Utopia (Lumina Magazine)

(Originally published in Lumina, 2013)

It wasn’t even a metaphor. That was the name of the place: the Utopia Diner, on Amsterdam and 73^rd. But it was the closest diner to the Meadow, where everyone from all the schools went to hang out, so if its name had taken on a double meaning among me and my friends, it’s because that’s usually where we were when the acid peaked.

We spent so much time at the Utopia. It was like clocking in at our jobs. The waiters, gruff men with hairy hands, pot bellies, and purple pouches under the eyes; unsmiling waitresses who spoke in monotone – Uh huh, you want that with salad, we have thousand island… They knew us and we knew them. They knew we were on drugs and we knew they knew. They looked over our heads at the counter waiting for us to decide. They said, I come back when you ready.

I took acid every chance I got that summer. It was the only thing that made sense to me, the only way to render myself defenseless enough to admit what I pretended not to know. It gave me a clarity, a wintergreen astringence, and if sometimes I had hallucinations, they didn’t show me things that weren’t there; rather, they showed me things that were always there, but couldn’t otherwise be seen. Afternoons atomized into nights as I sat in the Meadow, hands turgid with chi, deeply understanding a blade of grass, watching the broken neon sign on the Hotel Essex shine over the treeline: HOTEL   SEX. Then the regret, as I came down, and everything became insoluble and opaque again.

You used to be able to smoke in diners, which was a godsend if you were tripping: the chewy, vegetal taste of the unlit cigarette, the sulfur flash, then the acrid singe against your soft tissue. The smoke wending its way gorgeously through your veins, all the lights turning green, the avenues splitting into smaller and smaller streets until your fingertips buzzed. I turned the cherry of my cigarette against the bottom of the amber ashtray, sharpening it like a pencil. The pliant weight of the oversized burgundy menus, they way the sticky plastic crackled when you turned the pages: so perfectly orchestrated as to be pre-ordained.

This was during my phase of ordering cherry pie with vanilla ice cream on it, which I dubbed “the virgin special.” I thought this was hilarious, as I was neither. We were tripping at the Utopia. Hope and Alice were sitting next to each other on one side of the booth, Chelsea and Marcus Dean on the other side, me in a spare chair at the head of the table. Alice and Hope were my best friends, probably. Chelsea and Marcus were a couple we knew. She went to our school, he was from around. I believe we’d bought the acid from him.

Marcus Dean was notorious for sleeping with other women, which Chelsea knew and accepted, I guess, or was waiting for it to change. It’s always confusing when one half of a couple is monogamous and the other is a player. Marcus was a player, and everyone knew that, and yet he made an exception for Chelsea, he allowed himself to be seen as one half of a couple, and he didn’t do that with anyone else, so that was a kind of commitment in itself. That must have been one of the primary arguments in his ongoing defense – You know you’re special, you know you’re the only one. But she wasn’t. She couldn’t even get pissed at the girls he cheated with, because everyone knew that he was relentless. He was older than all of us by two years, his body was a man’s, bare chested under his leather vest, some symbol in silver on a cord around his neck; you leaned in to see it more closely and then there you were, mesmerized by his patchouli miasma. I understood why he was a hot property, but he was too much of a hippie for me, not that he ever looked my way. It was such a relief to me when I was uninterested in people socially or sexually, when they had nothing I wanted.

Hope may or may not have slept with Marcus already that summer – he certainly treated her like she had, coming up behind her in the Meadow and tickling her ribs, bearhugging her when she squirmed to get away. How was that legal? Because it purported to be antagonistic. Because it made Hope frown and say stop it, at which he grinned. Chelsea had to stand there and watch; she couldn’t say anything about the dumbshow playing out less than a foot away, or he’d tell her how wrong she was, how she was always imagining these things, how much her mistrust of him hurt their relationship. They’d fight – her fault – and then he’d have the excuse he wanted to do what he was going to do anyway.

It was so easy to see when you stepped outside of it. People thought they were doing such a great job of disguising their agendas, but they weren’t; their agendas were fake racehorses in an old carny game, everybody trying to edge theirs ahead of everyone else’s. So futile, so exhausting. And so blatant! I was horrified. Could I be this transparent and not know it? It was like seeing someone asleep with their mouth open and thinking how stupid and helpless they look, what an unwitting victim. Then you realize that’s how you look when you’re asleep, and you vow never to let anyone see you sleep again.

Marcus was paying attention to Alice now, his head tilted back and his eyes half open, in an attitude of lazy appraisal. She put a cigarette in the center of her mouth to light it; so strange, the lipless way she smoked. Her blonde lips. She liked getting people to do what she wanted. Alice was objectively prettier than all of us, so it wasn’t her fault when other people’s boyfriends wanted to sleep with her, and it wasn’t her fault if it wound up happening. She couldn’t help it if she was a dick magnet. Alice was already, you could see, feeling patronizing towards poor Chelsea; that un-asked-for sympathy in her voice. Chelsea, meanwhile, was mordant in her brown corduroys. She was resigned; rather, she’d been forced to quit, and every word from her mouth fell straight down, hit the table, and died.

