Brahm Deserves Mani Mani Deserves Better

Brahm was by all examinations a good, level headed and likable kid. I can’t think of anybody that had ever made a remark about Brahm that they didn’t later regret and want to take back. They’d say: Brahm? That kid complains to his girl about leaving the seat cover up, the stuff that was based solely on word of mouth distortion and when they did meet him soon after, they’d burst into tears and recommend the guy as approachable, understanding, hilarious even and sometimes profound. Two Saturdays before his brother got locked up for assaulting a man with a briefcase. Why’d you do it the cops had asked, because he’s a pompous, money hording bastard, he’s the real purse snatcher, the real purse pourer his rules have got everything upside down has got gravity upside down. Don’t lock up the guys robbing in poor neighborhoods. Brahm had gotten a call from a boy of his who brought up women and then suggested clubbing. Yea, he would say when he got a call requesting he come outside and live life. Shit is too short man, it is, he would reply, but I’ve got work to do for classes and shit. Look at me, the person on the other line would respond, I’ve got work in the morning. And then after explaining thoroughly why he could not join them, why joining them just wouldn’t be fun for him Brahm sat down in the dark for a while in silence. Brahm didn’t take conversation for granted he didn’t take experiences for granted, and I don’t think Brahm did it simply to make peace with himself or to create some kind of cohesion in an otherwise unpredictable world a world where there was hardly any, no Brahm just had independence he just had good unique sense.
Brahm did onto others. His junior year of high school Brahm met a girl, the most beautiful and wonderful girl, she was sweet, yea. She smiled every time he asked for her attention and waited for him between classes. Commuting side by side, she would start softly and then… I fucking hate school, she would blurt. Brahm always tried to suggest another path to finding peace with academia. Aw you can’t hate knowledge can you? He would ask. Na I don’t hate knowledge, I just hate being here. She would huff and sigh and then diverge the entire conversation onto herself. There’s a big difference between hating knowledge and hating the place where knowledge is peddled to you. I hate the indoctrination, the filtration of information Brahm. She looked at him with her round face and put a smile on display, there is no way I could hate knowledge Brahm. She sounded like she wanted to kill herself. Soon after Brahm learned that she did-more than anything else-want to kill herself.
         When junior year was almost finished, Brahm and Mani decided to tie the young knot and commit completely to each other. Mani however had been worsening over the year and was hardly herself. She wasn’t a sample of how Brahm knew her when they first met. She would hardly smile, and when she did smile it was delayed, she’d lower her big head and then look up with a sort of uncertainty like she’d just fallen forward, arose and was waiting for a crowd of ooos, and a lonesome observation of her front teeth are gone, then a muffled snicker following it up, pffff. 
If there was a bunch of us and we were talking shit against the walls of some building around fifty-third or fifty-fourth (where we hung out and joked on the briefcase toting, 401K investing, waiting idly for two week vacation, trolling around on auto-pilot until their retirement, teenage torturing Golems passing by), then the event would be postponed because whether I wanted to admit my shallowness or not I wanted to stick around and see her pretty ass face, see her smile. Make her smile Brahm.
  One day when Mani wasn’t looking Brahm thought he’d sneak up behind her and softly grab her arm. He thought she was so hyper, a gentle stroke would rattler her. His favorite criticisms were the ones he made of modern movies and he remembered telling his friend from Prattle and Davis how real scary movies, truly scary movies aren’t suffused with gore and mayhem and every twisted perverse, sexual, violent and senseless act out of Medieval Europe (when the infected scathed themselves seeking penance during the black plague); no they were refined, had suspense and drama and plot twist not just twist on the perverse. So Brahm grabbed her arm and she didn’t even notice, instead she kept on walking, her asses trading the lead. Brahm thought she was teasing him, smiled and slouched while he walked up to her with a swagger that had been lifted from T.V.
Brahm never saw her cry she never spoke to him about crying or asked him to rent movies that situate the most average unsuspecting heartthrobs in a devastating world and of course force you to contemplate, wow this can happen to anyone, if this can happen to such a beautiful popular person who deserves nothing but the best, then this can happen to anyone- this can happen to me! Brahm read a book that mentioned Golems and he figured that she was a Golem. One day her chatty, prying but truly concerned best friend approached him in the hallway on the fourth floor of what was a steadily depressing school that came closer each year to a neck-breaking halt. Brahm’s older brother Bernard had attended the school three years prior to Brahm’s acceptance and his parents hollered and bawled hysterically because this was their one shot at redemption. Bernard had fucked up real bad there and got into trouble with teachers all the time. The consensus was that Bernard was an incredibly intelligent kid who mercilessly let his intemperance get the best of him. Bernard, during the countless advisory parent meetings provided monotonous excuses like, I just aint calibrated for this mindless arbitrary learning system. All this, all of this advising and intervening for a useless generic degree. His advisor would watch as though she were imperiled by such a lost mind and insist that he change his ways or they would prevent him from getting accepted into a good college. His mother would sit a fairly significant distance away shuddering, his father massaging her shoulder and watching his sons fear of authority diminish before him. For a man who had spent his entire life believing that by industriousness and obedience one could achieve a state of wholeness; a man who spent cloves of his life inspecting and fumigating people’s homes as thoroughly as a mother washes her sons, he was speechless at the defiance and highness of Bernard’s words. 
