15-June. Raj Taj Varun, whose real name is Ed and he’s Irish, is my best friend. As is often the way with friends these days, we met in a yoga class. We were the only guys. This was back when we each lived in dumps in the East Village. Now we live in dumps worlds apart. I’m way out in Queens, and he’s up in the Bronx.
I call him on his cell phone, but I know he won’t pick up on the first call, in the same way I know he doesn’t believe our country, or the human race, ever made a moon landing. On his voicemail, I ask him to be my best man. I’m getting married.
16-June. He answers my call this time and guesses Kari, our yoga teacher back in those days. It’s not Kari I’m marrying, but I can’t deny that I had a huge crush on her. I could barely talk to her. I couldn’t hold a headstand in her class. I fell over, every time, because I was upside down and staring at her feet, at her exquisite toes that I wanted to kiss, one at a time. Those were the good old days, before rent increases and low wages pushed me out to Queens, forcing distance in every way between me and the life I was leading. There’s not even a yoga studio out here.
I’m marrying Justine Gootfur instead. I describe her to Raj as a woman of Danish heritage whose family made a fortune in horse racing. Her family now owns a deli out here in Flushing, which is where I met Justine. Because her family’s deli is where I buy Super Tripler Cash scratch-off game cards. I have her convinced, tenuously, that I’m worth keeping around because I’m lucky in life and have cachet. She’s twice my age and can lift twice my weight. She snorts when she laughs. I find it adorable. She likes to drink. We get drunk a lot. She smokes thin cigars that make her cough with a lip flutter. I think she’s great.
Raj says, “You’re so unhappy.”
Raj sees the truth behind the fake, like the moon landing, and he doesn’t want his thoughts to be stolen from him. He still calls aluminum foil tinfoil and has made a hat out of it. It’s more of a helmet, enclosing his whole head. He used to wear it when he and I smoked pot in the East Village. Back then, he explained that the helmet was to safeguard his thoughts, which were valuable to the government.
He can be convincing. Even now, I find myself wondering if it’s true that nefarious thought stealing signals cannot get through a helmet of tinfoil. After all, I’m not an expert. He guesses that Justine’s been married before. I acknowledge that he’s right about that: She’s tried marriage a few times.
I might be his only friend. In yoga class no one liked him because he could do Parivrtta Surya Yantrasana. One day, a young blonde woman sidled up to him after class, called him Guru, and asked if they could talk. He stopped her right there and said he would have none of that, and walked out of the studio without waiting for me. I’d never seen him so furious. But why? Maybe she was only asking him about a yoga posture. Later he told me that a secret group had sent her, and that I should be careful. Her name was Skye. I did not know her and didn’t feel that I should, after what happened between her and Raj. And then at another class I heard something during Savasana—that is, when we were corpses—and peeked over through my lashes without making it obvious that I was looking, and I saw Skye on her mat, on her back, eyes closed, weeping. Some people do that when they close their eyes and can’t be with themselves. If I could get Justine to go to a yoga class with me, she might weep. I’d like to know if she would.
I tell Raj the wedding date, and he says he’ll check his calendar. I say that he has to do this. I try not to sound on the verge of hysteria. Justine already has a maid of honor and four bridesmaids. Each is ripe with physical and mental problems that will make Justine seem more perfect. It has been explained to me that this is the wedding party’s job. Justine says I have to have a team. I don’t have a team. I have Raj.
“I’m excited for you,” Raj says. “You’ll get hurt. The spiritual journey crosses over from the physical.”
18-June. Justine has asked me to get a clear commitment from Raj that he will be my best man. He picks up when I call, which leads me to believe that he is committed to doing this for me, that we are true friends. On the phone, I hear crinkling and scraping like maybe the phone is sliding across foil. I ask him if he’s wearing his helmet, and he admits that he is. He says no one except me is able to hear him because of the tinfoil measures he has taken.
Not wanting to sound desperate, I first ask him what he’s been up to. As often happens, our conversation turns to dinosaurs.
He has never believed that dinosaurs existed. It doesn’t bother me that he has such notions in his head, so much as how public he can be about it. He’s been publishing his valuable thoughts and findings to an online community of dinosaur truth-tellers. I ask him how many are in this community of people who don’t believe dinosaurs existed, and he says it’s a credible thing, there are a lot of people out in the world, about a hundred. He’s convinced that I have the doubt—the truth—buried inside of me, that we all do. He suggests that acknowledging my doubt that the dinosaurs ever really existed will aid me as I get going on this journey to an enlightened married life. But, what does my wedding have to do with dinosaurs? I sense that unless I acknowledge my doubt, he won’t be my best man. So, I do. He gets very excited and actually whoops. Not long after our phone call, I find an email from him—to get me up to speed—with links to dinosaur doubt forums and to the many comments that he’s posted, which are more like treatises. That arrives just as I’m sending an email to Justine to let her know that I have a team.
