Authors: Megan McCafferty
friday: the eighth
sixty-four
I
t’s Friday morning-borderline-afternoon here in Sammy. When I awoke, I didn’t recognize my own body at first, as it was still unfamiliarly clad in Dexy’s dress, the polyester sticking to my body with the clammy dampness of drunken night sweats.
As for my corporeal condition, I, apparently, out of the goodness of my heart, volunteered to mop up the floor with my tongue before leaving the party last night. And my whole head now is pounding in retaliatory pain, as if I had spent the whole evening trying to jam it up my own ass. (Which isn’t true, even metaphorically speaking.)
It’s five glasses of water, four ibuprofens, three cups of coffee, two vitamin C tablets, and one immobile hour later. If you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of blowing off my fake job this week, so I don’t have to be anywhere (Bethany’s) or do anything (babysit Marin) until later this afternoon, which gives me several hours to document that which I was too polluted to write about in anything but semiliterate prose last night. As is to be expected, my memory fades in and out, but I will try to piece together an approximation of the evening’s events to the best of my hungover capabilities.
I’m doing this mostly because I feel obligated to finish what I’ve started.
sixty-five
T
he Social Activists’ Care. Okay? karaoke party is held every Thursday night at Come, the same place that hosted Shit Lit. Last night there were not one, not two, but three snarling bouncers to keep out any wannabe do-gooders who were not, in MILF parlance, OTB. This was a strictly OTB crowd, and as the Cerberean gatekeepers checked and cross-checked
Jessica Darling
+
1
on the various VIP lists, I couldn’t help but think of this as passage through to a very special kind of hell.
In the spirit of
Zagat,
Come is all about “manufactured scuzziness,” a “Disney-meets-Dionysus ‘Dive Bar’ with bottle service on the LES.” The “grimy,” “no frills,” “dimly lit” lounge is the perfect space for the “glossy,” “all-frills,” “megawatt crowd” who want to “escape the B&T scene on 27th Street” and “pretend they’re slumming.” It was packed to capacity with a melting pot of beautiful people who can afford to pay the $250 door fee and $250 per song, all proceeds going directly to whatever pet cause of the week is chosen by the Social Activists. I could name-drop here, but I won’t because mentioning these boldfaced names would imply that I was impressed, daresay honored, to share the same rarefied air with a certain underage movie actress known for cutting cocaine with Strawberry Quik, or the pop princess who is better known for the inflation-deflation-reinflation of her funbags than for her music.
And these were just the obvious A-listers in attendance. Dexy kept on pointing out other New York notables whom I didn’t recognize at all. The financier’s son who hasn’t let his marriage to an icy blond heirhead slow down his habit for squiring hard-bodied homos for bathroom blow jobs. The deejay paranoid that snorting crystal meth will wreck her nose job, and smoking it will give her jack-o’-lantern meth mouth, so she asks her unpaid intern to administer it via her asshole.
“THAT’S CALLED A ‘BOOTY BUMP,’ OR ‘KEISTERING!’”
Dexy shouted matter-of-factly, her neck swiveling around the room as she spoke.
“AND BEFORE YOU GET ALL WORRIED, LET ME ASSURE YOU THAT I DON’T KNOW THIS FROM FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE….”
“HOW DO YOU KNOW ALL THIS?”
I shouted back. (Okay, I don’t want to pull an Owen Meany here, so just assume that any conversation that took place throughout this whole evening was shouted, all caps, in bold, and italicized, as that’s the only way anyone could be heard over the karaoke caterwauling.)
“How do you
not
?” she asked, her head still twisting around, her eyes a-goggle.
With all this sordid gossip in my brain, it was difficult for me to remember that it was all supposed to be for a good cause. This week’s proceeds went toward the Global Fund, a nonprofit that helps fight AIDS, TB, and malaria in Africa. It’s just like I told Hope the other afternoon: Africa is hot, hot, hot. But I doubt Strawberry Quik, Princess Funbags, or the rest of their dilated-pupil posse could find Africa on a map, and Africa is a big freaking continent. And it stands pretty much alone, too, unlike Asia, which is practically spooning Europe. Anyway, I couldn’t help but be cynical about the whole endeavor when it was appallingly obvious that the success of Care. Okay? had almost nothing to do with the spirit of giving and more to do with showing off that you have so much extra cash lining your pockets that you can just give it all away to a continent best known as the birthplace of Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt.
