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Short Story - Jake and the Price of Cool - pg 2Art school is never the best place in the world for honesty or relationships based around anything but artifice and ego, but I tried. I really was trying. It was hard to make friends when I wanted to keep my standards high, and no one else seemed to live up to my expectations. At some point, I think, I just stopped trying. I was very often late for class, and I saw this as a form of being honest with myself. I was putting, as I saw it, a judgement of relative value on the idea of promptness. Was ‘on time' really me, or something valued by a system I didn't care about? That's the beginning of why I think I might have been a little bit responsible. Maybe. It's like this. Everyone snubs a lot of people, all the time. Mostly, you do it to protect yourself. You save your own time for you. You don't want to be wasted, and you especially don't want to be rushed early into your grave worrying about everyone else. Sometimes, you don't know who you piss off. You just don't. I always figure you get pissed off, other people get pissed off, but it's only your problem if you're the one getting upset. I mean, you can't make other people responsible for your emotional state, right? That's yours to deal with. That's why we have courts. Courts don't punish the lying, cheating guy who made a fool of his wife; they punish the wife for taking out her rage on his sports car with a baseball bat. So, as per that lesson, I've learned one sure method of defense — walk away from everything, and never look back.
I went to this restaurant. It was a place I really liked, and I felt really good there usually. It was fancy, but I figured I had the personality, if not the polish, to carry it. The waiters had always been friendly, and I have to admit I'm an exorbitant tipper. Even if I don't rack up the bill with Dom, I tip more than a lot of those expense account boozers do. The waiter just has less reason to anticipate coming good fortune. That day, though — well, I just don't get it. You go into the same place every week or so for months, and then one night they're unutterably rude. You have the same maitre ‘d who's always been a perfect gentleman, and he's a total prick. Despite the fact the place is almost totally empty, he sticks you in the worst corner possible with no view and no room to spread out. Then, you get your favorite waiter, and he treats you like you're something disgusting he's been trying to clean out of the washroom before the important guests arrive. I mean, I suppose everyone could just have been having a bad day, but it had to have been something more. I'm trying to remember how I was dressed. That could have been it, I suppose. But these guys were supposed to have been my buddies, right? I joked around with them, told funny stories, traded mock insults. Where did they get off suddenly judging me after months of ‘absolutely fine'? That's the way things happen. That's the kind of crap the world dishes you, just as a matter of course. But that's why you've got to just learn to walk away, because you can never tell who's going to stay mad, and who was just in a bitchy mood. You can't go around yelling at the world because someone's having a bad day. Right? That's what Steven always says, and I totally agree. We have bitch sessions, actually, down in the auditorium when no one else's around. I told him about the restaurant thing there, and he said that one of his teachers thought he had plagiarized his final essay, which is just ridiculous but so easy to understand. Steven's really smart but he doesn't care a lot most of the time, so no one knows. And I bitched back, about the fat kid with the tape recorder. That's something Steven was happy to join in with. There's only so much a person can take of losers who want to be where you are, sit where you sit, and rattle on about all this crap you don't want to hear. At least the fat kid was quiet. So, in late fall, Chuck brought Jake back to school, and this time I was locked away in an editing suite and didn't get a chance to see him. I was kind of disappointed when I heard they'd already left the school when I got out. There was some vague buzz going around about Chuck's wife having left him a few weeks before. Buzzes are always going around. There's the whole center stairwell of the visual arts wing, which is like a hive. All the classroom doors open off this thing, and the walls are always plastered with people passing the latest gossip up and down. I push through when I can. It makes me feel dirty for hours if I get dragged in. But I didn't hear anything else about Chuck. Later, when I bumped into him in the cafeteria, we had coffee together, and I decided not to bring anything up. He seemed pretty stressed, so I put together in my mind that his wife had just been to pick up the kid. If I'd lost a kid like Jake, I'd be really broken up too. So I was sitting there with Chuck that day when Steven swaggered up to the table. He wanted to take me skiing at this hill near school on the weekend, and I almost asked if Chuck could come too. I don't know what stopped me. Again, in hindsight, it was pretty easy to believe I'd had an inkling, a notion, that he wouldn't. Who knows? Maybe in that moment, because it didn't come ten minutes after, he would have said yes.
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