Less Than Hero Read online

  But I’m not interested in sharing her pitch. One, I’m not a performer. And two, this isn’t a great place to panhandle. Instead I just wait to see if she’s going to acknowledge my presence. But she doesn’t show any indication that I’m standing directly in front of her. Not a flinch or a twitch or a blink. Her lips don’t move and she doesn’t look at me. She’s a statue made of flesh and white paint and seafoam-green silk.

  I reach into my wallet and pull out a dollar and drop it into her yellow donation box and let her go through her routine because I know that’s what she has to do; then I hold out my hand to receive my pixie dust as she offers a smile and leans down toward me.

  “I’ll be done at seven,” she whispers as she sprinkles the pixie dust into my palm and blows the rest into my face. “Can you pick up some organic spinach on your way home?”

  Sophie and I live in a one-bedroom, fifth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side across from Seward Park. We’re just a few blocks from the Tenement Museum and right around the corner from the Doughnut Plant, the best doughnuts in Manhattan.

  That’s a personal endorsement, not a statement of fact.

  I don’t get to frequent the Doughnut Plant as often as I’d like because Sophie encourages me to live a food lifestyle that minimizes the consumption of cooked oils, wheat gluten, and processed sugars. I counter that the Doughnut Plant uses all-natural ingredients, but I tend to lose those arguments more often than not, which pretty much screws me on my doughnut fetish.

  “Can you pass the spinach, please?” Sophie asks.

  We’re eating a dinner of soy-marinated baked tofu with brown rice and fresh organic spinach. On the linoleum floor next to us, Sophie’s seven-year-old cat, Vegan, laps up a bowl full of rice milk. Vegan only eats cat food made with organic animal products. He also doesn’t consume any dairy products, even if they’re made with non-GMO ingredients or come from cows that aren’t factory-farmed or injected with HGH. According to Sophie, this is a decision Vegan came to on his own.

  I tend to think Sophie has more than a little influence on Vegan’s diet, but even though we’ve lived together for the past five years, I still don’t feel it’s my place to question Sophie about her cat.

  I take another bite of tofu as Vegan looks up at me and lets out a meow, which to me sounds like Cat for I could really go for some prime rib.

  Or maybe I’m just projecting.

  When Sophie’s not a living statue in Central Park, she’s the night manager at the Westerly Natural Market, which offers a huge selection of nutritional supplements, organic produce, all-natural groceries, and environmentally friendly body-care products. She started out as a part-time clerk during college but quickly worked her way into a job as full-time manager.

  “So how are the boys?” Sophie asks as we continue to eat our organic, gluten-free, animal-friendly dinner.

  Sophie always refers to the guinea pigs as the boys, never individually by name. It’s like they’re all one person sharing the same body. Or some mythological creature like a Chimera or a Gorgon, with Vic and Charlie and Randy as different snakes weaving around my head.

  “Frank’s a little crankier than normal,” I say. “I think he’s going through menopause. And Randy’s been educating us on classic-rock-themed anal sex.”

  “I tried that once in college,” she says matter-of-factly. Like we’re talking about acupuncture. Or blowfish. “It wasn’t my thing. Would you like some more spinach?”

  I take another helping and wonder how anal sex has never come up before. Probably because I’ve never been interested in going in through the out door and Sophie never mentioned any interest in taking a trip to the dark side of the moon.

  But then I guess some relationships are like that. You come together due to the serendipitous circumstances of your life without thinking about what’s going to happen next, and before you know it, five years have gone by and you’re sharing an apartment and joint custody of a cat and discovering that your girlfriend had anal sex in college.

  When Sophie and I met, I was twenty-five and doing freelance marketing for a start-up company that had taken on too much debt and was hemorrhaging money. The owner blamed everyone and everything but his own bad decision-making and fired his entire marketing staff, which consisted of me.

