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    131 Different Things
    131 Different Things
    131 Different Things
    Ebook224 pages1 hour

    131 Different Things

    By Zachary Lipez

    ()

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    About this ebook

    “Framed by Zinner’s sly photograpy . . . A boozy, grungy, alt-rock fable” from the collaborators of Please Take Me Off the Guest List (Kirkus Reviews).
     
    When Sam, a bartender in New York, hears that his ex, Vicki, his one true love, has quit AA and is out drinking again, he embarks on a quest to find her. Sam and his sidekick Francis trek from dive bars to gay bars to rocker bars—encountering skinheads, party promoters, underage drug dealers, and dominatrixes—but they are always one step behind Vicki. It begins to seem like 131 different things are keeping the lovers apart. Before the night is over, Sam will have to wrestle with what he is really looking for.

    Nick Zinner—who plays guitar in the three-time Grammy-nominated band Yeah Yeah Yeahs—provides the visual framework for this inventive novella with his intimate photography. Known for his essays and music writing for Noisey, Vice, and Penthouse, Zachary Lipez brings his pithy, multilayered, and self-deprecating voice to this debut work of fiction. The prose and photography are tied together in a playful taxonomic scheme by editor and art director Stacy Wakefield, the author of the novel The Sunshine Crust Baking Factory.
     
    “Engaging . . . may conjure your worst, most desperate drunken memories of your 20s-30s, but in a good way! The story is illustrated with Nick Zinner’s beautiful photos. This is a must read for all music/nightlife loving New Yorkers, or folks who wished they lived here in the aughts.”—BUST, Holiday Gift Guide
     
    “An entertaining pub-crawl saga like no other.”—The Berkshire Eagle
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAkashic Books
    Release dateNov 13, 2018
    ISBN9781617756962
    131 Different Things

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      Book preview

      131 Different Things - Zachary Lipez

      ten

      places

      we had

      a drink

      together

      1 New York 2004

      2–3 berlin 2003

      4 New York 1999

      5–8 New York 2001

      9 tokyo 2013

      10 charleston, sc 1999

      seven bars

      one nightclub

      one loft

      & a diner

      1

      At 12:03 Saturday afternoon the phone in my pocket started vibrating. I didn’t need to pull it out to know it was the regulars calling because the gates to Pym’s Cup were still down. I was a block away. That was fine. They wouldn’t call the owner till twelve fifteen. They didn’t want to snitch on someone who had control of their noontime drink unless it was absolutely necessary.

      When he saw me coming, Caldwell Teenager put down the receiver on the last working pay phone in the tristate area. He pulled a loosie out of the change dispenser and relit it. His hands trembled, but only a little.

      I just wanted to make sure you were okay. Are you okay?

      I’m fine, Caldwell. Thank you.

      I undid the padlocks at each side of the gate, throwing them one by one in front of the entrance. Even though I didn’t need it, Caldwell helped me lift the gates.

      The art on the wall was renewed on a regular basis. We’d had a dinosaur giving a cop the finger, a riot cop eating a cartoonish still-squealing BLT, I Miss Giuliani in sharp angular letters, and, of course, RIP . . . whatever. NYC, LES, Democracy. The current mural was Uncle Sam felating a skeletal camel with dollar signs dripping from his chin.

      I put the book of skateboarding photography I’d been making a show of looking at on the train behind the register, cover peeking out. I glanced at my phone as I ran the dishwater to clean the glasses that the nighttime bartender had left. My phone, habitually dropped, was on its last legs, with nothing on the inside screen but Sanskrit, though the outer notifications told me that there were six missed calls that I’d failed to notice as I ran from the J/M/Z station. Caldwell Teenager (from the sidewalk pay phone, twice), Steve, Young Steve, Terry the Faggot, and Whitey. The other four must have gone to get coffee for their beers. They arrived en masse as I came out from the quixotic task of sort of cleaning the bathrooms.

      Any bodies in there? Young Steve called out from the doorway.

      Everyone laughed like it was the first time they’d heard that joke.

      The regulars all drink beer at first, so I gave them all beer. I wiped down the bar with a damp rag. Someone put on the Monkees’ Stepping Stone three times in a row when I had my back turned. The regulars yelled at each other and no one fessed up and we all sang along for the third run.

      There was change on the bar for my tips. I didn’t fling change off the bar till the evening.