I obviously cannot afford such ostentatious generosity, so I’ve turned down all of Cinthia’s previous invitations. I only agreed to go because she had called me personally and told me not to worry about the tax-deductible door fee because she really wanted me to be there. In this age of easy avoidance through digital accessibility, the implications of such a gesture cannot be underrated. I had a feeling that there was an ulterior motive to the invitation, but I couldn’t imagine what Cinthia could possibly need from me.
She had reserved spots for me and Dexy at her table. Dexy led the way, barreling through the crush of bodies, providing loud and sordid commentary the whole time. We finally found Cinthia standing at the front and center table, right by the stage, forehead to forehead with the aforementioned DJ Booty Bump, in front of a table occupied by a cross section of contemporary urban hipster clichés. The group looked like they had been handpicked by an advertising agency designing the “urban market” ads for Valtrex:
Genital herpes can happen to anyone…especially hipsters like you!
“She’s tiny!” Dexy was swooning over Cinthia. “But she’s Reese Witherspoon cute and healthy tiny, not Nicole Richie needs-a-feeding-tube tiny!” She hugged herself passionately. “And I’m in love with her dress! I am so in love with her dress that I want to marry her dress and have its stylish babies!”
It wasn’t until Dexy said that that I realized that I had totally neglected to mention your proposal. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind, so caught up was I in Dexy’s cyclone of drama.
Cinthia was rocking a silk, one-shouldered, drop-waist minidress, mostly magenta and splattered with black Rorschach blobs, worn over black leggings with pointy ankle boots. It sounds ridiculous, and it was ridiculous, but she pulled it off with panache.
Dexy turned to me, in my secondhand polyester. “I told you you’d fit right in!”
But seeing Cinthia (and Dexy, and everyone else in the room, for that matter) wear that outfit so brilliantly only made me feel clumsy and self-conscious in my own throwbacks.
“I still can’t believe you’re friends with Cinthia Wallace!”
“It is sort of strange,” I admitted. “We’re on opposite ends of the Social Register, that’s for sure.”
“And you
really
didn’t recognize her when she arrived at your school to write that book? What was it called again?”
“Bubble-gum Bimbos—”
“I would have called her out in a second,” Dexy interrupted. “She was
the
jailbait socialite of the nineties! She was on Page Six like every day! She scandalized her whole family….”
“I wasn’t up on that kind of stuff,” I said. “I’m still not.”
“But no one in your school knew?”
“She picked Pineville High because we were so clueless.”
“Well, obvs.”
Dexy sashayed toward Cinthia, and in doing so passed right in front of the stage, briefly blocking the audience’s view of the Eastern European model apparently too fatigued with malnourishment to carry a tune. As the runway favorite strained to coax out the words to “Edge of Seventeen,” she gorgeously illustrated the fundamental problem with karaoke parties thrown and attended by Beautiful People, with or without the philanthropic angle. Beautiful People singing badly is fun to watch only if you are a Beautiful Person yourself. Because if you are not a Beautiful Person, all you can see is how in love these Beautiful People are with themselves. If they can actually hit some of the right notes, they are far too smug and impressed, as if one in-tune rendition of “Oh Sherry” has refuted the long-held myth that Beautiful People have no discernible talent other than being beautiful.
Hear that? That hot chick is easy on the eyes and the ears! Wow! Isn’t she genius? Aren’t we all?
But the self-congratulatory annoyingness is even worse if the singer is horrendous, because the singer is so hyperaware of her horrendous singing. The Beautiful Person, usually of the female variety, doubles over in laughter as she sings, covers her eyes with her hands, and pushes “Don’t watch me!” gestures at the audience, all of which is meant to show that she isn’t just another pretty face—oh, no!—she’s a pretty face who has a sense of humor, who likes to poke fun of herself and her very prettiness….
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
sixty-six
I
’m having a bit of a meltdown here.
First things first: I’m a hypocrite ne plus ultra for attending a party at which I would be surrounded by the those I’ve skewered in the past, such as the “wannabe or slumming Williamsturdburgers trying too hard to outdo one another in their kaffiyeh neck scarves, scraggly crusatches, and Jheri-curl mullets.”
I needed you to know that I know that.
