Straight Up

The guy I sit next to every Thursday is one of those guys’ guys you always read about but never thought existed if you went to a small girl’s school before heading off to a sort-of-co-ed college out east. He has dark, combed-back hair and a strong chin and makes loud exclamations in class when he feels strongly about something, even if it’s half in jest. When he doesn’t feel strongly, he’s quiet. He sits either hunched at the front of his seat or lounges back against the chair – in or out of the conversation, he doesn’t front. His comments are intelligent, and suggest some investment in the discussion, but if you look at him, it seems he might just as easily be debating the lyrics to a song he used to know or replaying a brilliant save as he scratches a borrowed pen across this week’s assignment. He’s the kind of boy I picture wearing sports jerseys all the time until he’s 18, although I saw him last week in a simple black sweater and a pair of jeans. I watched him talking to friends out of the corner of my eye and imagined that he’s learned the value of a basic black sweater, that he’s learned that it sits well on broad shoulders and a lean frame, and so some of the sports jerseys have gone now that he’s 22, and he only keeps the ones he actually plays in. I bet he knows how to use an iron.
I have a huge crush on the boy I sit next to. It struck me as I listened to him explaining a piece one day in class. Sometimes, in writer’s workshops, the author will give some introduction to a piece about to be workshopped, something about the inspiration or the title, some qualifier, calculated to preempt criticism. He spoke too, when it was his turn. This is what he said:
This piece is shit. I didn’t have time to really write, so I’m not attached to it or anything. You can rip it apart.

The guy I sit next to loses at scrabbulous. He reads Jack Kerouc, Cormac Macarthy, Joseph Conrad, Kurt Vonnegut – the kind of authors who wear a coarse persona and substance abuse like a pair of road-worn leather boots, to match their hard-edged, masculine prose– those writers descendant from Hemingway whose natural habitat you might expect to be a dingy bar in the serviceable, local sector of some tropical tourist trap at midday, where they sit, occasionally joking with the bar tender, or buying a bum a drink so they have someone to sit with, and otherwise just keeping quietly to themselves, watching the sun polish the long brass railing on the bar from the door that’s open to catch the breeze more than to entice early customers.
He plays baseball and watches basketball – supports at least two teams that I know of – a college team and one in the NBA. The NBA team is his home team. I imagine he’s the kind of guy who’s been with them for years – went to his first game when he was too small for the souvenir jersey he insisted on buying. He knows they’re not very good, but he would never admit that except to another die hard fan.
He listens to Outkast, Bob Dylan, Nas – you know he drives around in the car he bought himself as soon as he’d made enough money, pumping hip hop on speakers he got installed because he could picture himself pulling up to a bunch of girls he used to know from high school, the base pounding through the rolled up windows that he can’t lower because they’re not automatic and it would ruin the effect to lean over and turn the hand crank. The bands he lists as his favorites are all the kind of stuff that you can rattle off when another guy asks and get approving nods for – the kind of thing it was really cool to listen to in high school, that he probably bought because he heard it on a friend’s stereo one day while they were hanging out in a basement.
He drinks whiskey and belongs to a Southern Comfort fan group. Grew up around DC and classifies himself as a southerner; is interested in women, but married to a guy on the facebook; his profile says he’s looking for friendship in that way that says I’m looking for that girl, but I won’t find her, and even if I do she won’t like me, so whatever, I don’t need that shit… Out of our 387 combined friends at college, we have one in common – a girl I don’t even really know but took a class with freshmen year. The posts on his wall date back two months and say things like “son, whats good, hit me up” and “wiggity wigggity vas up?”, and are from guys with names like Joe, Tyler, and Teddy. His current profile picture shows a happy woman holding a smiling baby with flyaway hair and a big toothless grin in a soft, midmorning light tinged brown by what I would guess was 20 odd years of intervening time and a slight residue of dust from the scanner he used since they didn’t have digital cameras when our generation was born.
The picture before that shows a different kind of grin that I can only assume comes from the two girls who are nothing more than tangled limbs and shining hair, wrapped suggestively around him in what was clearly his idea of a great night. The picture before that is his baseball card shot – all done up in maroon and white, the word Brewers half visible on the cropped lower edge, slight gap between his front teeth unselfconsciously apparent.

