Miss Misery Read online

  Also by Andy Greenwald

  Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo

  SIMON SPOTLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  Text copyright © 2006 by Andy Greenwald

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON SPOTLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT and related logo are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Greenwald, Andy.

  Miss Misery : a novel / by Andy Greenwald.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-10: 1-4169-4049-9

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-4049-4

  1. Authors—Fiction. 2. Young men—Fiction. 3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.

  4. Electronic journals—Fiction. 5. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3607.R468M57 2006

  813’.6—dc22

  2005008729

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  To my father, MICHAEL GREENWALD,

  and my grandfather, ARTHUR SILVERBLATT,

  for telling me words and teaching me stories

  Contents

  Prologue: Late April

  1: Cities That Begin With “The”

  2: Quizilla Conquers Brooklyn

  3: My Aim is True

  4: Mixed Media

  5: Awfully Cute, Like the Martian Skyline

  6: Books With More Than One Author

  7: Hello? Lunch? (Or: Surprise! Yourself.)

  8: The Real One

  9: Doesn’t That Mean, Like, Flexible?

  10: Ring…Ring…Ring

  11: Independence, Daze

  12: The Grand Finale

  13: Roller-Coaster Screams

  14: Great! Salt Lake!

  15: New Orders From Mission Control

  16: (Try Again)

  17: A Whole Lot More Accurate

  Acknowledgments

  This is fact, not fiction, for the first time in years.

  —DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE

  Prologue: Late April

  MISS MISERY WAS ONLINE AGAIN. It was becoming more and more difficult to ignore her, waiting, crouched almost, feline—or was it supine?—in my buddy list. I knew where she was—online—but I still didn’t know where she was. Other than in my head, of course, which was where she seemed to reside more and more often.

  It was late April, and I was sitting at my desk, gray shirt, blue boxers. My laptop clock said it was 1:08 a.m., but it was running about ten minutes fast. On my headphones, a mix I had made for Amy’s birthday skipped tracks; in the silence, I thought I heard her shift in her sleep. Or almost sleep. Another song started then, one by Rilo Kiley: “The Good That Won’t Come Out.” A jaunty number about creative constipation. Not bad, I thought. Appropriate, even. I wondered if the crescendo would be audible to Amy even through the headphones.

  I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the window, framed in the halo of light from my computer screen. Familiar face, familiar situation. I looked tired, but that was the way I felt all the time these days. I was tired, but I didn’t ever feel like sleeping.

  Just then, Miss Misery switched on her away message. It was the usual one, a verse from the Cure’s “To Wish Impossible Things.” What was she doing at one in the morning? Who was she away with? Who was she away from?

  Maybe it was all just a tease. A way of letting me and all of her other virtual admirers know that she was around—just not around for us. The lady in her chambers. The lady will see you now.

  Except she won’t. Behind me Amy coughed. I signed off, hushed the music. It was time for bed. Again.

  [from http://users.livejournal.com/˜

  MzMisery]

  Time: 2:36 a.m.

  Mood: Thoughtful

  Music: Wheat, “Hope and Adams”

  I’m smoking while I type this tonight–getting ash in between the pristine white keys, probably, and I don’t care. Benson & Hedges 100s, apparently. I think it’s what Mom used to smoke. Cody gave me three tonight before he dropped me off. I’m on number two now and won’t go to sleep until all three are gone.

  When I went to the doctor back in January she asked me (like she does every year) if I smoked and blah blah blah and this year I just felt like fuck it basically and told her yes. She seemed kind of surprised at first, but then mostly just tired. She rattled off this long list of reasons why I shouldn’t smoke, but I could see it in her eyes that she had already given up on convincing me to quit. One of them was “your teeth will turn yellow” and I thought that (a) obviously this is the dumbest thing of all time to be worried about but also (b) I DON’T CARE. I mean, I LIKE the idea of old me with my yellow mouth–of my stupid too small teeth slowly picking up bits of tar and nicotine and whatever and changing color like leaves do in autumn. I’m looking at all this smoke that I’m taking into my body and then pushing out the open window here next to my desk and thinking–DON’T GO. I want to have evidence that I did it. Otherwise what’s the point? I want it to change me. I want it to color me. Otherwise I wouldn’t do it.

