our lost generation

Parts of this story have been altered for continuity, character anonymity, and simply due to incompleteness of memory. In deciding where to place it, I’ve ultimately chosen the “Memoir” section as everything here is personal to me and to brand it as “Fiction” feels entirely wrong. But it is always a fine line, and I do not claim this to be a truly faithful recount of anything. Enjoy - F.R.B.

“You are all a lost generation…”
- Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway

I woke up to the sight of long brown hair lining the right of my pillowcase. I hadn’t expected to fall asleep at all, and could tell from the light just starting to stream in through the window behind my head that I’d only slept for an hour or two. We had been up at least past four. I craned my neck over the coils of foreign hair spread out across the pillow to find her face, turned away from me and facing the wall. She was still fast asleep.
Instinctively, I reached for my iPhone on the carpet floor, running my fingers along the bed’s wooden sideboard until I felt the familiar leather of my case. I brought the device to my eyes and clicked it on, squinting through bright LED backlight to make out the time. I remembered the sleeping girl beside me had set an alarm last night. It was due to go off in forty minutes. I wished she would wake up and began to think nervously. What if she had been drunk? What if she threw off the covers, buried her face in her hands, and ran crying out of the room? What would I do? Should I have pushed her away from me on the porch, not opened the door and let her in?
I laid back down next to her and eventually her body rotated and her eyes began to flicker. For a few seconds we stared at each other, expressions blank. I told her the alarm would go off soon, and wordlessly she reached for her own phone, checked the clock and toggled each of three alarms off. Then she turned around and kissed me.

-     -     -

I’d turned off the GPS to save battery, but I knew the route well. Inside the small SUV the digitized voice wouldn’t have been heard anyway. All four windows were down and the stereo was turned up to compensate. I grabbed my phone and double-clicked away from Google Maps and back into a Soundcloud playlist. “It’s not far now,” the eighteen year old behind the wheel shouted, his eyes cocked upward towards the yellow traffic light ahead.
The Jeep whizzed through the intersection and I glanced over my shoulder at the two boys sitting second row. One’s eyes were turned down towards his iPhone as his right-hand’s thumb practiced the all-too-familiar swipe across image after image, face after face. From the passenger seat, I couldn’t make out any detail, but it was an easy guess what app he was staring at. “Got any matches?” I asked, dimming the stereo’s volume with my own iPhone in my lap.
“Yeah, a few I’ve been sitting on, some messages, gonna wait to respond,” the boy replied, not looking up.
“What do they say?” I asked.
“I dunno, can’t open ‘em for at least another thirty minutes,” he called back, his eyes never leaving the 4.7” screen and his thumb still mechanically swiping throughout our exchange.
I rolled my eyes and turned to the other boy sitting directly behind me, pulling on my seatbelt to come loose. He was staring out the window, clearly thinking over something. In his hands he held a crumpled pile of cash; a twenty, a few tens, and a crinkled mass of ones.
“How much we got?” I called in his direction. He didn’t move.
“Yo!” The Tinder boy yelled towards him, still not looking up from his phone.
“Oh! Uhh…” His gaze averted from the window and turned towards the money in his hands.
“Forty-seven. So with you at least fifty. What do you wanna get?” he asked, finally turning towards me.
Behind the wheel our driver, a tall boy six months my elder, chimed in. “Get two thirties,” he called, and I turned back to moneyhands and shrugged.
“We could,” I said.
“We could,” he repeated with a simultaneous nod and shrug.
“Or we could get a bottle of Henny,” the Tinder boy said, his head still trained downward, entranced by his cell phone. The boy with the cash alongside him snatched his phone away and pretended to throw it out the open window.
“No!” he cried, “That girl just super-liked me!”
“We’re not getting Henny unless you’re paying–”
“–and we know that’s not happening,” the driver completed.
“So let’s be practical. Like twenty people, maybe, that’s three brews a piece, plus some money left over to get us something actually drinkable. We could get a handle, or a nice six…”
“I’m feeling shots tonight,” the tall boy called from the driver’s seat. We all shrugged and nodded.
“Let’s get a fifth of something then,” the Hennessy advocate said.
“What’s a fifth again?”
“The one that’s not a handle.”
“A fifth of a handle? That’s nothing–”
“No! A fifth of… a fifth of alcohol!”
“Like a Svedka bottle,” I offered.
“Well why didn’t you just say that!”
The car slowed and pulled up next to a rusting Chevy Impala. “Looks like we gotta parallel it,” my friend called from the driver’s seat, sounding less than hopeful.
“Fuck,” the Tinder boy said.
“You run in, I don’t have an ID anyway,” the tall boy decided, gesturing to me.
“Where you live again bro?” the boy behind me asked, grinning and passing me the cash. I climbed out of the car, turned to him, shook my head, and recited the address printed on my fake ID. He nodded approvingly and I slammed the door shut with a smile.

