61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Hooksexup's videogame blog: Little Big Planet reveals itself to be truly and wholly insane. We go crazy with it.
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian 90210 braves new levels of incomprehensibility while we skip the debate to get drunk. Tuesday is saved! Plus: Hef's harem loses a bunny and SNL continues to ruffle feathers.
We hadn't seen Bob and Julianne since their wedding, so when our schedules meshed, we pulled a couple bottles of nebbiolo from our cellar and drove to their house in the part of town near the lifestyle center with the Apple Store, Crate & Barrel and Anthropologie. Katherine and I met B&J when the female halves of us were in grad school. The women could argue about Slavoj Zizek while Bob and I scrolled through the lists of interests we had in common, like vintage amps and data mining. It worked, the four of us. We'd leave each others' apartments feeling satiated with cheer, tell our partners on the ride home how much we enjoyed hanging with the other couple, include each other on funny email threads. Katherine endured bridesmaid hell for their wedding; Bob and I jammed a few times in a storage shed near the freeway.
Bob's and my creative powers had waned, siphoned into these things we got paid to do. Bob was going prematurely bald and I was prematurely gray. I urged Bob to shave his head and reformat it with a goatee; he convinced me to return to my punk roots and go for bright orange hair, which lent me some fleeting cred with my underlings at the technology company but provoked a bitter argument with Katherine, who said I needed to get serious about something, and no, just because I'd recently hit six figures in the salary department didn't mean I was de facto serious. That's about the time the wedding went down and
promotion
Julianne returned for a third helping of education to get certified as a Montessori teacher while Bob, basically retirable at thirty-two thanks to stock options, cycled through a series of consulting gigs for wireless companies. I invented an application that made it easier to create cellphone ringtones. Hilariously, we found ourselves more successful than anyone we had ever known personally. We were human benchmarks. And for whatever reason, schedules, fatigue maybe, Katherine and I left the orbit of our friends for months until I got this email from Julianne saying, Dude what's up, and, Hey we just bought this kickin' new barbecue. Come on over and enjoy some Indian food. Bring your bad selves.
To visit old friends, this is what I'm talking about. To walk into their house and see the books they read as undergrads lining the bookcases as you pet their dog. To hand them a deliberately dusty bottle of wine while the women's voices ring off each other at a higher register than usual. I love these friendships, squeezing my chest against my best friend's wife's breasts, feeling her bra strap as I press my hand to her back.
"B&J," I said.
"Guys!" Julianne said.
B&J had renovated their place, laying down eco-friendly bamboo hardwood and crown molding, replacing the plastic light-switch plates with ones made of chrome, getting all Restoration Hardware on the mantle, sconces and heat registers. Kind of put Katherine and me to shame. We still had a room full of U-Haul boxes slated to become a place to do yoga in. But B&J, man, they looked good. Julianne had clearly been working the hell out of her upper body. Bob had bought a new pair of glasses that made him look like Harry Potter or an architect. Whatever was cooking on the grill outside smelled really fantastic. Turns out theirs wasn't your typical suburban barbecue but an actual Indian tandoor. They'd bought it from a developer who dumped it on craigslist for cheap before he returned to Bangalore. Pretty sweet. We drank beer from pilsner glasses chilled in the freezer and helped Bob make the naan. This was a summer night, short-sleeves-in-the-dark kind of weather. Work came up as a subject of discussion, and Bob and Isorted through geeked-out anecdotes, speaking of rounds of financing, platforms, system migration. We still referred to our employers as "they" because only drink-the-Kool-Aid drones referred to their employers as "we." We'd erected fortifications around the parts of our personalities that remained intact after perversely houred work weeks. That's why we were here, in chaise lounges on their new deck still smelling of sealant, pretending we didn't give a shit about portfolios or due diligence. This was the part of the conversation about stuff they'd done to the house, with Bob waving his hand and talking about a dishwasher he'd completely fucked up. We talked about this stuff before we got to the sentences that started with the word remember. That happened after the naan and during the three distinct curries Julianne unleashed upon us, washed down with some of our wine, which didn't really match the curries at all, but was excusable after a couple microbrews.
"You just wish they'd invited you into a three-way," I said. "You already fucked Bob, you might as well go for Julianne, too."
