“My Nee-groes!” I cried. They did not hear me. “My Nee-groes!”
Noah jumped up, not in the way he used to back in school, with an ambitious sprinter’s leap, but quick enough to nearly upset the table. With that stupid, inevitable smile, those blazing teeth, that spinning, lying mouth, those gleaming enthusiast’s eyes, he turned the camera nozzle of his äppärät my way to record my lumbering arrival. “Heads up, manitos, here he comes!” he shouted. “Get out your butt plugs and get ready to groove. This is a ‘Noah Weinberg Show!’ exclusive. The arrival of our personal number-one Nee-gro from a year of bullshit self-discovery in Rome, Italia. We’re streaming at you live, folks. He’s walking toward our table in real time! He’s got that goofy ‘Hey, I’m just one of the guys!’ smile. One hundred sixty pounds of Ashkenazi second-generation, ‘My parents are poor immigrants, so you gotta love me’ flava: Lenny ‘freak and geek’ Abramov!”
I waved to Noah, and then, hesitantly, to his äppärät. Vishnu came at me with open arms and with nothing but joy on his face, a man possessed of roughly the same short-to-average height (five foot nine) and moral values as myself, a man whose choice in women-a tempered, bright young Korean girl named Grace who also happens to be a dear friend of mine-I can only second. “Lenny,” he said, lingering over the two syllables of my name, as if they mattered. “We missed you, buddy.” Those simple words made me tear up and stammer something mildly embarrassing into Vishnu’s ear. He had on the same SUK DIK bodysuit as my young co-worker at Post-Human Services, although his muzzle was gray and unshaven and his eyes looked tired and ITP, lending him a proper age. The three of us hugged one another close, in a kind of overdone way, touching buttocks and flailing at each other genitally. We all grew up with a fairly tense idea of male friendship, for which the permissive times now allowed us to compensate, and often I wished that our crude words and endless posturing were code for affection and understanding. In some male societies, slang and ritualistic embraces form the entire culture, along with the occasional call to take up the spear.
As I hugged each boy and patted him on the shoulder, I noticed that we were surreptitiously sniffing one another for signs of decay, and that Vishnu and Noah were wearing some kind of spicy deodorant, perhaps as a way to mask their changing scent. We had each embarked on our very late thirties, a time when the bravado of youth and the promise of glorious exploits that had once held us together would begin to fade, as our bodies began to shed, slacken, and shrink. We were still as friendly and caring as any group of men could be, but I surmised that even the shuffle toward extinction would prove competitive for us, that some of us might shuffle faster than others.
“Harm Reduction time,” Vishnu said. I still couldn’t figure out what the hell Harm Reduction meant, although the youth in the Eternity Lounge couldn’t shut up about it. “What does the wandering Jew-Nee-gro want? Leffe Brune or Leffe Blonde?”
“Blonde me,” I said, tossing a twenty-dollar bill bearing the silver authenticity stripe and the holographic words “Backed by Zhongguo Renmin Yinhang/People’s Bank of China,” hoping the drinks were unpegged to the yuan, so that I could collect some serious change. The money was promptly thrown back at me, and I enjoyed Vishnu’s kind smile.
“Nee-gro, please,” he said.
Noah took an orator’s deep, rehearsed breath. “Okay, putas and huevóns. I’m still streaming right at you. Eight p.m. on the dot. It’s Rubenstein time in America. It’s a motherfucking Bipartisan evening here in the People’s Republic of Staten Island, and Lenny Abramov has just ordered a Belgian beer for seven yuan-pegged dollars.”
Noah aimed his äppärät’s camera nozzle at me, marking me as the subject for his evening news segment. “The Nee-gro must tell all,” Noah said. “The returning Nee-gro must eh-jew-muh-cate our viewers. Start with the women you’ve done in Italy.” He switched to a falsetto voice: “‘Fuck-ah me-ah, Leonardo! Fuck-ah me now-ah, you beeg-ah heeb-ah!’ Then give us the pasta lowdown. Verbal at me, Lenny. Shoot me an Image of a lonely Abramov slurping up noodles at the neighborhood trat. Then the whole return-of-the-prodigal-Nee-gro shit. What’s it like to be a gentle, unsuspecting Lenny Abramov just back to Rubenstein’s one-party America?”
Noah hadn’t always been this angry and caustic, but there was something disproportionate about his efforts these days, as if he could no longer keep track of how his personal decline paralleled that of our culture and state. Before the publishing industry folded, he had published a novel, one of the last that you could actually go out and buy in a Media store. Lately he did “The Noah Weinberg Show!,” which had a grand total of six sponsors, whom he struggled to mention casually throughout his rants-a medium-sized escort service in Queens, several ThaiSnak franchises in Brownstone Brooklyn, a former Bipartisan politician who now ran security consulting for Wapachung Contingency, the well-armed security division of my employer, and I can’t remember the rest. The show got hit about fifteen thousand times a day, which put him somewhere in the lower-middle echelon of Media professionals. His girlfriend, Amy Greenberg, is a pretty well-known Mediawhore who spends about seven hours a day streaming about her weight. As for Vishnu, my buddy does Debt Bombing for ColgatePalmoliveYum!BrandsViacomCredit, hanging around street corners and zapping people’s äppäräti with Images of themselves taking on more debt.
Courtesy of the Debt Bomber, three wheaty beers, high in triglycerides, were smacked on the table. I began my debriefing, trying to entertain the boys with stories of my funny, dirty, crosscultural romance with Fabrizia, drawing with my fingers the outlines of her bush. I sang lyrical about the fresh garlic tang of old-world ragù and tried to inculcate them with a love of the Roman arch. But the truth was, they didn’t care. The world they needed was right around them, flickering and bleeping, and it demanded every bit of strength and attention they could spare. Noah, the one-time novelist, could probably think of Rome in nonimmediate terms, could conjure up Seneca and Virgil, The Marble Faun and Daisy Miller. But even he seemed unimpressed, glancing impatiently at his äppärät, which was alive with at least seven degrees of information, numbers and letters and Images stacked on the screen, flowing and eddying against one another as the waters of the Tiber once did. “We’re losing hits,” he whispered to me. “Ix-nay on the Rome-ay, okay?” And then, in a really low voice: “Humor and politics. Got it?”
I cut short a description of the Pantheon’s empty space drenched with early-morning sunlight, as Noah pointed the clumped remains of his frontal hair at me and said: “All right, here’s the situation, Nee-gro. You have to fuck either Mother Teresa or Margaret Thatcher…”
Vishnu and I laughed just the right amount and smiled at our leader. I raised my hands in defeat. This is the only way men could talk anymore. This is how we told one another that we were still friends and that our lives were not entirely over. “Maggie Thatcher if it’s missionary,” I said. “Definitely Mother Teresa from behind.”
“You are so Media,” Noah said, and we smacked fists.
From there the conversation moved on to Threads, a cult BBC nuclear-holocaust film, then over to the music of early Dylan, then a new way of fighting genital warts with a kind of smart foam, Secretary of State Rubenstein’s latest bungling in Venezuela (“nothing more oxymoronic than a Jewish strongman, am I right, pendejos?” Noah said), the near collapse of AlliedWasteCVSCitigroupCredit, the ensuing failed bailout by the Fed, our faltering portfolios, the “wah-wuh” sound of the doors closing on the 6 train versus the resigned “sheeesh” sound on the L, the life and bizarre death of the deviant comic known as Pee-wee Herman, and finally, inexhaustibly, the fact that, like most Americans, we would probably lose our jobs soon and be thrown out onto the streets to die.