-     -     -

“It’s not really blonde, though,” she said, pulling at her hair as if to take it off to show me. I smiled and unconvincingly shrugged.
“Whatever you say,” I said. Her lips twisted into a smile and she grabbed my hand, pulling at the e-cigarette clenched in its palm.
We were sitting on a field across from the school where we’d all had to gather every day just months before. Next to us a boy ignored the exchange over the Juul and raised a hypothetical.
“Your sister becomes a tree but to bring her back you have to kill your parents,” he said, seemingly out of the blue.
“What?” the girl and I said in unison.
“Actually nah, your parents die, you don’t have to kill them.” He paused and we stared at him for a second. He gestured impatiently. “What would you do?”
We all exchanged quizzical glances. “She’s got her whole life ahead of her,” I offered. “Parents had their chance.”
“Might not be that bad being a tree,” the girl said, blowing out vape smoke through her nose. I smiled.
It was a hot summer afternoon and we were sitting in a small circle in the shade along the side of the field. Littered between us were several iPhones, wallets, a guitar in a zipped nylon gig bag, a Spikeball net, and three empty Starbucks water cups. I picked up one of the plastic cups. “Do you think it’s really that good? Better than normal tap water?”
“I think it’s all psychological…” the boy answered, looking inquisitively towards the sun and wiping sweat from his forehead. “You go into Starbucks and get treated like a normal customer, you give them your name, it’s a nice cup, you can even get one of those sleeve things, it’s ice cold, but it’s just water and you don’t have to spend any money. Of course it’s gonna taste good.”
“Don’t they have some kind of special filter?”
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Hey–” the girl said, “–is that…” She pointed across the street that ran alongside the field to a figure walking down the sidewalk, walking slowly with his head angled downward towards his phone. We all squinted to try to make out his face in the bright sunlight.
She yelled the boy’s name and sure enough he looked up, gestured to us in some mix of a wave and a salute, then looked left and right and crossed the street towards us. He climbed over the cast iron fence, ignoring the opening in it twenty feet away, and sat down next to us under the tree.
“What’s good guys,” he said, in more of a statement than an ask. We all responded with mixed mumbles and head nods, and asked him what he’d been up to, where he was off to, how he’d been.
“Wasn’t going anywhere really,” he answered, “just figured I’d walk around and see if I see anyone, see what’s up.” The girl passed him the vape and he nodded a thank you and sucked into it for a few moments.
“Ya’ll get Starbucks water?” he asked, surveying the mess around our shaded area. “That shit smacks.”