      Steve sat with Young Steve—who was a few years older than Steve but had been hanging out at Pym’s for a shorter time—in the corner by the lone large multipaned window. The panes were all different colors, replaced on the cheap as they got punched in. The sun managed to get through the cracks and graffiti and the Steves were convinced it made day drinking tropical. Whitey, a black Dominican born and bred on Avenue D, sat underneath the Absolutely No Card Playing sign that he, through bad luck and worse temper, had been the cause of. Caldwell Teenager, in his thirties looking fifty, stood next to him, leaning on the Addams Family pinball machine. Its top glass was cracked but it still worked, emitting the theme song every few minutes. In several hours these guys would sing along to that too. Terry the Faggot, not gay just not great at sticking up for himself, sat a little farther away, hunched in his trenchcoat, unsure if everyone was his friend today or not. I put half a shot of vodka in front of him. He’d been hassled pretty bad on my last shift. Everyone had taken ice cubes out of his rum and Coke to throw at him because he "didn’t really care much for Die Hard." It was hard to defend. He always said shit like that. Just thinking about it, I wanted to take the vodka back.

      At one thirty, my former wife came in. She was dragging some twentysomething coke vulture with her. She looked okay, half-Cuban/half-Irish and all that went with that (strikingly good looks till death, counterintuitively racist parents), but the dude with her was wearing a black leather jacket with, god help us all, no shirt underneath. It was thirty degrees outside. I poured myself a half pint.

      Good morning, Sam.

      Aviva hoisted an oversized black purse, fringed with silver studs and something clanging inside, onto the bar. She pushed it toward me. I put it behind the bar.

      I’ll have a margarita, no salt, extra ice, it’s early, and my boo here will have a beer. Do you care what kind, boo?

      Whatever’s clever.

      I gave Aviva a look. She arched an eyebrow. I made her margarita weak.

      Aviva managed the art factory for one of those ceramic monstrosity pop artists who didn’t disappear after the eighties, making sure the thirty passive-aggressive dudes she outranked painted enough silver circles and oversized ceramic doll parts to make the artist another twenty million.

      When we’d gotten married, I still had a camera and was still naïve enough to think I had the talent to become the next Spike Jonze if Spike Jonze had quit or died before he made movies. Back then, Aviva was wild all the time and that was what I liked; she gave me action to document. But truth was, I was only dinking around; after some early success with my skateboarding shots, I never found another subject I could sink my teeth into, and when Aviva got bored of partying and focused on work, she turned out to have a lot of talent. She’d made a solid career, while I had given up trying. By the end, I was borrowing money from her all the time and resenting her for it. And when we broke up things only got worse. I didn’t even have a darkroom anymore and was too much of a curmudgeon to switch to digital. My only goal for my bartending career was to be like the ones in books or After Hours; the sort who didn’t hand out wisdom, didn’t flirt, but who grizzled regulars called nurse.

      I gave her date—who looked like both the singer of the Dead Boys and a literal dead boy—a Bud Light. Fuck that guy.

      Sam, this margarita is not your best. I’m not mad, as I’m not paying for it, but I think you should know.

      Thank you, Aviva. I like your necklace.

      Aviva’s silver-and-turquoise multitiered chest piece descended into her bosom. She was leaning into the bar to accentuate it. I knew better than to think it was for my benefit. It was just the way she leaned into bars. She was five feet something, I guess plus-sized if we’re siding with the patriarchy. Hot by human standards, if no longer my type. She draped herself in layers of shawls and scarfs that always managed to shift off her shoulder and still stay on, held together by occult brooches and pins of German industrial bands. Her black hair was pulled high on the top and struggling to get free. I was thinking if she took the compliment well, and it seemed like things were okay, that I would show her my picture in the skateboarding book. I wanted to think she could still be proud of me.

      Do you know who got this necklace for me, Sam?

      This guy? I pointed to Stiv Shirtless, whose chin had fallen into his chest. Maybe on a nod, but maybe simply a coke-just-wore-off-no-sleep-and-now-it’s-the-afternoon prebrunch nap.

      "No, Sam. You did. On our anniversary. Our first and only anniversary. You thought I didn’t notice that you’d forgotten, if you even ever knew the date, and you ran to some marked-up Tibet shop and bought me half a dozen necklaces. Did you even look at them?"

      I was just messing around. Of course I remember it. You look very nice.

      Get fucked, Sam. I bought it last year on MacDougal. You gave me a bottle of Patrón. Then you disappeared up that slut’s cunt.

      Ah.

      Aviva slammed down her empty glass and got up. She saw the photography book behind me and her tone softened: "Sorry if I’m snippy. I’ve been working sixty-

      hour weeks at the studio. Now I have a few days off, what with the holiday weekend. I’m gonna work some stuff out. Deduct what I’d normally tip a human being from the money you owe me."

      Will do. Thanks for coming by.

      She flipped me off and grabbed boo by the hair. He followed her out the bar bent over. I hoped their brunch would be overpriced.

      It had been crazy to think she’d be interested in the book. I’d submitted my photos when we’d still been together. I liked to think I’d gotten in on my own, but I figured maybe she’d made some calls. I didn’t want to get into who owed what to who. I was

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