  Where were girls in my freshman year unit who were already obsessed with getting older. These girls were like 18 and they weren’t afraid of leaving home and they weren’t afraid of falling into wells–they were afraid of wrinkles. I think their priorities were entirely wrong, but none of them ever asked me. Sometimes when I walk around through the city in the early early morning (which is rare, I admit it–it’s more likely to be the very very late night and I haven’t gone to sleep yet) I think of myself being older and being actually old and I wish it could happen sooner. There are times when I don’t like how unmarked and smooth my skin is, how utterly snappable my bones feel. I want density and debris; I want to live my life on the outside of my body for a change, not the inside. I want my life to be a suit I never have to take off. If I was old I wouldn’t have to wonder all the time and I wouldn’t have to blush. I could do things and people would trust me.

  Right now (note: cigarette number three!) I feel pent up caught up choked up. I see middle-aged women with their pear bodies and raisin heads and I think–that’s not what I’m going to become–that’s what I already AM. That person IS me–it’s not where I’m going, it’s what’s waiting inside to come out. This stupid skinny frame with the knotty elbows and knees is wound too tightly–I wish it would just give up, exhale, spread out. I wish–sometimes I wish it would just relax.

  My father is still awake. He’s playing more of that crazy Viennese modernist crickets dancing on vacuum cleaners in hell music. It’s loud and there’s no rhythm and I know he’s in there, twirling his pen, keeping time to some beat only he can hear. He’s such a sweetheart. I hope he can’t smell this cigarette smoke tomorrow. I can’t believe it’s almost May.

  ps I’m not drunk right now honest I’m not.

  [from http://users.livejournal.com/˜

  thewronggirl87]

  Time: 3:01 a.m.

  Mood: Dreaming

  Music: The Weakerthans, “A New Name for Everything”

  I should be asleep now because I have a trig exam tomorrow and I’m supposed to do super well on it but I can’t sleep. I can’t lie still. I’m still thinking about the concert. How amazing it was. How it made me feel. ::smiles:: My skin feels electric.

  Maybe it’s because I’m not allowed to go see many shows but I think it was more than that. This was special.

  Krystal and I got there early (it was at the SaltAir–crappy, I know, but both bands are so BIG now). We got about halfway through the crowd and had a pretty good view of the stage when Krys gave me this
LOOK and I knew what it meant–we just started laughing and DIVING through the crowd, like pinballs through a machine, bouncing off huge guys and their bitchy girlfriends. We got almost to the very front when this one gigantic guy in a Jazz jersey yells out, “Watch out for these two–they’re SNEAKY.” And for some reason this just made us crack up–like it was the funniest thing anyone had ever said. That’s us. We’re SNEAKY. ;-)

  But when Brand New came on I stopped worrying about what anyone else was thinking and just felt the music. It started in my ears but, like, MELTED into my sternum, into my waist, until I could feel every chorus in the bottom of my feet. Jesse Lacey has this way of singing onstage where you just KNOW he’s feeling every single word like it’s for the first time–the anger, the dreams, the tears, even the laughter–and it makes everyone in the audience feel the same way. I’ve listened to their albums approximately 1000 times in the last few months alone, but I felt like I was hearing every lyric, every note like it was–oh god bad pun–brand new. ::smiles::

  And then Dashboard. Even from where we were standing Chris looked like a little boy–like a bird boy–but that VOICE. I wanted to punch all the teenyboppers around me who started screaming “chris yr so hottt” when he came onstage. He WAS hot but it was wilder than that. It felt like when I went to temple with my parents when I was too little to start hating it and I believed that whatever I heard there came directly from a higher power. That’s what Chris singing those songs was like. I didn’t even hesitate–I just started singing along with him at the top of my voice and Krys did the same and I didn’t even mind it when the dudes who called us sneaky started singing along too. I felt connected to everyone then–the teenyboppers, the jocks, the punks, the boys, the girls. All the crappy people of crappy Utah and they felt like family. When he sang “Swiss Army Romance” and the part about “searching just like everyone,” I had tears in my eyes because I believed it. I felt for a second like I was bigger than my body and bigger than the entire arena. That I wasn’t trapped. That I could escape.