-     -     -

We’d been there for at least an hour before the cops came. They weren’t really cops, just campus security, but with their uniforms and badges and flashing lights they damn well looked like police. And to us, it made no difference. We weren’t supposed to be there. They knew what kids did on those fields at night.
I was sitting next to a boy I’d known for a few years just from both of us being around, through mutual friends and shared plans. We hadn’t gone to school together, lived a few miles away (a lot for our tiny city), and on paper had little in common. But countless nights of sniffing out house parties, fiending on cheap local food, and trespassing on the university’s property had aligned our similar down-for-anything mentalities. He was younger than me but had lived just as much, if not more.
That night the two of us had been sitting on the roof of a small field house in the middle of the university’s main sports complex, drinking beers and chatting while a few other boys passed around a blunt. The others had all left, citing pesky high school curfews, leaving just the two of us to enjoy the view of soccer fields and the houses and street lamps that lined them. It was almost midnight.
He reached behind him and brought out a small nylon pouch, opening it with care to remove a thin white rolling paper and a handful of feathery tobacco. He curled the paper around the small mound precisely and pinched it into a thin cylinder, licking it and reaching into his pocket for a lighter in one fluid motion.
“No filter?” I asked, watching intently.
He shook his head with a wide smile. “That’s the way I like,” he said.
He burned through the cigarette quickly, his hand quivering ever so slightly while he held it. We drained the last of our beers and started the walk back up the path, tossing the bottles in one of the university’s solar powered trash compactors.
He was midway through a feverish explanation of democratic socialism and why it mattered to vote when I spotted something in the distance and interrupted with an abrupt “Blue lights.” We both stopped and stared down the path. In the parking lot, about forty yards away, three campus police Ford Explorers had pulled up, lights flashing, and we could just make out two black-uniformed men climbing out of the closest one.
Our eyes still staring at the lights ahead, the two of us exchanged words quickly.
“Wall. Back corner soccer field. It’s lowest there.”
“Let’s do it.”
We spun around and sprinted back down the path, through a football end zone and past a baseball diamond, our hands gripping the steel trucks of our skateboards, backpacks swinging. Finally we reached the soccer field tucked into the rear of the complex. We weaved through an opening in its chain link fence and stopped at the stone wall that walled off the elevated complex from the rest of the city. It might’ve been a fifteen foot drop in most parts, but thanks to broken sidewalk here it dipped to just nine or ten. We tossed our boards down and hurled ourselves over the stone, raced across the street, then stopped to catch our breath on the opposite sidewalk, no longer in the sports complex.
I turned to him and smiled. “How’s it feel to be a law-abiding citizen?” With a smirk, he simply nodded and we began to walk slowly and casually back up the hill towards our homes.

-     -     -

“Ain’t Tyler wear these?” my friend asked, lifting up a pair of low-cut pastel-colored Vans. “In that video? With A$AP?”
“Probably,” I responded without looking up, inspecting the soles on a pair of burgundy high tops.
We walked in opposite directions along the men’s shoe wall until we both reached its ends, and reunited in middle once again looking at the Vans. “I feel like I always get the same shit,” he said, picking up a pair of black canvas Old Skools.
“Didn’t you just get a pair?” I asked.
“A few months ago, yeah, but they’re beat now too. Look at these…” he said, rotating the shoe in front of him. They were exactly the same as the pair he wore almost every day, minus the holes and worn-down outsole. “Classics.”
“‘Sup with yours?”
“They’ve got the Vans hole.” He gestured to the spot on the left toe that characteristically tore open on every pair of skated Vans.
I nodded. “That’ll do it.”
“The front is opening too, think from skidding the toe. Should really skate with my other ones.”
“Might as well get another pair. One to keep clean,” I said.
“Not that much too,” he added, pointing at the price tag on the shelf. We’d both gone through sneakerhead phases and had spent plenty of money on shoes in our day. A pair of the classic canvas skate shoes seemed like a bargain.
“Should I check eBay?” he asked.
“If you want, probably not much better though,” I answered. “Support local businesses, right?” I said with a chuckle.
He nodded and signaled to an employee.

