Better Nate Than Ever (4 page)

“Only a million times in my dreams,” I’m about to say, but don’t. “No.”

“Little young to be alone.”

I love these people already. Nobody would be so rude as to say that in Jankburg. They’d just talk behind your back. I can already tell that everything here is going to be straightforward and conditional, and I like that. It’s just like me. The only thing I’m unconditional about is dessert, and how much I love Feather and musicals.

“Yes, I’m traveling solo,” I say, “but I’m older than I look,” and I almost launch into my monologue about
Mom in the bathroom but then remember this guy isn’t a Greyhound employee.

“Okay, well, from the look of this map, you want to make a right.” He starts talking slowly, like I’m a tourist, which is insulting. It’s our first fight, this guy and me. “We’re on Eiiiighth Avenue now, and you want to walk down to Thiiiiirty-sixth Street, which is siiiiix blocks from here. It looks like it’s going to be on the ooooother side of the street.”

Like I’m Tippy the idiotic throw-pillow dog.

“Okay, cool. Six blocks’ll take me, like, a half hour to walk or something?”

He laughs. “No, not unless you’re a cripple.” I do love the
edge
of the humor here. It’s very me. “It should take you, like, ten minutes. And there’s a one-dollar pizza place on the way. And it
tastes
like one-dollar pizza, but, you know.”

“It’s only one dollar,” I say.

“Exactly. Good luck, kid,” and he leans back and gets swept up in the surge, his head bopping along, off in the direction of something called a Duane Reade.

Okay, this is it. I’m off to my first audition.

Full disclosure: If you knew how scared I was, if you saw me shaking right now, white as no cloud that ever flies over Jankburg’s dreary hills, you’d know I didn’t want to let on. That everything is riding on me making this happen. That I have to return home as
good as Anthony is, at something. Anything. Or not return home at all, preferably.

En route, I’ll get three dollars’ worth of pizza, fifty cents’ worth of pop—no, water: I don’t want to burp at my first audition—and use my remaining cash to buy Libby an ‘I Heart New York’ T-shirt, and
me
a Statue of Liberty keychain and a show poster of
Wicked
, if they sell those anywhere. They must. God,
Wicked
is, like, half the reason for New York to even exist.

And crossing the street (walking south, which is called “downtown,” according to studies), I’m feeling good: clean underwear, twenty remaining emergency donuts, and my mom’s ATM card.

What else could a guy need?

Suddenly the hordes cut in half, ducking into abandoned phone booths (there’s no other kind these days, I guess) or beneath the overhang of yet
another
Duane Reade. And then I’m the only guy standing here, out in the open street.

The only guy not in on the weather forecast.

The only guy getting soaked, re-baptized a New Yorker.

The only guy grinning.

I
shouldn’t have worn my audition outfit on the bus; that’s the first big lesson.

Pack a big enough bag for backup clothes and not just backup donuts (this is nothing against the donut industry, of which I am one of the chief supporters.)

But here I am, sopping wet, like I’ve just deboarded the log flume at the Kennywood amusement park back home in West Mifflin. Like I’ve never heard of checking the weather or traveling with a poncho.

To be fair, the only other time I’ve left the greater Jankburg area was as a tag-along with my parents at Anthony’s biggest tri-state area game. Yes, a trip to Akron, Ohio, can feel intoxicatingly foreign—sophisticated, even—in that “anything that’s different from me is exotic” kind of way. Also, one time, when I was a kid, we went to Orlando for a long weekend, but Mom ate a bad piece of fish at Magic
Kingdom and we ended up coming home early.

Back to New York, though. My bangs have melted into my eyes, my Nikes are drenched, and I’m shivering in the brown jacket that barely keeps me warm on mini-walks with Feather. Now it’s the only thing protecting me from the harsh city elements. A cab skids past me, spraying an additional forty gallons of puddle water onto my pants—the only things, so far, that had remained relatively dry.

Great.

I have another donut.

And then, just like that, the rain lets up.

When I reach the other side of the street, finally broken from my trance of vacation nightmare stories, a man wearing a metal sandwich board—$3
SHOES
+ $2
HATS
—thrusts a pamphlet into my face.