It seemed as though they had both stormed out of their classrooms discontent, and ironically Brahm’s teacher had just endorsed the adage, misery likes company. You, you she pointed and walked towards him with her massive self. He backed away and held his hands as if he were being held up. A girls’ best friend should never have that kind of authority but when she does its evidence that a guy really likes a girl, that the people who influence her also influence him. Hey, what’d I do? he waved his hands to plead his innocence. He couldn’t understand why she was mad he knew that she and Mani were best friends but he couldn’t even remember her name or when they had first met. Mani has been lugging around moping, looking all heavy and weighted down, being all hormonal and shit like she’s got extra ovaries. She got in his face and placed her hands at her hips as if she was saying, like well… and he wanted to laugh because he just kept replaying the image of Mani in his head walking around with extra ovaries. Mani’s best friend was too serious to laugh out loud. He watched and knew everything about her, what kind of men she liked, what kind of music she listened too, how soon she lost her virginity (really early on by some guy who was in college. Worked part-time then and works part-time now), and who she gossiped about. After he had managed to evade her questions and walk away from her, he worried more about Mani, was he the only one who could see that there was something terribly wrong?
         In some ways it seemed Mani was using Brahm to consume parts of her that she made up in her mind were cancerous, toxic, multiplicative, parasitical, poisonous, ailing. By the time junior year ended Brahm and Mani had been having a reprehensible amount of sex on an almost daily basis, except on weekends when Mani would stay with her recently fathering father. It’s like he was in a coma for seventeen years and was dreaming about me living some tragic life, snapped out of it and then decided hey, if I could just have her on weekends then I could fix her… She’d pause and wonder and then stand impassably and then mess up her face offering in a low disillusioned voice- I’m not a car. When she turned to him and looked up all he could see in her pruned face were sheets after sex and approached her with a kind of indifference to it all and she was too interdependent to say, hey you fucker the wetness is on my face and avoid him until he had cleansed himself and begged like a choir for salvation. Three times the same teacher walked in on them in a vacant classroom and simply raised his eyebrows and retraced his steps. Mr. Stacy is cool Brahm bragged and always gave the guy a pound when he entered his classroom, Mr. Stacy didn’t get along with any of the other teachers because he was an honorary senior every year. It was more or less wherever was empty; space, hospitability never crossed their minds they just did it, hence the term doing it he joked and that was perhaps the one time he ever got a solid, wholesome laugh from her. He started feeling like she was getting better and thought it was time to start bragging about how much of a freak she was to his boys. He never got the chance to because Mani seemed to always call whenever he was ready to leave his apartment and when he picked up she sounded so hopeless that he would end up taking off his shoes and consoling Mani from the couch. Then his mother would appear and scold him about the inappropriateness of a young man slumping on his mothers couch to talk to some half whit girl. Pissed off he would tell Mani, I’ll call you back okay? And before she had the opportunity to answer he would hang up the phone and casually walk into the building’s hall without saying a word.
                   What Brahm didn’t seem to understand was that Mani was one of those girls that’s furiously sought after by all the guys that aren’t with her, and undoubtedly Brahm was a cool, stand-up, honorable guy but in perspective Mani was just physically too good for him. She didn’t know it or maybe she was just too depressed to flaunt her fat ass, squeeze her hips when she was fed-up, fall and scar her long suave, lamppost legs. Mani is a beautiful, beautiful girl. Over the summer I heard on innumerous occasions guys talking about what they would do to Mani if she’d just leave the loser- they were talking about Brahm. In all honesty I wanted to aid Brahm’s honor, because here were a bunch of loose guys that were probably only around because one of them went out with one of the girls who hung with us- probably Marge or Lucinda; the only two girls oblivious enough to date guys outside the clique and think there wouldn’t be any confrontations. I wasn’t worried about most of them but there was one guy who looked like he had a chance. He didn’t seem impressively smooth but he had an energy or an aura about him like Mani’s and apparently, as it was the consensus of the girls, he was the perfect Goddamn man. They all gave him gargantuan smiles when they passed by him and he would only retaliate with a superficial kind of smile-lip-sync and elevate his eyebrows in an acknowledging gesture. Further proof that he was as lonesome and sarcastic as Mani. A few months before Mani’s depression became debilitating I actually braved it and introduced myself to the guy. It was at some party in Elmhurst in the middle of the week- I’d become so accustomed to busting my ass during the weekdays throughout the school year, that I still felt irresponsible when I had too much entertainment on a weekday. On multiple occasions I had to remind myself that it was summer, school was out and I could unfold all those dog ears.