-     -     -

“And then what?” I asked.
She sipped her coffee. “I’m going to marry rich,” she said.
I raised my eyes and started to laugh but then stopped, realizing she was serious.
“That’s the plan?” I asked, somewhat stunned.
“Well, I’m in the place to do it,” she offered, as if it were her chances of success that had preoccupied me. She attended a top Ivy League school.
I used my straw to poke at the ice cubes in my drink, a near-empty iced tea.
“What’s wrong with that?” she asked, reading the disappointment across my face. We were sitting in our favorite cafe, high school friends talking for the first time since completing our freshman year of college. Sharing summer plans of jobs and internships, the focus had turned to the future. There was talk of dream careers, LinkedIn, and the need to finally build a real résumé. In my head I was remembering the girl who had once told me she only smoked cigarettes for the aesthetic.
“I’ve realized I need money for my lifestyle!” she continued. “I like to travel, to wear nice clothes, you know…”
I looked at her for a moment and sighed. We’d just spent several minutes talking about the sweater she’d thrifted. I suddenly felt uncomfortable in my eBay-auction Dior.
I realized we’d never again kick a soccer ball around late at night or sneak through a hotel lobby to go for a swim. Her arms were folded tightly, and I couldn’t see her hands that I’d once pulled up from a fire escape onto a private rooftop overlooking our high school.
She took out her phone and began prodding at the keyboard, organizing her ride home I assumed. She didn’t live in the city, and being outside walking distance had always added an air of responsibility to her weekend planning. Getting together with friends for spur-of-the-moment ideas was all I’d ever known.
I picked up my bike helmet and shook my head. It was all wrong. This wasn’t what life was supposed to be.

-     -     -

The boy was trying, and failing, to ollie over a rock. The rest of us were standing in the parking lot outside his apartment and leaning on a car, watching him go. It was the July after our freshman year of college, and we were the stragglers who had come home to celebrate one last summer before signing our lives away with internships and work.
He gave it a couple more tries, picking up the skateboard and walking purposefully back to the side of the building, setting it down, giving it one hard push in the rock’s direction, and then stomping the tail as soon as he got close. But he didn’t make it, the board usually skimming the top of the stone or shooting out to the side or not popping up at all. He shrugged and left the board rolling down the lot’s slight incline and joined us next to the car.
“So what’s moves?” he asked, looking back and forth between the three of us who’d been watching his attempts.
“Food?” the one closest to me offered, and there was a chorus of slight nods and shrugs in return.
“Where at?”
“We could go to the hill,” one said, referring to the city’s Italian section, a cluster of mostly high end restaurants and markets.
“Not really tryna…” someone responded, and without saying so we knew he was advocating for the conservation of money.
This was met with a “Yeah…” and a “Hmm…”
“Back to the East?” one boy offered. He meant the East Side, where most of us lived. The apartment we were outside was located in a more affordable area on the West Side.
“Kind of a force…”
“Yeah that’s a hike.”
“Order pizza,” the one closest to the skateboarder suggested.
“From where?”
“Ronzio!”
“Ronzio’s gross.”
There were nods in agreement. Ronzio’s was not the most popular pizza chain.
“Bro the crust there goes crazy–”
“Man, my middle school had Ronzio’s every week. Ronzio fridays. Three years bro, every friday. Ronzio’s is nasty.”
“That sounds amazing,” the Ronzio boy said.
“Used to use a paper towel to wipe off the grease–”
The skateboarder, who’d been silent up until this point, looked frustrated and rolled his eyes. “We should wait anyway if we’re gonna smoke,” he interrupted.
“Yeah, smoke first,” one boy said.
“I got ‘woods.” He removed a package of Backwoods from a zippered pouch hanging over his shoulder and stared down at them, perhaps reading the surgeon general warning for the hundredth time.
There was a series of slight awkward nods. “Grinder,” the Ronzio boy said with another nod, pulling a neon-colored metal cylinder seemingly out of nowhere.
“Ya’ll got bud?”
“I got bud.”
“I can throw bud.”
“Yo can I Venmo?”
The skateboarder nodded. “I’ve still got almost half an O, you can Venmo.”
“Bet.”
Everyone stepped away from the car and walked back towards the apartment.