  I know it sounds stupid but I felt like these Russian wooden dolls that I’ve had on my desk since I was like 8 years old–you know they’re different sizes but they each fit inside the bigger one? I felt like I’ve always been the smallest, most hidden doll, but the music and the crowd and the singing and the MOMENT made me feel like a hundred different dolls just ready to bust out.

  I hope this is the greatest summer ever. And then next year at school goes in a heartbeat and then it’ll all be over. It’ll finally be time to escape.

  ::grins::`

  Good night. I hope I get some sleep!

  [DAVIDGOULD101’s journal has been deleted. If you are DAVIDGOULD101 you have 30 days to reregister your journal.]

  Chapter One: Cities That Begin

  With “The”

  THE DAY AMY LEFT was the first nice day of the year–at least in terms of weather. She had told me not to bother going with her to the airport, so I didn’t. When I woke up that morning, all the windows were open and she was gone.

  It was early, still—well, early for me: ten a.m. I briefly considered spending the rest of the day in bed. It certainly was comfortable enough, and with Amy absent I could stretch out diagonally if I wanted. Her side was still warm; it smelled of herbal shampoo, and I burrowed into it. My mind began to dance at the possibilities of hibernation: I could spend the entire summer underneath the covers, master the art of controlled dreaming, and finally strip the excess layers of fat from my 135-pound frame. This was going to work; this was going to be an excellent solution. I turned onto my back and stretched, letting my eyes fall lazily toward the open window, where a small, mustachioed Mexican man was sitting—dangling, really—with a giant spackling tool in his left hand and a friendly wave in his right.

  “Hola!” he said cheerily. “I paint the house today!”

  “Hola,” I said. And quickly scurried from the bed toward the bathroom.

  The home that I had shared with my girlfriend up until that morning was somewhere between a railroad apartment and an incredible bargain. It was big enough to be a two-bedroom, but unless you enjoyed high-fiving your roommate on the way to the bathroom, it was ideally suited for a couple. It was a third-floor walk-up in a three-story brownstone in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood with faux-French bistros and glowingly pregnant junior book editors in equal proportion. I liked living there because it was comfortable and not too hip—I liked the bars and I liked the trees and I liked not having electroclash bands vomiting PBR outside my window at three in the morning. Amy liked living there because I did.

  The building was owned by Mrs. Armando, a tough-talking, Italian-born widow who still lived on the first floor. She kept her door open all day, occasionally made me soup, and seemed to have no idea what exactly I did for a living. I was fine with all three of these realities.

  The apartment itself was a clash of Amy’s sensibilities with my lack thereof. In the living room, she had contributed the coffee table (which she’d painted herself), the large Mucha print, and the stuffed bumblebee hanging from the closet door. My offerings included the futon-as-couch, the potato-chip crumbs currently nestled into the futon-as-couch, the pile of newspapers on the floor, and the Xbox. A fair trade-off, no doubt.

  The strangest thing about the apartment—aside from it now being eerily empty and quiet save for the lusty Mexican painting songs emanating from the general direction of my bedroom—was that the bathroom was right off the kitchen. I’d spent hours thinking of it as a major health risk, but then again I didn’t cook all that much, so why complain?

