How Soon Is Never A Novel

9780609810408

0609810405

hello, I am the ghost of troubled joe My name is Joseph Green. I don't like the name Joseph. Prefer Joe, but that comes with some heavy pop cultural baggage. If you don't know already, I'll get it over with . . . From 1969 to 1981, 6'4", 280-pound Mean Joe Greene (number 75) was the fearsome defensive tackle for the Pittsburgh Steelers. My legacy: not much, really. His legacy: Team MVP in 1970. NFL Defensive Player of the Year, 1974. Four Super Bowl championships. One award-winning 1980 Coca-Cola commercial ("Hey, kid . . . catch!"). Inducted into the Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, 1987. I think he also played Sasquatch on The Six Million Dollar Man. And then, although few pro-ball enthusiasts point this one out: there's his unchallenged, three-decade run as an unholy source of my profound social awkwardness and tandem substance abuses. Yeah, to this day, even though I'm skinny, 30, Caucasian, and pretty even-tempered when sober, the utterance of my name to new acquaintances, bank tellers, hotel front desk clerks, and, worst of all, eligible women between the ages of 27 and 40 provokes the question: "Mean Joe Greene?" Each one acts as if I've never heard it before. It's made me pretty fucking mean. This is one of the reasons why I tend to hang out with 22-year-olds lately. My new social circle consists of kids just out of college. They're members of Generation Y to my arrested X. That eight-to-ten-year age difference can catch you on a mean snag if you're not careful. And it's caught me. Since Miki, I haven't even tried to pursue a steady girlfriend my own age. One of those wife-and-mother-of-your-baby candidates. I don't have any pets. I can't even keep a plant alive. A cactus died on me. I go out every night with party-crazed kids who don't have the same level of internal decay that I do. They can drink and snort and pop prescription drugs till five in the morning every night, then hop out of bed and do it again the next day. In an effort to keep up with them, I sometimes subject myself to daylong morning-afters that might only be cured by Keith Richards-in-Switzerland-style total blood transfusions. Twelve hours of smoking and moaning, prayer and guzzling gallon jugs of Ocean Spray cranberry juice cocktail also works and is much more affordable. Most of the time, I'm grateful that the new breed has accepted me as one of their own. When I'm feeling mean and spiteful and jealous of their youth, I fuck with them. After a dozen years of partying, my tolerance has become a brutal thing, and since I'm trying to be more honest than usual here, I'll tell you that it does fill me with pride whenever I drink a 21-year-old down to the puke-slimy tiles and walk away. Occasionally one of these young girls with their fine skin and goofy wide eyes will go home with me. They're good-looking and hungry for experience. I tell myself that they like me, they're not just "experiencing" me. I do my 10,000th line of blow with them while they're all excited about snorting up their first. After last call, I travel home to the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, loft they share with four other recent college grads. I ride with them on the L train. I'm so wired and paranoid that I'm convinced everyone is staring at me like I'm some child molester who looks a lot like the guy on the cover of Jethro Tull's Aqualung album. I wonder if the roommates are laughing at me while I try to fuck their friend in the next bed but can't get a hard-on. Sometimes the girl rides home with me and I hear 15-year-old R.E.M. and U2 songs on classic rock radio in the back of taxicabs while I reach under their T-shirts to squeeze their impossibly smooth tits. Those tits by the way are heaving things that feel like they've never, ever been touched by anybody else before but that doesn't make me feel very special somehow. It makes me feel dirty