Stanley and Blanche traveled up to New York from rural Florida, the first time they've ever been away from their parents. They moved in during Puerto Rican Day in Brooklyn, with their parents carrying all of their boxes. No fire hydrant was unbroken, no roof skimped on raining beer bottles down on the innocent, and no dry patch of grass lacked a burning firework of some sort, struggling to free itself. People danced in the streets, completely unaware of Michael Jackson's impending death. It was a great time for all of us. Stanley asked, "Is it like this everyday?" half hoping for his cartoonish view of the ghetto to be true. True or not, he finally belonged. He had escaped from the hick-infested swamp populated by his best friends in high school, his best friends currently, and his best friends for the rest of his life; those who did not appreciate the finer arts of drama, of acting (like an idiot), of using a Boston accent to portray a New Yorker, of pointing a camera at things he did in his room, that room haunted by his past, of his pre-New York life, and also haunted by an Incubus poster hanging from the wall by one stubborn tack.
You see, Stanley and Blanches' parents are bit religious, and didn't know that they were moving in together. So during the move-in, we were completely silent, as not to incriminate them in their little pre-marital scheme. After the parents left, they exhaled mouthfuls of everglades air, stole a cigarette from me, and asked for the nearest place to get booze. They made it, finally, to New York, the cosmopolitan utopia they had been dreaming of, in that they hadn't, and had actually moved into a shitty apartment complex in Brooklyn that looks like the house from Beetlejuice, after that pill-popping whore of a mom redesigned it.
Nicotine receptors held at bay, booze bile plentiful in their mouth, and parents gone home to cut their wrists over a crucifix made of their grandfather's bones, Stanley and Blanche started to open up. They had escaped a hillbilly hell, what Stanley referred to as "the confederate flag buckle in the bible belt of the south." He was really proud of that phrase, and said it about seven times the first day. From when little Stanley became self-aware at 13 years old, to when he was screaming curses at Jesus into his pillow at 18, he had come up with one creative act, one line that even his single, guilt ridden act of masturbation could not taint, one holy line probably scripted by the God he had become so hateful towards: "Yeah, I come from the confederate flag buckle in the bible belt of the south." Faulkner wept. For other reasons.
But nay, Stanley could not escape his upbringing. When given a comically miniscule amount of alcohol, the beast emerges. A few weeks in, some of us were on the roof with some puerto rican girls we had just met, one of whom we thought was very cute. The conversation was going well, until Stanley launched into a tirade about why he hates immigrants of any kind. They take all the jobs he hasn't bothered looking for. The girls promptly left.
Two nights ago, after a single glass of Old English malt liquor, he flashed his crocodilian teeth, and informed me that black women have different babies by different fathers because of slavery. "They've evolved that way." he said, boldly refuting the controversial notion that black people are the same species, while confirming the theory that black people could evolve within 300 years to resemble something as alien to him as seahorses, or black people.
Sometimes, late at night, he'll smoke cigarettes out the window, contemplating how his girlfriend is slightly more stupid than him. A mute banshee, he thinks, a paper plate punched with five holes for eyes, nostrils, and mouth, framed in permed hair that the cat gets tangled in periodically when it tries to hang itself on a noose of hair to end the misery. As she walks to Whole Foods to buy things she cannot afford, like pints of gourmet lemonade, the cat hangs from her hair and bounces off of her back like a vertebrate pony-tail, making its latest public suicide attempt. This races through his mind as he looks out the window, pretending he's addicted to cigarettes, and he'll ask me, with the eyes of a motherless bear cub, "Are you religious?"
Right when I'm watching the new episode of Megan Wants a Millionaire.
