Friend Is Not a Verb Read online

  Maybe that’s why I wasn’t all that upset about being fired by Petra outside the Bimbo Lounge. But that was upsetting, the fact that nothing could upset me—not even this beautiful girl who had ditched me in the rain. At the time, I chalked it up to the old bully’s rule of the playground: Punch an arm long enough, eventually that arm goes numb. Lord knows that my proverbial arm had been beaten senseless. Try to see it from my perspective. Or better yet, try to see it from your perspective: Here’s this loser, and his sister has been missing for a year; his parents are slowly losing their minds; his grades have long since circled the drain; last night he forgot yet again to put his socks in the hamper…and now his girlfriend has abandoned him, too.

  Does that sound self-pitying?

  Good. I think I’m entitled to a little self-pity now and then.

  There was an upside, though. Standing on that grim sidewalk—dripping wet, fired, and alone—I had six simultaneous epiphanies:

  Petra is very shallow and self-obsessed. I’m better off without her.

  Okay, that’s a big lie. Petra is hot and smart and funny (in writing), and even if she’s annoying sometimes, nobody is better off without a girl like that.

  But the deed is done, so it’s time to face facts: The only reason Petra went out with me was because she needed a bass player for PETRA.

  PETRA was never a joke band, and I’m a terrible bass player…and, wait, there goes George Monroe into the club. Hmm. As discussed, George shreds on bass, and he’s also better looking than I am, and he’s actually a really nice guy—I mean, we’re not supertight or anything, but he’s always been cool to me—and now I bet he’s stealing my job and my girlfriend.

  I want to be angry with George for this if it’s true, but I’m not, and I’m not sure why (though it probably comes back to the old rule of the playground).

  In spite of her shallow self-obsession, Petra is honest. She fired me because she needs a replacement, and I’m sure it’s George—I mean, come on; what are the chances that he just showed up here?—and he can actually get into a Lower East Side club like the Bimbo Lounge, whereas I probably can’t.

  I glanced at the bouncer again. He was attempting to open an umbrella without much luck. I wondered about the pin on his lapel. Maybe he was the psychologist friend of a friend of Petra’s dad. Maybe he’d once imagined himself to be a genius by ripping off the “S*** Happens” people and then came to the sad realization that he was nothing more than a plagiarist and was now forced to moonlight as a bouncer for the extra cash. Maybe, like me, he was a cautionary tale.

  From inside, I heard the faint strains of Shakes the Clown’s opener, a modified cover of the seventies soft-rock classic: “Feelings…nothing more than feelings…”

  “Feelings…Barnyard hoedown feelings…

  “Feelings…Prison hose-down feelings…”

  There wasn’t much point in hanging around. It was a ten-minute walk to the subway and a half-hour ride after that. Plus, I needed to make the Emma call.

  Whenever I suffer, whenever I rejoice, whenever those occasions arise when I think I might be close to slipping closer to the abyss of insanity, I make a point to talk it all through with my next-door neighbor Emma Wood. Skinny, neurotic, ratty haired, reclusive Emma Wood—she is and always has been the only person who can convince me that I am, in fact, still sane. Or at least sane in comparison to her.

  Emma lives at 598 Pacific Street. I live at 596. More than my next-door neighbor, however, Emma Wood has been my sort-of sister for the past decade. She assumed that role ever since my real sister—biologically, if nothing more—babysat the two of us at Emma’s house after Emma moved in with her quiet mom and nut-job dad (more on him later).

  This was a seminal event on many levels. Not only did Emma and I succeed in locking Sarah in the bathroom but we also ate all her dad’s Jolly Ranchers and fed raw hamburger to Emma’s cat, which grossed me out so much that I became a vegetarian, and I’ve stuck to it ever since—I swear, not a bite of meat in ten years, even at school. (The only animal product I eat are eggs; they’re just too good with cheese to forgo.) And all the while, Sarah pounded furiously on the bathroom door and begged to be let out. In addition, as vengeance Sarah swore to destroy the Lego fort on top of my dresser and to slice to shreds Emma’s entire stuffed animal collection, which she later held hostage at knifepoint. (The threats turned out to be empty.) It was the first time I’d ever gotten the best of Sarah. Unfortunately, it would also be the last, but that wasn’t Emma’s fault.

