Gay Saturday
“Seeing Kal shortly,” I texted my friend Brock. “You think he’ll honor me by fucking my dead body before dismembering it?”
It was a running gag I’d started after Brock had worked alongside Kal at a college football game and inquired with unabashed befuddlement about how I’d formed a friendship with the enigmatic man, a guy who judged quietly and spoke rarely. On occasions when he did have something to say, his volume knob typically hovered around the ASMR erogenous zone, another co-worker once deriding Kal for his complementary “soft features,” which Kal, a lean guy adorned in a crew cut, countered with a biting assertion that the instigator’s older sister was more manly than he’d ever be, shattering the wise-ass’s ego without leaving his desk. Brock guessed, maybe in jest, that Kal had likely murdered several people, his unnerving demeanor around others secretly betraying a different desire: an indomitable need to indulge in shit talk with a trusted cohort. Seems like nobody working that football game could match my snarky legacy.
Kal and I met in a training class at a StubHub call center a few miles from the airport, a green-walled building where it didn’t take long to hit it off by realizing we listened to a lot of the same indie rock bands and delighted in eviscerating everyone around us, the only two guys the specific rapport requires, any interloper bound to inject an unacceptable contrarian take in direct violation of an arrangement already made with pure, unleaded antagonism. Our trainer, an affable, chain-smoking gay man from Texas, permitted us more ten-minute breaks than were sensible so he could expeditiously inhale Marlboro Lights by lighting his second one with the dissipating cherry of the first, Kal and I tailing him outside and standing enough feet away from our classmates to viciously tear them down at length with vigor, an hourly tradition that persisted unabated for the three-plus years we worked together.
One co-worker who never missed a gratis bagel in the break room on Wednesdays was dubbed The Human Garbage Disposal. Kal, who had worked for the company previously, dogged another harmless guy who sported dreadlocks and wore Grateful Dead tee shirts by declaring that the man’s favorite bands before his metamorphosis were Journey and Dispatch, both acts’ lack of lysergic legitimacy proof of the man’s now dubious dignity, an outright denial of the idea that people can change. An immature girl in her early twenties known for brashly lashing out prompted a distant witness to come by and ask what her problem was. “She’s from South Dakota,” was Kal’s rejoinder. But no one got backstabbed more than our trio of bosses: one for disappearing during crises to volunteer at his family’s local ice cream shoppe instead (where he ate enough scoops that he had to constantly puff out his shirt like a self-conscious man exiting a swimming pool embarrassed by the fabric clinging to his gut); another for his inability to begin a sentence without a dumbfounded look succeeded by an extended pause or stammer; and the third for his Six Sigma black belt, a business leadership certification feeding our assumption that he would fix broken tech issues by adorning a dogi when karate chopping the company’s servers, a facile insult that always hit the spot. Kal and I worked hard but believed few people valued our dedication, a shared conviction to not cut corners, the two of us regularly verging on a breaking point while inhaling nicotine and debating if we should stop caring altogether, an act of betrayal that would’ve given us more time to focus on our bitchiness, like when I told one supervisor who said “What?” interminably: “Before I ask this question, do you need my grandfather’s old hearing aids? You are NOT going to say ‘What?’ to me this time.” She got the message. She also disliked me and still said, “What?” because she was too unfocused to comprehend the issue at hand, her marble-mouthed replies mimicking the detritus clogging her ears.
During our three weeks in training, Kal—his name not suffixed with a “vin” or a “bert” or an “orie”—and I made a pair of pacts: to alternate who drove each week when carpooling to the office (we lived two miles apart) and to hang out after our shifts finished at 11 p.m. each Sunday. It was during a peak televisual summer when new episodes of Breaking Bad and Curb Your Enthusiasm aired on the same night. We’d arrive at my house, smoke weed, and then drink potent bottles of beer, breaking for cigarettes whenever one of us stood up and flashed his lighter. Kal christened the weekly hang Gay Sunday, the two of us rarely seen apart all day transitioning to the second half of the doubleheader on my couch where we watched shows so good that they were uncriticizable, our hostility mercifully cached like the bowl we’d just smoked. A large black spider on my deck would sometimes contribute to the Gay Sunday festivities, Kal snagging moths by the nearby light and flinging them into the web to film the forthcoming homicidal ritual with buzzed glee, a grisly window into his soul that Brock would caution you to back away from and run.
