ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
PART ONE
The sky outside of Isaac’s window was going from dark grey to bluish black as he held Jinny and they lay together under the covers.
“What to do tonight?” he said.
“We could actually do like we told Dad, and go to the Walkers,” Jinny suggested after a while. She lay on her back and Isaac sat up over her, tracing circles and little zigzags on her shoulder.
“Well, I knew we’d hang out with Cecile and Ef, but I just don’t know where we’ll go. You know, it’s not like there’s nothing to do.”
“Yeah, we can drive out to the county limits and watch the grass grow.”
“No, but really,” Isaac said, crashing on his back and looking at the ceiling, “People always say it’s nothing to do, but it’s lots to do. And it’s not places that are boring. It’s people.”
“Well then it doesn’t matter where we go. Because we’re not boring. Call up Ef and Cecile and tell em we’re coming over. Or better yet. Tell them to come over since they’ve got the car.”
Isaac didn’t respond.. This did not mean he didn’t hear. It meant that he was gathering up his strength for getting out of bed.
“One of these days I’m going put this phone next to the bed,” Isaac announced with a groan.
“You make a habit out of saying that,” Jinny told him.
“This time I mean it.”
Isaac reached for his glasses, and climbed out of bed. Jinny loved his body, the geography of warm white skin unbroken by anything but the jet hair from his groin, spurting to his navel. She liked how they’d been together so long he’s no longer conscious of being naked when he goes to the phone at the other side of the room and reaches for his cigarettes. She signals to him while he’s on the phone, and he tosses hers to her with a lighter as well.
“Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, well get your black ass over here. Yeah, I knew you’d like that one. See you.”
“Efrem says he’s digging up Cecile at this very moment, and they’ll be over in about an hour to relieve our boredom.”
Jinny got out of bed, her breasts pendulums, ginger hair in her face.
“What are you doing?” Isaac asked.
In irritation she said, “After seven years I’m finally going to move this damn phone.”
Isaac hears his friend coming into the bookstore while he and Jinny are still upstairs.
“I was just closing up,” Nicky is saying.
As Isaac comes downstairs, he can hear Efrem saying, “Well now you can just leave. Let me close up. Isaac’s working you like a slave.
“Hardly,” Nicky laughs. “You really wanna close for me?”
“Yeah. Go away. Play in traffic.”
When Isaac comes downstairs the bell is already ringing as Nicky heads out of the bookstore.
“What an awful day to be in a bookstore by yourself,” Efrem glances once at the darkness of Aramy Street. “We’re gonna have a storm.”
“I told him I’d work with him,” Isaac offered a little defensively, checking the till as Efrem went to fetch the keys. “But he said he wanted to be by himself. You know how that is.”
“The last place I would want to be by myself is at this bookstore. I don’t know how you did it,” Efrem said. “Be alone for so long. We’ll meet Cecile later on. She’s at home.”
He went to Fiction to put up all the misplaced books. Isaac began turning off lights.
“Should we sweep?”
“No,” Isaac said. He pushed up his glasses. Efrem looks just like him except for the minor thing about him being Black, or rather Isaac being a German Jew, which has always seemed like a minor thing. That, and not having the trademark goatee. They are of a height with the same black rimmed glasses, same humor, same tragedy, same friends. Even the same hair cut. shaved low, sideburns. When Isaac pushes his glasses up his nose so does Efrem Walker.
When Jinny comes downstairs she is smiling. Wordlessly when they close up shop. Before Efrem can ask for something, Isaac has done it. Before Isaac can suggest it, it is finished. This is the way it has always been between them. She has known each longer than they’ve known each other, and it is very hard to get over how alike they are because initially she thought they were nothing alike. Or else she would have introduced them. They met by accident.
Efrem Walker was one of those rare people who not only was amply aware of his defects and attributes, and played to both magnificently. He couldn’t so much as dribble a basketball. He had no height, horrible vision, and knew that people hated smart asses so he became, quickly, a person of grace. Ef did everything with grace. That’s all that could be said. Boys liked him because he was not like other boys. Confident but not cocky; brilliant but not above himself, talented but unaffected by it. He was eloquent, but only spoke when spoken too. Friendly, but not offensive. He wasn’t a pretty boy. He wasn’t macho. He decided it would be best to be striking.