         We didn’t talk about much but striking up a conversation with the kid wasn’t as much trouble as I’d thought it’d be. He looked like the all about himself type, the kind that thought he had it all together and didn’t really need to acknowledge people all that much especially other males. I tried not to approach as an inferior male and I’ll admit walking towards him I felt a little gay, there was a sluggishness to the process (felt catastrophic), oh boy, he thinks I’m going to hit on him. I swirled the drink in my hand to try and get rid of the nerves, make it seem like what I was doing was casual, straight.  By the time I sat next to him and we started talking I had hardly the sense to realize that I was drunk. Yet I had sense enough to realize that the kid- Rodney- was gay! Gayer than the ending of Romeo and Juliet, gayer than preteen poetry, gayer than the kid who cant play sports at all, gayer than Saturday morning cartoon inspired card games, gayer than a fat kids room, gayer than talking on the phone with your girl for more than two hours, gayer than love, gay, gay, gay! I closed that forum as fast I could and got out of there- Brahm, your Mani is going to remain as unbroken as the wrapper of a wallet condom.
         Mani is chewed down to the bone. One night Mani called Brahm a worthless son-of-a-bitch for no reason he could find and then dusted him, took off running towards the low stars. He called after her but she didn’t slow down, instead she kicked off her heels and ran hard, hard like she was trying to crush up the floor behind her so Brahm couldn’t follow. He watched dismally and then resolved to catch her, she’s an escapee but I’m not the mad house- and took off after her. Mani stop stop running. Mani. Partially breathless he stooped and picked up the plastic shoes she’d kicked off. He held it in the air after her and seriously he looked like a zealot, a puritan hunting down a heretic a witch and I’m sure bystanders reported they could have sworn they heard him bellowing witch, witch! Around the bend she wound, Brahm in undiscouraged pursuit. When he finally turned and was almost prepared to accept that Mani was a crazy, wild bitch, that aint have no sense and wouldn’t until she got pregnant, or real sick with something so old it’s incurable like whooping cough, or polio he saw her slow down and before her all that remained like traces of morning on a kid’s grimy afternoon hands was a cemetery, a pitch black farm, its seeds retardant to water, to light, to love, to suffering, to naivety, to revival, to any provocation. Here she fell to the ground. Mani grabbed at the earth and brought up moist fistfuls screaming scrambled phrases at the headstones. Brahm ducked down at her side and stilled himself and as she carried on he started talking in a slow mournful tone. Death is coming for everyman baby, death will come sooner than you think.
         Some guys would have found Mani’s pagan behavior exciting, a dark death obsessed girl with an incredibly hot body and an absolutely stunning face under all those black loose cheap skirts and that pale makeup. Mani was every guys’ fantasy, it was like I can only imagine what’s under all of that bullshit what’s behind the succession of feelings, clothes, jewelry. Ah, it’s hard to explain. But I know that whatever is behind the shroud (and this is with people walking the streets, governments, regimes, cults) holds significant appeal, anonymity is an aphrodisiac.
         Mani and Brahm sat in Sin Nikoles Park. Dusk was setting in. Brahm had Mani in his arms she sat into him and in her ear he whispered, I feel like a Lazy Boy and she rubbed her shoulders into his chest clasped his right fist and pulled back on it, made a clinking mechanical sound like a transformer and smiled. He yielded back and started shaking her up. Feeling her arms against his own, he moved his up and down and noticed incremental roughness as if there were long strips of raised skin. He said something insignificant and distractive and then felt her skin on the sly. Mani! He said her name like her dad might have, had he been in her life long enough to have the authority to scold her. Why do you have these fucking scars on your arms what have you been up to, huh? I thought you were passed this shit, I thought you were getting better. That might have been Brahm’s largest setback when it came to Mani he kept trying to fix her kept trying to make her better. Don’t get me wrong Brahm’s intentions were good, I’m not saying that Brahm was this totally naive sucker but he didn’t understand that you can’t change people for the better you can’t establish what’s wrong with someone that’s living a functional life; meaning that they aren’t addicted to drugs or doing something on a regular basis that is life threatening or sanity threatening. Mani had him fooled she was just a typical teenage girl; I’m struggling with my body image and shit come on it’s a girl thing you wouldn’t understand Brahmeee! After he’d been quiet for a while after she could feel the contemplation in his tight moist embrace she sprung it on him: everybody wants to push me into being something I’m not, you too Brahm. They want us to be what they think will make us love life or cherish life or what-the-fuck ever it is! Fuuck it’s sickening Brahm, they’re always testing our sanity. The other day my mom had the most invasive conversation I think a parent has ever had with their child. She came in and asked me what I wanted to do after college, I don’t know leave me alone. I told her that I wanted to learn about the world and about myself more than I wanted to settle down and live out my life. A job I said, a job, a career she interjected, a career whatever. I said whatever with so much disgust it made me feel good to make her feel that I thought she was disgusting. That’d mean I’d have to commit to that job. The thought of it sickens me. She looked at me like I was just beyond reasoning or sensible thought. I know she was waiting for me to say I just want to be a pediatrician and volunteer as a youth mentor on weekends, settle down with a wonderful guy and get married. Actually Brahm…hunh? He replied with some residual disdain, I enjoyed torturing her. I enjoyed stringing her along and making her feel guilty as if she’d raised me wrong. Does that make me a bad person? That doesn’t make you a bad person Mani it just makes you feel a little more in control of your life than your parents seem to be in control of their own.