I’ve got less than one day left, but I’m not sure if I’m going to make it through this little experiment. It’s not just because my hand is killing me from all this writing, surely suffering from repetitive-use injury. Besides that is the ominous feeling that my hypographic carpal tunnel will be for naught. I’ve dutifully documented all the routines and rituals, conversations and connections that are supposed to imbue life with meaning, and yet I can’t imagine a worthwhile conclusion to all this onanistic scribbling. This seems most obvious right now, as I attempt to present last night’s events.
But I’ve got a history of giving up when things go bad. I’m a quitter. I quit the Girl Scouts when I didn’t sell enough cookies to earn a merit badge for my efforts. I quit playing clarinet when I wasn’t chosen for first chair in seventh-grade orchestra. I quit the cross-country team when I had little hope of rising above twenty-third in the county. I quit writing for the
Seagull’s Voice
when the adviser had the nerve to try to edit/censor my work. I quit my internship at
True
magazine when I didn’t want to simulate fellatio in front of the editor in chief. I quit my assignments for
Think
this week when I finally accepted that they would never lead to gainful employmet.
I quit trying to persuade you to talk to me.
I am determined not to quit this notebook. Even if not one word of it will make a difference.
sixty-seven
W
here was I? Oh, yeah.
“Jess!”
Cinthia gestured for me to come closer. DJ BB took one bored look in our direction and slipped away. Cinthia hugged me longer than I expected. I could feel all the room’s eyes on me, trying to figure out who I was, and why Cinthia Wallace was embracing me so.
“So what were you just talking about?” I asked. “Looked intense.”
“The de-deregulation of the lending industry,” she said. “Or reregulation, if you believe in the strategic propaganda powers of positive language.”
I knew Cinthia well enough at this point to suspect that she wasn’t kidding. She really was trying to discuss credit-card reform with someone who enjoys crystal meth colonics.
Dexy grabbed Cinthia’s hand and pumped it up and down. “I’m Dexy! J’s friend! And let me tell you how much I admire your work with the Social Activists!”
Cinthia extracted herself from the handshake and smiled. “Well, thank you…”
“Seriously! Don’t let the tabloids get you down!” Dexy said, now chummy enough with Cinthia to pat her on the shoulder. “What’s wrong with wanting to be remembered as more than a vapid coat hanger with a taste for the booger sugar? Why shouldn’t you do something positive with your money and fame?”
“Thanks,”
Cinthia said, taken aback by Dexy’s enthusiasm, as most people are upon first meeting her. “But we’re actually moving in a different direction….”
“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked. “The Social Activists?” I glanced at the other faces at the table, trying to get them involved in the conversation. But they were all talking among themselves, not paying one bit of attention to the current performer—a portly, bald Tenacious D type doing a spectacular Freddie Mercury.
(“I’m a sex machine ready to reload…Like an atom bomb about to oh oh oh oh oh explode!”)
But Cinthia spoke to Dexy and me as if we were the only people in the room, a skill that no doubt helps her when it comes to persuading people to part with their money. Only we had no money to part with.
“The Social Activists can only do so much. We can raise money, sure, and social profiles, but we’re not raising
consciousness.
I founded the Social Activists hoping I could exploit the conspicuous one-upmanship that is so pervasive here in the city and do some good. No one here cares about where the money is going”—she gestured around the table here—“they only care that they are among those being seen giving it away. And I figured that as long as the money was going to worthy causes, the dubious intentions of the donors didn’t matter.” She paused and leaned in closer. “But it
does
matter.” Cinthia let out a sigh. “I know, it’s all so
sincere,”
she said, screwing her lips into a sneer on the last word. “Well, what’s wrong with sincerity? Why is it such a dirty word?”
Dexy stood up, curled her lip, and swiveled her hips.
“Well, you gotta be sincere,”
she sang in a horrid rockabilly twang that cut through all conversation.
“Oh my baby, oh yeah!”
“Save it for the stage,” I said, yanking her down into her seat.
“Bye Bye Birdie
!” Dexy explained.
“Go on,” I insisted. I was genuinely, daresay,
sincerely
interested in hearing what Cinthia had to say.
“Er, right,” Cinthia said, unfailingly polite. “Irony has become the language of our generation. And the problem with irony, and sarcasm, and its evil twin, snark, for that matter, is that nothing is too sacred for a funny punch line. If people spent one tenth the amount of time thinking about, oh, I don’t know, the midterm elections as they did trying to find pictures of Firecrotch’s umpteenth upskirt, maybe our country wouldn’t be so completely fucked up.”