  I hunched over my cell phone and dialed, fighting to shield the tiny keypad from the rain.

  “Wow, that’s so weird!” she answered.

  “What is?”

  “I was just going to call you,” she said. “I now have proof that there is no God. The band Journey still exists. What label would carry them? It was bad enough when Mom told me that ‘Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’ ’ was ‘their’ song. You know how much the wedding video traumatized me. But now they’re actually going to pay to see the so-called reunited Journey in concert. It’s June twenty-sixth. Anyway, Dad said I could bring you, and I was wondering if you wanted to go. I mean, for comic value—”

  “Emma?” I interrupted. My teeth chattered. I was wet and miserable. I was on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, far from home. She knew all this.

  “Yeah, I know. You don’t remember who Journey is. I’ll give you a hint. Picture my mom, circa 1983. Then start singing, ‘Just a small town girl—’”

  “No. She finally did it.”

  “Your mom actually burned your socks?” Emma hooted.

  “No, Petra broke up with me. Then she kicked me out of her band. In that order.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  I frowned, my nose dripping. “That’s all you have to say?”

  “No. But it would have been a lot funnier if your mom burned your socks.”

  I sighed. “I guess you have a point.”

  “Hen, you can’t get too upset about this,” she warned. “Remember that ancient Simpsons episode, when Lisa said that the Chinese have the same word for both crisis and opportunity? This is a classic case of ‘crisi-tunity’! You should make the most of it. Just like how Ozzy made the most of it when he was kicked out of Black Sabbath. Who’s had the most lucrative solo career ever?” she finished rhetorically.

  “Jermaine Jackson,” I said.

  “Very funny.”

  “Seriously, Emma, I thought you liked Petra.”

  “The person or the band?” She snorted. “Listen, Hen, I say a lot of stuff. I once said that her band might have a shot at making it big or whatever. But I didn’t say the stuff you need to hear. Like how Petra always sneaks a peek at herself in any reflective surface, like an ATM screen or even a gypsy cab window.”

  “That’s what I need to hear?” I asked, sloshing through a puddle.

  “No, but she’s raised self-obsession to an art form. And you had something she wanted.”

  I almost laughed. “What’s that?”

  “You have this edgy mystique,” Emma said.

  Then I did laugh. For a second, I forgot about the rain. I even forgot about how the rain might short-circuit my cell phone and electrocute me. “You want to run that by me again? You’re not making any sense.”

  “You’re the guy whose sister disappeared, remember? Petra said it herself.”

  “Yeah, I remember,” I said. “I’m the guy whose sister disappeared.”

  “You were even on the news.”

  Yes, Emma, I remember, I grumbled silently. I was even on the news.

  And what a fifteen minutes of fame it was. About a week before school started in the fall, a twentysomething blond reporter—a real go-getter, at least judging from the amount of hair product and makeup she wore—showed up at our door with her trusty bearded cameraman sidekick, straight out of central casting. They arrived on the heels of the police’s third and final visit, basically to ask the same question: Why would a smart, attractive
, white (apparently even with our black president, America isn’t still quite “postracial”) twenty-two-year-old Ivy League grad vanish with four friends without any explanation? The response Mom and Dad gave to the reporter and her cameraman—which was the same response they’d given to the cops—was: “We have no idea. Yes, we are a close family. No, she doesn’t have any skeletons in her closet. Neither do we. Yes, we are worried and shocked and blindsided and praying that she’ll show up soon, safe and sound….”

  The twisted part? I knew better. Mom and Dad did know why Sarah had run away, and moreover, why she was wanted by law enforcement. And the truly criminal part? They refused to tell me. So did the cops, but for a different and much more understandable reason: They couldn’t jeopardize an ongoing investigation.

