melts into every seat in the world. Although, like John, I might be most at home during our trips. Our wanders, I mean Ponders. Inside our friendship, at a dark bar, in an alien city. Begging time that it should never end.
John pays for the Ponders. We stay at the local Four Seasons. Fly business class. John’s parents were wealthy and he inherited it all then invested it all, presciently and perfectly. As a junior at Harvard he abandoned schooling for private investment. His expertise was tech; he’d worked at tThe Byte, Harvard’s computer repair shop, and had even been recruited by Apple computers Computer to come out west. Despite his ridiculous fortune, the things money could buy meant little to him. Sure, he owns a loft in Soho, but it has so little furniture, and unpacked suitcases from his move five years ago. It has a dart board (is it a sign of schizophrenia to play darts against yourself?) and a leather chair that belonged to Hemingway’s Paris, literally. And a bed. He sits in that chair, reads, divines, then goes to the gym. Then he’s at his local, holding court from four ’‘til he gets laid.
“The tourists just ordered vegetable lo mein, smart,” said Jack. “How is CathleenKathy, Johnny Boy? You never should have left her,.” Hhe wagged his finger.
John had married early and awfully to a five-foot-tall bottle blonde. The wispy-voiced gold-digger hawked her engagement ring for a fake one in order to afford a black sable coat that looked absurd on her diminutive if busty person. Still, Jack thought the world of her ersatz self and was devastated when John and I came to Shun Lee hours after the dissolution was final.:
“Johnny Boy just divorced Marilyn Monroe. Stupid.” I think Jack cried that day.
“As far as I know CathleenKathy’s fine, Jack,” said John. “Thanks for asking.”
Now he was hunched over, on his BlackBberry, typing maniacally quickly. He was an early adopter of the thing, and got one for Florence and me as well, specifically for our Ponders. Communication was key. Where to meet. What to order if one of us was running late, which Wayz to order. We’d decided that the ubiquitous Nokia cellphone was less elegant than the BlackberryBlackBerry’s huge silent screen. Besides, pay phone Wayz still had a big place in our hearts.
“Those typing machines are the devil,” said Jack. “They will take over your ghost.”
“They’re the future,” said John.
“Then future will be empty. There will be no ghosts in the future.”
-----
John Apple can’t cry. He didn’t cry when he received the news that his parents died in the plane crash and he can’t remember the last time he cried since before that day. The only thing, he’d said that made him cry was, when he was a child, leaving freaking Disney World.
“After that bout of post-partum despression, I have not shed a single tear,” he’d said.
“Girls don’t like that. They can sniff out that failure to squirt a few,” I’d said. “Perhaps some feminine sixth sense confuses it with not being able to ejaculate.”
“Well, one day, and I feel like it’s coming soon, a girl will be drawn to my emotional drought. She’ll be beautiful, and cry for us both, down her long dark lashes.”
He had long lashes too. I watched them as he blinked at the dangling Shun Lee monkeys above.
“You ever been in love, Jack?” he asked.
“Ha!” scoffed Jack.
I liked that Jack had no time for love. Disgruntled pragmatism is the only true religion. Were it not for Florence I would join his cult.
“You know, I’ve never been to Disney,” I said.
Florence and I did not have any children. By design. We’ve kicked around the idea of rescuing a greyhound but decided that we’re both too selfish to commit to the care of another animal, aside from one another.
“If there were better restaurants and bars at Disney, I’d consider taking Florence for a day or something.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said John. “There are actually some incredibly inventive themed bars. You just have to invest in the concepts, drink steadily. The Adventurer’s Club might be the most lusciously anachronistic bar in the world.”
“How do you know?”
“Research. There are books just about the Adventurer’s Club and its past. The Imagineers are fucking gods.”
“Always too much cursing with the hard drinks,” said Jack.
“The hard Wayz,” I corrected.
“Yeah, yeah, Murray Marks,” said Jack. “Why do you order twenty-four24 dumplings? Too much.”
“I bring Florence leftovers.”
“Chinese girls know enough not to eat cold dumplings.”
Life is unbearable by and by, two dozen dumplings and then you die. Soon he’ll bring out the tray of pork dumplings. I’ll attack while John goes on about the adventure bar. He sure can talk, and I sure can eat Jack’s dumplings. Symbiosis.
“So, where the hell are we going this year?” I asked.
John looked up from his BlackberryBlackBerry, smiled his radiant devil smile. Look at all those white teeth. Perfection. And with that slammed down a single piece of paper. It made Jack jump.
“Just one?” I asked.
“No choice this year, my friend. Sorry about that.”
He kept on beaming; it was a little unnerving.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Wait: two more hard ones, Jack.”
“A Harvard man should have better manners,” said Jack.
“Please,” said John.
“Even Murray Marks has better manners.”
John pushed the scrap of paper over to me.
“Every great adventure begins at a dark Chinese bar under papery monkeys with red eyes,” said John. “Given the truly evil glow of those eyes, you’d think we’d have gotten into some serious trouble during a Ponder. I believe that life has symbols. They’re everywhere. Some of them evil.”
“Should I flip it over?” I asked.
“Wait. Just wait a second. I want to remember this moment. Okay, go.”
There was a circle, and atop, on either side, two small circles.
“What is this?”
“Let me see?” said Jack. “It’s just circles. Makes no sense. I’ll go get the dumplings. A Harvard man should not draw like a child.”
“What does it mean?” I asked, turning it upside down, sideways. “Are they a planet and its moons? Space exploration?”
“Those three circles are the universal symbol for Mickey Mouse. We are going to Walt Disney World, and this time, our lives will change.”
“You’re crazy,” I said.
“One day you’ll look at that piece of paper, and it will all come flooding back. Like Proust and his croissant.”
“Madeleine,” I said. “So we’re going to go on rides and stuff?”
My parents owned a bookstore in Cambridge called When I Die, after the Emily Dickinson poem. It’s where I met John, who would loiter away the afternoons on the couch across from the cash register reading and, napping. My folks adored John, took him in, cooked for him. My mom would clean his clothes. Who doesn’t like a handsome orphan?
Johnny Boy slapped five twenties on the bar.
“Did you know that my father almost transformed himself into an actual Paladin just before he died?”
“Huh?”
“He would have been the first modern man to do so since the Middle Ages and he almost made it, poor bastard, white suit and all. He had an idea about a new type of man. A true ascetic. Girls love true ascetics. Who fight for causes. Like love. Fight for what you love, Cheese.”
He kissed me on the mouth, which he’d only done once before, after my wedding, then left. What the hell is a Paladin? And why are there judgmentalemental monkeys at a Chinese bar that is straight out of a nascent MTV video in which some mulleted band troubadours its way ironically, replacing drum sticks with chopsticks? But I love Shun Lee and its modernistic dimness. They dip their fortune cookies in choclate. An excess that renders the paper message inside moot.
“Where’s Johnny Boy?” asked Jack.
“He left.”
“What do the circles mean?”
“Disney World.”
“A very bad place,” said Jack. “A very dangerous place.”
I looked up at the monkeys, who were looking down at me.
