Less Than

Klayter McCabe

000

"Hey," said Griffin. He tried again, louder, when he got no response. "Hey!" he yelled, and finally Bart sat up, eyes wide open and looking around the room with a peculiar expression on his face. Griffin felt like a creep, standing in the doorway while his roommate was wearing nothing but boxer shorts and tangled sheets.

"What's wrong?" Bart asked.

"Nothing." Griffin shrugged. "You were having a nightmare. Thrashing around and being loud and shit."

"Oh." Bart looked away. "Sorry."

"No big deal." Griffin glanced down at his watch. "It's almost six am. I'd have been getting up in an hour anyway." He made sure to smile when he said it, though stretching his lips over his teeth took more effort than usual this early in the morning.

"Sorry," Bart said again, but this time he returned the smile. Griffin nodded and headed for the kitchen, leaving Bart to get dressed in peace.

"You want any coffee?" he called over his shoulder.

"Coffee?" Bart's voice carried well, despite the closed door between them. "Blech."

Griffin rolled his eyes. "Trust me. When I make it, you'll like it!"

"No I won't!" Bart yelled back. Griffin sighed. Hanging out with Bart made him feel--and occasionally made him act--all of fourteen years old. Bart came out into the kitchen before Griffin had even managed to finish filling the coffeepot with water. He was fully dressed and had already combed his hair.

"You Keystone townies," Griffin said, getting out two boxes of cereal. "You have to do everything so fast."

Bart shrugged. Normally he was defensive about Keystone--again with the attitude of a fourteen year old--but he got out the milk and two bowls and two spoons silently.

"What do you...think about?" Bart asked, after they'd each poured their cereal--shredded wheat for Griffin, cocoa puffs for Bart.

"Jesus Christ." Griffin laughed, half amused and half exasperated. "You sound like my ex-girlfriend."

Bart cocked a half-grin. "Which one?"

"All of them."

"Seriously." Bart spoke around a mouthful of cocoa puffs. "I mean, when you're doing things, what do you think about?"

Griffin raised an eyebrow. "Usually what I'm doing at the time."

Bart sighed. "I think that I think too fast. I mean, I just can't let things go."

"It happens." Griffin offered a shrug, trying to banish the cobwebs that waking up too early had left in all the corners of his mind. "It's easier with bad things. Or harder, I guess. When my mom died, that was all I could think about. At the time it seemed like forever, but you know. Things fade. Things get better. Why? What are you fixating on?"

"Everything!" Bart threw up his hands as he spoke, scattering droplets of milk across the table from the spoon he hadn't bothered to put down first. Griffin laughed aloud, at either the milk or Bart's sense of drama or the fact that the roommate he'd met last month on craigslist was trying to have a heart-to-heart with him at six am.

"So work more hours," he said, after his laughter had died down. "Get a second job. Something to keep your mind off it."

"I used to have a second job. It just...made things worse. Or made things better. I don't even know anymore."

"Okay. I get that there's something big that you're not telling me. Unless you do, I'm just going to assume that you used to work as a male stripper and it's left you with deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. Or something."

Bart narrowed his eyes for a moment and then, to Griffin's surprise, nodded. "Okay. So I used to work this second job as a stripper. And at first it was really great, you know, because why wouldn't it be? But then it turned out not to be so great. And people died. And there's this part of me that really, really wants to go back to being a stripper, but there's also this part of me that just can't. Like something got broke, and I don't know how to fix it."

"Okay." Griffin nodded and put his spoon down, letting his shredded wheat get soggy. "You took the stripper analogy a little further than I was going to, but that's cool. Did people actually die, or is that just part of the, uh, analogy?"

"People died."

"Okay. Well, that's rough." Griffin picked up his spoon again, poking at his cereal without taking another bite. Bart watched him through his bangs, then looked away and finished scarfing down his own cereal when Griffin met his eyes.

"It's early," Griffin said finally.

"Yeah." Bart stood up and put his bowl in the sink. "Sorry. Just pretend I never said anything, okay? I didn't mean to get weird."

"You're not...weird." Griffin chuckled. "Okay, you are. But not, you know, irredeemably weird, or anything."

Bart nodded, and started to walk away, but the coffee maker beeped, and Griffin stood up.

"Have a cup of coffee," he said.

"I already told you. I don't like coffee."

"Yeah, I heard you." Griffin got out two cups anyway. He filled one of them up only halfway, and then filled it the rest of the way up with milk and sugar and handed it to Bart. "Just try it."