Remember that camping trip where we took mushrooms and went out in the canoe at four in the morning to watch the sunrise from the middle of the lake? Remember that fucked-up roommate of yours who listened to Joy Division for thirty hours straight and always denied that he drank our orange juice?
These became less like questions and more like remonstrations. Remember! . . . when the car broke down. Remember! . . . when you lost that earring and we had to go back across the Canadian border to retrieve it. Remember! . . . when you thought you had testicular cancer. Into my second glass of wine, my mouth a riot of flaming spice and laughter, I faced down the truth that soon we'd think of these friends of ours as people to add to the Christmas card list. I thought of myself racing toward the stinking corpse I was destined to become. It made me want to puke into their new pedestal sink. I accepted another glass.
Then there's that part where the guys go do one thing while the women do another, and in this case it meant me going down to the basement to check out the Marshall half-stack Bob had been rebuilding. The monster had been trashed and decimated for parts when he bought the cabinet and head. Bob explained how he'd purchased a rare kind of British tube off eBay, sautered it back to life, nurtured it to a scrotum-tightening crunch.
Bob handed me his cherry-red Gibson SG and plugged me in. "Go ahead," he said, "Gimme a good power chord." I hit a muffled G and goddamn if it didn't feel really nice. The amp was cranked loud enough to move my pant legs thanks to air displacement. I knew the women upstairs were sharing a sweetly denigrating comment about us. I played some bars of songs I knew parts of, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Black Dog," "Walk This Way." Never the whole songs, just parts. Which made it notable when Bob plugged in his Gibson hollow-body and said, "I've been working on this project for six months. Some guys make it a goal to scale Everest. Me, well, just check this out." Upon which he proceeded to play "Stairway to Heaven" note for fucking note. And sing at the same time. Even Jimmy Page didn't do that. And by note for note, I mean he didn't fake his way through the solos. Every lick was in there as far as I could tell. His singing was shit, of course, but he'd learned the whole song and played it through to the end. Around then the piper will lead us to reason, the women descended, sat on the basement steps and smiled, bobbing their heads, imitating stoners from the '70s they were too young to have actually been. When Bob finished, we all clapped and I said, "Wow, man, that is some accomplishment." Bob shrugged, put his guitar back in the case and set it next to an aborted experiment about growing some pot with heat lamps.
"Tell him about the website," Julianne said.
"It's kind of stupid. I started this site for guys like me who want to learn 'Stairway,'" Bob said.
"What are you talking about? It's got almost a thousand registered users," Julianne said.
"Yeah, I kind of got carried away with it. There are tutorials and tablature and a board."
"Oh yeah, what's the URL?" Katherine said.
"Ooohitmakesmewonder.com," Bob said.
As I cracked up I couldn't help register surprise that Bob hadn't told me about the site. I stopped myself. What the hell had happened? Me with hurt feelings that a guy I used to do knife tokes with in adult student housing hadn't asked me to learn "Stairway to Heaven" with him? I was primarily a bassist anyway.
Back upstairs someone said, "Why don't we hang in the living room?" Julianne sat with her bare feet tucked beneath her, swirling another glass of wine, and here, with an iPod shuffling through a playlist titled "Mellow," we talked incredulously and uninformedly of politics until Julianne and Bob looked at each other and Katherine and I knew something was about to get told to us.
"We're trying to have a baby," Julianne said. Smiles and more high-pitched voices from the women. My knee-jerk imagination had my friends fucking. There was Bob rubbing his dick against that tattoo on the small of Julianne's back. There were Julianne's legs, up around Bob's shoulders, giving him some of that Kama Sutra action. Then they were talking about how incredibly difficult it is to get pregnant, how we're brainwashed through sex ed into thinking the condom or pill is the only thing keeping you from childrearing oblivion. "It's more like tossing a dart at a dartboard," Julianne said, "Everyone can hit a bullseye, but it usually takes awhile." Katherine then broached the subject of childbirth styles, and true to our nonconformist roots, we all agreed midwives and birth centers were the way to go, with all the candles and harp music that went along with it. I knew that on the drive home later that night every word out of Katherine's mouth would glom onto this single subject, having kids, and why it was such a horrible idea.
I followed Bob back into the kitchen for more wine. "Man, it's crazy," he said, "the idea of me being a dad. Seems like a giant time suck. We're trying to see as many movies as we can right now, go on some burly hiking trips. Because when Julianne gets pregnant, I just know we're going to be homebodies."
