like, ten million hits. I mean, I read
The Peak
every week, but you guys have never come close to shit like that.”
“So why do you still pick it up?”
“Because, dude. Because I’ll always have a few minutes to kill between classes. Because I like scouting the comics and seeing if any hot girls were interviewed for
Peak
Speak. Because it’s there.”
“You don’t look for breaking news. Or features that are, I don’t know, in depth?”
“Fuck no.” Tyson dropped the Pink Floyd poster against a bootleg print of Bart Simpson smoking a joint and kept walking. A group of girls gathered a few feet ahead of them. “Be honest with yourself,” he said to Alex. “When was the last time
you
looked for any of that shit?”
The girls were looking at a print of Che Guevara’s face against a dark blue background. All of them wore cardigans, expensive jeans with coloured stitching on the back pockets, and professionally worn-in caps that were meant to recreate the quaint old-world knitting techniques of their grandmothers. “I think I want this,” one of them was saying, “but in green. Do they make it in green?”
One of her friends flipped her bangs out of her eyes and took a big sip of bubble tea. “Green, seriously? That’s gnarly.”
A third chimed in, “You mean gnarly as in good?”
“God, just drop it already, Melissa,” said the bubble-tea girl, flipping her hair again. “I say orange.”
“Yeah,” the first agreed, “like a burnt, kind of …
almond-
y orange. You know? That would just kill it.”
Alex took in this conversation as if he was breathing truck exhaust. Tyson followed his friend’s line of sight. “Oh, nice. Funny story, actually. Which one do you like?”
“Jesus. None of them,” Alex said. “They’re trying to figure out which colour goes best with revolution. It’s fucking embarrassing. You want to record that kind of bullshit and play it back for them, just so they can hear what the rest of us hear.”
Newly engaged, Tyson waved his arms to get Alex’s attention back. “See, that’s exactly your problem,” he said. “You’re too worried about the words coming out of their mouths. You’ve gotta learn to get past that shit. It’ll ruin you every time.”
The bubble-tea girl looked over at Tyson with an extended, nervous glance, then drew her indecisive friend, who was wondering aloud what shade of orange a sunset is, around the corner toward a tangerine-ish print with “DANCE LIKE NOBODYS WATCHING” written overtop in loopy capitals. (That particular poster [item code: MOTIVATIONAL-DANCE] had been part of a series of blue-chip fixtures in the fridge-magnet and greeting-card industries for nearly a decade; this year marked its maiden voyage into the world of informal home decoration.)
“There are probably thirty girls in this whole school whose personality is a match with yours,” Tyson continued. “And guess what? Twenty-nine of them are golems. The other one is already fucking her TA .” He nodded at the girls as the last of them trailed out of sight. “Look at them. Probably what, nineteen years old? Psychology majors? They commute from somewhere an hour away, and have recently signed their first Greenpeace petition. Two of them have bumper stickers for the Dave Matthews Band.”
Alex’s nostrils flared involuntarily. Tyson pointed at them with a triumphant flourish.
“Exactly!” he said. “All of these are real possibilities, right?”
“Too
real,” Alex muttered.
“So just don’t think about it, man. Block that shit out. You need to be a zen about sex. A blank slate. I mean, just look at her”—Tyson peeked through a gap in the display and pointed at the bubble-tea girl—“and see what your dick has to say about it. Imagine she’s stripping for you, real slow-like: what’s coming off first? Decide if you want to see, for instance, her butt smooshed into the edge of a pool. Most of the time you’ll get an enthusiastic,
The Peak
every week, but you guys have never come close to shit like that.”
“So why do you still pick it up?”
“Because, dude. Because I’ll always have a few minutes to kill between classes. Because I like scouting the comics and seeing if any hot girls were interviewed for
Peak
Speak. Because it’s there.”
“You don’t look for breaking news. Or features that are, I don’t know, in depth?”
“Fuck no.” Tyson dropped the Pink Floyd poster against a bootleg print of Bart Simpson smoking a joint and kept walking. A group of girls gathered a few feet ahead of them. “Be honest with yourself,” he said to Alex. “When was the last time
you
looked for any of that shit?”
The girls were looking at a print of Che Guevara’s face against a dark blue background. All of them wore cardigans, expensive jeans with coloured stitching on the back pockets, and professionally worn-in caps that were meant to recreate the quaint old-world knitting techniques of their grandmothers. “I think I want this,” one of them was saying, “but in green. Do they make it in green?”
One of her friends flipped her bangs out of her eyes and took a big sip of bubble tea. “Green, seriously? That’s gnarly.”
A third chimed in, “You mean gnarly as in good?”
“God, just drop it already, Melissa,” said the bubble-tea girl, flipping her hair again. “I say orange.”
“Yeah,” the first agreed, “like a burnt, kind of …
almond-
y orange. You know? That would just kill it.”
Alex took in this conversation as if he was breathing truck exhaust. Tyson followed his friend’s line of sight. “Oh, nice. Funny story, actually. Which one do you like?”
“Jesus. None of them,” Alex said. “They’re trying to figure out which colour goes best with revolution. It’s fucking embarrassing. You want to record that kind of bullshit and play it back for them, just so they can hear what the rest of us hear.”
Newly engaged, Tyson waved his arms to get Alex’s attention back. “See, that’s exactly your problem,” he said. “You’re too worried about the words coming out of their mouths. You’ve gotta learn to get past that shit. It’ll ruin you every time.”
The bubble-tea girl looked over at Tyson with an extended, nervous glance, then drew her indecisive friend, who was wondering aloud what shade of orange a sunset is, around the corner toward a tangerine-ish print with “DANCE LIKE NOBODYS WATCHING” written overtop in loopy capitals. (That particular poster [item code: MOTIVATIONAL-DANCE] had been part of a series of blue-chip fixtures in the fridge-magnet and greeting-card industries for nearly a decade; this year marked its maiden voyage into the world of informal home decoration.)
“There are probably thirty girls in this whole school whose personality is a match with yours,” Tyson continued. “And guess what? Twenty-nine of them are golems. The other one is already fucking her TA .” He nodded at the girls as the last of them trailed out of sight. “Look at them. Probably what, nineteen years old? Psychology majors? They commute from somewhere an hour away, and have recently signed their first Greenpeace petition. Two of them have bumper stickers for the Dave Matthews Band.”
Alex’s nostrils flared involuntarily. Tyson pointed at them with a triumphant flourish.
“Exactly!” he said. “All of these are real possibilities, right?”
“Too
real,” Alex muttered.
“So just don’t think about it, man. Block that shit out. You need to be a zen about sex. A blank slate. I mean, just look at her”—Tyson peeked through a gap in the display and pointed at the bubble-tea girl—“and see what your dick has to say about it. Imagine she’s stripping for you, real slow-like: what’s coming off first? Decide if you want to see, for instance, her butt smooshed into the edge of a pool. Most of the time you’ll get an enthusiastic,
Similar Books
