Larry could feel the day heating up through the thin soles of his cheap plastic drug store flip flops, and see it wavering off the rooftop asphalt like a mirage. The pretty girl in the elevator from the 10th floor life insurance office had told Larry in a hushed tone about the luau on Sunday on the roof. She clearly didn’t want the other secretaries in the elevator invited, although they could care less, prematurely aging black and white women stuffed into their professional poly-blend shirt and skirt sets, clutching their Egg McMuffins which they would quietly and insistently devour while checking office voice mail.
“Just bring some lemons. A bag will do,” the girl said when he politely and quietly asked what he should bring.
He tried to mask his excited disbelief that this perfect pretty girl was offering an invite to him, a mail clerk, for a taboo weekend party on the office building rooftop.
“We do it all the time,” she said.
“Oh yeah, it’s cool,” he said, angry with himself for not completely disguising his ignorance.
His usual train route ran only local stops on the weekends so it took a one hour ride, plus the usual two bus transfers, and a three stop subway ride to get to the office building. He had an entry card and the security guard only mildly viewed the lemons as he signed in.
“Preparing for an early AM staff meeting,” he told the guard who would buy any story from someone with legitimate access. He did not get paid enough to get shot.
And now Larry waited on the roof top with his bag of lemons, sweat beading up on his forehead, pooling in his pits and between his upper thighs because there was no shade under which to retreat. No gauzy colorful green and pink umbrellas secured in buckets of sand. He struggled to not accept the obvious reality that there was to be no luau on this roof at any time on this summer Sunday. The party, or at least when she told him to arrive, was to start at 1 PM and he had come fashionably late at 1:43 according to his accurate digital watch (well, he actually was nervously a half hour early but the C train came fifteen minutes late and so he thought he had actually benefited which made the out-of-key Creole disco keyboardist in the station that much more pleasant to hear). There were no tiki torches, and mismatched chaise lounges from people’s homes, Coleman coolers spilling with iced beers, and coals hot and ready under the Weber brought by the cool account managers from the office systems company on the second floor. Faces from the main lobby always shrouded in the mask of the daily grind would now be washed in weekend levity, and the interaction would be open, human and social. From this luau forth, the working world of the 9-5 Manhattan lower-middle class in his office building alone would be alleviated by a familiarity. He wasn’t expecting to walk away from a few shared cold brews while island music blared from a boom box with best friends forever, but he would have names to the strange faces that frowns and smiles graced for the last anonymous two years.
A helicopter intruded the air space above and circled quite low over the rooftop, the roaring of the propellers deafening him. He clasped his hands over his ears and shut his eyes. It did not sound like a helicopter with his ears covered but rather a native luau, where young nubile female islanders in grass skirts and coconut bikini tops pounded the ground in their enthusiastic celebratory dance while he sipped a pina colada from a mango. He didn’t want to accept he would need to leave and start his disappointed subway, two bus, long train ride home to his rat hole college town apartment shared with blubber butt Jerry the perpetual grad student.
His anger was thick and hot, and when he saw the helicopter steer to the right and fly off towards the FDR, he took his palms away from his ears, letting back in the periodic cab honks, passing truck radios and hiss of city buses. He could hear a lot up here above the fifteenth floor and only now he un-rooted himself from his sun-baked standing place and walked over to the edge of the roof. There was no rail, just straight down, and he dared himself, pushed himself, to stand at the very very edge, where a centimeter of the tips his flip flops were over the edge, and look straight down. Fifteen floors was not a tall building, rather modest for Manhattan, but tall enough to cause a sudden onset of vertigo when you looked down. He almost toppled off the roof in surprise when he heard “Hey!” from behind him.
His arms spun in quick circles as he turned and took a big step away from the edge towards a guy in surf shorts with palm trees and a pink tank that said Do It In Daytona and a bag of pineapples. Shit, Larry thought, at least I didn’t have to lug a bag of heavy pineapples all over town like this boob.
“You surprised me,” Larry accused. “I almost pitched over the side.”
The guy had now noticed Larry’s bag of lemons. He had also clearly seen no party and no guests.
“You the only one here?” he still asked Larry.
“I think so,” said Larry with a sweep of his arm, his rage sudden and aimed solely at this loser jerk-off in his spring break get up. Not a luau outfit at all. This chump clearly did not know the difference between low rent Jagger shots in a faux island bar, and a sophisticated NYC weekend luau social on the roof. Larry realized that maybe this guy had found out about the party, and when the cool set understood he was coming and ruin it for everyone with his uncomfortable overt frankness, they cancelled the party. Of course, this had to be what happened and the hot pretty babe who invited Larry on that blissful Wednesday didn’t have Larry’s number to call him and cancel. She was probably in her apartment somewhere in Hoboken in a little terry tunic and bubblegum colored toe nail polish fretting that Larry would make the long trek and be upset.
