Great Guys Club

by Caroline Kepnes

A moron who goes around the world is just a moron who went around the world. That's what I'm on the verge of saying to Jeremy, my best friend of twenty-eight years. He's always been kind of a moron, but never been this kind of a moron, pompous in sunglasses, a ratty wool sweater on and it's June. He's crossing his legs and taking a pill for his parasite and getting a text from some girl named Estlund from some bar in Thailand that I couldn't (and shouldn't) try to picture because I've never been to Thailand, because most of the girls I've banged are named Kelly. Jeremy and I were friends in the womb. Our moms were pregnant at the same time and there are all kinds of pictures of them bumping their bumps, sitting side by side on the beach. Our friendship is defined by the organization we founded in the fourth grade, the Great Guys Club, a top secret society of two top secret agents on a mission to win the heart and hand of one Amy Meredith Tarantino. The GGC's original meeting spot was a busted tool shed my dad had built and tossed into the woods a few years back. Nobody knew about the Club and though Jeremy and I both had other friends, sports and stuff, we spent the bulk of our time, the important hours, huddled in the tool shed doing the good labor of the GGC, figuring out how to prevent our enemies, who were all other dudes on planet earth, from winning the heart and hand of Amy Tarantino.

"So I got news too."

"Yeah? What? You take a road trip to the quarry or something?"

"Nice try, dickwad."

We laugh. Maybe the moron I love is on the way back. He takes off his stupid fucking scarf. "So what's up?"

"I'm dating Amy Tarantino."

He slaps his knee and takes off his sunglasses and raises his hand for a high five. No, you do not high five over Amy Tarantino. A high five is for a good dirty joke or an unexpected blowjob. I let him hang there and he settles down.

"Amy Meredith Tarantino."

"The one and only."

"Well, go to Eastern Europe and walk through some of those villages, my friend, and you might see that she's not the one and only."

I want to throw the sunglasses on the ground and step on them. I want to go to Eastern Europe and Thailand and hold them all at gunpoint until they give me my friend back.

"Dude, this is the founding goal of the GGC."

"I know, I know. I didn't realize you were still obsessed with her."

"And you're not?"

He shrugs and looks away. A friendship can peter out like conversation on a bad date, you can grow apart, see each other less, but there's always a moment where the end begins. I had waited until today to tell Jeremy about me and Amy Tarantino and now I wish I'd just sent him an email.

"Hey, calm down, Petey. It's cool, you and Amy Tarantino. It's good."

"It's not cool. It's not good. It's a lifelong mission and it's complete."

He laughed and put those fucking sunglasses back on. "Dude, no offense, but you gotta get out more. Spread your wings. Amy Tarantino is the tip of the iceberg. The tip."

Amy Tarantino is the iceberg, the only warm iceberg in the world, a miracle of a person. I nod. I have won her and he was not. I have no choice but to expect that he's gonna be jealous.

"So, did you make it to Afghanistan?"

***

The overall goal of the Great Guys Club, aside from Amy Tarantino, was Greatness. We spent years identifying Greatness around us. Rick Springfield was Great because he sings "Jessie's Girl", the song that got Amy Tarantino to dance in a circle with four other girls at the first school dance of our lives. We wished our names were Jesse but they weren't, but Jeremy had the advantage since his name, at least, began with a 'J'. I had my advantages too. Andre Agassi was Great because Amy Tarantino chose Agassi as the focus of a speech she made in Social Studies class, the only class we both shared with her that year. Andre Agassi played mad tennis and had long blonde hair. I'm blonde. I play tennis. Jeremy started taking tennis classes but his hair wouldn't grow and he was never gonna be good at tennis like me, so we figured he'd focus on Springfield qualities, sing in chorus instead of making fart noises like most of the dudes, and maybe try out for the play. The list grew. By the end of the eighth grade, we were spies like the Great James Bond, we could dance like New Kids on the Block, Amy Tarantino's favorite band. Her favorite New Kid was Joey. We bought embarrassing magazines for girls and memorized everything there was to know about Joey Mac, the Irish Catholic baby brother from Needham. At dances though, the floor opened up and Amy Tarantino would be right there clapping as hard as anyone, chanting our names. In these moments of Greatness, we would commit Active Pursuit, but it was always the case that Amy Tarantino found me and/or Jeremy to be really sweet but not as enticing as the guy she was interested in, guy inevitably being a moron in our class who played baseball and had an endless supply of rugby shirts and could not dance, bore no resemblance to a New Kid whatsoever. Amy Tarantino's taste in the opposite sex was confusing to us, but we didn't break. We concentrated on practicing Greatness. Great Guys always get the girl. It was our job to become Great and thus prepared for the moment when Amy Tarantino would be ready for Greatness.

