The Book of Joe

divide guys into friends and potential boyfriends. You have to get yourself into the right category from the get-go. You do it your way, you’ll end up being friends, and there’s nothing harder than trying to switch categories once that happens.
    She’ll end up talking to you about all the other guys she likes, in which case you’re better off being rejected from the start.”
    “Thanks,” I said. “But I think my way makes more sense.”
    “And you’ve certainly got the results to back it up,” he said, smiling as he flicked his ashes over the edge of the building.
    “Fuck you.”
    “Sorry, I’ve made other plans.”
    We smoked in silence for a while, watching as the scattered lights in the surrounding houses slowly went out. The hangnail moon took refuge behind a cluster of gray clouds, and I shivered as a slight chill took hold of the night. This is what it feels like when time speeds up, I thought.
    Wayne turned to me, his expression earnest as he stubbed out his cigarette. “We should get tattoos,” he said.

Eleven
    I went in for rock posters in a big way back in the ninth grade, which is obviously the last time I redecorated my bedroom. Above the pine Workbench dresser in the corner hangs an enlarged poster of the painted girl from the cover of Duran Duran’s Rio album. Beside the window, which looks out over the front door, is a poster of The Cure. On the far wall, above my bed, there was room for both Elvis Costello, peering inquisitively over his Buddy Holly glasses, and Howard Jones, relaxed and smiling under his hair spray, photographed sometime in the five minutes before synthesizer pop was laughed off the music scene. I seem to recall having had edgier taste in music, but I suppose that’s just one more adjustment I’ll have to make to my compromised memories.
    The young, bearded Springsteen sweating over his guitar on my bathroom door cheers me up for a second, even though I probably hung it there more for credibility than anything else.
    On the door to my room, held up by thumbtacks, its white border ragged and torn in countless places from random human contact, is a Star Wars poster, just like in the song by Everclear. I hum the words softly to myself. “I want the things that I had before / like a Star Wars poster on my bedroom door.”
    You have to question the originality of your life when it can be captured perfectly in the lyrics of a rock song.
    Sitting on top of the dresser is my old Fisher stereo. I press the large silver power button, and the console lights up with an amplified squawk. I watch in awe as the phonograph arm rises automatically and swings over to the turntable, upon which spins an old 45. There is no reason it shouldn’t work, and yet I’m surprised when it does. It’s plugged in behind the dresser, and I remember struggling with the dresser to move it out far enough so that I could reach the outlet. It seems unbelievable to me that something the kid who would grow into me had done back then has remained intact until now, as if waiting for me to return. We are suddenly connected, he and I, as if by some cosmic warp in the time continuum, and I see him with perfect clarity, can feel his fears and thoughts suddenly running through my brain, his younger humors flowing through my veins, and for the briefest instant, through some act of molecular recall, I am him again. My thigh muscles falter and I sit down quickly on the bed. My bed. Through the speakers comes a scratchy rendition of Peter Gabriel singing “In Your Eyes,” and I have to smile.
    I use the hall bathroom, and my hand remembers that the flusher must be yanked up before being depressed, a plumb-ing quirk that has not been repaired since my childhood, because with my father living alone in the house, the hall toilet has basically gone unused. For a moment, I try to imagine a set of circumstances that might have led my father to use the hall toilet, but I cannot. Between the downstairs powder room and his own master bathroom, he’d have had no reason to come down this way, and Arthur Goffman is not the sort of man inclined toward whimsical changes of scenery when it comes to taking a dump.
    I return to my room and walk over to the double windows that overlook the front yard, absently fingering the white plastic grille. My father had installed the grille because the pigeons kept mistaking the large window for open air and crashing into it. I can vividly recall the nauseating sound of those