“Gay Sunday has caused a very Hungover Monday,” Kal texted me in the aftermath of a night when we’d stayed up later than usual. Upon arriving home from work, Sue and my mother were drinking champagne in the kitchen, Sue surprising my mother on her birthday with balloons, flowers, and scorpion bowls at a sushi dinner. When the three of us stepped outside to smoke cigarettes and spider-watch, Sue nagged us from opposite the screen door to quit, my mother yelling back, “It’s three to one! You should start smoking!” Kal endured the nonsense for an hour prior to following me to bring Sue home and helping me convince my mother to go to bed. The prize was worth it when we took a fifteen-minute break to ridicule them for how sloppy they’d been, the two most significant people in my life ripped apart with ease in the company of my new partner in contempt, a guy who ensured he got in his digs on me intermittently, alleging that he could fashion a gorilla mask with my neck and back hair and mockingly cajoled me to leave Sue for one of the chatty, corpulent supervisors who stopped by my desk chewing gum and twirling her ponytail as Kal took mental notes to cite when needling me—but mostly her, since there was far more of her—during our next smoke break.
One time, our co-worker Geoff discovered that he and Kal had hooked up with the same girl. Geoff, much like Kal and me, enjoyed stirring up shit—he would tell me Kal had “child-bearing hips”—and when taking his daily stroll by the area where we sat, he said, “Hey, Kal! Friday told me that we’re Eskimo brothers!”
“What do you mean?” Kal asked in confusion.
“We entered the same igloo, brah.”
“Is that like saying we’re ‘weiner cousins’?”
“Maybe where you come from, but I’ll take it anyway, Doggins. Pound it.”
Now bonded, the indigenous boys subsequently bumped fists to celebrate their bygone ejaculatory efforts, whereas if it were Kal and I honoring the same circumstances, we probably would’ve first expressed contempt for the girl’s chipped nail polish and labeled her fake eyelashes cumbrellas. Kal, who initially nicknamed me Cartwright in deference to the character on Bonanza, had begun referring to me as Doggins, which Geoff appreciated so much that he and I began referring to one another by the same nickname, the ending s sourced with a z by yours truly. And it was literally sourcing that Kal and I did each day: orders where the original ticket seller defaulted on a sale were sent to a queue for our department to fix, meaning to source comparable tickets from the company website and contact the ticket buyer. Many orders were handled with ease—few customers said no to better seats—but other times there were only downgrades to offer, or even worse, nothing at all. Since we worked shifts later in the day, some of our negligent co-workers would let these problematic orders linger, a passive aggressive (and cowardly) signal that Kal and I should dig in and do the dirty work, calling people who soon became enraged by our company’s misleading, legalese-drenched guarantee promising upgrades, one we’d make an exception to unapologetically defend if the customer reacted like an insufferable asshole.
When Kal called customers, he would inevitably get their voicemail, a trick he learned from one of the managers we disparaged, the guy explaining that if a person’s cell phone received two calls simultaneously, the second one would immediately be bypassed, a brilliant kamikaze work-around. Kal would call customers by first dialing them on his cell phone with his number blocked, then call from the recorded company line to leave a voicemail in a hushed tone detailing how the order would be cancelled, a refund issued, and a token coupon applied to the person’s account for the inconvenience, the return escalation call resolved by our customer service team while he refreshed the order to read internal notes about the crisis’s predictably heated fallout, a strategy similar to poking a bear with a stick then hiding in a tree while giddily witnessing it maul a hapless family. He delayed telling me about his ploy until I’d moved on to work for a ticket broker, and for years afterward I felt cheated because our pact to defuse the worst orders, absorb the blows, and keep carping in their wake was supposed to be a joint cause, his revelation violating our unified integrity, especially given my commitment was what spawned our signature Gay Weekend.