I picture him sitting at a bar, ten of fifteen years from now, holding a glass of whiskey, surrounded by smoke from a cigarette he’s holding but not really smoking, occasionally taking a sip from the glass of whiskey in which the ice cube has long ago melted into a thin film of diluting water, thinking about some girl he still sometimes wishes hadn’t left him when he told her to, or maybe about his father, which makes him melancholy regardless of whether the memories are good or bad. Or maybe he’s thinking about a story he’s going to write, because he still does. Write, I mean. Maybe his books are selling right now and he’s meeting with a reporter from some men’s magazine who will also wear a leather jacket and order himself a beer because he has to stay professional but will look wistfully at the whiskey and maybe give in as the night fades on like blue smoke from the forgotten cigarette, and the writer will encourage him with a barely gap-toothed grin and a nod of appraisal that makes the reporter say aw, fuck it all, and buy them both the next round so that they’re just a little bit drunk when they get down to the real questions, and the writer let’s himself be just a little more sentimental than he normally would, and the reporter thinks – this is a real guys’ guy. This is the kind of guy who’d have your back in a bar fight even though you’d only known him as long as three rounds of drinks – and then writes an article that’s more about the kind of whiskey the writer drank and the shoes he had on and the way he shifted his head when he was really thinking about an answer then it is about his latest book.
He’s the kind of guy that girls will be tempted to believe is just waiting for the right woman – the kind of guy who’s single forever because ‘he wants to play the field’, or because ‘he just doesn’t have time to settle down with someone’. But you know that when he walks into his apartment late at night there’s someone there, waiting for him, half ghost, half memory – the idea of a good woman. Someone strong - like his mother, whom he still calls once a week - but who lets him take care of her in small ways because she knows he likes it when she wears his jacket on summer evenings that suddenly get cold, or when she stays in bed on Sunday morning and pretends to be asleep because she knows he’s making her his famous eggs and toast and coffee, and that he’ll smile when he brings it in to her like the little boy in the picture she saw once with flyaway hair and a strong, happy woman holding him in her lap.
He’s the kind of guy you can’t help but laugh at sometimes if you’re really listening to him because he’s still bitter about that popular boy in the fifth grade who hit puberty first and was the star of the basketball team simply because he was a full five inches taller than anyone else. The kind of guy who’ll own up to the stupid decisions he made in high school that nearly got him killed once or twice, or at least arrested. He’s probably had more run-ins with the cops then anyone but his closest friends know about, because they were there too and saw how he talked the officer out of charging them because they got caught in a backyard with a fence that’s too high to jump three blocks down after they ran from the flashing lights, but no one can prove that they weren’t just hanging out in Tommy’s backyard since they got lucky and this house with the fence happens to belong to an elderly man that they know is staying with his daughter for a week in Michigan and who always leaves his back door unlocked because he can’t remember to lock it after he lets the cat in, so their story checks out just enough to fly with a skeptical cop when he’s really spinning it, really hitting his stride and just barely keeping from going too far in a tribute to the sheer rush of adrenaline.

I have a huge crush on this guy I sit next to every week. I don’t know what color his eyes are, but I know there’s something soft about them that seems to fit him best when he’s discussing his work. It’s something unexpected, like the way he’s picky about diction and hates to hear echoes from a word used too often and thoughtlessly.
The boy I sit next to smiles at me sometimes, and sometimes he admires something adorable in the story we’re reading. If he doesn’t like it, if he thinks the work is bad, he doesn’t pay much attention. But if it’s good, you can tell he thinks so, because then he becomes an active member of the conversation. He has things to say, he has opinions. If it’s worth it, he gives a crap.
And so you know, that deep down, this boy I sit next to actually cares. Deep down, more than anything he is afraid that he is alone – not just that no one will understand him, but that understanding someone like him is impossible, and somewhere in the awkwardness of adolescence, he has come to believe that writing is something important, that a good book, a good story, can change things, because it’s been there, buried, as parties raged and parents yelled and teammates scored, and somewhere, between pen and paper, he finds validation. For this boy, writing is justification and promise, it is enticement, it is sex. It is love, as far as he can imagine it. It is everything he will never admit to wanting. It is everything he never believes he’ll have.
The last time the boy I sit next to brought in a piece to be workshopped, he hadn’t been prepared. He scratched something out and sent it out an hour before we met, and when it came to him, the class was silent. At first he joked about it, laughing at how little he’d done, reveling in his detachment and catching my eye. As the silence stretched and the sparse suggestions dried up, his laughter softened too. Five minutes passed and it was over. He looked around at the waiting faces, and saw only finality. Not bad, they said, but that’s all it is. Not Bad. And not good either.
His face fell as he realized it was done, that it hadn’t been any better here and now than it was in his room, that the little voice he would just laugh away, the one that tells him his writing really isn’t any good, maybe is right after all.
Before going on, he had a chance to ask us any questions, but he just shook his head.
I’m kind of disappointed now that I didn’t send out something else. – I would have, if I’d remembered that the class was going to be reading it... – I guess I wish I’d put a little more of myself into it, you know, that I’d actually said something...
And the something soft melts a little bit more in his eyes.
Straight up.