  Just past the doorway to the bathroom, to the left of the kitchen sink, was a tall window blocked from the inside by a sliding security gate. Outside the window was a small fire escape upon which I’d set up a starter-kit herb garden that my friend Carrie had sent me for my birthday. The directions seemed simple enough: Fill with soil, sprinkle with seeds, set outside, water, repeat. Soon, Carrie promised, I’d be drowning in fresh basil, thyme, chives, and chervil. Innocent and excited, I’d asked, “Won’t the pigeons eat all of the herbs?” She’d laughed at me, said of course not. Pigeons don’t eat herbs. Carrie, it should be noted, lived in San Francisco. She didn’t even know what a pigeon was.

  I slid back the metal grating and stared at the mordantly obese, slate-gray pigeon that had taken up residence in the soil of my herb garden.

  “Hey,” I said.

  The pigeon looked at me, no fear showing on its beaky visage.

  “Get out of there,” I said weakly, waving my arms. “Shoo.”

  The pigeon’s beady eyes registered something between pity and disgust. A few days after the first green sprouts had appeared in the dirt, the neighborhood birds had ganged up and made their move. Carrie was right about one thing: Pigeons don’t eat herbs. Pigeons do, however, rip baby herbs out of the dirt with their mouths, spit them onto the ground, and use the now empty planters as La-Z-Boys.

  “She left today,” I said. “She’s gone for at least six months. To The Hague.”

  The pigeon rearranged its feathers to be more comfortable.

  “What kind of city begins with ‘the,’ anyway?” I said. “It doesn’t even make any sense.”

  The pigeon looked away.

  “OK,” I said, closing the gate. “Enjoy the chervil.”

  I went into the bathroom and took a shower.

  Amy and I had been together for five years and living together for three of them. We had met senior year of college during a picture-perfect New England fall—we were introduced at a Concerned Democrats of America meeting and first made out at an Arab Strap show (though it could have been the other way around). She was the older of two girls, from St. Louis, tall and thin with hair that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be brown or red. I was an only child from Providence, Rhode Island, not that tall and very thin. She was serious about lots of things: human-rights abuses, voter fraud, history as a construct, Albert Finney movies. I was serio
us about nothing, apart from my CD collection and her. It was a pretty good match.

  The first few years in New York were pleasant ones: She was in law school, and I was always more than happy to adapt my freelance-writing schedule to her days and nights filled with homework and stress. In between the various exams, we had inside jokes and vacations with her family. We had rituals. We had matching sheets. I liked going to the movies and out to brunch and going to bed together by midnight. I liked not going anywhere in particular.

  Except that then I started the project and she finished school, and it turned out she’d been going somewhere all along. I just wasn’t necessarily along for the ride.

  Usually I can spend all kinds of time in the shower—zoning out under the hot water, thinking about sports, thinking about nothing. But my shower had a big, barely curtained window that faced the backyard. I decided to wash quickly before the painter turned loofahing into a spectator sport.

  When I emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel—dripping, red-faced, and nominally clean—my answering machine was blinking. My heart did a half skip because I thought that it had to be Amy calling from the airport: Her flight was canceled; her job was canceled; she had mistakenly booked her tickets to A Hague instead of The Hague. Anything that would get her back to me safely by lunchtime. But I pressed play and found out otherwise.

  < YOU HAVE ONE NEW MESSAGE>

  David? David, buddy! It’s Thom calling. We haven’t spoken in a while and you know I love to check in with my struggling authors! Not that you’re struggling! Or not that I’d know! Ha, ha! Listen, David—call me! The manuscript is due in a month, and I’m very curious to hear the latest. You know my number. We should get drinks. Call me. Call me!

 

 

  Thom Watkins, my editor at Pendant Publishing: the only man I knew who laughed like he was spelling the letters out, with exclamation points attached. Not that I really knew him; the only day Watkins and I had ever met face-to-face was back in March, when he took me to lunch, put a contract in front of me, and said, “You sure you don’t want to get dessert? It’s not like you’re getting another one of these free meals! Ha, ha!” That was nearly three months ago. In the contract I was given four months to write a book. The funny bit—really “ha, ha!” funny—was that I still hadn’t started the thing. Which is why I had yet to return any of Watkins’s increasingly shrill phone messages.