I Am a Character in a Novel of Linked Stories

Yo, remember me? The beardy dude on page 39, waiting in line at the pretentious coffee bar where Amy and Gordo had their knock-down drag-out fight? The “scruffy Italian-American sweetie-pie who’s forever trying to pygmalion his stoner vacuity into depth”? Dude, I’m back!

I was at Amy’s yoga class in the first story, which is why I ended up standing behind her in line at Filtered Truth, even though I don’t know her or Gordo. Also, I work at the club where Gordo buys his drugs (pp. 112-133), and then later, on page 203, I’m on the bus when Gordo has his crise de coor. (I’m the guy who puts his hand on Gordo’s shoulder and tells him, “Chillax, bro.”)

I know—totally convenient, right? In all of Brooklyn and Manhattan, I happen to cross paths with this book’s two main characters more often than if we were roommates. It’s like when Dorothy Gale wakes up in black and white: and you were there, and you were there, and you were there.

The weird thing, though? I should have also been in that dog-walking scene you just read: I was sitting on a bench fifty feet away, yo! But I guess that at that point I hadn’t been sufficiently established as a character in my own right, so I would’ve seemed like some random scruffy Italian-American sweetie-pie lurking in the background, and readers would’ve been, like, “What’s up with Mark Ruffalo on the park bench?”

But now I have my own story, and this will be an awesome opportunity for me to talk about some of my issues. I think we can all agree that a lot of the earlier chapters here focussed on wee episodes of psychological manipulation, but in my story I arm-wrestle with my father until he almost starts bleeding and then later I accidentally see adulterous Gordo kissing his kid’s oh pear. So put that in your wee episodes and smoke it. This shit just got real.

I mean, sure, I’m not like the most important story here? Maybe all my depth-pygmalioning isn’t like one big wow for mankind, nome sayin’? But I offer a valuable counterpoint to the ravages of the arrested male psyche as thematically embodied in Gordo. My looks-like-a-lost-boy-but-is-actually-totally-take-charge thing contrasts beautifully with Gordo’s whole looks-like-a-bank-president-but-is-actually-consumed-in-a-drug-spiral thing. I guess I’m what Michiko Kakutanzi would call a dramatic foil. Once you see that I am able to keep my head above water, then the fact that Gordo cannot do the same seems all the more poignant and whatnot. I mean, Gordo just keeps putting himself in a lake of fire. But that’s how life is, man! There’s a motherload of alienation and social anemone in the world! But we’re all complicit in it. At the end of the day, everybody poops. And some of us poop in the morning, too.

But, hey—there’s a lot of cool stuff coming up in the next hundred pages or so, so stay with me, bro! In two more stories, you learn that Amy has been secretly visiting Gordo’s dad at the dad’s nursing home, and then there’s some slightly sketchy touching between the dad and her. It’s super edgy, but the tension is cut beautifully when Amy hears Gordo’s voice in the nursing home’s lobby, and bolts out of the dad’s room, only to crash into a defibrillator in the hallway. Everything flies out of Amy’s pockets: YARD SALE. That scene is the book’s big reveal, the book’s denoumenthe. If you were reading that scene in college, you’d make that shit all fluorescent yellow.

I’m not pissed that I’m not in that story—I’m not all that into Senile Dad and His Handsy Daughter-in-Law narrative tropery. But I could have been in it, if the writer had really wanted a foil-on-foil smackdown. Because Ericfoil would have handled that scene totally differently from Gordofoil. But at the time of the incident, I was actually at a Bikram class, where I did my first-ever crane pose. And that’s the bummer of a collection of linked stories: a lot of my best work is off-camera. I mean, everyone calls his book of stories with recurring characters in them a “novel” now, but wouldn’t a novel have room for a guy who can put his entire body up in the air while balancing on his palms? Guess not. Cuz this brother is living at Washington D.C.’s Linkin’ Memoriain’t.

Oh, the beardy guy at the end of the book, around page 244, when Amy rides home from the movies on the bus and sees the oh pear and is, like, oh no, oh pear? That’s not me. That guy’s an asshole. Ignore. No foil capacity whatsoever.

But if you make it all the way to the acknowledgments, there’s a guy named Josh Woolford who is or is not the real-life person I’m based on. Hey, Josh (if you’re reading this). Nice work, dude. Keep up all the pygmalioning, yo.

Illustration by Rachel Domm.