Generation Nothing
Originally published in Cathedral #1
I
Joe Griggs allowed his life to pass by in black and all other forms of dark colors. Throughout elementary school, throughout high school, Joe walked the halls a stranger to his classmates who were in turn a gallery of strangers to him. Joe had friends but they came to him only while he was dreaming; women with silk lips and long arms that twisted to envelop his body.
He sometimes tagged along with his older brother Tom. Joe would stand in the back of a crowd of boys in a cramped apartment, trying not to be noticed as they got high around him. Sometimes they passed the joint toward him. Joe would take a hit and it would loosen him up. He might say a few words or laugh at some jokes.
Joe imagined that women’s lips tasted like silk until he found out they tasted like clay.
There was an incident. Tom had just gotten a promotion at the pizza place where he worked. Joe met Tom at his apartment and the two brothers drove around a few of Atlanta’s seedier neighborhoods looking for a lay. Tom paid for two women, a mother and a daughter. They were both fat and had greasy blond hair. The two women got in the car and gave Tom directions to their apartment building.
The building should have been condemned.
Joe was in the main area, on the couch, getting a blowjob from the mother. Tom was in the bedroom with the daughter.
She stopped and looked up at him. “My God,” she said. “You’re a beautiful young man.”
Clay. She had allowed Joe one kiss on the lips and she tasted like clay. Then she went down on him. She unbuttoned her shirt a little and exposed her sagging breasts to him. Then she laid back. She motioned for Joe to undress her. Joe wasn’t sure what to do but he was dying to know what it felt like.
II
Tom hired Joe as a dishwasher. Years passed. Joe got into a routine. He was happy with his routine. It made it easier for him to pretend he was invisible, to disappear.
He left his apartment at three o’clock and walked to work. He carried his dinner in a brown paper bag. From four o’clock to about one in the morning he scrubbed pans, plates and glasses. He went home and watched TV for the rest of the night. He could count on his routine six nights a week.
III
Tom fired Joe but he said it was for his own good. He said that Joe needed to do something on his own for once. He needed to grow up. He needed to branch out a little, spend some time on his own.
So Joe looked through the paper. He looked for a job where he wouldn’t be noticed, some place where he wouldn’t draw any attention to himself. He couldn’t find anything.
He took the paper to Tom. “Look,” Tom said, “here’s one.” They wanted security guards.
“Fuck that,” Joe said. “I’ll have to break up fights and shoot people and shit. It’s not for me.”
Tom laughed under his breath. “Nah. I’ve got a friend that does this. He reads books all night and if he sees anything suspicious he calls the real cops.”
Tom picked up the phone and called the main office, pretending to be Joe. He got Joe a seat at their next training session.
It was a lecture. Joe sat in the last row of folding chairs, holding a notepad on his shaking knee. He tried to take notes. He tried not to make eye contact with the instructor. At the end of the lecture they issued everyone a uniform and a sew-on badge and gave everyone a location to report to the following night.
Joe was assigned to a place called The Phantom Club.
IV
Joe walked in and found the owner. He was a gruff man who slumped as he walked. He looked like he was in his mid thirties.
“There are some rules,” he said. “Mainly don’t drink or sleep. And try to at least look like you’re keeping things safe, okay?” Joe nodded. The owner turned around and went into his office, slamming the door. Joe found a barstool and dragged it away from the bar. He set it down near the wall. He sat on it and folded his arms over his chest and tried to disappear into the wall.
The night wore on. The club filled with people. Bands started to play. It occurred to Joe that this job might make him even more invisible than his dishwashing job had. Everyone seemed to be ignoring him. At the restaurant, people were constantly shouting at him, telling him to hurry up. He could get used to sitting in a chair and listening to music all night.
V
He had been at The Phantom Club for a couple of weeks when Marie Ruiz introduced herself to him. She walked up to him and stood next to him for what seemed like a long time. Joe looked away. She put her foot on the barstool and shook it a little. Then she started to talk, nervously.
It occurred to Joe that she might be half as nervous as he was. He was nothing to get nervous over.
She asked him questions and he answered them. His answers were short and to the point. Part of him wished she would go away. But her brown skin seemed to shine and her words had a soft, soothing tone to them.
“The boys that come here are all creeps. I mean, just creeps. But I tell you, I saw you and you don’t look like a creep. You’re not a creep, are you?”
Joe shook his head.
VI
She moved in with him. On a Saturday, the two of them walked back and forth between the apartment Marie shared with a girlfriend and Joe’s apartment. They made several trips, carrying Marie’s clothes, her stereo and various parts of her computer.
Joe particularly liked her computer.