  Since I’d been hired as an independent contractor, I couldn’t collect unemployment. So while I looked for another full-time marketing job, I got a minimum-wage gig as an office clerk. When my life savings started to get sucked down the fiscal drain of rent and monthly bills and Chinese takeout, I got another minimum-wage job working five nights a week making pizzas and I started eating Top Ramen for lunch and dinner. But you can’t make a living on minimum wage. At least not in Manhattan. Five years ago, even if you worked two full-time minimum-wage jobs at eighty hours a week, you’d barely earn a whopping $30,000 a year. Before taxes.

  The great lie about a college education in the infancy of the twenty-first century is that it guarantees a job that will allow you to live the lifestyle portrayed in all the beer commercials and car advertisements you see on TV. The reality is that you have a lifetime of student loans to pay back while you send out résumés and serve pizzas and wonder when your proverbial ship is going to pull into port to help you navigate your ocean of debt.

  So there I was, my savings dwindling down to pocket change, struggling to pay my bills even after canceling cable TV and my health insurance, trying to figure out how the hell I was going to make rent without having to get yet another part-time job or move to Washington Heights.

  It was near the end of October and I was walking through Central Park, watching the pigeons milling around on the ground in front of me, the first real autumn chill blowing off the Hudson and the leaves from the American elms turning yellow and falling to the ground like broken promises, when I looked up and saw Sophie standing perfectly still in front of the Olmsted Flower Bed, holding a rose in her left hand and wearing the faintest of smiles. As if she had a secret. As if she knew something I didn’t.

  I watched as people brought her to life with their donations and received their pixie dust, unable to look away, my gaze drawn to Sophie like a magnet to metal. Like a compass to north.

  After a few minutes I decided I didn’t have anything to lose but a hundred pennies. So I walked up to her, told her I’d gotten laid off, was working sixty hours a week and running out of money, about to lose my apartment, that I didn’t believe in God but I believed she’d appeared to me for some divine reason, and that I could use a little pixie dust to change my luck. Then I gave her a dollar and watched her go through her routine and I wished for a job with the Yankees or National Geographic when she blew her pixie dust over me.

  Before I could thank her, she leaned forward and whispered:

  “Do you like cats?”

  One month later, I moved in with her.

  “Would you like some more tofu?” Sophie asks.

  While Sophie has removed her wings and chiffon skirt, she’s still wearing her makeup and has pixie dust on her hands and in her hair.

  “Thanks,” I say, helping myself to another helping of baked, marinated, coagulated soy milk.

  Sophie started her living-statue act during the fall of her junior year at NYU as a project for her Behavioral Psychology class, only to discover that she enjoyed being the Fairy so much that she kept doing it even after getting an A in the class. At the time I met her, she’d been the Fairy for two years.

  Before I met Sophie, I didn’t know anything about fairies. When I Googled them, most of what I got was useless crap about tiny winged creatures and fairy godmothers and a bunch of Tinker Bell porn.

  “That’s not uncommon,” Sophie once told me. “Most men are drawn to the fairy energy but they don’t know why, so they sexualize it just like they do everything else they can’t understand.”

  According to Sophie, there are a lot of different types of fairies, including Dryads, Pixies, Flower Fairies, Cloud Fairies, and Earth Fa
iries. Sophie is an Earth Fairy, as she loves nature and animals and has plants all over the apartment: dracaena, ficus, English ivy, spider plants, Chinese evergreens, golden pothos, and bamboo palms, all of which are supposed to improve the quality of the indoor air.

  I suppose they do, but most of the time I can still smell Vegan’s litter box.

  After I moved in with her, it didn’t take me long to discover that Sophie’s living-statue act isn’t an act at all. Even though she doesn’t wear her makeup or her fairy outfit all the time or stand still for hours in the corner of the apartment while I research potential clinical trials on my laptop, Sophie is truly a full-time fairy, spreading her good cheer by volunteering at the SPCA three days a week and giving half of what she earns in Central Park to the Bowery Mission. She also sprinkles her magic pixie dust everywhere, even in the apartment, and I’m constantly following her around with a dustpan and a brush, sweeping it all up and recycling it.

