Around 2010 or So
I walked into the Verizon store with a defunct phone and said to the saleswoman as she approached me: I’m here for your cheapest flip phone.
Don’t even start, I seemed to say, waving my old piece of plastic around like warding off evil salesperson spirits. Save it sweetheart, because me and my Unnamed Friend — now in his third blog, in full form here — had bigger things to do that day, like hit the video store in the strip mall next door to grab season 5 of The Sopranos.
Yes, that’s right: proudly, there was a video store in town when I was in college, much utilized.
In less than thirty minutes, the flip phone was in the palm of my hand — literally: like a pill bottle, even smaller, like a tracker placed on a car, a Zippo, a key. You could close your fist around it.
Text and calls. What else did we need back then in Harrisonburg, Virginia, a mere half moon ago, when we seemed calmer, freer?
Some were watching Vines, I think it was, some popped open Snapchat, but only occasionally. Everyone had Facebook, but it was all local stuff — your crew, your language: an image dump from the night before, or depending on the level of the photo-dumper’s hangover, a couple nights before.
Everything’s rosy in hindsight, obviously, but I’m starting to think it actually was. Are Millennials — the ones with the last non-digital upbringing — an anomaly, the actually-rosy-in-hindsight generation? Pre-advertising on the endless scroll, pre-supercomputers buzzing cancer swiftly towards the crown jewels.
I recall lying on the grass as a kid, looking up at the clouds in the sky, when I had nothing else to do. I can hear my grandmother, noticing my boredom, telling me to “go sit outside and count the cars” as they rode past. And I did.
Once back at the old college apartment, I tossed the flip phone into my nightstand drawer — relegated for answering calls from home on Sundays — “Were you ever going to call us?” I can hear my mom saying — and, more pertinently, for Cabby Chris, as close to a God as we had at the time. I can still see the back of his head as he drove us, ridged and undulant with some minor cranial syndrome if my memory serves me (perhaps major, in which case — R.I.P Cabby Chris), driving us from pre-game to party, from party to home.
Watching Jersey Shore this year brought me back — it aired when I was in college and there was a buzz around it. You can hear Pauly D shouting Cabs ah heh! And, back then, they actually were.
Cabs — another thing lost into the Black Hole of Time — a cabbie’s retirement-dream medallion gone as swiftly as yanking down the meter-lever.
Back then, you built a rapport with your cabbie — you said to your crew, “Who’s calling Cabby Chris tonight?” And you actually called him. In my case, on the flip. You tipped him the best you could. And you heard his crazy stories on the ride back. “Had a girlfriend once that would have me Aveeno her entire body every single night. Could you believe that? Every square inch of her.”
And you’d laugh in a fit of camaraderie, even if thinking what Tony Soprano said before he whacked “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero after hearing the poor rat’s last tall tale about that Puerto Rican girl. She even really exist? Tony says with a terrible finality to it before he kills him.
Did we look at our phones when we were at parties? I don’t think so. I remember making small talk in tight spaces, standing around kegs of Natty Light, our shoes soggy to the bone. I remember reading books on the bus back from campus to the apartment, a red hardcover first edition of Gravity’s Rainbow with no dust jacket. I remember the peel, click, and pop opening a new DVD and the mechanical whir of the disc disappearing into the player like on a frog’s tongue.
I remember the back of Cabbie Chris’s head, driving us in his roomy Crown Vic with the cab company’s logo emblazoned on its side — taking us like on a magic carpet to somewhere better, over the smooth rolling hills of youth.
Present Day
Another mean, though incorrect assessment of Tony Soprano: ‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.
But what’s better?
We had big plans for the weekend, this guys-only jaunt, four of us from the mean streets of college.
One texts in the group chat beforehand: Are we going to do that cinematic power hour? Referring to a power hour we created using clips from movies that reference drinking — something so good that we eventually created a second version with all new clips.
I would think both of them, I boldly respond.
I did one of them recently, another texts, the realist, and ended up puking… may have lost a step, boys.