  No matter how hard I had begged my parents—and I’d begged in some small, subtle way every single day—they wouldn’t budge. It was for my own good, they said. “Sarah can tell you herself, when she comes home.” In the Hall of Fame of Unfairness-Coupled-with-Lousy-Parenting, that comment deserves its own gold plaque.

  Anyway, the reporter and the cameraman wouldn’t take the hint to leave. And just at the very moment Mom and Dad started screaming at “Blondie and the Beard” to “get the hell off our stoop!!!” (Mom actually addressed them in the third person as such), I strolled into camera range on my way home from the deli. There was a choice shot of me, with my jaw hanging open, looking like a lobotomy patient. It made both the six and eleven o’clock broadcasts, sandwiched right between the same two pieces about how the nightmarish economy was affecting the Chinese food delivery industry and a series of rapid-fire man-on-the-street interviews asking random people what they thought about the Steal Your Parents’ Money stickers. (Best response: “I stole my mom’s wallet this morning! Hi, Mom!”)

  There you have the short-lived Sarah Birnbaum media circus, in a nutshell.

  Emma sighed on the other end. “Listen, Hen, this is going to sound harsh, but Petra never saw you for who you are. To her, you’re just this guy with a runaway sister—a sister who’s rumored to be a fugitive from the law, no less—so even though you don’t realize it yourself, you do have this semicriminal aura, which is always great for a band. Plus, on a more practical level, you have a really kick-ass bass rig—”

  “Petra did say she had feelings for me,” I interrupted.

  “Any dumper says that she still has ‘feelings’ for the dumpee, Hen,” Emma groaned. “It’s a perennial. It’s in a thousand cheesy songs. It ranks just below ‘It’s not you; it’s me’ and ‘I think we need a little time apart.’ Which just goes to show you, Petra is not the creative genius she makes herself out to be. And even if her band does make it big—which they won’t—they’re going to end up being total crap. You deserve better. Speaking of which: What about this Journey concert? It’s three weeks from tomorrow night. Wanna make a deal? If you come with me, I’ll do something really nice for you, okay? I’ll put your socks in the hamper.”

  “Um…I’ll let you know,” I said. “Bye, Emma.” I closed the cell phone and shoved it back into my damp pocket.

  Maybe Emma was right. Maybe the only reason Petra had gone out with me was because I was the “guy whose sister disappeared,” and I had a kick-ass bass rig. The silly irony is that the only reason my parents bought me such a rig (a Mesa Boogie speaker with a custom Acoustic head, if that means anything to you) was because they felt guilty about having spent most of last year obsessing over Sarah and keeping me in the dark about why she was gone.

  As if it even merits a mention, their extravagant expenditure did not make up for their incomprehensible behavior or for the fact that I have very little musical talent.

  But that’s not even the best part.

  No: the sillier irony? The punch line? The wrap-up to this laugh-out-loud, million-hits-on-YouTube-worthy evening?

  After a long, lonely subway ride back to Brooklyn (the train smelled), I arrived in the pouring rain to find a note dangling precariously from a piece of tape on the front door of the Birnbaum family brownstone.

  Hen,

  Guess what? Sarah came home!

  Can you believe it? She made us swear not to tell anyone she’s here. So you should probably throw this note in the garbage as soon as you read it.

  We’re at the airport, picking her up. We tried to call you on the cell, but you must have been on the train. If she’s not in need of immediate medical or psychiatric treatment, we’ll be back at about 11:30, depending on traffic. But the expressway is always a nightmare, and who knows about Atlantic Ave.?

  Love you,

  Mom

  PS: There’s some leftover Chinese in the fridge. We got you vegetable lo mein. Your favorite! But try not to finish it. Dad wants some.

  PPS: Try to clean your room a little, too, before we get home, okay? It would be nice for Sarah.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Big Favor

  I did not try not to finish the vegetable lo mein. Nor did I try to finish it. I did not try to clean my room. I did not try anything.

  The whole entire year I’d been trying—trying to make sense of Sarah’s disappearing act and the peculiar, gaping hole it had left in my life; trying to make sense of why my parents wouldn’t let me in on the secret—and every time I tried, I came up short. So: No more trying.