Isaac had never been striking. Jinny loved Isaac Weaver, who had become a bit of a heart throb in recent years, but through high school and in the beginning of college, had been of no account at all, inward, taciturn and friendless. She was glad when Efrem finally saw him. Up until then Jinny had wondered if Isaac would ever have a friend.
If he’d bothered to, Isaac Weaver could have counted on one hand the people he reserved warmth for. The last finger went to a very large group, the patronage of the bookstore he ran with his father. His Freshmen year at Saint Clare’s was a disaster far as Jinny was concerned. He knew it. She didn’t understand him. She thought that he wanted to be fun and have lots of friends. She was having a sort of transformation that Isaac, frankly, was not entirely sure he liked, and she wanted him to have one too.
He’d resented her for this. He resented her for starting to turn pretty and starting to turn heads because this meant he might have to start playing catch up. When Isaac Weaver looked in the mirror he saw exactly what was there. A brooding boy with longish, lank hair, brass rimmed spectacles, and a baby face. A nerdy face. He dressed out of the Salvation Army, and he wore a wallet chain that came in and out of a pocket popular among the burnouts and disaffects of St. Anne County.
Jinny didn’t understand that he did not want friends. She did not understand that guys were different from girls. They didn’t need to run around in groups sharing their feelings and, anyway, if they did, Isaac had never met such boys.
“I just want you to have a good time,” Jinny told him. “Like I’m having.”
That Saturday had been the one where she’d asked him to go out with her and Cecile and a few friends.
“I’ve gotta work,” he lied, and then went to tell his father that he would stay in the store.
Jinny O’Muil did not know everything, oh she thought she did because of what the nuns had taught her in Catholic school, and how her dad was a professor and everything. But she didn’t know everything. Like what she really didn’t know, and what he was finding out was that you couldn’t open up to everyone. You might want to. But it was a two way street. If someone else didn’t want to be loved, didn’t want to be opened up to, it wouldn’t work, and up until this time, Jinny was the only person he’d ever been able to open up to. There was so much in him, a big old grave full of crap, and you couldn’t throw that down on just anybody.
Isaac was sure that there wasn’t anybody to throw his crap on. And why should there be? It—his life—was, after all, crap. Spending most of his time alone allowed Isaac to understand more about the self than a lot of people. Isaac understood, for example, that he was intensely lonely. He knew that Saturday in the bookstore. And he knew that if he was with Jinny and all her fun friends he would feel even lonelier. Sometimes he wanted to crack up and cry, but only Jinny would get that. Not another guy, not another friend. And he had too much in him. He never told everything to Jinny in the way she told Cecile everything. It would have been too much. So he sat in the bookstore.
Having found Jinny at such an early age, the funny thing was he’d assumed for years that he had someone to love. As if there were only one person in all the world meant to be loved by him. But really that was what this loneliness was. He wanted to love someone else.
He wanted to be real with someone. He was real with his customers, and they kept coming back because they felt loved. They felt like he was putting all of himself into this really paltry work, and the truth was Isaac Weaver did. Because when a customer came to Weaver’s and found him in the back of the store, this man or woman might be the only chance he had to love someone beside Jinny in the immediate future.
Today the recipient of all this attention looked worthy of it. Sometimes Isaac stayed away from certain people. Everyone didn’t want to be helped. Some people, it was just like meeting a snake. The whole short process of talking to them was like being bitten.
“Can I help you?” Isaac asked the other young man.
He looked up at Isaac and said, “I really don’t think I’m buying anything. You don’t know how strapped I am,” he laughed. “I think I’m just looking.”
And then, to Isaac’s surprise, the other guy starting talking to him, “Do you ever just look? I mean, since you work here and all?”
“Actually I look anytime I want to,” Isaac said. “My last name’s Weaver.”
“Oh. Then this is your’s?””
“It’s my dad’s,” Isaac shrugged. “Ours.”
“You’re Isaac Weaver,” the boy said now.
Isaac seemed a little surprised.
“Well, yeah.”
“You go to Saint Clare’s. You never say anything. You look like you hate people.”
“I do?”
“Well,” Efrem said, “You probably do. No use pretending.”
Isaac gathered up his courage to ask, “Do other people think I hate people?”
Efrem shrugged. “I don’t know. Other people never bring it up. I just think about it because you’re in my art history class, and when Father Keenan turns out the lights and starts running slide, I get time to think about things like that. You know?”
“Yeah,” Isaac said and shrugged again. He was out of practice in the social skills department. “Uh, you read any good books, lately?”
