Read Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City Online
Authors: Choire Sicha
Tags: #Popular Culture, #Sociology, #Social Science, #General
“You will notice in the next twenty minutes or so that this place will empty out,”
David said. Whatever, John thought. In twenty minutes the whole place was empty.
And then: “Everyone goes to dinner at this time,” David said. It was ten p.m. on the
dot.
They went for a long creepy walk in the dark, through the black-and-green maze of
the town, the trees shuddering in the wind off the ocean. All you could hear was silverware
clanging in the dark, dishes being put down, people laughing over dinner. You could
see little glimpses of warm lit windows and, inside, happy faces.
Finally they got home and had a late dinner of steak—they were all starving.
Everyone was reading and relaxing, but John was pounding beers. He’d resolved that
he’d try the nearest bar again, especially so he wouldn’t have to walk so far.
But the bar, when he got there, seemed terrible. So he set out on the beach, sensibly,
aiming for the other town. Finally he found the path: He came across three guys at
the edge of town buckling up their pants. He walked and walked and walked and couldn’t
find anything, no houses, just sand and trees, but then he saw an enormous flag attached
to a house and figured out where he was. So he marched up the beach and was knocked
straight back. A small part of the beach was roped off for the nesting of an endangered
bird species. The piping plovers! They weren’t very interesting birds at all: Tiny,
they’d run along the ocean in the day, and at night, who knows. There were lots of
animals like this that wouldn’t exist for much longer.
At the top of the wooden stairs leading up from the beach, he could hear the music
carried on the wind from downtown. He followed it. The bars were packed.
He circulated; he smoked a few cigarettes. Some guy started talking to him—from his
neighborhood too, where John knew him from the bars. John told him it was his first
time here.
“Oh, honey,” the guy said. “So who did you sleep with last night?”
“Oh, I dunno, some guy named Taylor,” John said.
“Of course,” the guy said, “he’s a slut.”
“Is he?” John said.
“He’s a really friendly slut though,” the guy said.
Then across the room, John saw this other guy who had been his mortal enemy in school.
It totally ruined his spirit. The guy was with a big group. The evening began to be
about weaving through the crowd, trying to avoid the guy from high school. Eventually
John went running outside and ran right into Taylor.
“You’re a bitch,” Taylor said.
“What!” John said.
“You didn’t wave to me on the beach,” Taylor said.
“How did you even see me?” John said.
“Anyway, this is my friend Dennis,” Taylor said.
Dennis looked like a cartoon character. He was cute. And then they had some guy who
John thought was really gross-looking with them. So John hung out with them and Dennis
kept shooting him meaningful looks. Like crazy. And then Taylor left for a minute
and John and Dennis started kissing. And Taylor came back, and John wondered if he’d
be mad. But then Taylor and John started making out.
“Let’s go back to your house and go in the tub,” Dennis said.
“Okay, bitch, let me buy one more drink,” Taylor said.
“Why would you buy one more drink when we’re about to leave?” John said.
“Obviously because, like, we’ll take it with us,” Taylor said.
So they went stumbling down the creaky boardwalks in the wind to their house, and
they banged through the house and went out into the backyard to the hot tub. The tub
wasn’t really working; it kept overflowing and shutting off. John looked around. The
house was kind of shitty; it was one-story, but it had been just cavernous until random
little walls had been put up to create seedy little rooms.
“Fuck, why isn’t this thing working!” Taylor said.
Finally it did, and then John and Taylor and Dennis were going at it in the tub.
But their friend that John didn’t like was there too. And he kept touching John, and
John kept shaking him off. Then the tub stopped working again.
“Fuck it, I’m going home,” Dennis said.
It was maybe three or four in the morning. The owner of the house showed up. He kept
talking about how much he loved political conservatives. He got in the tub. Everyone
kind of sat there and then the night was ending and the owner started giving directions.
