I Hate Everyone, Except You Read online

  “I’m going to ride that,” I said.

  “What?” said Terri. She wasn’t incredulous; she couldn’t hear me because I was whispering. The words had slipped out of my mouth before I could suck them back in. Even with what little life experience I had, I knew Kamikaze was designed for grown men with diminished mental capacity, sort of an experiment in natural selection.

  “He said he wants to ride that!” Jodi yapped.

  “Absolutely not,” Terri said. “You’ll kill yourself. Let’s go home. Remember, it’s rush hour.”

  “C’mon, Ter,” Mike said. “Let him ride it if he wants.” Great. Now Mike was involved. I really couldn’t tell if he was defending my budding manhood or if he finally saw his opportunity to destroy me and get my mother to himself.

  Mom asked, “Do you really think it’s safe?”

  “Take a look,” he answered. “Nobody’s been carried off on a stretcher yet.”

  It was true. Grown men were indeed walking away after riding Kamikaze, but most of them stumbled as though they were recovering from a frying pan to the frontal cortex.

  “OK. Just be careful,” Terri said.

  “Yes,” Mike said, “be careful.” He was smiling the same smile he had when dropping Jodi and me off at our grandparents’ house for the weekend, except this time it was bigger, like he expected me to be gone for more than two days.

  I started off to the steps of Kamikaze and heard Jodi call after me: “Don’t die!” Sweet kid.

  I climbed the metal stairs, occasionally pausing to see if my family was looking. They were. I could see my mother holding her round belly with one hand and shielding her eyes from the sun with the other. Jodi was holding Mike’s hand.

  Because so few people wanted to ride Kamikaze, there was no wait when I reached the top. A kid barely older than me told me to step into the cage and cross my arms. His name tag read KEVIN. “You’ll probably want to keep your legs together,” Kevin said without looking at me. He was reading a magazine about dirt bikes.

  Keep my legs together? Why the hell was I doing this? To prove something to myself? To Mike? To my mother? My heart was pounding through my emaciated chest. I wondered if Kevin could see it vibrating like a berserk squirrel trapped behind my sternum. I could die right now or become paralyzed, I knew, and yet to climb back down those steps, with half of New Jersey watching, would have been more humiliating than to live the rest of my life with a torn spinal cord and the mental capacity of a parsnip.

  I glanced at Kevin, who had raised his head from his magazine to make sure I was standing as instructed. I wondered what kind of family Kevin came from, whether his parents were proud that he had a job at Action Park. He looked a little dead in the eyes, so I concluded that he came from a home in which his father drank too much beer and his mother smoked cigarettes at the kitchen table while wearing a floral housecoat. Would Kevin cry if I died? Or would he brag to his dirt-bike-loving friends that he helped kill a skinny kid who was probably a fag? Most likely the latter.

  Kevin pressed a button and the floor dropped from beneath me, sending the Human Xylophone plummeting to earth, clad in nothing but a white bathing suit at least two sizes too big. (Terri and I hadn’t been able to find the coveted white trunks in the boys’ department, so I convinced her to buy me a men’s small. Look, Mom, I can tie the drawstring really tight! They’re not too big! To give you a little perspective: My waist at the time was about 26 inches. A men’s small is 30. Those extra four inches will prove important in just a minute.)

  I free-fell for less than a second before my body made contact with the slide, which came as sweet relief, and before I knew it I had begun the turn from vertical to horizontal. I cascaded over a few small humps and continued down the chute to where the deeper water slowed me to a complete stop.

  Unfortunately, that deeper water, combined with my high speed of travel, spread my spindly legs apart and jerked my too-big bathing suit severely to the right and halfway up my torso. Upon realizing that my barely teenage privates were now on display for a small but significant fraction of New Jersey to see, I yanked the suit back down to cover myself before anyone could notice.

  I stood up, a little shaky but in one piece. Stumbling back to my family, I was greeted like a soldier returning from war. Or a dog that ran away for a couple of hours.

  “That was crazy,” Mike said with a laugh. “I’m really impressed.”