"Totally," I said, which was all I felt like saying. He wanted me to egg him on, give him a chance to riff on the rites of paternity, but instead I got him talking about how he figured out the really hard solo at the end.
When we returned to the living room, Julianne was showing Katherine a kit of some sort, a little box which included a thermometer. Julianne said, "I've been checking my temp every hour or so; obsessed, I know." Shrugging, she stuck it in her mouth, putting the impetus on Bob to converse.
"What about you guys?" Bob said, "Thinking about kids?"
Kind of a direct question, and yet it did seem to draw a line under the fact we had lost touch with each other. It was the kind of question you ask people you don't know very well. The understanding now was that Katherine and I were expected to proclaim our procreative intentions. Our friends really should have been more tip-toey about it, knowing about Katherine's abortion two years before. That had been a fucked-up time. Katherine and I split, came back together, slept with some other people, repeated the cycle a couple more times until, exhausted, we clung to the remnants of each other and realized no one else would have ever put up with this much shit. Thankfully B&J had been there with some no-bullshit conversation and therapeutic Thai food to help us get through it. At one point I literally vomited in a gutter, if memory serves. Julianne had told me that Katherine's and my love was like that between John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, tempestuous but unstoppable. I remember nodding like I knew who those people were.
"Julianne will be down in awhile," said Bob. "She's up there with her legs in the air trying to get my sperm to drip into her uterus."
"We're thinking about it," Katherine said, avoiding eye contact with me. If she had looked at me while saying it, the statement would have meant one thing. When you say, "We're thinking about it" and smile and look into each other's eyes, it means you intend to reproduce. When you look straight ahead and avoid eye contact with your lover it means the topic is a point of contention. I wanted to have a kid, she didn't, that was our story, and sure I blamed the abortion for it. We'd even resisted getting officially married, ostensibly in protest that gay people couldn't get married, but mostly because the ceremony and psychological transformations involved really freaked us out. As Katherine put it, she didn't want to toss a whole meat-and-cheese tray off the bow of a boat just because someone brought the wrong nail-polish remover.
The thermometer beeped and Julianne looked at the read-out. "Darling?" she said, "It appears I'm ovulating."
"It's not the spicy curry?" Bob said.
"I'm pretty sure not," Julianne said.
I couldn't tell whether this was supposed to be a hint that Katherine and I should leave. We picked at the edges of coasters swiped from a brew pub. Bob said, "Well I guess we should go upstairs and make a baby, then."
We all laughed. Our friends rose from the couch. "So, yeah, we'll just take off," Katherine said.
"Oh no, no, we want you to stay," Julianne said, "I've been dying for a chance to play the new edition of Cranium. You guys stay put. This shouldn't take long at all."
"Not that, well, usually — " Bob said.
"There's Ben & Jerry's in the freezer," Julianne said as they hurried up the stairs, "Totally help yourselves."
Katherine and I sat on the couch. The master bedroom floor squeaked overhead. I finished the last smidge of my wine and said, "Maybe we should leave."
"We can't leave without saying goodbye," Katherine said, "That's rude."
"More rude than going off for a fuck while your friends hang out downstairs?"
"You won't believe what Julianne told me when you guys were down there playing guitar," Katherine said. "They placed one of those Internet ads looking for a woman to have a three-way with. Can you believe that? I mean, this isn't college anymore."
"They said they have Ben & Jerry's," I said.
"Did you hear what I just said?"
"How am I supposed to react? Who cares? Good for them."
"They've had three women respond to it already."
"They've actually gone through with it?"
"Yeah! On the one hand trying to have a baby and on the other doing this sleazy Internet thing. Unbelievable."
We heard a couple squeaks of furniture upstairs and took that as a cue to move to the kitchen. I opened the freezer. "Looks like they have Chubby Hubby and Phish Food."
"How can you be so blasé about this?" Katherine said, "These are our friends."
"What the hell's that supposed to mean?" I said.
"You are useless," Katherine said, genuinely disgusted, "Completely useless."
"You just wish they'd invited you into a three-way," I said. "You already fucked Bob, you might as well go for Julianne, too."
