Fundamental Jelly

…and so I asked my guide:  “Please look around and see, as we keep

walking, if you find someone whose name or deeds are known to me.”

                                                                    –Dante, The Divine Comedy

It usually starts like this:  “I’m thinking his name is Jonathan, but he hates that, so he calls himself Jon,” one of them would say.

“Right, and, both his parents work, his dad is a sales manager for, for some furniture manufacturer and his mother works as an office manager for a pair of Mormon dentists who happen to be brothers,” someone else would offer.

“Yeah, and, he’s a senior in high school and he drives a 1991 Honda Civic, but has lost his driving privileges every since he got a second speeding ticket.  Tom, his father, only allows Jon to drive to school and back.  This gets his wife Janice out of having to take Jon’s sister Caitlin to school.”

“And, they have an ancient Chihuahua named Pancho, who is nearly blind from doggie cataracts and has a variety of bizarre skin diseases, but they won’t have him put down because he been around since Caitlin was an infant and she won’t hear of it.”

“And,…”

This pretentious chatter, this somewhat mean-spirited palaver continues until someone more interesting walks by or it ceases to be funny altogether.  Nobody remembers who really started the Game, Allison thinks she did; she recalls doing an anemic version of it when she first began working at Borders. 

“…is still pissed because he got a ‘D’ on his Oliver Cromwell term paper even though he copied it virtually word for word from his girlfriend Briana’s paper…”

“Two-and-a-half stars,”  Allison noted.  They scored their gamesmanship on a one-to-five scale. 

Allison was bored; she made a partial fist and turned her palm up, stared at her nails.  Her eggplant colored nails were small and they reminded her of a little girl’s hands when playing ‘dress-up.’  Allison’s mother said, like her, she had bad nail beds, but she wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. 

She was sitting outside the coldstone ice cream place next to Starbucks, the one across the street from the mall, with her two best friends, Josh and Brown.  She had known Josh since they were sophomores in high school—nearly ten years now.  Brown, and that’s his middle name, she met in college.  A slightly chunky, blond-haired young women walked by talking on her cell phone.  There was nothing angular or perpendicular about her, she was round, her face was round, and even her persona was concentrically circled and spheric.  As though she were listening to something juicy on the phone, her mouth formed a soft mulberry-colored ring like she was blowing out birthday candles.

Allison licked her ice cream cone in a vaguely naughty manner and raised one eyebrow, “That’s Melissa,” she said as she patted her mouth with a napkin.  “And, she moved out here two years ago from Ohio.  She works at a kitchen remodeling place as an assistant designer slash go-fer.  And, she spends her spare time baking desserts and Martha Stewarting her apartment.”

Josh sat up and laughed through his nose, “Yeah, and she lives in this faux everything apartment with her boyfriend, Tim, who is chubby, in a Jack Black sorta way, and has stringy hair and wishes his weiner was a little bigger.” 

Brown missed his turn, he wasn’t paying attention.  One must be quick when playing the Game; it demanded rapier-like verbal reflexes, and spontaneously acid wit. 

“Dude, hello, what can Brown do for us?”  Allison quipped.  He loathed UPS for those stupid commercials. 

“Huh, right, sorry my bad, the boyfriend, um…”

“Tim.”

“Right, Tim, he worked as a roadie for a couple of years, but now works in a music store part-time and sleeps-in on days that Melissa works and he steals money out of her purse to buy cigarettes and 40s and…”

The moment was lost.  Brown hamstrung the whole Gestalt of it and it was slipping away, even though he continued, “…and he’s in a decidedly awful garage band called Leagues From Nowhere, and he thinks aliens are secretly stealing his mail, and…”

“Three stars maybe,” somebody said.

Brown was somewhat detached from the proceedings this day and though something seemed to be bothering him, he wasn’t sure how to explain it.  He propped up his sandals on the remaining indestructible, white plastic chair and looked at his bony, angular feet.  He turned slowly to his left and saw a smartly-dressed business woman walking towards them.  She was wearing high-heels (no one seems to wear high-heels anymore he thought to himself) and she walked in a brisk, deliberate manner—her shoes tapping out an air of authority and pale aggression.  Her short brown hair shimmered in the now setting sun and had a slight plumy glint about it.  The others noticed her too.

“You’re up Josh,” Allison quipped.

Josh pulled at his goatee briefly, “Umm, that’s Anne and she’s the head of the Accounting department for a large legal firm…and she is married to Don and they’re world class snobs—the modern-day Verdurins of the West Coast…”

“Anne has a tat of a butterfly on her butt,” Allison added, “and they used to have a cat named Button, which they gave to a shelter when it started digging its claws into their fabulous leather couch.”

The others looked at Brown, waiting, waiting for him to say something.  “Okay, so they’re jerks or whatever, and to stay with your French motif Josh, let’s just say they’re the 21^st century version of Emma Bovary, and, well, it’s all so boring, isn’t it.”

Allison and Josh stared at Brown, his words hung suspended in the space between them.  “What’s wrong with you,?” she asked pointedly. 

Brown looked at Allison for a second and turned his head toward the street, he heard the 60-cycle buzz of the florescent lights above, he smelled synthetic fudge fumes and hibiscus shampoo floating around him, “I don’t know, sorry,” he said blank faced.  His wasn’t a face revealing puerile contrition, no, he wasn’t sorry really, just sad. 

Brown didn’t like confrontations, not even on this level.  He, like half the young people his age, came from a broken home and suffered the scars attendant to such a life—timidity, insecurity, or even repressed anger.  He would have normally averted himself at this stage in an unpleasantness, but for some reason he sat up straight and continued, “It’s just I’m tired of making fun of other people and frankly, ya know, we’re no better than they are.  We drink bottled water, and eat kale and leeks, and have PIN numbers, and blah, blah, blah.” 

“Brown, what…” Allison said.  He held up his index finger and cut her off.

“And listen, no offense, but I’m done with trying to feel superior, I’m done with dropping verbal smart bombs on people just out of earshot, I’m done pretending to be shocked at materialism, because we’re just like them—paper or plastic, debit or credit, ranch on the side, receipt in the bag, and, so I’m not playing this juvenile game anymore,”  he said making ‘quote marks’ with his hands in a sarcastic way.  Brown sat back in his chair and smoothed the hair on the back of his head.

“So, is that all?”

“Look guys, I’m not mad at you, I’m just disgusted at myself, ya know, and so I’m going to go now and I’ll talk to you later.”  Brown got up and nodded slightly and started out across the parking lot.  He felt an invigoration in his chest and breathed deeply through his nose as he awkwardly mouthed the lyrics to a favorite song of his…If man is five, and Devil is six, then God is seven….dah, dah, dah, daaaaahhh, dah, dah, dah.

Josh and Allison eyeballed each other for a second and watched him walk away.

Allison cocked her head to the side like girls do when putting earrings on and said, “His name is Brown and he apparently has some issues and…”

“Jesus, Allison,”

“Whatever.”