EUNI-TARD: I just want a nice, clean apartment, Lenny. Don’t you want to come home to a nice, clean apartment too? Don’t you want to be proud of where you live? Isn’t that what being an adult is about? It’s not just about reading Tolsoy and sounding smart. Big whoop.
LABRAMOV: Reading who? Big what?
EUNI-TARD: Forget it. I got to run to the laundry. Who else is going to pick up your undies? By the way, you should wear boxer briefs not just plain old regular briefs. They provide more support. You always complain that your balls hurt after a long walk, well why do you think that is?
LABRAMOV: Because I wear bad underwear.
EUNI-TARD: Who loves you, kokiri?
13 AMY GREENBERG’S “MUFFINTOP HOUR”:
Dear Diary,
So, after the huge success with my parents, I asked Eunice to come out with me to Staten Island to meet my friends. I guess my intentions were self-aggrandizing and superficial. I wanted to introduce Eunice to my boys, impress them because she was so young and pretty. And I wanted to impress her because Noah and his girlfriend, Amy, were so Media.
The first part worked-you can’t really meet Eunice without appreciating her youth and her cool, shimmering indifference. The second part not so much.
The night in question was what we called Family Night, when all the boys invited their respective partners to Cervix, the kind of night when I was usually minus girlfriend and feeling like a fifth wheel. But on that night it would be Noah and his emotive girlfriend, Amy Greenberg, Vishnu and Grace, and Eunice and me, the couple-in-progress.
Even on the way to the subway, walking arm in arm, I tried to show my girl off to the denizens of Grand Street, but the selection of Eunice-appreciators was a bit thin that day. A crazy white man brushing his teeth in broad daylight. A retired Jew throwing a plastic cup of Coke at a discarded mattress. A feuding Aztec couple hitting each other over the head with two plastic yellow daisies from within the unremitting brick façade of a housing project.
I had almost made it to the subway without incident. But by the razor-wire-surrounded lot next to the RiteAid, where our neighborhood’s resident shitter would squat in the middle of the day, I noticed a curious thing. A new billboard had gone up, courtesy of my employer, the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation. It depicted a familiar latticework of glass and pomposity, a series of three-story apartments crashing into one another at odd angles like a bunch of half-melted ice cubes in a stirred drink. “HABITATS EAST,” the sign proclaimed, beside the flags of the United Arab Emirates, China-Worldwide, and the European Union.
AN EXCLUSIVE TRIPLEX COMMUNITY FOR NON-U.S. NATIONALS
By Staatling Property
Seven TRIPLEX Living Units priced to move from 20,000,000 northern euros / 33,000,000 yuan
“Twenty million euros!” I said to Eunice. “That’s fifty years of my salary. Even foreigners don’t have that kind of money anymore!”
“Isn’t this the place where that guy shits all the time?” Euny said nonchalantly, evidently inured to the vagaries of my quartier. I continued to read:
ATTENTION FOREIGN RESIDENTS!
BUY AT RIPLEX LIVING UNIT TODAY AND RECEIVE
· Exemption from American Restoration Authority (ARA) Cavity, Data amp; Property Searches
· Prize-winning security by Wapachung Contingency
· EXCLUSIVE Immortality Assistance from our Post-Human Services Division
· Free parking for first 6 months
Credit ranking of 1500+ only please
This Area COMPLETELY Zoned for Harm Reduction
“EXCLUSIVE Immortality Assistance”? Beg pardon? You had to prove you were worthy of cheating death at Post-Human Services. Like I said, only 18 percent of our applicants qualified for our Product. That’s how Joshie intended it. Hence the Intakes I was supposed to perform. Hence the Language Cognition tests and the essays on outliving your children. Hence-the whole philosophy. Now they were going to bestow immortality on a bunch of fat, glossy Dubai billionaires who bought a Staatling Property “TRIPLEX Living Unit”?
I was about to start a healthy diatribe on the Subject of Everything (I think Eunice likes it when I teach her new stuff) when I noticed a familiar squiggle on the corner of the sign.
In a stenciled, bleeding-edge style that had been cool at the turn of the century, I saw-no, it couldn’t be!-an arty reproduction of Jeffrey Otter, my inquisitor at the U.S. Embassy in Rome, in his stupid red-white-and-blue bandana, a smudge of what could have been a cold sore on his hairy upper lip. “Oh,” I said, and actually backed away.
“Kokiri?” Eunice asked. “What’s up, nerd-face?”
I made a breathing sound. “Panic attack?” she asked. I put up my hand to indicate a “time-out.” My eyes ran up and down the graffito as if I were trying to scrub it into a different dimension. The otter stared back at me: curved, oddly sexual, pregnant with life, the fur smoothed into little charcoal mounds clearly warm and soft to the touch. It reminded me of Fabrizia. My betrayal. What had I done to her? What had they done to her? Who had drawn this? What were they trying to tell me? I looked at Eunice. She was using my forty-second pause to bury her head into her äppärät. What was I even doing with this sleek digital creature? I felt, for the first time since her arrival in my life, truly mistaken.
But the day wasn’t finished with me yet.
When we got to the Cervix, my friend Grace was the one to object.
“She’s too young for you,” she whispered to me after Eunice had turned away from us and started AssLuxury shopping. There wasn’t anything particularly antisocial about this-the boys were watching Chinese Central Banker Wangsheng Li’s visit to Washington on their own äppäräti, and Noah’s girl, Amy, was setting up hand lotions and other sponsored products for a live stream of the “Amy Greenberg Muffintop Hour.”
For a second I thought Grace was jealous of Eunice, and that was more than fine with me, because, to be honest, I’ve always had a crush on Grace. She wasn’t particularly pretty, the eyes too widely set apart, her bottom teeth like an interstate pile-up, and she was, if it’s at all possible, too thin from the waist up, to the point where she looked bird-like doing any activity, even walking up the stairs or passing a plate of Brie. But she was kind-so kind and forthright, and so well educated and serious about life, that when I thought I was in love with Fabrizia in Rome, all I had to do was think of Grace talking about her complex wintry childhood in the farthest reaches of Wisconsin State or the German artist Joseph Beuys, her passion, to know that everything about my relationship with poor, doomed Fabrizia was transitory and a lie.
“Why don’t you like Eunice?” I asked Grace, hoping she would stutter and painfully confess her love for me.
“It’s not that I don’t like her,” Grace said. “It just feels like she’s got a lot of things to work out.”
“I got a lot of things to work out too,” I said. “Maybe Eunice and I can work them out together.”
“Lenny.” Grace rubbed my upper arm and flashed me her lower yellows (how I relished her imperfections). “If you’re attracted to her physically, that’s fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. She’s hot. Have a good time with her. Have a fling. But don’t tell me, ‘I’m in love with her.’”
“I’m worried about dying,” I said.
“And she makes you feel young?” Grace said.
“She makes me feel bald.” I ran my hand through what was left.
“I like your hair,” Grace said, gently pulling at the clump standing armed sentinel over my widow’s peak. “It’s honest.”