“Thank you so much, sir,” I say, thrilled at the amount of instant friendship that can be attained here. “A three-dollar pair of shoes. Could this be true?” I crazy-shake my head, taking a cue from Feather after a bath.

“Don’t know, boss,” the man says, spinning on himself to propel additional flyers into the hands of the rushing masses, none of whom appear to be stopping. These people don’t know what they’re
missing
, that’s for sure. Maybe I’ve landed in New York as an angel of reason.

“Where are these three-dollar shoes and two-dollar hats, sir?”

He continues his twirl, landing a flyer in the hand of a blind woman. “You look on sheet,” he says. “It’s on sheet.”

I look down as instructed (I don’t think we’re going to be friends, after all) and see, photocopied across the top: “39th and 8th—One Day Blo-Out Sale—Montego’s Discount Warehouse.”

Montego’s! So tropical; it’s like my own bazaar. I bet I could get new audition clothes and even buy a chicken at Montego’s, as a best buddy or a bus snack, depending on how things go today.

“Hey everyone, follow me to Montego’s! You’re not going to regret it!” I almost say. “Which way?” I say instead to the sandwich-board man, who has now moved away from me, apparently with some urgency and not a little fear. “Which way exactly are these Thirty-ninth and Eighth roads?”

He stops what he’s doing, dropping his arms so that the metal sandwich board pops with cheap exasperation, and groans at me. His eyes shift back and forth too quickly, set to some warp speed that would probably make me throw up if I tried it.

This could be a handy technique if I get mugged and need to puke: eye shifting.

He points downtown at a building just past the
cheap pizza place: Montego’s Discount Warehouse, advertising its tremendous deals with a waving plastic banner. Imagine a three-dollar shoe in Jankburg, PA! You couldn’t. Everything back home has to be imported, purchased somewhere cooler. But not here, where for five dollars you can get a slice, a pair of Keds, and a new ball cap or something. I’ll have to launch an investigation.

This seems like a good time to text Libby, and I flip open my ancient Nokia and see that she’s written a billion times already, that I could have been keeping a comforting travel dialogue going. Not that I wanted to eat up the battery. Her texts range from an old-fashioned
42nd Street
reference—“go get em peggy sawyer”—to a general shout—“HAVE YOU BEEN KILLED????”—to the most recent, clocking in only ten minutes ago—“ok a bit of news here. dont hate me.”

Uh-oh.

It’s almost nine thirty, a half hour away from the audition sign-up, and I press call to connect to Libby, but immediately my phone powers down. It needs about seventeen hours of charge for seventeen
minutes
of chat. And PS: It used to be Anthony’s before he got a
Droid
.

“I would like three slices, please, sir,” I say, mall-walking into the pizza joint. And then, realizing I forgot to get extra cash out in Harrisburg (busy on the
lookout for child-murderers), and knowing I’ll need my money to stretch long enough to buy a dry new pair of audition shoes at Montego’s: “Make that
two
slices,” I say to the pizza man. “For two dollars, as advertised.”

A moment later—everything happens in a moment here; I’ve had to wait for nothing but the rain to pass, and I can’t really blame New York for its own weather—the large gentleman slides two paper-thin wisps of pizza to me on a flimsy plate. I take out my plastic cash bag and pay him one dollar and four quarters.

“Anything to drink?” he says.

“No, thank you,” I say, tapping on my water bottle, “I’m all good in the hydration department.” Shut up, Nate.

A woman behind me, obviously either homeless or just aware of a New York trend that hasn’t made its way to Jankburg (something involving a sweater worn as a hat), asks me for spare change. Libby’s on a real kick about karma these days, so I decide to be extremely selfless.

“Do you have change for a five?” I say to the lady, and she laughs, revealing a row of broken teeth, browned at the edges.

If I make it home alive, I shall go as this woman for Halloween.

“No change, man,” she says. And I don’t hate being called “man.” That’s a first.

I hand her the five and start to hoof it over to Montego’s, with time before the audition all but running out. But then something truly remarkable happens.

Three teenage boys pass me, all a little taller than I am (duh) and each wearing extravagant fashions, their hair daring and swoopy; one’s dancing across his forehead and another’s spiked to the skies, probably able to predict the weather before the news, even.