However, we don’t even recall the possibility for a power hour once we get there, into this tiny rental home in Brigantine, a Jersey Shore town for Philly people (as a Jerseyite, I never do get comfortable down there), our broad shoulders and dad bods and thick memories pushing up against the walls of the living room, playing “remember when” instead for hours, our legs burning from standing for so long. You forget, so removed from dorm-life and locker rooms, just how small spaces feel when you’re only with men.
After a few hours, I say to my Unnamed Friend, “When was the last time I saw you anyway?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
“Was it my wedding?”
“Probably, yeah.”
“Doesn’t feel that long.” No — it doesn’t. I can still hear him saying after the first episode of The Sopranos back in college — what’s the deal with the ducks? Ready to give up on the thing.
“You’ll come around,” I said to him at nineteen, twenty, though I didn’t think he’d become a history major and, essentially, a Mob Historian, unable to go three sentences without referencing the show. He tried bringing me one of his essays to proof once, since I was the resident English major, and I couldn’t get past the first sentence.
“Like yesterday,” I say to him. “Reading that crap you handed me. It was a bright, sunny day… what a terrible opening for a paper. So cliché.”
There is more talk like this, though we do come out of it to remember that we’re at the beach, managing to get out of the place, colliding into each other in the tight foyer on the way out, funneling out the front door like boarded Great Danes. We play horseshoe in the sand for a few hours, where the game of “remember when” continues from a distance this time, over the sound of the waves and clanking metal.
We also remember to get over to Atlantic City, only a seven or so minute ride.
“Our Uber driver’s name is Osama,” someone says after ordering our cab on the click of a button.
“Think that’s like being named Adolph now?” someone wonders.
“Isn’t it crazy,” I opine, “that the American President to kill Osama was named Obama? You can’t make that shit up.”
“Happened in college,” my old roommate reminds me.
“We stayed up all night drinking and celebrating,” I say, “Shouting USA, USA, USA! I wonder if campuses are like that today…”
I take out my iPhone and fight off muscle memory to crack open Twitter, or X, and Instagram, even Facebook tickling at the tip of my thumb for a millisecond, and go to Google. The name is on the decline it says, just like Adolph, which seems to be nearly extinct. Like a little side bet, it’s an added result of total evil: not only the actual mass death of people, but of the name itself.
Osama picks us up in a tiny sports car with leather interior. We go from one small space to a smaller one, our shoulders pushing up against one another, my Unnamed Friend — the 6’2’’ one who’s been hitting the gym lately — in the middle seat for some reason. Reason, on a guys’ weekend, as it turns out, is not something accessed very much.
We ask Osama about himself and he tells us he quit driving a truck recently. “Too long away on the road.” He’s got kids and a wife and wants to be around more, so he’s picked up this. “Great money, trucking, but not worth it.”
“God damn it,” we hear from the middle seat, my Unnamed Friend’s head tilted to fit inside the car like he is perpetually seeing something odd out the front window. “I forgot my wallet.”
A sigh, a groan, a deep breath from the rest of us.
“To Atlantic City,” I say, “you forget your WALLET?”
We work it out with Osama — adding a stop onto the app to bring us back and then back again. It all needs to be worked out on the phones. Back in the day, Cabbie Chris would’ve just given us a whad are ya stupid or something? before taking us back, and we’d give him an extra couple of bucks and get an extra story out of him.
The Unnamed Friend unsurprisingly comes back with beers and we hit the road for AC again, drinking in Osama’s sports car, the male-heavy stagnant interior taking on a sweet hoppy air, and then our burps start sending out a sour-y stale scent, I’m sure making Osama dream a bit about the isolation and quiet of driving a big rig across Kansas or some such place, far away from it all.
By the fourth sip, I swallow hard, realizing the potential of something, and say, “You didn’t just bring us beers, right? You have your wallet?”
I’m somehow surprised when he says that he does.
Listening to Ace
A parole officer, a project manager, a photographer, and a copywriter walk into the Borgata…
Casinos are like one long extended joke — and the joke is on you. Many misinterpret the almighty American Crime Sleazeball Trilogy masterpiece of Goodfellas, Casino, and The Wolf of Wall Street. Evidently Goodfellas inspired young men to become mobsters; Wolf stockbrokers or hedge fund bros; and people keep on gambling after Casino.