“First of all, John, you’re beautiful and wonderful, so you’ll be with us tomorrow,”
he said. “What’s going to happen here is, you will sleep with Taylor tonight for the
second night in a row. You guys will sleep on the couch out on the living room. Tomorrow
we’re going to a party at eleven a.m., and I’ll have a lot of coke for us. Then we
have another party at four thirty. I’m so sorry, John, I can’t offer you any blow
tonight.”
The orders went on. Taylor seemed anxious. Clearly he wanted to be accommodating and
polite to the owner, since after all he stayed there at his discretion, solely because
he was good-looking.
They got away, eventually. The night turned blue. John said, “Let’s go somewhere.”
“Where do you want to go?” Taylor said. “Everything’s closed.”
“Can’t we just go to the Meat Rack or something?” John said.
“It’s not really good at this time,” Taylor said.
“Alright, I mean, well, you’re the expert,” John said.
“Can we just have sex?” Taylor said.
Then they had sex on the couch. They made a lot of noise. The whole house probably
heard.
“Okay, I’m going,” John said. It wasn’t night anymore.
“Why aren’t you staying?” Taylor said.
“Good seeing you,” John said.
John was feeling guilty at this point. He took Taylor’s phone number. He’d stayed
up all night, away from his hosts, ending up at some coke party. And they’d never
used a condom during sex, the whole time. He felt disgusting and panicked.
And earlier John had asked Taylor, as a joke, “Who have you done today?” And Taylor
was like, “Oh, some guy I just picked up off the street.” And John had asked, how
was the rest of last night, after I left you? And Taylor was like, “Oh my God, it
got so crazy!” John was trashed. He’d been trashed for days now. What he thought was
the worst was that he realized this was the kind of fun he’d set out looking for:
boys, drugs, excitement, booze. The hunt and its success. He was out of the town by
then and walking through the woods and the birds were chirping, it was disgusting
out, and suddenly again there was the guy from his neighborhood. “Oh hi!” John said.
And the guy could barely get it together to speak either.
It was a common nightmare in which you did something you never wanted to do, but then
you woke up, and you hadn’t actually done it, and you were relieved. But when it wasn’t
a nightmare, there was no relief.
The night was getting lemony and pale; it was almost-day night. Like there was the
light of two moons or something. There were guys stumbling out of bushes. It really
was a maze. Finally John stopped a man and asked how to get home, and the man said,
“Just follow me.”
They walked and walked. “My sister just died,” the stranger said.
He got home at seven thirty a.m. He sneaked in the house, all burned out inside. No
one heard him.
He woke up at almost one in the afternoon. He came downstairs.
“Are we going to the beach?” John said.
“No, we’ve all been to the beach. We’re going back to the City in forty-five minutes,”
one of his hosts said.
Instead of showering, he went out in the backyard and got in the little long black-lined
pool. He felt depleted. Sally was holding him up so that he wouldn’t drown. Disaster.
He was idly kicking, too tense to drift, too anxious to listen, sad as he could be.
In a very old and
still popular history book, there was a story about a man who said he talked
to God. When he was no longer a boy, he confided in his family that he heard
voices. So obviously he became employed as a prophet and as a military
general. And when he was old and famous, the people said to him, “This
system we have just isn’t working out. We’re ready for something new, and we
would like you to tell us who should be our king.”
But their prophet said,
“That’s a terrible idea. If you have a king, he’ll conscript your children.
He’ll make you do his fieldwork. He’ll have your daughters make his bread.
He’ll take the best things you grow for his people. And then he’ll take ten
percent of your vegetables and grains and the wine that you make—and that’s
just for his servants! He’ll take ten percent of your sheep. Basically,
you’ll all be his slaves. Eventually, you’ll be sorry, and you’ll have no
one to blame but yourselves.”
But from time immemorial—and
this was indeed a very long time ago—people have wanted someone in charge.
They knew that the person in charge would be terrible, because only a
hardheaded and rash and possibly psychopathic person was good at defending a
country. Countries wanted to expand, always, and fortify their borders;
their leaders personified that need to ooze over maps, over dusty hills,
creeping along rivers, seizing and insulating.