Efrem raised a sharp eyebrow at the turn of the conversation, and then said, “I’m trying to read Faulkner. So that’s not really a good book I’ve read. That’s An author I hoped would be better who I’m still trying to read.”
“You’re an English major, right?”
Efrem nodded, surprised Isaac knew.
“I’m religion-philosophy,” Isaac said, “You should read Basho.”
“Who?”
“This Japanese guy. He wrote journals and poems and all this stuff. Come on over here,” Isaac gestured for Efrem to follow him.
“Now I think this is a dumb place to put all the religion and philosophy, right with Tarot cards and the occult,” Isaac said. “I tried to get my dad to move it to the literature section cause I said good books are like religious experiences, and the Bible and Koran and all that. They’re good books, right? So, Dad just says, ‘If you wanna move it you can move it yourself.’” Isaac was acutely aware of how rapidly he was speaking, of the diarrhea of the mouth suddenly afflicting him. Efrem kept nodding, and Isaac wondered if the other guy just felt sorry for him. But Isaac kept on talking, “Every time I make a suggestion my dad, who’s usually a real nice guy—I mean he’s tops—says something snippy. It’s like, say whatever you want to, but not about my bookstore. You know Dads.”
“Not really,” Efrem said.
“Are your parents divorced?” Isaac got quiet.
“Oh, no,” Efrem went on. “My mother’s widowed. My father had the audacity to blow his brains out on my eleventh birthday.”
To Efrem, Isaac looked as if he’d just been slapped, like he was the one with the suicide daddy.
“Are you joking?” Isaac said.
“I’m afraid not,” Efrem told him. “We had to get new carpet and everything. What?” Efrem said. When Isaac still didn’t talk, Efrem said, “I know it sounds cold of me and everything. I’m sorry. I’ll drop it.”
“No,” Isaac said. At first Efrem could hardly hear his voice because Isaac could hardly talk. “No...” he said again. “You see... I never knew someone that it happened to… Too.”
Efrem cocked his head at Isaac.
“My mom. She killed herself when I was nine. And I don’t ever talk about it to anyone.”
Both boys looked at each other, and out of all the emotions each saw in the other’s face, the one neither brought up for years afterward was the completely inappropriate joy of meeting someone traumatized like himself.
The sky outside of Isaac’s window was going from dark grey to bluish black as he held Jinny and they lay together under the covers.
“What to do tonight?” he said.
“We could actually do like we told Dad, and go to the Walkers,” Jinny suggested after a while. She lay on her back and Isaac sat up over her, tracing circles and little zigzags on her shoulder.
“Well, I knew we’d hang out with Cecile and Ef, but I just don’t know where we’ll go. You know, it’s not like there’s nothing to do.”
“Yeah, we can drive out to the county limits and watch the grass grow.”
“No, but really,” Isaac said, crashing on his back and looking at the ceiling, “People always say it’s nothing to do, but it’s lots to do. And it’s not places that are boring. It’s people.”
“Well then it doesn’t matter where we go. Because we’re not boring. Call up Ef and Cecile and tell em we’re coming over. Or better yet. Tell them to come over since they’ve got the car.”
Isaac didn’t respond.. This did not mean he didn’t hear. It meant that he was gathering up his strength for getting out of bed.
“One of these days I’m going put this phone next to the bed,” Isaac announced with a groan.
“You make a habit out of saying that,” Jinny told him.
“This time I mean it.”
Isaac reached for his glasses, and climbed out of bed. Jinny loved his body, the geography of warm white skin unbroken by anything but the jet hair from his groin, spurting to his navel. She liked how they’d been together so long he’s no longer conscious of being naked when he goes to the phone at the other side of the room and reaches for his cigarettes. She signals to him while he’s on the phone, and he tosses hers to her with a lighter as well.
“Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, well get your black ass over here. Yeah, I knew you’d like that one. See you.”
“Efrem says he’s digging up Cecile at this very moment, and they’ll be over in about an hour to relieve our boredom.”
Jinny got out of bed, her breasts pendulums, ginger hair in her face.
“What are you doing?” Isaac asked.
In irritation she said, “After seven years I’m finally going to move this damn phone.”
Isaac hears his friend coming into the bookstore while he and Jinny are still upstairs.
“I was just closing up,” Nicky is saying.
As Isaac comes downstairs, he can hear Efrem saying, “Well now you can just leave. Let me close up. Isaac’s working you like a slave.
