Friend Request (version 1)

I can’t even walk into the store of a cell phone service provider without feeling like my penis is hanging out or something. My hands won’t stop sweating in this bustling digital beehive, barely middle aged women in slacks and navy blue button-ups shuffling their awkward proportions back and forth between their postmodern-looking stations and some mysterious back room, leaving you alone in a chair that’s too high off the floor to sit in without your feet dangling like a little kid getting a root beer float at the counter of a drug store in the 1950s. Their impatient words escape from behind teeth as white and straight as a picket fence in a contrived homemaker’s imagination, their faces bright and overdone. Take away the gender neutral work apparel and they could be wives from the congregation of an overly evangelical church, faces perpetually wrenched upward into radiant, hollow smiles. I get the impression that they were all named after various scented candles, but I can’t bear to look at their name tags. They’re pinned too close to the breast and I’d feel disrespectful.
There is always a line of six to eight people, and there are only two chairs. The rest of us have to stand against the walls that are actually big windows and timidly jostle out of the way of the endless stream of individuals coming in just to pay their bills on the ATM-like machine to the right of the door. We are surrounded, and the only way I can get my legs to quit shaking is the more terrifying notion that someone could think I’m doing a pee dance.
“Can I help whoever is next?” The employee has dyed cinnamon cockatiel hair, and the top part of her work shirt is unbuttoned, revealing enough cleavage to make me stare at the cars passing outside and wish I was young enough for my grandmother to hold my hand and lead me across the street to the campus of the high school, like she used to. Every day I would run through that grass and pick the bark off of the dying maple tree there, watching the ants scuttle up its frail trunk.
She takes my information, punching things into her computer like I’m not even there, eyes wide and lit up by the blue light of the screen. The clicking of her shimmering, painted nails against the keys is almost enough to cover the drags of my irregular breathing.
“Ok, sir, what is it that we can help you with today?”
“Yeah. My-my phone. My phone is, uh, broken. Well, the-the keypad isn’t working. The numbers.” Stammering incoherently, I try to tell her how the numbers on my keypad have ceased working properly. They lag behind what I’m typing, registering at random. Then, that T9 thing takes my typos and auto-completes them into words I’m not trying to say. The button that lets me turn it off is completely broken, and the button that lets me initiate calls and choose the recipients of my text messages works without any detectable rhyme or reason.
The employee stares at the air over her shoulder for a moment, sorting out to herself exactly what it is I just tried to communicate to her. The subtext of her body language is blaring: Her shoulders want to go to a bar and her pursed lips say go home, you stupid faggot.
“Hmm. Ok, sir. Well, what I’m seeing here is that your phone is past the manufacturer’s warranty, and you don’t seem to have insurance. Unless you’d like to purchase a new phone today there’s nothing we can do for you, I’m afraid.”
“No. That’s ok. Thank you very much.”
I can never bring myself to get angry or argue in a place of business. Sometimes it’s that I’m too relieved that the experience is over, but mostly it’s that I’m worried that my fury would come off as silly or insincere rather than intimidating. Really, I can deal with my phone’s malfunctions. It’s not that big of a deal.
I wait until I’m outside to put my jacket on and zip it up so that maybe no one can see me miss the remaining arm hole and flail at the autumn wind, or take a few extra tries than a normal adult would to get the zipper to catch. The metallic whir of the passing cars sounds just like the elevator in my building. There’s nothing I need to do now, but I can’t bring myself to go back there. My therapist says these things get easier every day, but I’m still not ready.
It would surprise the few people who know me that I could even walk into a mall, let alone go there and visit Erin like I’ve done nearly every day since what happened with Lisa. Amongst the sprawling slalom of bodies strolling side-by-side, it’s surprisingly private. They sell my favorite banana flavored milk at the ice cream place, and there is always a table open in the food court within view of the smoothie kiosk.
The smoothie kiosk is where Erin works. She is about 19, I think, with hair the color of Coca Cola and a smile like my grandmother’s back porch. She is always very nice to the customers, that hair of hers spilling across her shoulders when she turns to re-tie her burlap colored apron and mix their order. It’s a genuine smile. A smile she doesn’t use her face to make, quite unlike the ladies at the cell phone store. Erin is pregnant, but not in the way that would make you think any less of her. I can’t decide if she knows who the father is or not, but I usually think she might be better off without him. Things must be so difficult for her already without having to depend on the type of boy who’d be so careless.