So this prophet consulted with
the voices he heard, and the voices said, go on, go ahead! Give them a king
then, if they want one so bad.
For thousands of years after,
the people were always plagued by kings. The kings came in all varieties and
titles, but they all shared the love of territory and capital, the love of
oozing and taking and fortification and celebrity.
The kings changed their
methods over time. Later, the kings were only sometimes military or
countrywide kings. All over the world, there were kings that had mere
hundreds or maybe thousands or tens of thousands of subjects, but most often
they were corporate kings. They let people farm the land for them and keep
some profit. Or they bought up all the jobs in a town, as giant merchants,
and then owned many of the workers in town for their kingdom. Or they owned
all the land and so everyone paid them rent.
You were a king if no one
could compete with you, and if no subject could easily leave your
kingdom—the less porous your kingdom, the greater your kingship.
While many countries were
subject to kings, the City itself was so compressed, so vertical, so tall
with kings, that in fact the citizens had more freedom from local kings.
There were so many opportunities to become a king, and some were immensely
successful and some were less so. Mostly the kings were too busy with each
other, oozing and creeping their kingdoms in perpetual alliances and
skirmishes. So the people could, usually, hop from kingdom to
kingdom.
What had changed over those
thousands of years were a few things. Many things did not change; always,
there was land and royal matchmaking and trade. Of course there were always
more people who wanted to and had to pay for things. And then, in concert
with the growing number of people, they invented new kinds of things that
people had to pay for. For instance, once you “paid” for water by getting
together with others and digging a well; then you all owned it. Now people
who lived in cities did not have that equity from their labor; instead they
paid for water to be delivered continuously to their homes. It was always
on.
There were other things—games
and fashions and trinkets and entertainments—that were merely advanced
evolutions of age-old markets, from the necessary to the enjoyable to the
frivolous. There was, for instance, medical treatment, which at this time
hovered confusingly between being a right and being an unobtainable
luxury.
THE CITY WAS
all soft and steamy and delirious. Tree roots pushed up against slab,
patient, growing every day. Down in the old former swamps of the City, where
the
hard schist broke up or dove down, the roots roamed wet and free, and pushed
up
because they could, and pushed down through garbage and broken rock and
landfill. The old buildings sagged. In the bathrooms a tile would crack, and
then another. One day a window wouldn’t quite close square. The old hills from
the west side pushed down what was once an old former soggy cove. The rocks and
burned buildings and gravel that filled in the swamps and unevenness of the east
side, that mass was all compressed and thick now from decades of pressure, held
together by webs of pipes and wires and roots and time. Little dirty streams
appeared in the subway tunnels. Hundreds of pumps moved millions of gallons of
water from the boreholes into tunnels built for wastewater, and then pumped it
back into the sea. The sea shoved the water back. The more of the City there
was, the heavier it got. All things settled, but not without constant tension,
and often, unnoticed, a thing would quietly break. The great heap of structures
made allowances one after another after the next for as long as it could.
JOHN BOUGHT A
loaf of bread for dinner and was asleep by the stroke of nine.
He’d been texting Taylor back and forth, like
dozens of times.
“I have nothing to hide,” Taylor had texted.
“You have my number,” Taylor had texted.
John awoke to the humming of his phone, another
text from Taylor. “Don’t worry,” Taylor texted.
Then it was three a.m. and he couldn’t go back to
sleep in the dark and hot and quiet, and he stayed up and watched some terrible
movie on the TV.
IN JOHN’S MAIL
there came a bank statement, for the period of June 22 to July 21.
His checking had 0.41 dollars. His savings had 0.85
dollars. His delinquent loan payments were 1,496.04 dollars. His Checking Plus
Credit Line minimum payment due was 43.36 dollars. His annual percentage rate
for interest on that was 15.25 percent. The amount of money subtracted from his
bank account in that period was 2,581.07 dollars. But the amount of money he’d
put into his bank account in that period was 2,272.72 dollars.