“Hardly,” Nicky laughs. “You really wanna close for me?”
“Yeah. Go away. Play in traffic.”
When Isaac comes downstairs the bell is already ringing as Nicky heads out of the bookstore.
“What an awful day to be in a bookstore by yourself,” Efrem glances once at the darkness of Aramy Street. “We’re gonna have a storm.”
“I told him I’d work with him,” Isaac offered a little defensively, checking the till as Efrem went to fetch the keys. “But he said he wanted to be by himself. You know how that is.”
“The last place I would want to be by myself is at this bookstore. I don’t know how you did it,” Efrem said. “Be alone for so long. We’ll meet Cecile later on. She’s at home.”
He went to Fiction to put up all the misplaced books. Isaac began turning off lights.
“Should we sweep?”
“No,” Isaac said. He pushed up his glasses. Efrem looks just like him except for the minor thing about him being Black, or rather Isaac being a German Jew, which has always seemed like a minor thing. That, and not having the trademark goatee. They are of a height with the same black rimmed glasses, same humor, same tragedy, same friends. Even the same hair cut. shaved low, sideburns. When Isaac pushes his glasses up his nose so does Efrem Walker.
When Jinny comes downstairs she is smiling. Wordlessly when they close up shop. Before Efrem can ask for something, Isaac has done it. Before Isaac can suggest it, it is finished. This is the way it has always been between them. She has known each longer than they’ve known each other, and it is very hard to get over how alike they are because initially she thought they were nothing alike. Or else she would have introduced them. They met by accident.
Efrem Walker was one of those rare people who not only was amply aware of his defects and attributes, and played to both magnificently. He couldn’t so much as dribble a basketball. He had no height, horrible vision, and knew that people hated smart asses so he became, quickly, a person of grace. Ef did everything with grace. That’s all that could be said. Boys liked him because he was not like other boys. Confident but not cocky; brilliant but not above himself, talented but unaffected by it. He was eloquent, but only spoke when spoken too. Friendly, but not offensive. He wasn’t a pretty boy. He wasn’t macho. He decided it would be best to be striking.
Isaac had never been striking. Jinny loved Isaac Weaver, who had become a bit of a heart throb in recent years, but through high school and in the beginning of college, had been of no account at all, inward, taciturn and friendless. She was glad when Efrem finally saw him. Up until then Jinny had wondered if Isaac would ever have a friend.
If he’d bothered to, Isaac Weaver could have counted on one hand the people he reserved warmth for. The last finger went to a very large group, the patronage of the bookstore he ran with his father. His Freshmen year at Saint Clare’s was a disaster far as Jinny was concerned. He knew it. She didn’t understand him. She thought that he wanted to be fun and have lots of friends. She was having a sort of transformation that Isaac, frankly, was not entirely sure he liked, and she wanted him to have one too.
He’d resented her for this. He resented her for starting to turn pretty and starting to turn heads because this meant he might have to start playing catch up. When Isaac Weaver looked in the mirror he saw exactly what was there. A brooding boy with longish, lank hair, brass rimmed spectacles, and a baby face. A nerdy face. He dressed out of the Salvation Army, and he wore a wallet chain that came in and out of a pocket popular among the burnouts and disaffects of St. Anne County.
Jinny didn’t understand that he did not want friends. She did not understand that guys were different from girls. They didn’t need to run around in groups sharing their feelings and, anyway, if they did, Isaac had never met such boys.
“I just want you to have a good time,” Jinny told him. “Like I’m having.”
That Saturday had been the one where she’d asked him to go out with her and Cecile and a few friends.
“I’ve gotta work,” he lied, and then went to tell his father that he would stay in the store.
Jinny O’Muil did not know everything, oh she thought she did because of what the nuns had taught her in Catholic school, and how her dad was a professor and everything. But she didn’t know everything. Like what she really didn’t know, and what he was finding out was that you couldn’t open up to everyone. You might want to. But it was a two way street. If someone else didn’t want to be loved, didn’t want to be opened up to, it wouldn’t work, and up until this time, Jinny was the only person he’d ever been able to open up to. There was so much in him, a big old grave full of crap, and you couldn’t throw that down on just anybody.