  That’s very important to Sophie. To recycle her pixie dust. To never throw any of it away.

  “It’s cosmic,” she says. “It floats around and settles on those who need it the most.”

  While I humor Sophie about her pixie dust, I don’t believe there’s anything magical about it. It’s just glitter that gets on everything and in everything and I’m pretty sure has been the cause of more than one serious rash.

  After all, you can’t change someone’s life by sprinkling silver metallic glitter over them.

  “Can you take Vegan to the vet tomorrow?” Sophie asks. “Mandy’s out sick and they asked if I could work a double shift.”

  “Sure.” I take a bite of tofu and glance down at Vegan, who stares up at me with either contempt or hunger, I can’t tell which. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “His upper-respiratory thing has come back,” she says. “I think he might be allergic to the new food we’ve been buying.”

  On cue, Vegan sneezes.

  I notice he has pixie dust on top of his head and stuck to his nose and I wonder if the upper-respiratory infections Vegan sometimes gets are related to his diet or to the good fortune Sophie sprinkles around the apartment.

  Fortunately, Sophie’s job compensates her well enough that she can afford Vegan’s vet bills, which she usually pays with some of the extra money she makes as the Fairy. I chip in for groceries and rent and utilities, splitting most of our costs, though Sophie gets some of our organic food at discount. And between the money I earn volunteering for clinical trials plus the tax-free income I take home from panhandling, I earn more than $50,000 annually.

  Not bad for someone who makes his living taking experimental drugs and begging for money in Central Park.

  A few minutes of silence pass before Sophie says, “So how was your diabetes trial?”

  The trial Randy, Vic, Isaac, and I recently wrapped up was a one-week, outpatient, placebo-controlled, double-blind study for an investigative diabetes drug.

  “Fine,” I say, as if I don’t have any idea where this is going.

  Every few weeks we have a conversation about volunteering for clinical trials, with Sophie trying to convince me to stop. After nearly a year of this, I can tell what’s coming next. It’s like a guided tour I’ve taken so many times that I know the route by heart.

  “Have you thought any more about looking for something with health benefits?” she asks.

  Up here on the left, we have passive-aggressive pragmatism.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “And?”

  “And I’m still thinking about it.”

  I’m not, really. But admitting that I’m not looking for another job is one thing. Admitting that I don’t have the confidence or the ambition to make a living doing something other than volunteering for clinical trials is a whole other kind of honesty.

  “I wish you could find something in marketing,” she says.

  And up here on the right, we have unreasonable optimism.

  “I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” I say. “It’s been five years since I worked in marketing, and my résumé isn’t exactly up to snuff.”

  “Well, I know you’d be great at it.”

  Sophie’s always trying to make me feel better about myself, telling me I’m good enough and smart enough to do anything I want—be it marketing, teaching, acting, or running my own business.

  The people who love us see all of our potential and promise and the bright, shiny edges, while we often focus on our failings and missed opportunities and the dull, tarnished surfaces.

  This tends to be the self-image default setting when you don’t believe in yourself.

  And although our loved ones and ardent supporters do their best to encourage us and make us believe in what we have to offer and how talented we are, sometimes the stories we tell ourselves have more power. And the more often we tell ourselves these stories, the more likely we are to believe them.

  “What about working with me at Westerly?” she asks. “I can see about getting you an interview there.”

  And if you look out the window to the other side of the road, you can see a disaster waiting to happen.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I guess it’s kind of like you and anal sex. It’s not really my thing.”

  To be honest, I don’t know what my thing is. I’ve never found anything I was particularly good at or really wanted to do. Even my dream jobs are just that. Dreams. I don’t expect them to come true. And even if they did, I don’t know if I’d be all that happy managing a baseball team or playing professional golf or taking pictures of beautiful naked women.