20-June. Not many people know this, but Ed became Raj during the time that I knew him. The notion of a new name came to him out of the ether, or alternate universe, or whatever extra-dimensional space. It came to him one day while he was meditating. His meditation practice is daily, while wearing a soccer uniform, down to Adidas cleated shoes. He sits cross-legged on a pillow in the morning after coffee, oatmeal, and a few soccer warmup exercises like kicking up to his outstretched hands, which is something I’ve never been able to do. To be clear, there is no soccer in Ed’s, or Raj’s, life, but he’s a great fan of its warmup routines. He once told me that during meditation he does not repeat mantras, he becomes mantras. One of those mantras was Raj Taj Varun, which I think he made up. I guess he became that one, and when he opened his eyes, he remained Raj Taj Varun.
Raj has been to silent retreats for days at a time. Once he disappeared for a full week and returned fired from his job on St. Mark’s, at a store that sold drug paraphernalia and, ostensibly, T-shirts. When he meditates, Raj belches and breaks wind. He told me that these special exhales come naturally to those who are able to transcend. He said that he has experienced grace many times. Try as I might, sitting in silence on a pillow, I cannot become anything but bored.
Raj asks me on the phone, “Am I expected to take communion?”
At first I have no clue what he’s asking about, but he’s asking about the wedding. “The Eucharist,” he explains. “The liturgical wafer of bread that undergoes transubstantiation.”
I’d mentioned in passing that Justine’s family is Catholic. Ed was raised Catholic. Raj is not Catholic in the least. He says to me, “You have no religion. You are not saved. For you, there is nothing after death, no state of grace to look forward to, which is why you’ll never feel joy in this life.”
It’s not true. Maybe some of it is. My family was suburban Pentecostal, approximately—that is, when there was a church in our life. I was baptized in the marshy tendril of a lake, during a family summer vacation to a campground. I was nine. Afterward, my parents thought to include an event worth remembering: we went to a Christmas village. Maybe camping meant something to my Boy Scout older brother, and maybe Christmas village meant something to our baby sister—but at any rate, all three of us kids were baptized that day. I nearly drowned.
Raj asks me if I remember, if I can recite for him, the Hail Mary that he taught me once when we were high. I can not. I can remember only the first two words, so I say those and then Raj helps me through the rest.
I ask Raj what the value of that prayer is for him since he’s not Catholic in the least. He says words are not prayer, and prayer is not the path to grace. When he meditates, he might recite childhood prayers, he might say nursery rhymes, or hum, or make up rude limericks. He says, “The form or shape or musicality of those do not make a difference in the meditation.”
He asks what has come up for me during my meditation practice about the looming marriage situation, and then seems disappointed to learn that my daily practice of sitting is anything but.
He asks, “And Justine’s meditation practice?”
I’m concerned that he’ll judge her. I only say, “Really, she has a lot going for her.”
“I see,” he says, and there’s an awkward silence until I hear that he has turned up the Ramones. It’s so loud that I can barely decipher him saying it’s to confuse signals.
21-June. In hindsight, I could’ve asked my brother to be best man, but my brother has transmutated himself from a nondescript rural Pennsylvanian to a Texas rodeo gambler. He now wears a cowboy hat. Last time I talked to him on the phone, I asked him what he was up to. He told me he’d just come in from out back. I asked, “From out back?”
“From shooting a horse.”
He’d just shot a sick horse with his rifle.
His rifle he’d named Pearl. He said, “I shot it with Pearl.” I could hear the adrenaline in his voice. “I thought its head would explode. I was really disappointed it didn’t.”
I winced. My own disappointments in life do not include animal body damage. Now I have a policy of never asking my brother a question. I haven’t told him about the wedding. I worry that he’ll bring Pearl. Raj has been my only hope for a best man.
22-June. Over the phone, Raj asks why I haven’t yet posted a comment on the dinosaur doubt forum to acknowledge my doubt that the dinosaurs ever really existed. He ends the call so that I can do that right away.
24-June. It’s Saturday, and I’m surprised and alarmed when a man wearing tinfoil knocks on my apartment door. The first thing Raj says when I open the door is that I can’t talk to Kari unless one of us is wearing a tinfoil helmet. Talk to Kari? “To tell her,” he says. “Now. You have to.” Tell her? Tell the person I have such feelings for that I’m marrying someone else? Talking to her on the phone is the last thing I want to do. In desperation—I’m actually shaking—I lie and tell him my cell phone is dead, so I can’t possibly call her to talk, not today.
“And I wish you would’ve called me before coming here,” I say, “all the way from the Bronx. Come in, I guess. Come in.”
He doesn’t move yet. He says, “Your phone is dead?” He’s looking out at me from inside his helmet.
“It is,” I say, and I take the lie further. “It turns on, but nothing.”
“Does it beep?”
“I haven’t heard it beep.” From somewhere in the room behind me, my phone beeps.
Raj says, “I envy you this journey. What I wouldn’t give to learn things about myself that I’ve never understood.”
Just then, I hear someone else coming up the stairs. Justine? What ruin! The worst that can happen! I whisper anxiously, “Come in and take that off, quick!” I’m worried she’ll see him like this, the best I have. I grab for his arm, though it’s too late—there’s no time to pull Raj into the apartment, to get him to take off the tinfoil helmet and make him presentable. I’m mortified. But it’s Kari who comes up the stairs. It’s Kari—Kari! And she’s showing—that is, she’s pregnant. Not a surprise, because after all she’s been married for years.
