Friends in the Autumn (For my friends from Seattle)

An excerpt from a story I worked on recently. It's called The Committed.

As seen from a police helicopter or a guardian angel or the top-down perspective of video games from the '80s, the men emerge from John's townhouse into the dampness of November. Despite Obama's victory two weeks earlier, November is, in the words of Mike, “the cruelest mutha.” The daylight and exalt of summer and early fall have fully vanished and the ghastly rhythm of dark days, short ones, and wet everything, begins.

The men say, “Ugh.” This is ugh weather.

All is covered in sheen: the sidewalks, the leaves of grass, silver mailboxes, elevated strips on treacherous downhill sidewalks, John's Lexus, Dick's Hamburgers litter, abandoned copies of The Stranger, bike handlebars, gates to their parents' silent homes, girls' Patagonia jackets (with such glorious, toned, sweating bodies beneath), and the green benches in the empty parks with views of Lake Union and Washington and Puget Sound. With the rhythm of a child plunking at a piano, drop after drop of this wetness plummet from the city's bridges into the water below, unifying the individual to the mass.

This is the season the men try to retain a girlfriend from the bacchanalian summer. They commit, preferably late in September, in order to take advantage of as much summer and women as possible, to endure these months ahead in the comfort of late Sunday morning bedrooms with a naked and familiar—if not loved—body next to them. Outside of their window, the bespeckled city insulates them, and at noon, they watch movies or football together while drinking coffee or eating nachos. The Will Strategy they call it, as cyclical as the seasons, when it works, although last year only James and Seth had girlfriends at this time, and this year none. Drew declared that Global Aging was the cause for this phenomenon. John believed in the strategy. He said, “People are lonely. People just want to be with other people for a limited amount of time.”

In Buenos Aires and Jerusalem and Tripoli—places where epics occur—people roam outside to induce and collide with action: boisterous love with jiggly bodies, theft, prayer (and real belief in it!), gusts of cigarette smoke, bocce ball in fallow parks, groups of hairy men yelling at each other in gutteral languages with grodie gold necklaces, loud clankings of little espresso cups in cafes pressed up close to filthy streets. The citizens of our city—you can ask any of them—imagine a man in Dakar or Naples or Oaxaca hanging outside of a window, yelling down at a recognized passerby on the pedestrian street below. Something about the soccer team or the price of beets right now or the nationalization of some industry, and they find such warmth and escape in this image, because it's a world where you can be recognized everyday, where community is a word used outside of bank ads and public service announcements.

Here, though, here, everyone and thing is within instead of being outside of. Within cars, within jackets, within sheets, bedrooms, headphones, kitchens, bars, weightrooms, within headphones in weightrooms, within hipster hats, buses, text messages, attitudes, dressing rooms, mile-long stares, condoms, and airplanes, even, to arrive somewhere that is not quite so within. Within clouds and rain that keep everyone within. And emotions (ugh) are within the men who are within it all, trapped under all of it like the last Matryoshka nesting doll, emancipated only by accident or upheaval, which is what this story is all about.

However, these young men below us—these single syllables—are outside. They do their best to “get out there to just do something, anything.” They seek conflict and volume and the awkward bump-in, and they have a knack of working through awkwardness to get to the fun core of every person, which they argue is the soul.

Look at them as they streak down the hill toward the bars. The pastel pinks, blues, and greens of their collared shirts. Basketball jerseys, Obama T-shirts, baby blue peacoats, retro baseball jackets, caps turned at an ever-so-slight angle, spotless Adidas and Clarks. Hollering profanities, using vast body language, and patting each other's shoulder blades, they pass homes where bachelors jerk off, garlic sautés in olive oil, and couples watch DVDs in the crooks of their comfy couches. They push each other, their feet clomp hard, they text more people to come out, shit's gonna be popping off. Their ears listen closely to each other and their minds chase for the zinger to satirize those very words. They very often arrive to the same joke, so in tuned they are.

They feed off each other.

If there were aliens above this city, and they could only see real human life with infrared, what they would see right here on Stone Way would be a large cherry-red dot, and it would pulsate vibrantly, large and alone in the void.