  Okay, yes, I’d probably enjoy that last one. But if you asked me what I’m passionate about, if you asked me what I want to do that would make me happy and fill me with a sense of satisfaction and personal enrichment, doing something that mattered to me and nurtured my soul? I couldn’t give you more than a shrug and a blank expression.

  I’m thirty years old and still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

  “I realize working in a grocery store isn’t your thing,” Sophie says, attempting to guide me into adulthood. “But I wish you’d at least think about it. Putting all of these chemicals in your body can’t be good for you. You don’t know the possible long-term effects of all of these drugs you’ve been testing.”

  Over there, behind loving concern, is thinly disguised questioning of intelligence.

  While I understand Sophie’s anxiety, I’ve been a guinea pig for almost five years and I have a pretty good understanding of what I’m doing. And if any adverse side effects were going to manifest themselves, they probably would have done so by now.

  “I like being a professional guinea pig,” I say, which isn’t an entirely factual statement. While I do enjoy the freedom and flexibility my lifestyle affords me, it’s more like I’ve just grown used to the idea of doing what I do and I don’t have the desire or motivation to change.

  I’m a victim of my own inertia, having succumbed to the ennui of my existence.

  But I don’t think I’m alone. The American dream hasn’t worked out the way a lot of people imagined, so they’ve settled into their lives, existing in a pervasive, low-level misery: commuting an hour to work; sitting in makeshift offices surrounded by false walls; sharing half-hour lunches and fifteen-minute breaks with office mates who have their own makeshift offices; spending nine hours a day in a garden of cubicles beneath a sky of fluorescent lights; taking another hour to get home, then waking up the next day and doing it all over again.

  Somehow I doubt this is the life anyone dreamed about when they were kids.

  “I know you like the freedom your job offers,” Sophie says. “And I respect your choices, Lollipop . . .”

  That’s Sophie’s pet name for me. I asked her once, why Lollipop? She told me it’s because I’m sweeter than an apple pie.

  “. . . but don’t you ever think about your future? Don’t you think about your destiny?”

  I’ve never been a big believer in
fate or destiny, in the idea that there’s some invisible, cosmic force planning out my life or guiding me to my inevitable doom.

  I’m more of a shit happens kind of guy.

  Good shit, bad shit. It doesn’t matter. It’s all shit and it either happens or it doesn’t. I’ve had my share of both, though I don’t have a Swiss bank account or a penthouse apartment on Central Park West. But it’s kind of embarrassing to complain about your life when you’re a white, heterosexual male living in the twenty-first century.

  Sophie, on the other hand, believes everyone has a destiny and that we all need to figure out what that is, who we’re meant to be, and what we’re supposed to do. I don’t think much about my future, because it makes it that much harder to live in the present. And I believe destiny is just a word people throw around to make themselves feel like they have some kind of special role to play when in reality, we’re all just turds caught in the siphoning water of a giant toilet, our lives getting flushed down the drain one day at a time.

  No one has ever suggested that I become a motivational speaker.

  Rather than share my cynical analogy with Sophie, I just smile and say, “As far as I’m concerned, my destiny is right here with you.”

  Sophie doesn’t return my false cheer. “I just don’t think being a professional guinea pig is a long-term plan.”

  And straight ahead of us is a philosophical roadblock.

  “Do we really have to talk about long-term plans?” I ask, realizing too late that was the wrong thing to say to someone I’ve been living with for five years. I try to come up with something to make it better, but when you’re a man, sometimes it’s best to just quit while you’re behind.

  Which brings us to the end of our tour.

  We finish the rest of our meal in silence, then I do the dishes while Sophie straightens up the apartment and waters the plants, whispering to them before she sprinkles some of her pixie dust over their leaves and soil. I think that’s the main reason plants don’t tend to do very well in our apartment: pixie dust doesn’t make good fertilizer. Sophie, on the other hand, blames their poor health on the lack of south-facing windows.