Isaac was sure that there wasn’t anybody to throw his crap on. And why should there be? It—his life—was, after all, crap. Spending most of his time alone allowed Isaac to understand more about the self than a lot of people. Isaac understood, for example, that he was intensely lonely. He knew that Saturday in the bookstore. And he knew that if he was with Jinny and all her fun friends he would feel even lonelier. Sometimes he wanted to crack up and cry, but only Jinny would get that. Not another guy, not another friend. And he had too much in him. He never told everything to Jinny in the way she told Cecile everything. It would have been too much. So he sat in the bookstore.
Having found Jinny at such an early age, the funny thing was he’d assumed for years that he had someone to love. As if there were only one person in all the world meant to be loved by him. But really that was what this loneliness was. He wanted to love someone else.
He wanted to be real with someone. He was real with his customers, and they kept coming back because they felt loved. They felt like he was putting all of himself into this really paltry work, and the truth was Isaac Weaver did. Because when a customer came to Weaver’s and found him in the back of the store, this man or woman might be the only chance he had to love someone beside Jinny in the immediate future.
Today the recipient of all this attention looked worthy of it. Sometimes Isaac stayed away from certain people. Everyone didn’t want to be helped. Some people, it was just like meeting a snake. The whole short process of talking to them was like being bitten.
“Can I help you?” Isaac asked the other young man.
He looked up at Isaac and said, “I really don’t think I’m buying anything. You don’t know how strapped I am,” he laughed. “I think I’m just looking.”
And then, to Isaac’s surprise, the other guy starting talking to him, “Do you ever just look? I mean, since you work here and all?”
“Actually I look anytime I want to,” Isaac said. “My last name’s Weaver.”
“Oh. Then this is your’s?””
“It’s my dad’s,” Isaac shrugged. “Ours.”
“You’re Isaac Weaver,” the boy said now.
Isaac seemed a little surprised.
“Well, yeah.”
“You go to Saint Clare’s. You never say anything. You look like you hate people.”
“I do?”
“Well,” Efrem said, “You probably do. No use pretending.”
Isaac gathered up his courage to ask, “Do other people think I hate people?”
Efrem shrugged. “I don’t know. Other people never bring it up. I just think about it because you’re in my art history class, and when Father Keenan turns out the lights and starts running slide, I get time to think about things like that. You know?”
“Yeah,” Isaac said and shrugged again. He was out of practice in the social skills department. “Uh, you read any good books, lately?”
Efrem raised a sharp eyebrow at the turn of the conversation, and then said, “I’m trying to read Faulkner. So that’s not really a good book I’ve read. That’s An author I hoped would be better who I’m still trying to read.”
“You’re an English major, right?”
Efrem nodded, surprised Isaac knew.
“I’m religion-philosophy,” Isaac said, “You should read Basho.”
“Who?”
“This Japanese guy. He wrote journals and poems and all this stuff. Come on over here,” Isaac gestured for Efrem to follow him.
“Now I think this is a dumb place to put all the religion and philosophy, right with Tarot cards and the occult,” Isaac said. “I tried to get my dad to move it to the literature section cause I said good books are like religious experiences, and the Bible and Koran and all that. They’re good books, right? So, Dad just says, ‘If you wanna move it you can move it yourself.’” Isaac was acutely aware of how rapidly he was speaking, of the diarrhea of the mouth suddenly afflicting him. Efrem kept nodding, and Isaac wondered if the other guy just felt sorry for him. But Isaac kept on talking, “Every time I make a suggestion my dad, who’s usually a real nice guy—I mean he’s tops—says something snippy. It’s like, say whatever you want to, but not about my bookstore. You know Dads.”
“Not really,” Efrem said.
“Are your parents divorced?” Isaac got quiet.
“Oh, no,” Efrem went on. “My mother’s widowed. My father had the audacity to blow his brains out on my eleventh birthday.”
To Efrem, Isaac looked as if he’d just been slapped, like he was the one with the suicide daddy.
“Are you joking?” Isaac said.
“I’m afraid not,” Efrem told him. “We had to get new carpet and everything. What?” Efrem said. When Isaac still didn’t talk, Efrem said, “I know it sounds cold of me and everything. I’m sorry. I’ll drop it.”
“No,” Isaac said. At first Efrem could hardly hear his voice because Isaac could hardly talk. “No...” he said again. “You see... I never knew someone that it happened to… Too.”
Efrem cocked his head at Isaac.
“My mom. She killed herself when I was nine. And I don’t ever talk about it to anyone.”
Both boys looked at each other, and out of all the emotions each saw in the other’s face, the one neither brought up for years afterward was the completely inappropriate joy of meeting someone traumatized like himself.