***

The summer when Amy Tarantino was lip locked at the teen center with the baseball moron, we focused on becoming brave. We stole a golf cart from the place we caddied. We lifted chewing tobacco from 7-11. We threw up all over the golf cart and at the next meeting declared not throwing up to be a GGQ. Great Guy Quality. It was really hot that summer and we didn't have air conditioning and my fan was too loud, so some nights I'd just lie there and sweat. Something was changing about the GGC and I only felt free to think about it when everyone else in my world was asleep. There was a fundamental flaw in our club: We were two guys and there was only one Amy Tarantino. Guys can share the pursuit of a girl, but they can't share the girl. In these dark hours, I would get all worried that the GGC was ugly at heart, that we were the two biggest dumb asses of all time because we had accidentally set each other up to be Worst Enemies. Someday, one of us would get Amy. And what of the other? I'd try and get Jeremy to have a crush on another girl, because I wanted to be his friend forever. The GGC was a lifelong kind of thing and I didn't like the idea of a future where the GGC was extinct because that's what happens when you get what you want. You lose the dream of getting what you want and you can't have a club based on trying to fill that want anymore. I never asked Jeremy if he shared my concerns. I don't think he did. Jeremy didn't worry as much as me. This you could even see when we were babies. My mom has all these old home movies from the beach and Jeremy runs into the water and thrashes. I walk in slowly. I test the water.

***

"So how is that Jeremy Calder doing?"

Amy Tarantino is in my bed, lighting a cigarette and covering her ass, even though I always tell her not to cover it. We just had sex. I always wish she would be quiet in these moments and just let me hold her, but she's squid-like in her need to move around. She doesn't understand the years it took to get here, the GGC, the reverence I have for these moments. I can't tell her. She'd obviously freak out and flee.

"Jeremy's all right. He's back, you know, he's good."

"Did he really go all over the world?"

"Most of it. He skipped Canada though."

"We should all get a drink."

We just had sex. I don't want to get a drink with Jeremy and Amy Tarantino. "Yeah. Cool."

"Can you call him?" "I didn't even know you know him that well."

She rests her chin in her tiny porcelain hands. She is still, for once. "Come on, Peter."

"Come on what?" She is the most beautiful creature, the only creature. Everyone else is just a human.

"You know he and I used to hook up in high school. But it doesn't matter because that was a long time ago and obviously I am very much with you now. You don't have to get all jealous or anything."

I feel like someone just shoved chewing tobacco that's been sitting around rotting since eighth grade into my gullet. I run into the bathroom and puke. She stands over me, naked. She rubs my head.

"I told you, Peter. You, my sweet, cannot handle tequila."