In my back pocket I keep a small notebook that I can pull out and write important things in. Flipping past Claire, Eloise, Margaret, all of the other obsolete predecessor names that belonged to Erin before, I finally come to her fresh page. I’ve set up everything I know about her in a format similar to Facebook: lists of the things she likes to do, her college major, the parts of herself that she so wants the world to see. Each time her name changes, those things change with it. I used to try to write diary entries in her name, but the flesh of illusion wore thin very quickly and I felt like a creep. Nobody lies to their diary. Mimicking things like Myspace makes it seem more concrete to me, makes me feel like there could be a real person out there just like my Erin. I could even meet her if I clicked in the right place. The mall is closing up, and the reality that I’ll have to go home settles in a powder of quiet panic. I pull out my phone to text Lisa wondering would it be imposing if I asked her to hang out with me for a while tonight. My phone stops halfway through, T9 word taking hold and sending “wounded immigrant possum dick” to my boss’ cell phone instead.
I’ve lived in this town for so long I don’t have to think while I drive. Tonight, though, I would give anything to have something to focus on other than my apartment. That drab little piece of shit I can’t even afford anymore, wedged in a corner on the third floor of the building. I’m trapped with the elderly, with the crocheted crosses on their doors and their four o’ clock dinners.
I feel like my lock should stick or something, like my apartment should hate me and want to oppress me into leaving it alone, but everything works fine. The landlord maintenances it regularly, the thermostat is responsive. I toss my keys and busted cell phone onto the nursing home couch in my living room. After I’ve taken off my shoes I step into the kitchen, where on my counter the CD sized strip of clay with a paw print pressed into it lays in a Ziploc bag. Across the top, in a semicircle around the print, is stamped the word “Bananas.”
When I brought her home as a puppy, after getting her acclimated to the apartment, she would sit on my lap on the couch and try to stuff her head into the cushions while growling softly and making snurdling noises. Every evening after Jeopardy I watched the news, and this one particular night there was a segment on how spiders have been known to lay eggs in the tips of bananas and that consumers should be careful. The information came as quite a shock, and I fell into a panic thinking I would forget to not eat the ends of bananas if I didn’t write it down immediately. After raiding the place and not finding the pen that I write in my little notebook with, I named her Bananas as a last resort.
There’s a little note card in the bag that has directions for baking the clay print to make it hard. Preheat the oven to 275 degrees Fahrenheit and place the clay onto a pan. Bake for fifteen minutes. I preheat the oven and carefully place the clay on a cookie sheet, set the timer.
I didn’t realize Bananas was sick. One day she stopped eating like normal, and started throwing up most of the food she did eat. The vet didn’t know what was wrong with her, either. It took several weeks of tests to figure out that she was born with kidneys that were too small for her body. There hadn’t been any noticeable problems in her first years because I had taken exemplary attentive care of her, but now we’d begun a crawl to the end that the nice woman in the white coat and dark grey slacks assured me was inevitable.
We started Bananas off with pills of some experimental drug that the vet felt very positive about, and medicine meant to bind the phosphorus in her bones. Instead of watching Jeopardy, I administered an IV of saline every evening to flush out the poison her little kidneys couldn’t manage. Aside from trundling around for about an hour with a slight hunchback from all the saline, not much was different. Bananas still pranced around when I came home, toenails clacking against the tile, rearing back on her hind legs to be picked up. She still hogged the center of the bed, even though she had a whole side to herself, and demanded fresh water every morning.
What few differences there were I accepted with as much grace as could be expected. I couldn’t walk her anymore, so we took frequent car rides. We’d drive through KFC to get chicken for me to hide her pills in, and she’d get a treat from the girl at the window, crunching benevolently and sprinkling crumbs all over the passenger seat. There were more naps in the afternoon, more potty breaks, and I’d carry her to the elevator and through the lobby.
The timer goes off and the clay is a dark, dirty orange. I pull out the sheet and let it cool on the counter for twenty minutes, like the note card says, then thread the tiny hole at the top with yellow yarn. My knees sinking into the couch cushions, I tenderly hang it from the nail between the only two decorations in my family room: a wooden Anglican crucifix and my framed and autographed vinyl copy of Modest Mouse’s Building Nothing Out of Something.