Right at that moment, a bubbly blond Nickelodeon starlet who last year, at the age of sixteen, legally emancipated herself from her parents, took the stage wearing a fedora, a flannel shirt, and fishnets. If this young lass had begun her evening with pants, or shoes for that matter, she was without them now. The crowd thundered their approval as she giggled and hiccupped through “I Touch Myself.”
“Okay,” Cinthia said with a knowing raise of her eyebrow, “what are you thinking? I know you’re thinking something. Say it.”
I contemplated her question.
You have urged me to practice “the art of compassion.” Whenever I come across an annoying target for snark, I’m supposed to take a moment to consider the confluence of biological, psychological, sociological, and anthropological forces that have made this person who he/she is today. Being mindful of my fellow man’s struggles is supposed to make me less likely to take him out with my sniper tongue. What could be the downside to practicing the art of compassion? Shouldn’t we all try to be more mindful of others’ struggles? Especially in New York City, in which mythic comedies and epic tragedies can be witnessed on a single street corner while impatiently waiting for the right moment to jump the go signal and jaywalk to the other side?
You have been warning me about my callousness for years, though you’ve graciously blamed the city’s cruel influence, and not what I suspect is an inborn character defect. You see, it’s not that I don’t want to be a more compassionate person; I do. But that requires a certain sensitivity that doesn’t come naturally to me. And so what usually happens is that I overcompensate by being super-duper empathetic, often with ridiculous results. Like this:
Cinthia:
My foot hurts.
Me:
What happened?
Cinthia:
I got caught in a bear trap and now it’s just a bloody stump.
Me:
That sucks! I totally know what you’re going through!
Cinthia:
You do?
Me:
Oh, yeah! Totally!
Cinthia:
Your foot got caught in a bear trap? And it turned gangrenous?
Me:
No!
Cinthia:
No?
Me:
No! But one time I got a pedicure and the bitch clipped my pinky toenail way too low.
Cinthia:
Gee whiz, I’m so lucky to have such an empathetic friend like you.
Okay, this conversation never happened, but honestly, I wouldn’t put it past me. As this fictional yet totally possible example illustrates, all my “empathy” accomplishes is taking the conversation away from the aggrieved party and back to me, me, me. Surely this has always been a deficit in my personality, and it’s why I’ll never further my studies in psychology to become a professional counselor/therapist/psychoanalyst. So I was speaking from experience when I told Cinthia that she was talking out both sides of her mouth.
“You can’t throw parties like this, with tabloid favorites like her,” I said, pointing to the stage, “and then lament about the death of serious discourse. You can’t have it both ways. Your intentions are good, but your execution could be better. And I should know, because I feel like my entire life is comprised of good intentions with suck-ass execution….”
“What did you just say?” Cinthia asked, eyes afire. She didn’t sound angry, but I was afraid I’d offended her. I suddenly got all flustered.
“Uh…Suck-ass execution?”
“No, before that. You said my intentions were good but that I could do better! That’s amazing! Amazing!”
“Uh…”
“Because that’s what I want to name my new association.”
“Amazing?” I asked.
“No!” Cinthia was shaking her head so wildly, her chandelier earrings slapped against her cheeks. “Do-Better.”
“Do-Better?”
“As in better than do-gooder. As in make the world a better place.” She slapped her hands on the table. “I knew it!” She beamed at me with her Baccarat teeth. “I knew I could count on you to tell me the truth. I have always admired your candor, Jessica. I wanted you to come here tonight and tell me what no one else had the balls to say. I’m looking for people like you to help me get Do-Better off the ground.”
“Uh, what exactly is Do-Better?” I asked.
“As you probably know, I inherited an obscene amount of money from my capitalist pig of an absentee father.”
Dexy broke in, unable to stop herself. “How much? I heard it was fifty million.”
Cinthia didn’t bat an eyelash. “More.”
“More, more, more!”
Dexy squawked.
“How do you like it? How do you like it?”
“Way more,” Cinthia said, already learning how to ignore Dexy. “The media analysis was all about, you know, the wayward paterfamilias trying to overcompensate for leaving me and my mother when I was still in preschool, but they were wrong. He knew the money would make me uncomfortable, and he just wanted to make me squirm, even after they sealed his tomb.”
Yes, Cinthia’s family is so dysfunctional that even a multimillion-dollar inheritance could be interpreted as a wicked “Fuck you!”
“Anyway, I wanted nothing to do with it. Don’t get me wrong, I know that even without his blood money I’m still grossly wealthy. But how much money does a person need? Seriously. I knew right away that I was going to give it all away.”