  Terri added, “You were definitely the youngest guy to go on that thing.”

  “I’m glad you’re not dead,” Jodi said.

  I mumbled some thanks to the three of them and assumed the funny feeling in my pelvis was because I had just cheated death.

  “OK, let’s hit the road,” Mike said. “Does anyone need to use the bathroom? It’s a long ride home.”

  Jodi said she didn’t, which was unusual because she had a strange affinity for public restrooms. Clearly, she had peed in the wave pool until her bladder was empty.

  “I guess I’ll go,” I said.

  The men’s room at Action Park was one of those places where you never want to find yourself. I mean, if some sort of sadistic genie ever forces you to choose between spending time in a Ugandan prison or a similar amount of time in the Action Park men’s room during a heat wave, choose the men’s room. Otherwise, avoid it at all cost. There are just too many wet, hairy guys in drippy suits and bare feet mingling with all the smells of humanity.

  Back in 1982, there weren’t dividers between urinals. If you had to pee, you would do it shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger, in this case a shirtless stranger. I chose the far-right urinal, so there was a wall to my right and a man to my left. Men’s room etiquette dictates that you don’t look too closely at other men, but I could tell he was a big-boned, New Jersey dad type.

  So, I get ready to pee, but before anything comes out, I realize I have to . . . well . . . fart. So, I fart.

  Except this fart doesn’t make the usual pfft sound. It makes a splash on the concrete floor.

  I stood frozen in pure terror. Holding my penis, looking straight ahead at the wall, I could see with my peripheral vision that the man next to me has glanced down at the floor and now he was staring at me. I turned my head slowly to the left and upward to meet his gaze.

  We were two strangers looking into each other’s eyes in a hot, wet men’s room. This man, with the bulbous nose and a smattering of acne scars across his cheeks, has the power to make this the worst day of my life or to provide a glimmer of sympathy. I steeled myself for a laugh or a snide remark, but mostly I was hoping for a kind word or two. Say it, buddy. Whatever you’re going to say, say it now.

  Without the slightest change in his facial expression—not even a raised eyebrow—he turned to face forward and continued his pee. He said nothing. Nothing.

  I looked down to the small, thankfully clear, puddle between my feet. I felt like something needed to be said, if only to prove this was actually happening. To prove that I am in this men’s room right now, that I haven’t died on the waterslide and my soul isn’t floating aimlessly from urinal to urinal in search of The Light.

  “Kamikaze,” I whispered.

  Still expressionless, he shook his penis, flushed, and left. I would never see him again.

  * * *

  The ride back to Long Island was pretty quiet. None of us was in the mood for Kenny Rogers or Donna Summer. At some point, around Nassau County, Jodi fell asleep in the car.

  “Something tells me that wasn’t the day you were expecting,” Mike said.

  “Nah, not really.”

  “You’re being really quiet. Is everything OK?” he asked.

  “I guess.”

  My mother knew I was lying. “What’s wrong?”

  “Water came out of my butt,” I said.

  Mike and Terri looked at each other, startled.

  Terri craned her neck around to look at me in the backseat. “Did it come out of your butt right now?” she asked.

  “No!” I ba
rked. “In the bathroom. At Action Park.”

  “In the toilet?”

  “Standing up.”

  Mike looked at me through the rearview mirror. I could tell he was wide-eyed, even through his dark aviators. “Was it just . . . water?” he asked.

  “Yes, it was just water! Oh my God, I knew I shouldn’t have told you! Can we please not talk about this anymore? I wish I was dead.”

  “Aw, don’t say that,” Terri said, then I wished I hadn’t.

  “So, you got a little water up your ass. There are worse things in the world,” Mike offered. “You rode Kamikaze, man! You couldn’t pay me to do that.” He was smiling, which made my eyes well up, because my embarrassment was giving way to the realization that Mike was proud of me on some level, and that we were becoming a little family, with another member on the way.

  BRILLIANT IDEAS

  Jennifer’s new sofa had been delivered that morning, so she invited me to her apartment to see it, and presumably to sit on it.