It took an entire month. First, the weekly tests that had been showing gradual decreases in her internal toxin levels began to plateau. Then they came back up. One daily IV turned to two, more and more food was left in her bowl each night. The phosphorus binder quit working. Summer waned, and she with it.
Then she was frail bones that didn’t eat or take pills. She’d sneeze and there would be a faint crackling sound as a few teeth would skip across the kitchen tile, sliding under the dishwasher. We didn’t watch TV at all. The end of the day was spent trying to get her to take her medicine. Huddled on the kitchen floor, Bananas in my arms, crying as I shoved a tablet of some fucking stranger’s experiment with hope to the back of her throat, gagging and writhing, and I’d put my hand over her muzzle to try to suffocate her into swallowing. She started hiding behind the couch. Nobody greeted me when I came home.
It gets to a point where even love isn’t worth it. After a violent seizure I took her to the vet, and we made the decision together. Lisa held my hand while the needle went in. I hurt her, squeezing hard to not cry in front of the doctor. I wrote a Myspace bulletin in my head about how brave I was being, and cycled through the flood of comments. Pages of support that I could read again and again and feel warm.
I grab my phone, slamming the buttons to make them work, texting Lisa saying I’m sorry, please just come over. “Ho snore please my convict” goes to my therapist’s cell.
Where are my keys? I need my fucking keys. The couch cushions are on the floor and I find them, cramming them into a jacket pocket and letting my door slam, leaving it unlocked. In the parking lot it takes me three tries to get into my car. I start hyperventilating when I pass Lisa’s house.
I met Lisa four years ago, just after my mother died. At the funeral distant relatives I’d barely spoken to before told me to call them if I ever needed anything, vague acquaintances gave me one-armed hugs, murmuring about how if I needed to talk to someone they were there any time. I had a panic attack at the reception. On leave from work, I spent the next few days at my computer on a chat site that paired you up at random with another person online. Lisa was the first one to not log off upon learning that I was male and over the age of 15. Talking to her was like reading a story about a witty version of me that didn’t have to take a pill to leave his apartment in the morning. I stayed up all night telling her everything. When I explained about losing my mother, she wrote, “Aww I’m so sorry! Maybe you should get a dog or something so you aren’t all alone in that apartment. My puppy always keeps me company :D!”
We chatted two or three times a week, each of us learning about the other, becoming a more integral part of the other’s life. Eventually I knew everything about her. She was the sweetest, most honest person I had ever known. She used to have a boyfriend who would sit in his truck in her driveway all night to make sure she didn’t go anywhere and maxed out her credit cards so she couldn’t go back to college. She thought I was funny. I was in awe of her, and wished desperately that people as interesting as her lived around here. It took us nearly three years to figure out that, not only did we live in the same town, but Lisa lived a block from my building.
The pain in my chest comes while I’m passing the movie theaters, thinking about that first year after Lisa and I started speaking in person. I wasn’t afraid of her. My hands shook only a little. I didn’t compulsively check my fly. Everything felt like it was covered in syrup, and made my stomach turn like I was about to go down the first hill on a roller coaster.
I think maybe some food will help balance things out in my head, I just need to stay calm, so I turn down the road past the sprawling brick school near what used to be my grandmother’s house towards McDonald’s. This is where I asked her to move in with me.
I guess it never really occurred to me that the featureless building across the street from my old high school is an abortion clinic. Every summer, the lit up sign in front says in thick plastic letters “Guys what if she’s pregnant?” but when the 27th of August has come and gone it simply reads “Welcome Back Students” and lists a phone number underneath. I remember the silence in Lisa’s eyes following the question as we walked past the clinic and she said, “I was almost engaged once.”
“Really? What happened?”
She pointed to the sign, “Apparently one of those costs about as much as a ring.”
I can smell the McDonald’s before I see it, bright and putrid against a cod-liver-slathered parking lot. I want her to know that I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me. I can work around it. I pull up to the speaker, pushing against the impending anxiety attack, and try to text her one more time. “I need you, stay with me” turns into “I need to stop doing this giraffe” and fires off to mom’s old cell phone number.
An electronic voice says, “What do you want?”