These are the types of boys back home, maybe a year older than I am, who make it their primary interest in life to torture or, if I’m lucky, murder me.

On instinct, I push myself against the wall outside Montego’s Discount Warehouse, knocking my head into the bricks (so they don’t have to, I suppose), and drop my bookbag. Like maybe the tallest one—the James Madison of the bunch, though he doesn’t have James’s joke of a moustache—might just pick it up and steal something out of the front pocket.

But he doesn’t do anything like this.

In fact, these three boys, these three kings, all cooler than anyone I’ve ever breathed the same air as, walk right past me. And in the best possible sense, they take no note of me at all.

Me, “N-n-nate F-f-foster,” with wrists so thin I
can’t even wear a watch. With ankles so fat I have to wear men’s socks.

With an allowance of fifteen dollars a
month
for mowing the lawn every week. With clothes so dated, these three New York teenagers would probably have a poster of me on their apartment walls, as a model of what
not
to wear.

Or better yet, while all us Pennsylvania kids are doing projects on cave drawings, on early civilizations and their silly woolly mammoth skirts and dinners of forest berries, these three New York boys probably just do reports on
me
. On
my
dinners of Kraft macaroni & cheese; on my weak wrists and tubular ankles. Of Kmart slacks that these boys wouldn’t even use to wipe their butts. I’d be their version of a caveman, of a guy so undeveloped, so confused by fast objects, that I’d probably get killed in my first winter without thermal underwear.

But they don’t seem to care at all.

Not about me.

They’re so focused on whatever joke they’re telling each other (I hear the phrase “mondo rack” and imagine they’ve either just come from Montego’s clothing sale or are discussing a Latina girl gaining her first set of boobs this year, at their sensational, dangerous junior high school) that they don’t have any time to mock me.

Me, with scraggly Midwestern bangs down to his soft Midwestern chin. With more holes in my ear than the ozone layer, from the time I made Libby play Rizzo opposite my Sandy (the ear-piercing scene) during a method-acting basement scene-study of
Grease
; me, with an old cross around my neck, worn to keep Mom calm. A cross that’s practically burning a hole into my clavicle for all the sins simmering in my stupid head.

For the things I’d like to say to these boys to thank them for not noticing me.

Especially the tall one. The Puerto Rican James Madison. Jaime el Madison.

I pull away from the wall and watch the boys disappear into the crowd across the street. And then, picking my bookbag back up, I officially decide that when I’m old enough, I’m going to move here. And someday I’m going to find Jaime Madison and thank him, face to face, boy to boy, guy to guy.

And as I walk into Montego’s—its overhead fluorescents bouncing something awful; its music pounding a foreign calypso thump; its floor littered with tossed-off shoes, with shirts fallen from mondo racks—I decide I’ve never felt any more at home than I have today, in this city that whizzes past me.

In this city that, brilliantly, couldn’t care less about me.

“You,” a guy says, an employee in a pair of jeans
so baggy I could actually spend the night in them and have spare room to make S’mores, should the audition run long. “You buying anything or what?” He produces a pair of black high-tops with a purple tongue, something even Anthony wouldn’t attempt to pull off. “You ready to step up your fashion?”

And I put my bag down and say, “Let me see how much money I’ve got in my plastic bag,” and know that I’m going to leave Montego’s as cool as those three New York boys. Or as cool looking at least, especially if Montego’s has a barber in the back.

I know I’m going to arrive at my first audition literally changed for the better.

O
verall it is impossible to tell, with my
fashion experience (wearing whatever Boy’s Husky clothes my mom throws on the bed,
once every two years), whether the new look is an improvement on the old look. The old
look being the way I’ve looked, every day, for the last thirteen years.

God, I can’t believe I’m thirteen. Such an unlucky number.

My new friend Duane helps me out with the Montego’s purchases (the
many Duane
Reades
, he informs me, sell everything in the
world: baby wipes,
Star
magazine,
carrots—everything).

“Do you think I look like a ten-year-old who lives in California and
rides magical flying bicycles?” I say to Duane, not kidding.