“You heard about the party through the grapevine?” asked Larry hopefully.
“No, Charlene invited me.”
Larry’s heart sank to his balls, which by now were very itchy and uncomfortable and reminding him of how little of a man he was.
“She told me to bring pineapples,” the spring break meathead said.
Both men stared at each other.
“We’ve been duped,” said Larry, looking down at the lemons that shone freshly yellow in the penetrating sun.
“That raging cunt,” said the guy, extending his hand to Larry in solidarity on the tail end of the c-word which Larry never used.
Larry still shook his hand.
“I’m Dave B.” said the guy who still used his last initial with his first name even though the clarification was from long ago when there were nine Daves in his elementary school.
“I’m Larry. Why would a girl do this?”
“I dunno,” said Dave B. “Because she’s a dirty hole?”
“You know, I wish you wouldn’t talk like that about women. It makes me uncomfortable,” said Larry.
“Okay, what would you call her then?” asked Dave B. “Standing here like a stupid lame ass on a perfectly perfect Sunday with a bag of useless fruit?” Dave B. paced back and forth in front of his brown double grocery bagged load of pineapples. “Shit, and I thought chicks would be here wasted already in bikini tops and short shorts ready to give hand-jobs with suntan oil.”
Larry was deep in thought. Although he knew he should leave, he was trying to figure out what he would in fact call Charlene if he could get nasty words to travel from his mind out his mouth as easily as Dave B. A woman who would do this to not just one guy, but two guys on a rarely sparkling summer Sunday in New York had serious problems with not just morals, but with men. She was also fearless and that scared the crap out of him so much, that he actually battled the belief that she could hear the horrid thoughts he would try to think about her. She knew she was going to see them Monday in the lobby, snack shop or elevator. And she didn’t give a crap.
“She’s probably getting me back for pinching her on the ass in the elevator last week,” said Dave B.
“I’ve never done anything to Charlene,” sputtered Larry. “Nothing of that kind!”
“Of course not,” said Dave B. chuckling. “She’s a crazy chick. I’m sure you looked at her though when she was close, maybe leaned in a bit to see if she smelled as good as she looked.”
“Well…” said Larry without commitment.
“Charlene is hot enough for me to walk over here by the chance she actually was throwing a luau. I only live three blocks away. All I gotta do now is go home and watch baseball on rabbit ears and smoke a bong.”
Larry thought about Grand Central station and its lonely emptiness plus all the homeless people overdressed in everything they own that made him feel oppressed and hot and uncomfortably like he was always one step away from becoming them if he lost his job. Dragging their milk crates of cracked and broken and ratty possessions around with them. Larry did not want to be a lunatic homeless person! He therefore cannot no matter how much he would like to make a scene with Charlene on Monday.
“You want to grab a cold one across the street at McManus’s Pub?” asked Dave B.
“Sure,” said Larry. He thought about the Asian guy whose face was black with dirt, and shoes without soles, singing Aud Lang Syne as he shuffled through the terminal. “Why not.”
They left their bags of fruit on the rooftop and made the oath that no matter how enraged they were when they saw Charlene on Monday, they would feign absolute ignorance to the joke played on them. If she was so cruelly bold to ask “How was the Sunday luau?” - and they figured she absolutely could be - they would answer “Fun times! The best rooftop party ever! A summer memory for sure!” extra loudly and with a bit of high strung euphoria in their voices to render her speechless before they were able to ditch out onto their work floors. If they encountered her together, Larry would pat Dave B. on the back and say, “Nice moves on the supermodel.”
As they walked through the building’s lobby, entering was a tall thin nerdy guy whistling a happy go-lucky tune with a crate of naval oranges. Larry and Dave B. watched him sign in at the security desk with a flourish on his signature.
“What’s with all the fruit coming in here today?” asked the usually disinterested security guard.
“Oh, just an office project,” said the tall thin nerd with a sly smile curving on the corners of his lips.
“Hey guy!” Dave B. called out to the thin man.
The tall thin man stopped at the elevator and looked blandly at Dave, the smile quivering.
“You mean me?” he said.
“Yeah you,” said Dave B. “When you’re done wondering what happened, leave the oranges by the lemons and the pineapples and join us across the street at McManus’s.”
Larry and Dave B. left the lobby to get that cold beer on that hot summer Sunday in Manhattan. And the bartender even put little umbrellas in their beers for them.