***

The GGC's greatest feat came in the ninth grade. We started watching Amy Tarantino's favorite television programs and learned that we were going about pursuing her in the wrong manner. In these shows, the Amy Tarantino figure was always thrust in the middle of a love triangle. We had to make her jealous. We had to have girlfriends and be unavailable and then Amy Tarantino would grow obsessed and lie in bed staring at our yearbook picture, and then some night, in a pool, she would swim up and say she couldn't help herself and didn't want to cheat on her boyfriend, but that she couldn't stop thinking about us. And we would take her in our arms in the pool and one of her cafeteria ballads, by Chicago or Air Supply, would fill the air and we'd be kissing Amy Tarantino. Jeremy's girlfriend was Alice Quick. Poor Alice was doomed from the get go with that name. I don't know you have the last name 'Quick' and don't become a total whore. He lost his virginity long before I did, in Alice Quick's parents' catamaran. I knew her to be a whore because the virginity lost took place in November, and it is not warm on a boat in November. Alice Quick had blonde hair she crimped hair and jittery blue eyes you wanted to grab because they seemed like marbles might, at any moment, fall out of her head and roll away and make some unsuspecting passerby trip and fall. Alice Quick played field hockey but she wasn't very good. She was in a group of girls that had some lame name for their circle and got off on excluding other girls from their weekend gatherings. But we were invited. My mom would drop me and Jeremy off at one of these girls' houses and we'd all drink beers that someone's brother got. I'd kiss someone every weekend. During Jeremy's courtship with Alice Quick, I kissed seventeen different girls. None of them became my girlfriend. Jeremy said this was the right way to play it. He said I was becoming a player. Girls love players. I worried that a player was not the kind of guy that the GGC would condone. But Jeremy said it was okay because Amy Tarantino is a smart girl and smart girls like challenges and that if she were to hear that I was the last guy in the world who would ever settle due to his life being a nonstop flow of random mouths and Jolly Ranchers soaked in bottles of Zima, she would feel compelled to entrap me and make me change my ways. He also said that above all, the GGC had to be always trying new approaches. Since he was attempting the jealousy trap, I would be the single playa. He said it like that, with no 'r' at the end. I wound up fucking for the first time in Amy Tarantino's house junior year. The girl's name was Sally Weinraub. Sally Weinraub was, to my knowledge, always drunk when she wasn't in a classroom. Her mother must have had no idea, because Sally's clothes were always ironed to perfection, as if Sally were at all kempt in her behavior. She had enormous boobs, even after the legendary breast reduction surgery I'd heard about. We screwed in Amy Tarantino's little brother's bed, and I worried, in that moment, that I had just eliminated any possibility of ever winning Amy Tarantino. Jeremy said I was way off and that Amy Tarantino would only want me more, knowing that I had been with another girl in her house, near her bedroom, on her little brother's primary colored sheets. She would want to reclaim her home by sleeping with me. It made sense to me. Sally Weinraub did not become my girlfriend and by the end of junior year I had slept with seventeen different girls, none of them named Amy Tarantino. Jeremy stayed with Alice Quick through senior year. He never pledged his love. We agreed that, at the end of the day, a Great Guy does not say something he doesn't really mean.

I left Amy Tarantino's as soon as I got my gut to stop heaving and walked home. I locked the door and knew I wouldn't be opening it for a few days, maybe never again. I lost time, I sealed the windows and blasted the heat and only ate when starving, and only then just raw chocolate pop tarts and tequila. And then I'd throw up. I was on a Great Guy Mission of my own and I'd never done this before. Always Jeremy and I had come up with these missions together. I wasn't even sure what the end goal of the mission was. I had Amy Tarantino. The mission required that I read the GGC bible cover to cover. Eighteen years of meticulous fact checking. There was the Benetton Choice Count Chart. One year, Amy Tarantino favored Benetton rugby shirts. We charted her selections so we would know when to expect pink, when we'd next see the baby blue that made her green eyes spike. The Great Guys Quality index wherein we charted the importance of Great qualities, noted that while Great Guys can sing, it is more important that they open a car door for a girl. I'd never read the GGC bible in its entirety before. A few times I threw it against the wall. The Great Guys Club was nothing but a big pit of lies. Jeremy's betrayal, which began when we were fifteen, was retroactive poison. He'd killed our childhood and not bothered to tell me. Everything in the GGC looked different to me now. I saw unfairness everywhere. Generally, my handwriting appeared far more than his chicken scratch. Yet, there was infinitely more written about Rick Springfield than Andre Agassi. The GGC bible revealed itself to be completely one-sided, skewed to Jeremy's qualities, the bulk of these testimonies in my handwriting. I was the biggest sucker who ever lived and I tore up a yellowed picture of Rick Springfield. How had I not seen what was really happening? Even the good memories held evil now. The night we chewed tobacco and stole the golf cart? Only I got in trouble. Jeremy insisted we hide the golf cart at my house, not his. And when my parents found out, they didn't call Jeremy's parents and rat him out. They said I should learn a lesson from Jeremy. I should become the kind of person who puts himself first, out of harm's way. Jeremy, they had reasoned, was not a moron and would do very well in life, great even.

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