  A purchase of furniture neither disposable nor secondhand was company-worthy at this point in our lives. We were in our late twenties, living paycheck-to-paycheck, the vast majority of those paychecks going toward the rent for our Upper East Side apartments. I lived in a small rent-stabilized one-bedroom, located precisely a mop’s-length away from the uptown exit ramp of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. Because the car exhaust would regularly cover the living room’s two windows with a semiopaque layer of grime, once a week I would stand on my fire escape and clean them with a sponge-head mop I had purchased specifically for this task.

  Most drivers inching along in the ceaseless traffic of the exit ramp would pretend not to see me standing outside in my boxer shorts and an oversized T-shirt, leaning over the second-floor railing, mop outstretched and a plastic bucket overflowing with suds at my side. But I could sense their vague suspicion. Is he trying to make money by mopping stopped cars? Don’t make eye contact. Don’t make eye contact. Keep your mop off my Toyota Corolla.

  Occasionally, on a really hot morning, a driver with all his windows down, most likely because his car’s AC wasn’t functioning, would attempt to strike up a conversation with me.

  “Hot out, huh.”

  “Yup,” I’d reply.

  “Dirty windows, huh?”

  “Yup.”

  “That’s what you get for living next to a bridge.”

  “Wait. This is a bridge? I thought you were all waiting in line to go to hell.”

  “Eh, fuck you.”

  I’d shake the mop in his direction as if to say, Don’t make me use this thing on you, because I will.

  Once, a woman in the passenger seat of a minivan rolled down her window to ask me where York Avenue was. I pointed east with the mop, dripping some soapy gray liquid on myself in the process. “I told you so, Hal,” she barked at her husband. “I’m sorry,” she said to me, “my husband is an idiot. I hope one day you get a better apartment.”

  Jennifer’s apartment was a bit more posh than mine; it was a sublet in the high-rise famous for its cameo in the opening credits of The Jeffersons. Every time I entered the lobby, I imagined myself as the meat in a George-and-Weezy sandwich, him proudly strutting on my left and her on my right, regarding it all in wide-eyed wonderment. I’d press the elevator button and fantasize about the dinner Florence would have waiting for us, maybe meat loaf with a side of sass. And perhaps tonight would be the night Mr. Bentley would let me walk on his back.

  The first few times I visited Jennifer, I’d sing The Jeffersons’ theme at her apartment door: “Now we’re up in the big leagues, gettin’ our turn at bat!”

  She’d inevitably shush me in her politely paranoid way; she didn’t want to bother the neighbors, lest they rat her out for her not being on the lease.

  Jennifer had quickly become my best friend in New York. We met a few years earlier while we were both working as home-shopping hosts for Q2, a short-lived offshoot of QVC that broadcast live from Silvercup Studios in Queens. She was gorgeous, and I hated her on sight. When an executive for the company introduced us, Jennifer gave me a weak smile and kept her arms folded across her chest. She thinks she’s better than me, I told myself. I’m going to make her life miserable.

  The next day she apologized for the lukewarm reception. She explained that she was hungover, the air-conditioning was too high, and she was wearing a thin bra. “Boing!” She pointed her index fingers away from her boobs. I knew we’d be friends forever.

  Her sofa was nice, I supposed, a seafoam-green convertible, smallish but the right size for her alcove studio. I had helped her pick it out, mildly jealous the whole time we shopped because she could afford one while I was still sleeping on a futon. She was making more money as a commercial actress than I was as a freelance writer and editor. I had given commercial acting a shot but quit after my first audition, which Jennifer’s agent—at her prodding—had set up for me. It was for Boar’s Head Turkey.

  The casting director, a blasé gay-ish guy maybe a decade my senior, pointed a video camera in my direction and took a seat behind an industrial folding table. “You’re a radio announcer,” he said, “and your line is, ‘Boar’s Head Turkey.’ ”

  “So you want me to say ‘Boar’s Head Turkey’ as though I’m a radio announcer.”