Each quarter, StubHub held a contest entitled “Champion of the Fans,” a company-wide honorific voted on by employees to commend one person whose work rose above to benefit customers, an award generally won by higher-ups and overseas technology innovators. During a mandatory conference call in January 2014, our COO announced that the newest winner was…me! (I just took a customary bow while fanning an imaginary ticket stub.) Numerous co-workers had essentially stuffed the ballot, a noteworthy majority applauding my inclination to embrace awful issues, willfully providing customers my personal work email address and phone number if they wanted to reach me directly no matter the time of day. It was the most important job of my life and a huge source of my esteem. The internal notes I stamped on orders were marked by their grammatical perfection and carefully chosen implementation of confounding verbiage, people glimpsing my name beneath a dense paragraph describing the issue at hand aware that I would be handling it until its conclusion with a preference that they not overstep, the tactic of a customer service bounty hunter, my continued pride the true bounty.
Winning the award granted me two tickets to any event I wished to attend along with gratis airfare and three nights at a nice hotel. Nine months later, Kal and I went to the Austin City Limits music festival with VIP passes, which allowed us to drink vodka nonstop each day at the consistently eighty-degree, sun-splattered park where the concerts took place. We saw one of the last shows Outkast ever played, Lana Del Rey segueing into Eminem on the second day, and the hometown act Spoon—a band we both loved enough to go see again the next summer—to wrap up the weekend. Despite lacking any familiar faces to roast, we did extensive people watching and debased as many Texans and travelers as possible during the festival, one that would be followed by me giving two-weeks’ notice on my first day back in the office.
A pair of highlights occurred outside the park, though, as I expensed tickets to a University of Texas football game mainly to say I’d been to the stadium where they played, a mammoth field home to our seats in the upper level endzone directly facing a gorgeous view decorated by a limpid sky perched above the campus and downtown in the distance. We took a rickshaw ride back to our hotel, Kal and I knocking knees a few times as the eager peddler zipped down a hill and around a few tight corners while a light wind pecked our faces, a scene many maligned former co-workers might now retroactively suggest hinted at the type of tension pervading Call Me by Your Name. Although the food and drinks were bottomless (“Behave!”), we purchased lime cucumber-flavored Gatorade to mix with the extra vodka we stored in our hotel room, the libations loosening me up and making me famished in the wake of Eminem’s set to end night two.
While we stood in line at a burger eatery near out hotel, a yuppie couple from Connecticut were beside us, the uppity lady’s sweater tied daintily around her neck as she mentioned her excitement to see Pearl Jam, my most hated band, the ensuing night. A few minutes after abrading her to an uncomfortable degree—Kal and I have forgotten the specifics, certainly because the woman wasn’t a co-worker, but he recollected how her husband was at his boiling point from the nonstop condescension, the large crowd surrounding us surely saving me from an ugly incident that could’ve been resumed later back on our home turf in New England—we left with our food to return to our hotel. Unwilling to make it that easy on him, I decided to lie down in one lane of the busy road blocked by traffic cones, Kal using his strength to pull my dead weight back onto the sidewalk as a cop walked by but let us go without incident, my insatiable need to destroy a time celebrating my crowning achievement at the company that gifted us the experience extinguished by being the one guy who was spared Kal’s enmity. Well, sort of: I passed out in the desk chair in our room, Kal too unforgiving to not throw his unwanted pickles and cold french fries at me until he got bored, alerting me in the morning that I’d spilled the ones seen on the carpet to compel me to pick them up, waiting until the afternoon to deliver the real story, including his fascination with how my neck hadn’t relinquished support of my head, as we resumed vilifying concertgoers in Pearl Jam gear while ordering vodka and seltzer refills at the VIP tent.
The trip ended at a bar called Bikinis, a noisy dive where each server, the majority of them thin and ours unreasonably pallid, wore the garment in the establishment’s name accompanied by less revealing footwear, a Mensa-level yin and yang in a city enamored with proclaiming its allegiance to weirdness. Where would our grouchiness land us this time? We were too out of our element, mainly observing the implantless breasts and tolerating our pub food, nonetheless pondering if the line cooks worked without shirts on, chest hairs interlaced with the lettuce for garnish. Countless people implored us to inspect one bridge by our hotel famous for its bats, a city staple, hundreds of them spotted on our final walk back to our temporary home. Unfortunately, they didn’t do much. But you know what they say? Bats: maybe you’ll fare better.
