“Why would I have given up?”
“Boys who just want to fuck girls will only try for a certain amount of time, like six months or so. But this has been several years.”
“Yeah, you remind me of my mother.”
“Is that a good or bad thing?” said Petra.
“Well, you both talk a lot and are really erratic and manipulative. But you don't have the whole racist republican thing.”
“You think I'm manipulative?”
“Yeah, but I find that endearing.”
“Not many people do.”
“That's because you probably just manipulated them.”
“I don't manipulate you.”
“Only when I want you too,” I said.
“Then that means you manipulated me.”
“Yes, but you don't know I've manipulated you. You still assume you have done the manipulation.”
“I enjoy this game.”
“It's the only game worth playing,” I said.
“Having a dick in my mouth makes the world go away.”
Twenty Four
The next and last day of the New York City trip nothing special was supposed to happen. I was supposed to live through the day and around 9 I would get on the bus and go back to Ohio. The only exciting thing that was going to happen was Petra's friend Sonia was coming to visit for a couple of days and we were supposed to go to a Christmas Party at Melville House in Dumbo. All Petra did was have people visit. I'm not sure if she did anything but have people visit and get drunk. It seemed like a good life. Live in a nice little apartment on the lower east of Manhattan, get drunk at night with friends, hang out, do dumb shit, talk dumb shit, and never discuss anything serious. Then get up, eat a nice breakfast. Maybe go to the post office, go to a bakery, and get a man to buy lunch, maybe a drink at a nice bar. Read a book, buy some books, admire New York City, feel good about the choices you've made in life. Check Craiglist for jobs, get drunk again. Get a man to buy you a nice dinner. Walk down the street admiring New York City, text message someone. Text message someone else. Admire New York City. Have a celebrity spotting. Get drunk with friends.
It was a really good life Petra led. She was happy. This is what the liberal and the republican media told people to do, they told us to make ourselves happy. They said, “People, make yourselves happy. Because there is no God.” People always thought if no one believed in God and we were nihilists then people would go around murdering each other. That didn't happen at all; we just bought a lot of things with credit.
Sonia was a half-Mexican half-white American from Texas. She grew up in a good neighborhood. She didn't grow up in poverty speaking Spanish riding on buses and sweating without air-conditioning down in Texas. No, she had it okay. She was from the middle-class. She didn't have a dad, only a mom. Her dad was somewhere. She didn't know where. He had left so long ago she didn't even care. The only thing that remained was a ghostlike abandonment issue that haunted her romantic life. She didn't care for romance though: she went to an expensive college. Sonia was in her senior year. Her loans added up to over 100,000 dollars. She planned on going to law school and making her loans total 2 maybe 300,000 dollars. She was convinced she would be a wealthy lawyer. She had gone to good schools and shown proficiency, there was going to be no stopping her. She had perfect grades, even in modern biology. She was a memorization machine. You gave her sentences and titles, she memorized them. She was a master at Sudoku which led to getting a 162 on the LSAT. The sky was the limit; she was the future of the American legal profession.
I was sitting in the kitchen on a stool drinking coffee when Sonia came in. Sonia was pretty, nice little cheeks, beautiful curly hair, not the most attractive, but in terms of women who become lawyers she was hot. She was going to be a hot lawyer.
When she came in Petra ran over. They hugged each other and jumped up and down and made a lot of noise. This is how women who haven't seen each other in a long time greet each other in America. No matter where you fucking are. They run over, hug, jump up and down twice, sometimes three times. And during all that movement and action they are making a lot of fucking noise.
Petra introduced Sonia to me. We shook hands. I didn't care about meeting Sonia. The trip was almost over. I had met enough people. She wasn't a writer. She was going to be a lawyer. I was tired and needed rest, not another person acting out in my presence. Petra and Sonia sat in the bedroom talking about trivial shit that didn't matter. Petra was showing Sonia her new dresses. Sonia was trying them on. Sonia was walking around in her underwear. Then Petra suggested that I strip down to my blue long underwear and black socks and Sonia stay in her underwear and we take pictures wearing funny hats in the kitchen.
I had never played fake model before. I had always seen fellow writers and fans' Photobuckets and Facebooks full of 1000s of pictures of themselves playing fake model. Them standing there looking “real” or “emotional” or “attractive,” posing for the camera. I never understood it. The only time I thought pictures should be taken is when you are on vacation; you stand in front of The Grand Canyon with your brother or girlfriend and take a picture. There is no other reason to take a picture. But everyone in New York was very adamant about pictures. It was important to have one's image recorded as many times as possible for the sake of what, I don't know, ask a sociology professor.
I participated in their event without complaining. Sonia and I posed together in like 30 different positions. I noticed that Sonia had a lot of sweet tattoos. She was the tattooed lawyer. I got the urge to have sex with Sonia. But then I felt greedy and decided not to care about Sonia. Petra was very happy taking the pictures. She was showing how artsy she was to me. Sonia was showing how sexy she was. It was all really pagan after the pictures were taken. We sat and looked at them. They all looked like two people standing there. I had no shirt on and a very serious expression on my face. I wondered why. I knew then I was playing model too. It was fun to pretend you were sexy for a little bit. There was no truth to it. I knew I was not sexy. There was nothing sexy about me. I was not cool. It was okay, I had learned to deal with it. The pictures were dumb. Then Sonia took pictures of Petra and I on the bed looking cute together, like a couple, like we were “in love.” We weren't in love, we weren't in lust; we weren't in anything. We weren't two lonely people meeting in the night either. There was nothing awesome or amazing about our relationship. It was just another dumb slogan in New York City. Benny Baradat Dates Petra for $25.99 gets 10 % off on Tuesdays. Everything was a slogan in New York City, everything was publicity. She was publicity; I was publicity, our clothes, our eyes, everything a slogan to sell more units or to get into better parties. There was nothing inherently wrong with the relationship. We weren't evil people, we didn't beat each other. I didn't get Petra pregnant and abandon the kid and not pay child support. We merely considered our relationship a slogan, a flashy commercial, I'm not even sure if it was supposed to be a real life experience.
Petra and I pretended we were in love on the bed. Cuddling, looking warmly into each other's eyes, at one point I grabbed her breast and laughed, everybody laughed and felt very happy. It was completely predictable: the boy always does something stupid and the girls laugh and everyone pretends it's spontaneous. New York City was starting to get to me. There was too much paganism for me. There was too much nihilism and pointlessness. There was nihilism back in Youngstown, but not like in New York. I couldn't wait for the bus to come.
The girls tried to convince me to call off work and go home with Sonia who was traveling down I-80 the next day. I called people at work, pretending I wanted to stay another day. I wanted to stay another day to have sex again. I realized that and felt stupid. Petra and Sonia kept yelling at me to stay another day. They told me not to show up for work, they would forgive me. It was just a steak house, who cares. That infuriated me, but I didn't tell them that. They considered my job, what I did to feed myself and pay bills a joke. If I stayed there I would just be this nice little blue collar boy to play with. I really felt demoralized being there. I didn't mention it though: it didn't seem like their business. They had their own version of reality, their own version of how life should be lived, and I wasn't going to change that. I was surrounded by Petra, Sonia and Lyndi Wood was down the hall, three women that were completely accustomed to getting what they wanted. I was from a world where one did not get what they wanted, and was happy if they got anything at all. There was a huge discrepancy in our world views.