-     -     -

I waited, packed, and listened to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Every few minutes I checked my phone then tossed it across the room. The ringer was on and I knew I wouldn’t miss her text, so I began to feel the urge to throw it before even looking at the screen. I’d found another screen protector while packing and would replace the cracked one tomorrow.
I tried to imagine what her final text would be, if there would be one, if I’d get it too late at night or in the morning after I’d left for college or a few days from now. Would I play it cool, act like I understood what she was thinking? Would I ignore it altogether? Would I lash out at her, throw away the calm demeanor of the past two months and channel everything I was really thinking into words? The clock ticked on and there was still no text.
Maybe her phone had died, maybe she’d ring the doorbell any minute now like the old days. Maybe her family had gotten stuck on the road and actually hadn’t gotten home four and a half hours ago as scheduled, maybe there had been an accident, god forbid. They could all be sitting at a rest stop somewhere, trying to figure out what to do next, her standing there by the road, no, she’d be on her phone, she’d tell me, text me, I’d respond immediately–
My phone buzzed but it was only a low battery warning. It had been at full charge at dinner just a few hours ago. I thought back to the concerts, the nights out with friends, the movies together, the hours of staying up late with our bedrooms lit up by only each other’s messages...
Should I double-text? Would it make any difference? I remembered a friend of mine laying down the set-in-stone rule to never text a girl while waiting for––
Her name pops up on the top of my screen. I click, type, and send a response before fully processing what I'm reading. But it is not an “otw” or “are you home?” and it feels like bullshit and I know right then that it's over. Suddenly I want to get out of the city and get the summer over with, to stress over classwork again and wear coats in the cold, to stand summer up and leave it waiting for next year like a girl who after everything doesn't respond to your texts on your last night home.
I close my computer and walk out of my house, grabbing the last beer left in my stash and jumping onto my bike, racing past every spot and avenue while assuring myself I'm not looking for her, trying not to imagine what I would say if I skidded into a crosswalk and saw her there. But you never run into the people you're looking for, only everyone else, and eventually I end up back at home wishing I was drunk or at least less alone. I finish packing and in the morning I am gone.

-     -     -

The park sat on a terrace and we looked out into the city, looked out into the downtown lights. The skyline was small but perfect. You could see it all from there. It was where everyone went to smoke.
I’d spent so many nights standing around or sitting on benches in that park, talking with friends while shivering through scarves and on hot days lounging in the sun. There was always talk of a new skyscraper, new developments that would change the view. “Providence is on the come-up,” the mayor always said, or something like that. But it was fine the way it was, and there was always a part of us that was sad to leave.
For every college vacation we would come back and do the same things. We’d walk down Thayer Street, shoot pool at Brown University, head out to the fields at night and maybe get chased out by campus police. We loved it, it was home.
Sometimes we’d go downtown riding bikes, cruising past Ken’s Ramen and Lupo’s, looking up at the veranda to see what shows we’d miss once back at school. We’d check out the new restaurants but always return to the old for a slice or a burrito, shaking our heads in awe of the food we’d all grown up on. “You can’t get tacos like this,” someone would say, about their new school, cursing their dining hall, yet to find their new local college spots. In a way we didn’t want to.
Groups would migrate from one house to another, playing video games and sipping Coronas topped with Whole Foods limes. Friends drifted in and out like breaths of smoke to go grab food and for meetups or to roll one. We’d share college stories but always return to the old ones, high school tales of the time so-and-so eurostepped the cops, the time intoxication rode copilot on a skateboard and knees were skinned. Aimlessly everyone wondered aloud “What’s moves,” what to do next, but in good company it didn’t matter. There was always another friend to run into on the street, another number to call or Facetime.
Loading into cars we’d pass the aux cord and scan Soundcloud for the perfect song to play. Someone might Shazam discreetly or give props to the front-seat DJ where they were due. A new album would last for a few days before the rest of the world caught on and we’d have to find the next big thing to listen to.
Summers and winter breaks tapered out inevitably and move-in dates would approach and we’d all trade handshakes, leading into a hug with eye contact and a nod. You never know when it’ll be the last time, but for the moment it was fine, everything was fine.

dedicated to all my friends whom I love dearly

© 2018