I worked as diligently as I had all along during my farewell fortnight at the Call Center of Excellence, Kal and I pledging to keep in touch. We would go see a few concerts, Sue and I attended his wedding, and he would text me about his upcoming baby shower at a fire station, the cost to host it there so inexpensive that he and his wife couldn’t say no, but I told him I couldn’t make it while questioning why he thought I’d show up for anything baby-related even if my calendar was clear. Kal would become the target of jocose manslaughter references and the guy who came to mind whenever my friend Rick said we were “touching swords,” the homoeroticism of male friendships a tree of life for absurd laughs.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
In advance of my book reading last fall, I sent an email inviting friends current and old, which got a response from Kal. He suspected that I’d been ignoring his texts for months unaware that I’d replaced my old phone number. We’d engage in back-and-forths now and again, telling old tales and ripping apart the ticket industry, but they stalled out on each interaction. When I rebuked Kal’s flippant dependency on blowing off select things I typed, he acknowledged his poor texting manner, a cue for me to recommend meeting in person, the dynamic where we’d always done our finest work. Due to our living an hour apart from one another, I told Kal about my fondness for a Bosnian restaurant in Hartford, him hesitant due to his conservative palate until I sent a link to their menu, also home to classic Italian fare, and we agreed to a rare Saturday meeting.
As I backed out of my driveway, Kal texted me, “I’m gonna be late, man. Clara is still at the grocery store. I guess some sauce jar smashed and a piece went in her eye. They’re filling out an incident report.”
I immediately called him to confirm she was okay, insisting we could postpone, but Kal was adamant we get together. As I arrived, the waitress seemed baffled by my, “How’ve you been?” until I removed my hat, my bald dome well known in the eatery. Kal arrived and ignored my extended hand to give me a hug, removing the red snowboarding jacket he’d routinely worn into the old office, no longer storing a pack of American Spirits in the chest pocket.
“Last time I was here, we were discussing the European coastline when I said, ‘Present company excluded, of course, but Albanian women are the most beautiful women on earth.’ Then, I mentioned Dua Lipa, who is the finest woman in the world, to make my point. When I got back from the pisser, they played her music until we left. The two waitresses here are awesome.”
One of them disclosed that they had a strawberry-flavored regional drink, my cue to broadcast how much I liked anything with strawberry and suck down a tiny blue bottle of the tasty stuff. Kal ordered a seltzer to keep his tap water company, later pouring the contents of the smaller glass into the larger glass multiple times as we consumed endless refills while recapping past sources of our loathing until he brought up one classic moment.
“Remember when that bus hit us in Boston on our way to a show?”
“Dude, I was telling someone about that recently!”
“The driver didn’t even acknowledge it!”
“Well, it did pull over for three seconds, but there was no way for me to park and talk to the driver, so it just went on its route. At least it only scraped the side and didn’t do any other damage.”
“But then we pulled into Rat Alley!”
“Oh fuck, that’s right!” I said while laughing. “Was that before Father John Misty?” I stopped for a beat. “It was. We were going to the Paradise, I took a wrong turn, and then…”
“A thousand rats scampered away!”
At least they hadn’t been on that same street where I abandoned my faculties in Austin. There was chatter about Kal fucking with a co-worker by deactivating all the ticket listings for one event when the guy was fixing an order, a mildly risky move that had me howling on the inside and repeatedly messaging Kal during the act, assured that the guy would figure it out, but of course he failed to and the joy ebbed, an apt subtitle for corporate life. There was another time when I persuaded Mark, the guy most welcome to temporarily partake in our hate fest and make it a limited time only power trio, that Kal had contracted a rare disease simply known as “bone disorder,” telling Mark we didn’t know how long Kal had left, a ploy I got away with concocting while neglecting my work for an hour because nobody in charge was in the building to reprimand me, leading to our analysis about the lack of leadership after 5 p.m. and on weekends, when we were trusted to fix complicated orders and rely solely on our communal expertise and instincts if questions arose. I told Kal how much I missed bonding with others to work as a team, that kind of mission nonexistent at our homes each day as Kal responded that he periodically began his shifts in his boxer shorts, a reveal that could’ve been testing our prevailing tolerance for homoeroticism.