He liked to get online and pretend he was someone else. He liked the anonymity. He could be anyone he wanted to be.
VII
He had conflicting feelings about it all. Marie was an art student. She liked to draw him while he was sleeping, in the early mornings. And while they were not quite silk, her lips were soft.
But they were also dry, chapped. And her nails cracked on his back as he made love to her.
Coming home from work, and opening the apartment door, watching Marie sleep in the pink light of the rising sun, Joe could almost feel love rising inside of him.
She woke up and put her arms around him.
VIII
Her screen-name was CYBERSLUTT and she wanted to fuck Joe with her words. Fuck me, she wrote. Get inside my wet, wet pussy.
Joe looked at the words on the computer screen and started to jerk off. Marie was at school and Joe had had time to kill before he went to work.
He had no idea how new, how fresh he would feel, pretending to be someone else. This is how it feels to be normal, not to be shy, he thought.
IX
“Never trust a man,” she had said. “Not even a shy man. They’ll all break your heart.”
Joe had come home at his usual time; five in the morning. He hadn’t been going to work for days. He had found an all-night Internet café before work one day. He had been spending his nights there, writing to women in chatrooms.
When he walked in the door she threw the phone at him.
“Some man calls me and asks if I know where my boyfriend is. That’s all he says. Then he hangs up.”
She told him to get out and he did, even though it was his apartment.
Hell, Joe thought, it must have been the club owner. The asshole. Joe took the elevator down to the ground floor and walked outside.
X
He sat on the steps outside the apartment building for a while. Occasionally, he’d look behind him, to see if Marie was looking out the window. She never was. Might have been sleeping. The call might have come early, when his shift was supposed to start.
He wondered if she really meant as much to him as it seemed. It occurred to Joe that he didn’t know anything about her. Not really. He never asked any questions about her life. Did he care about her or did living with a woman make him feel less shy?
He didn’t want to think about questions like these. He didn’t want to think at all. He wanted to feel human.
Joe stood up and headed in the direction of the Internet café.
XI
He was at his favorite table, on his favorite computer. He logged on and pretended.
He pretended that he was in a real café having a real conversation with a real woman. He pretended he was handsome.
He often wondered if the people he typed love-messages to were putting on a similar show for him. Of course they were. They were just as lonely and terrified of reality as he was. That was part of what made it special. Two lonely people meeting in a place that doesn’t exist.
Joe looked up from his computer and saw someone. It was a blond woman with short, boyish hair and a long, old-fashioned dress. She was sitting at the bar, having a coffee. He had noticed her before. She was always here. Sort of her hangout. Sometimes Joe thought he could feel her eyes staring at him.
The two of them caught each other’s eye. Joe’s head snapped back to his computer. Warm sweat began to bead all over his body. Especially his palms.
She picked up her coffee and walked over to the table where Joe was sitting. She sat down at the computer next to him. She logged on.
“You’ve got a beautiful profile,” she said to him.
She showers him with compliments until Joe finds himself turning off the computer and following the woman to her apartment.
X
She was on top of his naked body, fucking him.
“You ever been alive, Joe?” she asked.
“No,” Joe said. She started fucking him faster, violently.
“You ever been alive, Joe?”
“No.” Thrusting harder, fucking harder.
“I want you to be alive, Joe. Right now. Come alive and fuck me Joe.”
The silky warmth of her body. So tight. This new blond woman was fucking him fiercely.
He had forgotten her name. But the way she felt. So warm.
Conclusion
Or
Something just went kaboom
Of course he was shy and lonely and had a beautiful face. He realized that after he left the woman’s apartment. I’m beautiful, he thought. But it doesn’t matter. The colors are always dark and the lips always rough. Something quite unlike silk.
Marie forgave Joe but the relationship fizzled. She moved out.
“The thing is,” Tom said, after Joe asked to get his dishwashing job back, “I don’t think you’ve tried living your life. I don’t think you’ve learned how.”
“I just want my routine,” Joe said. “Something I can count on.”
Several weeks after he got his job back, Joe walked to the front of the restaurant with an armful of plates for the Sunday night buffet line. A woman in her early twenties with black skin and bright-red hair walked up to him. She pretended to look over the pizzas in the buffet line. Then she looked at him. “I hope I’m not being rude or anything,” she said, “but, do you have a girlfriend?”
Joe looked at his shoes and admitted he didn’t. She asked for his phone number and he told her the best way to reach him was to call the pizza place. He was always here.
Although that wasn’t completely true. When he wasn’t at work he was at the Internet café, chatting it up with CYBERSLUTT and girls (he hoped they were girls) like her. And he created words and sentences and paragraphs of lust and fucking. He was good at it. He was good at nothing.