  Why try to turn on the lights?

  Sarah was coming home. She could turn on the lights.

  Sarah is coming home, I repeated to myself, wondering if the words would carry more weight if I silently shouted them. They didn’t.

  Good. Once again, I could not feel a thing. Above all, I did not try to feel. I sat in the dark at the kitchen table. For a while, I stared at the blank spaces on the wall where the photos of Sarah had once hung. (“I can’t bear to see her face in two dimensions,” Mom had wailed once with far too much drama, even for her.) The seconds ticked by. I knew, objectively, that each tick brought me closer to a reunion with a long-lost sister who had abandoned her family—and now, judging from the tone of the note on the door, was somehow getting off entirely scot-free. Should I be at all mad?

  Maybe if she spills the beans the second she walks in the door, I shouldn’t be.

  Ticktock, ticktock…

  But no…maybe I should be mad, because she always got away with everything, even before she split. Did part of me always suspect she’d come back?

  Ticktock, ticktock…

  I wasn’t mad, though. At least not now. Hooray for me.

  Maybe if I played the whole fiasco over in my head again…

  Graduation day at Columbia…Sarah’s square cap flying up into the sunshine, the cheers, the euphoric laughter…and she was graduating with honors, no less. Everything should have been wonderful, right? The ceremony marked the first time Mom and Dad had cried real-live tears of joy, which, if you want to know the truth, was sort of disturbing. But then she broke the news: instead of sticking to the summer plan of living at home with her spanking-new Ivy League adulthood, she was slinking off to an illegal sublet in a Chinatown tenement with Gabriel and her college roommate, Madeline…and then Mom and Dad stopped crying and got pissed. As well they should have. Not because the sublet was illegal, but mostly because Sarah still kept insisting that she and Gabriel were just “pals.” Pals? Please. She’d talked about Gabriel incessantly ever since freshman year. (“He’s so funny!” “He plays bass!” “He’s in this hilarious band!” No, Mom and Dad, that doesn’t sound like a pal to me, either.) Still, they let her go without a fight. What about living at home to save money?

  But it wasn’t the Birnbaum family coffers I cared about. Selfishly—even though I never said as much out loud—I needed Sarah to provide that essential buffer between my lunatic parents and me.

  Some examples of why it was helpful, if not crucial, to have Sarah around:

  1. The “[Hen] discovered girls!” incident. Three Decembers ago, Mom and Dad decided to proclaim to the world that I’d entered puberty. In p
rint. Paragraph two of their holiday card read: “Hen asked us to buy him an electric bass. Between that and the amount of time he’s been spending alone in the bathroom, we’ve come to the obvious conclusion: He’s discovered girls!” Sarah luckily got a hold of the final draft before it went out, adding: “Irv has discovered the joys of Viagra!” (Untrue, but it did prevent Mom and Dad from going ahead with the mass mailing. One hundred fifty people would have seen it, including teachers at Franklin.) To this day, Mom and Dad claim they still don’t understand why I’d been so horrified.

  2. The time Mom and Dad attempted to sell all my vegetarian literature and snack food on eBay. This coincided with Mom’s slamming the door in Sarah’s face the night of my fourteenth birthday. She’d foiled their plan to use the money they’d made from the eBay sale to take the four of us to Peter Luger Steak House (difficult, anyway, as they’d netted $14.00). Sarah was outraged, because she’d guessed rightly that it was all part of a vast conspiracy to get me to eat meat. For reasons that still elude me, Mom and Dad lump vegetarianism in with “deviant behaviors”—their words—such as cross-dressing, online gambling, and porn collecting. They also believe that it’s an easy fix: Upon seeing a succulent slab of beef, I will naturally lose all control and bury my face in it. After Mom slammed the door on her, Sarah screamed at them that they were crazy and evil, grabbed me, and stormed out. We dined alone at a vegan restaurant in Chelsea. Mom and Dad later apologized, but grudgingly. Who knows? If they’d tried to take me to Peter Luger this past year, I might be gnawing on a T-bone right now.