I can’t breathe. I feel caught, as if I’ve done something tremendously wrong, but I haven’t—have I?—except that I’ve ended up where I am, distant and insignificant. I feel small, and it hurts.
They make themselves at home, and I pick up around the apartment. I’m picking up socks which I tend to leave everywhere, not in pairs, and I’m gathering laundry hanging on the two chairs at my little square table. The reason I have laundry hanging is that Justine has asked that I wear these expensive boxer-briefs which have to be hung to dry. Kari says they are nice yoga shorts. I blush; I can’t not. Kari slips off her shoes—those toes!—and sits on the bed, barefoot. My place is a studio apartment with not much furniture to speak of. I continue to push clean laundry under the bed until Raj, seated on the floor with his back against the bed, opens a small tin of English biscuits that he’s brought, which has drugs in it, not English biscuits.
We smoke Raj’s joints and listen to didgeridoo and hang drum. Kari sways with her arms up in the air. I sit on the bed, keeping a respectful distance. She’s divine, and I’m unworthy. Raj has my laptop, selecting the music. My phone beeps. It’s a text from Justine: WTF something stupid on the internet with your name on it. Dinosaurs.
Kari congratulates me. When Kari speaks, I’m entranced, and the phone falls out of my hand. “Your engagement,” Kari says. She knows everything. Raj offers his helmet to Kari. He explains that it’s for her protection, because when a person is high their thoughts are easier to steal. She puts the helmet on, and Raj tells her that she may speak freely. She doesn’t say anything. She simply looks at me, while my phone quietly beeps—with the beeping and her in the weird helmet it’s like I’m on another planet. And what do I see there? In Kari’s eyes, I can see that she’s unhappy. I’m stunned to see this. How is this possible? Then Raj hits play on a rapid djembe drumming track, which gets me on my feet, hopping and flapping my arms. Is it the pot dancing, or is it me? Kari throws off the helmet and joins. She dances a hip grind in front of me, to my thrill—she’s actually bending over, hands on the floor—and then the door opens and in walks Justine.
Raj abruptly stops the music. Kari is in the middle of a sort of whoop call, which rings out from under her tossed blonde hair, a rebel’s cry into the new silence. And then Kari stands straight, solidly on both feet like a mountain. I gape at Justine—her nostrils are flaring. This is the real me. Weird friends and a toe fetish. This is the best I’ll ever be.
Raj points at Kari and says: “Pregnant.” Justine snorts and stomps one foot. And then with her chin low, she swings her head from side to side looking from one of us to the others. My voice is stuck in my throat. I’m stuck between shock and fury. I’m stuck between shouting at Raj for provoking—he’s not Raj, dammit, he’s Ed!—or explaining to Justine, or making a desperate plea. And then Justine charges.
Ed bellows a long war cry, the likes of which haven’t been heard since the days of tribal battles in Irish dales. Kari steels herself, pitching her weight forward on her feet—those toes! The four of us collide in a wrestler’s embrace, and then I’m pushing and pulling us apart. I have Ed in a headlock and I’m screaming his real name in his ear. Justine pulls him out of my arms so she can get at me, and when she has me in a chokehold Kari pinches her to make her let go and Ed pulls her ear, and I shove Kari to get her out of the way and what does she do for such a generous act she kicks me, her toes connecting with my root chakra—that is, down there, where it hurts most—and then Kari kicks higher, because she can, and Justine puts her head under Kari’s leg and lifts upward with her strong neck and flips Kari onto her back. The brawl rolls, leaps, spins, and shimmies, with grunts and cries, from the bed to the floor and in and out of the kitchen and against walls and windows—the 90-year-old floor almost can’t take it—it buckles and throws us back up into the air—the plaster walls crack—the ceiling wants to fall on us—the table and chairs participate—the brawl goes in and out of the bathroom where someone receives a spray of toothpaste in the eye, and out the apartment door, out in the hall where a neighbor woman for whom I have the highest respect because she’s been a schoolteacher and has devoted her life to the education of wayward youth, opens her door, spits on us, and slams her door shut again. It’s finished. No one goes back into my apartment except me. I invite no one in, and no one comes.
25-June. Waking up to a new day, I no longer believe that dinosaurs ever existed. My phone is dead. The apartment’s a mess and I don’t pick up. The helmet is torn, but I find that it’s easy to fix by adding more tinfoil to it. And then, to hide more than I am already, I sit in a corner and pull on the helmet. I can’t remember the Hail Mary. I begin to scratch the gray gummy coating off the Super Tripler Cash scratch-off game card I’ve been saving for a moment like this. I scratch and scratch, and I’m crying inside the helmet. A coin works better, but I don’t have a coin on me and I don’t have it in me to stand up and go looking for a coin. It will be a triple winner, I’m sure of it. It will be! In a low swell of confidence, I scratch harder and faster. I’ll buy a new me! This card can’t possibly be a loser, not today—and then I see that it’s just what I thought it couldn’t possibly be: not a winner. It’s the worst of possible outcomes.
Best of luck next time.