         Brahm reached an understanding and harmony with the world around him through means unsupported by the culture surrounding him. He lay on a bed he complained was no bigger than a cot. Out loud he said, hunh, I can be a hero if I can just do something wildly, invigoratingly heroic- I want to be worthy of a statue! Up on his wall he had posters of solid snake, the espionage the debunker of secret corrupt crime organizations, a clone of the best soldier in the world. Metal Gear Solid was Brahm’s favorite videogame for a long time, he set aside and replaced it with Mani for a while. Smart move Mani needed supervision. Brahm fantasized about greatness so much he thought he could become like snake, and I didn’t want to tell him but video games have a continue option; you get shot and you’re alacrity is unfazed; you’re always faster and stronger than your enemy and if you’re not, the game is designed so that you get saved by a beautiful woman with so much cleavage it’s believable, you say okay she’s a ridiculously good spy. Look at her, look at how she corrupts these indoctrinated men, men who otherwise can’t think for themselves are self- determined enough to be distracted by the former stripper, who worked her way to patriotism by crossing the border, turning away the once legitimate peso and then accepting the dollar, then only dancing for white men and then wearing the skimpiest impersonation of a U.S flag as her costume. Before she left her father had begged her to stay in Mexico, that he could live with even tolerate her dancing for Mexican men but for white men uh uh he said- the only phrase he knew in English- no way his daughter was going to go dance for white men. White men stole our land you’re going to dance for thieves and killers they’ll call you a gypsy and a whore, your whole family will call you a gypsy and a whore! I will think of you as a whore! I will think of myself as a super heroine, the clothes are my costume and when I pelt it from me out comes my identity and they will know who I am, they will know what I am. A beautiful, beautiful woman with the metal to say look at how undeniably Mexican I am, I’m worth more than you’re letting on. You pay to see me and you can’t even touch me and you’re satisfied with just seeing me so satisfied, and I am still chaste, I am still a virgin. Who’s manipulating who Papa? Crazy, she didn’t even need to learn English half of the men in the joint found her Spanish an irresistible turn on. A couple of men tried to go a little too far. This pseudo muscular, milk skinned, gel haired, really well kempt customer- I’m talking shirt and pants preciously pressed- while dispensing his third twenty dollar bill down her underwear, sneered and dug down with his middle finger she jumped up and screamed, fucker! The next thing he knew he was out back with a gun to his head. The manager’s most prized possession was incorruptible, the strict no touching policy for his employees was a striiicccttt no touching policy for, we’ll call her Lady Liberty. You couldn’t make a more heinous trespass in that place. Unfortunately I’m not at liberty to say whether or not the guy just got pistol whipped or damned in a furnace.
         Little did he know that the military thrives on the job insecure the financially frustrated, in fact the military frustrates job acquisition expecting that those who become fed up with job hunting, going to interviews, pretending, will- after much dissuasion that there is any real opportunity- wave their freedom for a few years in search of security. A cycle of insecurity, insecurity and insanity! Brahm was afraid of obscurity I think and so he thought that maybe by doing something where he had to sacrifice a great deal of his peace of mind, he could demonstrate how out of tune he was with Halcyon. How willing he was to suffer, once of course he would be venerated and eternalized.
         Mani loved reading, Brahm loved videogames. Both hobbies require a great deal of fantasy and immaturity. Mani started her own short story! Mani started this imaginative, light shedding thoughtful short story. A criticism on the deficit between the rich and the poor, the wicked and the meek. Dangerously Marxist but still wonderful and enlightening. I have it here with me along with Mani. She might believe she’s here against her will but she’s not. She loves me she’s just having a hard time understanding why it is I can’t trust her to love me in kind. It isn’t distrust I just need to make sure that she can hear the eloquence of her literature of her own personal language.