  “That’s what I just said, except in reverse.”

  “Gotcha.” I cupped a hand to my ear (the way radio announcers do?) and produced my most resonant tone: “Boarrrrr’s Head Turkey.”

  “OK, do it again.”

  A little more gusto this time. “Booooarrrrrrr’s Head Turkey!”

  “Again.”

  Maybe I wasn’t accentuating the right syllable. “Booooar’s Head TUR-key!”

  “Again.”

  “BoaRRRRR’s Head Tur-KEY.”

  “Again.”

  “BOOOOOARS Head Turrrrr-key.”

  “Again.”

  “Boarrr’s HEAD Tur-KEYYYY.”

  “Again.”

  I was stuck in a sadistic loop with this fucker. He knew I’d never get the part, but he was making me repeat this damn line over and over. I couldn’t think of any new ways to say it! I was barely intelligible at this point. It was like that scene at the end of The Miracle Worker when Anne Bancroft gets Patty Duke to say “water” but it sounds like “wwwaaaaaauuhh-waaaahhhhwuh.”

  I refused to be the first to quit.

  “BWOOORRRS HEHD TUH-TUH.”

  “Again.”

  “TURRRRRRRR GA-BWAW BWAH.”

  “Again.”

  “BUHHHH HUH TURRRR TURRRR.”

  “Again.”

  A knock at the door. His assistant, asking if he was ready for the next auditioner.

  “Yes, send him in. Thank you Mister . . . Kelly.”

  “You are . . . welcome.”

  I waited years for that commercial to make its way to television, just so I could see who beat me out for the role of self-loathing, turkey-loving radio announcer, but it never aired. While Jennifer opened a bottle of wine and assembled a cheese platter in the kitchen, I perused the magazines on her coffee table. I had already read that week’s People and Entertainment Weekly, so I flipped through another I had never heard of: Marie Claire.

  Opening to a feature story titled “How Many Men Have You Slept with This Week?,” I was instantly sucked in, so to speak. But I was even more intrigued by the women holding up signs with big, bold numbers like “3” and “0” and “1” and “27.” By the time Jennifer came back to her new sofa, I had gobbled up every word of the article.

  “What is this magazine?” I asked.

  “Marie Claire. I like it.”

  “It is literally the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen. I need to work there.”

  “Uh. OK,” she said.

  “Do you mind if I rip out the masthead?”

  “Take the whole thing if you want.”

  “That’s OK. I don’t want to be seen carrying this rag around.” I tore the masthead conta
ining all the editors’ names and the address of the Hearst offices, folded it, and put it into my pocket.

  We drank wine and talked about men and our careers and the television shows we should write, like the one about the gay guy and the straight girl who are best friends living in New York City who have some wacky neighbors and go on crazy dates. “There’s nothing like it on TV!” When Will & Grace premiered the next year, Jennifer was convinced NBC had bugged her apartment.

  When I returned home, I drafted a letter to the editor-in-chief, Glenda Bailey. Glenda. Glenda. The name floated through my mind like an incantation. Glennnndah. Glennnndah. I had never met a Glenda before, though I had driven through Glendale once on the way to Disneyland. How exotic Glenda seemed. She would be the woman to change my life, I decided, and so I mentally grouped her with other G names that positively influenced me, like Glinda the Good Witch of the North and Glen the First Guy I Ever Made Out With.

  Dear Ms. Bailey,

  I don’t know you and you don’t know me. I don’t even know anyone who knows you, but I want to be an editor at Marie Claire.

  I’d like to meet with you, and to make it worth your while I will come to our meeting with 100 original story ideas for your magazine.

  My résumé is attached.

  Thank you for your time,

  Clinton Kelly

  Two weeks after mailing it, I received a call.

  “Can I speak to Ms. Kelly?” asked the woman on the other end of the line.

  “This is Mr. Kelly.”

  “Oh, you’re a man.”

  “Mostly.”

  “Glenda Bailey of Marie Claire asked me to call you. She’d like you to come in for a meeting tomorrow.”