There’s a joke about us Jews and skiing. The joke basically states that Jews don’t ski; they own the ski resort. A similar joke, for sure, can be made about casinos, where the odds are comically against you. The film couldn’t have been clearer about it either, with narration laying it all out there for you: “What do you think we’re doing out here in the middle of the desert? It’s all been arranged for us to get your money. That’s the truth about Las Vegas. We’re the only winners. The players don’t stand a chance.”
This is from the main character, the Mob-connected casino boss Ace Rothstein, based on Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal — of course a Jew. And perhaps the only time I allow someone to utilize anti-Semitism in full force, calling me — with endearment I should add — a “Jew mudda fuckah you!,” would be when my Unnamed Friend, the parole officer, does it in Joe Pesci’s voice, inspired by this film, something he says to me — in the midst of an actual casino — roughly a hundred-and-forty-two times. I wonder what people think when they catch him calling me that as we stroll past a row of slot machines.
Going to the casino for fun is another activity you can tack up under the goyishe naches label. Standing there watching all these people shovel cash across felt tables appears like some bizarro ATM machine. Because the only way to win — and there is a way without cheating — is to stand up once you do win. And leave.
Unfortunately, the time it takes for this to happen is about 30 seconds. The problem is that you made plans to go to the casino for the night with your friends, so after an hour twiddling your thumbs (if you had the fortitude to get up from the table in the first place) you take your seat again out of boredom and eventually lose.
So, I watch the parole officer, project manager, and photographer lose the allotted sum their wives said was okay to lose while eating two scoops of coffee ice cream. Altogether, not a terrible time.
Man Down
We eat an absurd dinner at Carmine’s, where the portions appear to be designed for some kind of eating competition that you don’t sign up for and get no reward. Following the appetizer, the project manager only half-jokingly says after a worried pause amongst us all, everyone thinking the same thing: “I’m full.”
Our Unnamed Friend starts fading away quick too — his eyes glazing over and entering another dimension — something we’re used to from back in the day. When the man has had enough, he has had enough.
The waiter kindly comes by when it’s taking a while and tells us the status of the food and assures us that the mammoth plate of fried calamari that just did us in would be on the house. We only realize a minute later that our aloof pal hadn’t witnessed or was not privy to the waiter’s spiel at all, shouting out of nowhere only moments after the man leaves us: “WHERE’S THE FOOD ALREADY!?”
The waiter just explained it! we shout back, but he’s not listening, lost in some inner cosmos, blinking slowly back at us.
Although college may feel like yesterday — when we’d come back from a night out and each put down an entire pie of pizza with embarrassing ease (I remember being hungry after finishing a pie) — at Carmine’s in the Modern Era we stare at these bowls that look like mini Colosseums to scale, crowded with pasta and bloody with marinara, no longer entertained by such sweeping displays of carbs.
Our dad bods expand — our guts now entering mere fat mode, jutting up against the edge of the table as we try and stand, setting us back down to try again.
We somehow manage to get outside after ordering an Uber and funnel wearily into another tiny car, with some other driver.
In tight quarters, unable to put on seatbelts —
“Remember when you guys had us over to Stone Gate that first time?” the project manager recalls.
“Legendary night,” I say, remembering when us sophomores — our Unnamed Friend and me — had the freshman — the now project manager and photographer — over for a case race.
“Milwaukee’s Best Ice?” the project manager tries remembering.
“No,” I say. “It was Keystone Ice. The black bullets.”
“The black death,” the photographer says.
“Rough night,” says the project manager, laughing.
“Good God,” the photographer groans, remembering vomiting off our balcony, fooled into drinking a myriad sum of a gut-shimmying strong-ABV bottom-of-the-barrel beer.
“Do they even make Keystone Ice anymore?” I say, feeling a buzzing by my leg, a phone — someone else’s — an incoming call, cancerous lasers finding purchase. It’s our Unnamed Friend’s and he pulls it out showing a random number from Atlantic City.
“Who the fuck is this?” he says, popping his dry lips, re-entering planet Earth from whatever dimension he had been visiting at that moment.
“It says Atlantic City,” I say, “You should answer it.”
“Hello?” he says into his phone.
“Hi,” the voice says. “Is this — —?”
“Yeah?”
“This is Carmine’s. We have your wallet.”