It was like looking through a panoramic binocular, the heavy shield-shaped kind you find on tall buildings, the ones that get so cold in the winter it stuns your browbone, the ones that take all your quarters to operate. Wherever I trained my sight, remote vistas rushed forward to become immediate. I could see that Hope was expecting Marcus to flirt with her, as he had in the past, and because he wasn’t, she was discomfited and bored. She kept making little sniffs out of her nose: Knffff. Knffff. Her chin tucked down almost to her chest, eyes up, lower lip fattened, and – you could read her mind! You could actually read her mind! There was no question that right now, she was saying, Knfff. I can’t believe Marcus’s not talking to me. Why is he not talking to me? I’m mad.

I stifled a laugh. She was doing a terrible job of hiding her feelings, everyone was. Their motives were naked. Their motives’ epidermis was showing. Alice was talking to Marcus, and whatever she was saying, it sounded like, “You guys, there’s this thing that I know about that’s really valuable information, you’re lucky I’m giving it to you, I’m really cool – YOU GUYS.”

Because even as he was sitting next to his girlfriend Chelsea, looking directly at Alice, and enjoying Hope’s jealousy, Marcus was somehow managing to give me, on his right, 100 percent vibe. We were all ostensibly attending to Alice, now Chelsea was answering her, and in an indescribably minute unit of time, Marcus turned just far enough my way – all of fifteen degrees, probably – allowed his eyeballs to slide just a shade right, and managed to increase his smile only from the right corner of his mouth in just such a way as I knew exactly what he meant. Get a load of Alice, he was saying to me. We’re enjoying a moment of intimacy at her expense. She doesn’t even know because she is not as sensitive as I see you are, because you got it right away. His right knee swung towards the outside of the booth, his flank advancing on me by an inch, at most. The subtlest of movements. Unless I was flattering myself. But no, he stole a look down at the bench next to him, as though he were keeping track of his napkin, and when my gaze followed his, he caught my eye and smirked at me: Made you look.

Hope caught a whiff of the wind, and her frown deepened. She started picking assiduously at her thumbnails in front of her face, like she was crocheting a tiny, angry blanket. Alice was not oblivious either, as Marcus started to positively gleam at me with one eighth of his face, basically a sideburn and an ear and the corner of his eye. I don’t know what Chelsea saw that made her look down at her food, her whole head tilted forward too far, her hair dropping like a curtain. Marcus nudged her leg with his, angled his shoulder her way, as though jollying her, which she rejected. He smirked even more, hoping to catch her eye – You mad at me? Or, Do you dare me?

Chelsea looked my way and then looked at him like, You’re serious? Disparaging. But I knew what she meant. I was not very special or hard to get; I was the generic supermarket brand, there was always a sale on me. A tryst with me would not be born out of any kind of special bond, or even lust. It would just be for sport, a little boy nagging his mother to watch, Mommy, watch me.

This was crazy. To be sitting there, while Marcus and Chelsea conducted a conversation entirely with eyebrows and elbows, a conversation about me, in front of me, without me, while we all pretended not to notice – I should have stood on the table and yelled, CAN WE PLEASE ADMIT WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE? I mean really. Hope’s curdled expression, Alice’s deflated conceit; Chelsea turning away, shucking Marcus’s shoulder, digging in her knapsack for nothing. Me with my too-open eyes. All of us, transparent as ghouls, naked as opinions, neon signs flashing broken over the night. And this was seen as a fait accompli; it seemed given that Marcus could seduce me anytime he wanted, or not. My say in the matter didn’t matter much. I only had to sit back, and watch.

This was the kind of determinism we professed to believe in when it was convenient. And in fact, it did sometimes work this way: You did nothing, and things either kind of happened or didn’t. Sometimes shit just happened because nobody said no: Brendan having sex with Emily Milstein while she was passed out drunk. What Fred and Alberto did at Rebecca Blick’s party. Six months ago, I sat at the Washington Square Diner across from Hope and her boyfriend Jay, and at some point Jay moved his leg forward so that it pressed against mine under the table. Pressed it. And I didn’t move mine away. That was all it took. You know what happened next, even if you weren’t there for it. From that one frame of the movie, you could tell the entire plot.

Listen, this isn’t even a story. Nothing happened, and nobody learned a goddamn thing. There wasn’t anything special about this day, except that I remember it so well. We piled our change on top of the check, we slid outside into the unfair brightness. I pressed ahead to walk with with Alice and Hope; Chelsea and Marcus lagged behind with lowered voices. She caught his forearm with her hand to make her point, held it as she argued with him for the two blocks between Amsterdam and Central Park West. What? You know what. Why you mad? You know. What did I do? I didn’t do anything. But it’s obvious you wanted to. Who, her? Any of them. Marcus slowed down and shook his head. None of them, he told Chelsea. You gotta stop seeing things that aren’t there.

Then we entered the park and passed Strawberry Field, and he shook her arm off, flexed his shoulders back and stretched his chin up, a yoga pose of being unchained. And he walked away from her, free.