This sort of petrified my girlfriend into a state of anger that neutralized her ability to think about ice cream. She walked briskly to the powder room with the fancy toilet- paper holder and left me standing in the kitchen reading about bovine growth hormones. Wow, I'd played the you-fucked-Bob card. I hadn't done that in over a year. I wondered why I had chosen to play it tonight. As promised, things seemed to conclude rather quickly upstairs. Bob, a little out of breath, now in sweatpants, joined me in the kitchen. "I see you found the ice cream. Julianne will be down in awhile. She's up there with her legs in the air trying to get my sperm to drip into her uterus. Hey, we have whipped cream and maraschino cherries if you guys want to do a sundae."
Katherine rejoined us and having known her for seven years I could tell she'd just suppressed a cry, probably with a terse, under-the-breath pep-talk to the mirror with her angry, fluttering left eyelid. "I'll have a sundae," she said, "a really big one."
Dwelling on that water under the bridge between her and Bob, I wanted immediately to hurt her. I said, "Someone's gonna be doing a lot of pilates tomorrow."
"I don't see you getting off your ass and exercising," Katherine said.
"Should I leave the room?" Bob laughed.
"Why, Bob, it's not like we're going to start screwing," Katherine said.
"Jesus, Kath," I said.
"No worries," Bob said."You guys like nuts on your sundaes?" "Sure thing," I said, "lots of them."
Katherine excused herself, saying something about a board game. When she was out of earshot I said, "God, man, I'm sorry. I don't know what her deal is tonight."
"Yeah," Bob said, squirting a big pile of whipped cream on my sundae, finishing off the can. "Wanna do the whip-it?" he said, offering it to me.
Julianne was wearing a bathrobe, her hair having assumed what the beauty industry called the just-fucked look.
"Sure," I said, taking the canister from him. I emptied my lungs of air, put the nozzle in my mouth, then inhaled the remnants of nitrous oxide. My head tingled and felt about the size of one of those Mylar balloons you can buy at a county fair.
Bob said, "Things aren't weird, are they?"
"Huh?"
"Like, there's no weirdness? We're all cool with everything? Because it's really important to me that everything's cool. People's feelings and stuff."
"Yeah, Bob, everything's cool," I said, momentarily high. "Everything is so normal it's not even funny."
We brought the bowls of ice cream into the living room, where the women had set up the game on the coffee table. Julianne was wearing a bathrobe, her hair having assumed what the beauty industry called the just-fucked look. Bob fed her a maraschino. Katherine dug into her sundae as Bob assigned us pieces according to our favorite colors.
"Damn, I wish we had some pot," I said, which was another way of saying, "Hey Bob, got any pot?"
"I actually got some hash upstairs," Bob said.
"You still got that hookah from Egypt?"
"You know it."
"I thought we were going to play Cranium," Katherine said.
"Who's not playing?" I said.
"You can't smoke around Julianne," Katherine said. "Not if she's pregnant."
"Oh yeah," I said.
"And if you guys go and smoke out, it's going to throw off the whole dynamic of the game," Katherine said. "Two high people and two straight."
"The high team and the straight team doesn't work?" I said.
"Never mind. We don't have to smoke right now," Bob said, making the decision for the both of us, popping open the container of citrus-scented modeling clay.
We played one game all the way through, embarrassing ourselves with our fake enthusiasm, spelling words backwards, imitating Chuck Berry, trying to figure out how to convert a verb into a doodle. I knew that later that night I would enclose myself in my workroom with the Monty Python box set and a joint while Katherine pretended to sleep in the next room, and I wouldn't return to our bedroom until I was sure she had stopped crying.
"Some game," Bob said as he folded up the board.
"Yeah, well, it's getting late," Katherine said.
In the old days, they would have begged us to stay longer, but instead they told us it was time to leave by saying, "It was great seeing you guys." And so this palindrome of a dinner party ended with hugs and the saying of each others' names. Back in the Audi I turned the CD changer to Radiohead. Katherine waved to our friends, who stood on their slate entryway waving back at us. We left this street of $800K houses behind us and passed the lifestyle center, debating briefly about getting a DVD and deciding it was too late as the car unconsciously found its way back to our garage. We sat inside listening to the end of a song until the motion sensor on the garage-door opener decided we'd had enough light. In the darkness, I asked Katherine if Bob knew she had aborted his baby. She said she'd been holding off telling him until he became a father. n°
Ryan Boudinot's work has appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003 and 2005, Black Book and McSweeney's, and is forthcoming in Stumbling and Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction. He lives in Seattle.