“You like being a dad?” I asked him.
“Yeah, I love it.”
“What are their names again?”
“We named our oldest Kal,” he said before dramatically pausing for several seconds. “After me, of course.”
“No shit? You don’t say!” I replied while somehow avoiding a cry-laughter flash flood.
“We actually didn’t pick a name. Then, in the hospital, we had no idea what to choose, so we settled on it but gave him a different middle name so he wouldn’t be a Junior. It was a whole thing.”
“So, he’s actually Kal the Second?”
“I guess.”
An interesting approach to honoring the first of the two most important creations of his life, but it signified how Kal hadn’t changed much, not one to take himself too seriously, but merely covet the respect he felt he deserved. He showed me pictures of the house he and Clara had purchased in late August, the hardwood floors on display a borderline aphrodisiac for my ogling eyes as both waitresses arrived to set down our dinner plates, Kal’s pieces of chicken parmigiana large enough to barely fit inside a map of the former Yugoslavian republics if they were drawn to scale. One of the two girls had mocked my choice, chicken piccata, by recalling how I’d deemed it “banquet food” when asking about the non-Bosnian offerings on the menu during my previous visit, but the plate included sun-dried tomatoes in addition to the capers and heaping chunks of garlic in lemon sauce, a favorite dish of mine that I used to prepare frequently prior to no longer cooking meat in my home. In a shock to myself, I kept a prized culinary factoid at bay, often eager to notify people that capers are pickled flower buds, usually capturing a split second of their interest, which, in my defense, is at least more stimulating than staring at bats.
Unsurprising topics arose—feelings about our current ticketing gigs, speculative selling nightmares, overall pricing thresholds, industry “improvements” we frowned upon, and various brokers like Mikey Eyebrows (aka Mikey Will Call) forever ripe for callbacks and potshots—as we largely skirted around being too caustic, a sign of maturity or an indication that our next get-together would feature severe overcompensation when disseminating our pent up abhorrence of all things work-related. In attempting to determine when we’d last seen one another, we later verified that it was our third Spoon concert seven years ago.
“I don’t think I’ve been to more than one show since that,” Kal said. “We gotta hit one up.”
“I am down, man. You like Cass McCombs, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you been to that little room in Hamden?”
“We saw Todd Barry there.”
“That’s right! With Sue and Clara. Let’s go in March. Be right back, I gotta piss.”
I sent Kal a link to the ticketing site then applied hand sanitizer, another item I associated with him because he squirted an unscented blob of it to neuter the stench of each cigarette he smoked. The lonely vase of white flowers by the urinal earned a purposefully goofy selfie in the bathroom mirror, one I’d later post on Instagram with a trademark limerick, Kal in disbelief that I hadn’t disavowed using social media, a reminder of how when I’d asked him fourteen years prior if he was on Facebook, he replied, “No, I’m too busy fucking my girlfriend.” We walked outside and he showed me his Subaru, a vehicle beloved in the lesbian community, commenting on the ding by the front left headlight.
“I hit a street sign. Thankfully, it didn’t do much damage aside from cracking the sunroof, but I put tape around that, as you can see.”
“Better than being hit by a bus.”
We fist bumped goodbye. Sitting in my car, I remembered recently asking Kal if I had told him that Brock thought he was a serial killer, yielding a blasé response: “You might have, not sure.”
“You know who answers that way?” I texted Brock. “A serial killer.”
Did Kal really hit a drifter? Was this his way of casually substantiating my worst fears? In his defense, I bet he could avoid filing an insurance claim should Clara need a glass eye, prying one from the carcass of a client he put on ice outside an ophthalmologist’s office after hours. Either way, I’d misunderstood why he slapped the word Gay before the day of the week, Kal’s indignation turning to frivolity when in the company of one of his biggest fans. As for why we’re both obsessed with a band named Spoon, however….