“All
of it?” I asked.
“Every penny,” Cinthia said.
“Can I have some?” This from Dexy, of course.
“The people with power are the people with money….”
“I WANT THE POWER!”
“There aren’t enough of us trying to improve life, not just for the select few but for everyone. We live in the richest country in the world and we are only serving the top one percent of our own citizens. The majority of people in this county can’t afford health insurance. Or quality child care. They can’t pay for college without going into catastrophic debt. And I can’t even get into our appalling attitudes about poverty abroad.” She sipped her club soda.
“It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the things going wrong in the world.” This from me.
“I know. So many fucked-up things, and even with my inheritance, not enough money to fix them all. So I had to choose. First I thought I would donate it all in one big lump sum in my father’s name to an organization he abhorred when he was alive, like the National Endowment for the Arts.
Hey, Daddy, you funded that sculpture made from
Hustler
magazines and semen!
Then I thought I could go global by using it to fund AIDS research. Or for micro-financing small businesses in undeveloped countries. Then I reconsidered and thought I should go local and donate it to a bunch of underfunded New York City public schools, or set up a series of scholarships for minorities at all the private schools that had the good sense to kick me out.” She laughed here, and I did, too. “The point is, there are so many causes out there, and I felt helpless because I couldn’t help everyone, as helpless and powerless as many of us feel when we see our government making decisions that we find morally repugnant, whether it’s waging an amoral war or giving tax cuts to the megarich—like me!—who need it the least.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Something more personal, yet more ambitious, and more likely to fail.”
I was listening carefully, waiting for her big plan.
“I am committed to funding a cross-cultural coalition of dedicated high school and college students, a philanthropic collective through which tomorrow’s change-makers can work together to have a positive impact on real people’s lives
today.
”
She paused here, obviously waiting for some sign of approval.
“So you decided to go with a scholarship program?” I asked, not really following her.
“More than that. A movement.” Cinthia slapped the table again for emphasis. “Do-Better scholarship recipients will promote a system of positive change, not only through their charity work, but by having a hand in selecting the next wave of Do-Better scholarship winners, who will one day do the same. In that way, Do-Better is self-sustaining. Our philosophy, our philanthropy, will grow and grow and grow….”
I must admit, I envied the young idealists who would get a chance to be part of Cinthia’s altruistic gamble.
“I would Do-Better if I were still in college,” I said.
“I know you would,” Cinthia said. “Because you get it. You totally get it….”
“So what exactly will you—”
“We!” she said, gripping my wrist.
“We?”
“Yes!”
Cinthia’s enthusiastic approval made me blush. “Okay,” I agreed. “What will
we
do?”
“Again, this is why I like you. You don’t just drink the Kool-Aid, swallow the rhetoric. You want real answers. And the real answer is: I don’t know.” She thumped the table once more with her palm as she laughed. “I have no fucking clue what we’ll do
exactly.
I can only tell you what I want to do….”
THE DO-BETTER MISSION STATEMENT
• INVEST funds in the next generation of philanthropists in the form of scholarships and employment oportunities
• INITITATE a system of economic sustainability through ongoing education and infrastructural rebuilding
• INAUGURATE a new guard of change-makers who support the collectivist ethos and sublate individualism
• INCLUDE other conscientious charitable institutions and nonprofit organizations in an open exchange of resources and ideas
• INCREASE awareness of socioeconomic crises here and abroad, and provide specific methods for effecting positive change
• INSPIRE tomorrow’s leaders to volunteer their assets—be it money, time, talents, or wisdom—today
Okay, I didn’t actually remember all this. I was, after all, a few drinks in at this point. And all the poorly sung pop-rock noise pollution was starting to addle my brain. I got this information directly from the Do-Better website, which hasn’t officially launched but is already tricked out with some pretty impressive interactive flash technology. I’m pretty sure that in the effort to distance herself from the superficial high-twattage of the Social Activists, Cinthia had erred on the side of pretension and lifted some of the more academic dialect of this mission statement directly from her Harvard senior thesis. (I had to look up the definition of
sublate,
which has the opposite meanings “to take away” and “preserve and assimilate.” It is the translation of a term favored by Hegel, the unreadable German philosopher I’ve forgotten about from my Contemporary Civilizations class at Columbia. I need to tell Cinthia that this is no way to get the masses on her side.)