Bart sniffed at it, then stuck the tip of his tongue into the cup. Griffin almost warned him that it would be hot, but with that much milk in it, the coffee was probably tepid at best. Bart took a cautious sip, then a full gulp.

"That's not so bad," he announced.

Griffin rolled his eyes. "Sit back down. Drink your coffee with me like a real adult."

"That's another thing. Sometimes I don't feel like a real adult, either."

"Oh, that's totally normal. None of us do. How old are you, anyway?"

Bart tilted his head and hesitated for a moment, as if he had to calculate the answer. "22. Or thereabouts."

When Griffin didn't offer any mockery at that answer, Bart sat back down at the table, wrapping his hands around his coffee mug. He had large hands for a man as thin as he was.

"So why do you want to go back to being a stripper, if it was so bad?"

"Because it's the right thing to do." Bart's voice was so sure of itself, so righteous, that Griffin laughed again. Bart looked wounded for a moment, then quickly covered it up.

"Sorry," said Griffin. "Sorry. Just, you know. Stripping as the moral thing to do."

Bart smiled. "I probably should've gone with a different way of putting this."

"No, no. Stripping's good. We're gonna stick with this. Why don't you want to go back to it?"

"That's complicated." Bart sighed deeply and took another drink of his "coffee." "I told you that people died. And it's not like any of it was my fault," he said this so firmly that Griffin almost doubted him, "but I couldn't fix it, either. So how can I go look all the people I used to work with in the face? And when I said something broke, I meant literally. I won't be...reliable, anymore. I mean, I've been hurt before." He tapped his knee. "This isn't even real. It's fake. But this is a totally different kind of broke. And there are people who want to help me work on it, and they're good people, but there's this part of me that's afraid of getting it fixed, too. Or even worse, finding out that they'll never be able to fix it, and then what'll I be good for? It's like, what's the point? Of anything?"

Griffin tried to sort through this hesitantly-delivered mess of half-finished thoughts, and finally settled on the part of it that sounded the most interesting. "Really? Your knee's fake?"

"Yeah." Bart tapped it again. The sound wasn't flesh hitting flesh. "I got shot, and they had to replace my kneecap so that I could still walk."

"Wow. You don't have a limp or anything."

"It happened when I was...when I was still a really impulsive kid. I'm used to it now."

They were silent a moment, and Griffin tried to get his thoughts back on track. "Wouldn't finding out for sure be better than waiting? Finding out if you're, uh, broken, I mean."

"I don't know."

"It would. I'm telling you that. It's better to know."

"There's another reason I don't want to go. A really dumb reason."

"So tell me. Trust me, it couldn't be any dumber than this already is, since we're talking about your career as a stripper."

Bart's smile was just a sliver. "One of the women who could help me. She looks just like an old girlfriend. I mean just like. And this old girlfriend is sort of the one that got away, y'know? So just looking at this new woman is hard."

"So fuck her."

"What?"

"I'm serious. Did you ever fuck the one that got away?"

"No! No. We were just kids."

"So fuck this one. It'll be like fucking the one that got away, and then maybe you can let her go. It'll be cathartic."

"It wouldn't be like that for me. I'm not that great with women."

"I bet girls like you a lot." Griffin tapped a finger against his chin. "I bet you bring out the mother in them."

Bart stuck out his tongue. "Too Freudian for me."

"Who cares how Freudian it is, if it gets you ass?"

Bart laughed. "Sometimes you remind me of one of my old friends."

"Yeah? Not one of the dead ones, I hope."

Bart's laughter stopped immediately. "Yeah, actually. One of the dead ones."

"Oh. Sorry."

Bart sighed. "Seriously. I didn't used to be like this. Lately I'm just...down, all the time."

"Well cheer up, emo kid. I'll take you out. You can get drunk, maybe laid. It'll be good for you."

"I don't get drunk."

"So make an exception."

"No, seriously. I don't get drunk. I metabolize alcohol too fast."

"Whatever. You've just never been drinking with me, man. Trust me, I'll show you drunk. You'll puke for a week."

"See, that makes it not sound fun at all."

"Trust me, Bart. I mean, you just trusted me with your super secret ex-identity as a stripper, right? So trust me with this, too, okay?"

"Sure." Bart paused a moment, then smiled. "I trust you."

000

End "Less Than"

000

January 25, 2008

For Calvin J. Cleary, no matter how much he doesn't want such a dedication.

See? It's not even slash.