Fingerless Gloves: A Story About Best Friends And Mistakes

By Nick Orsini

Tonight will be the most difficult night in 25-year-old Anton Duchamp’s life.

When his best friend James Squire is mysteriously rushed to hospital, Anton begins a night-long journey that takes him from shady, marijuana-smoke-filled apartments to ex-girlfriends’ bedrooms, and eventually back to his childhood home.

As the night unfolds, so do new revelations about Anton’s recreational drug use and his past failures. And as Friday night drags into Saturday morning, he learns of James’s deteriorating health. In a universe that has seemingly left him without a specific function, it takes a single night for Anton to realize that no one will ever hand him a meaning or a purpose.

Fingerless Gloves, which won the Fiction Fast-Track prize for new writing, is a story about best friends and the mistakes we never knew we were making. It is a story about remembering – by any means necessary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apostrophe Books Ltd
• Release date: Jan 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781908556400

Nick Orsini

Nick Orsini claims not to be a writer. After graduating from college in the heart of the Great Recession in 2008, unable to find work, he set out to tell one great story. Armed with a background in Film History and Criticism, and after spending his formative years analysing everything from Blade Runner to pro-wrestling, he started to write. Nick has self-published two books, one collection of poetry, and maintains a blog of over 2,000 original poems and short stories. He has written for The Projection List and Thought Catalog. His poetry spanned topics from the Occupy Wall Street protests to the senselessness of coming-of-age. His first self-published novel, Two Wrongs Make a Vice, has been shipped to over 40 countries and all 50 US states. His second novel, Fingerless Gloves, is a story centering on the fragility of friendship and the ways we come to terms with ourselves and our past failures. In August 2012, it won Apostrophe Book’s Fiction Fast-Track new writing competition.

Book preview

Orsini

Solo dolo is defined on Urban Dictionary as to do things by yourself (solo) and on the down low (dolo). Tonight, I’m pretty sure I have the first half of the definition down, but I’m not sure what I’m doing is on the down low." In fact, I’m out in public…and as far from low as anyone has ever been. I think people give being alone this bad rap, like it’s something to pushers and freaks…and any normal person should have at least one friend, one accomplice, one tagalong. Fact is, on some nights, during your most formative times, you often find yourself alone, whether it’s intentional or not. There you are, solo…trying to hide something. Trying to justify some nasty, developing habit that the world has written off as lawless and wrong.

The night started in an apartment. To be exact, the apartment I moved in to five months ago, on May 1st. That night was the first cool night at the end of September, the first jean-jacket type of night. All things being what they were, I didn’t own a jean jacket. I still don’t. I own too many pairs of jeans to own a jean jacket…I’d be stuck with Canadian tuxedos every night of the week. I’ve always been more of a hoodie person. I’m all for functionality, comfort, and pockets. Jean jackets, when I worked up the nerve to try them on in the store, were always too tight, with pockets way too small and inaccessible for my purposes. That purpose? Smoking dope. You read it right: dope. I am not a drug addict, nor is my life in some sort of mess. This is not the story of a downward spiral or a descent into addiction. Those stories exist. This is not one of them. I have parents who love me, friends who care about me. I’ve always just been enamored with the feeling of getting high…not gateway I need to get higher high…just, you know, fuzzy enough.

I have read all the clueless accounts of smoking pot. I have heard the stories of mythical White Castle runs, spontaneous trips to the beach, ill-advised hook ups, and entire boxes of Chips Ahoy! consumed without consideration of heart and waistline. Friends of mine have gotten into car accidents, ruined parental trust, and set gloves on fire all in the name of pot. It has driven even the most put-together people to the brink of some type of unexplainable madness. Pot makes bad movies good, good movies unwatchable, and any type of dialogue-driven comedy almost incomprehensible.

Speaking of, movies and TV don’t help much. Stoners are James Franco in Freaks and Geeks, Harold & Kumar, and that weird kid from That 70’s Show who played Venom in Spider-Man 3. They are always heavy-eyed with perfectly imperfect hair, a strange drug-induced way with women, and a knack for accomplishing whatever they set their minds to. The stoners inside the movies will always get the girl, solve the crime, figure out his or her life, drive on the right side of the road, and never, ever be consumed by the overwhelming desire to sit on a couch, deflated, doing nothing at all. They are the funny part of drug use…the five-day beards and the mouth-full laughs.

Music is even more detrimental to the cause. Stoners are rappers, garage-fuzz wielding 20-somethings, or John Mayer in his Rolling Stone interview. Musicians, since the dawn of time, have been getting stoned before shows…from bands with multi-million dollar recording contracts to the bunch of kids playing at a seedy bar or VFW hall. I know you know all their stories.

You’ve seen the movies, listened to the songs and felt peer pressure to laugh at that ideal, yet unobtainable high. You’ve watched as friends did their best to vibe out. The clichés are piled on thick, like a munchie-induced peanut butter and jelly triple-decker. But you wouldn’t know anything about that sandwich because, as anyone can tell you, when you’re high in real life, all you can ever find are Reduced Fat Triscuts or a quarter bag of Cape Cod Potato Chips. The munchies have never inspired me to take an epic road trip. If I’m out driving and close to fast food, well that’s fortunate. If I’m in my apartment and the only thing to eat is half a box of Kix and three McIntosh apples, so be it.

That night… the worst night of my life, my best friend, James Squire, was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. He had been in his room, playing NBA Live 1996 on Sega Genesis, when he collapsed. It was 20 minutes before his mother called him for dinner. When she finally walked upstairs and opened his door, she found him face-down in his shag carpet. We didn’t know it at the time, but the massive brain aneurism that had been ticking like a baking timer inside his body had picked that exact moment to announce that he was done. Just a Steve Kerr three-pointer before, everything was fine.

It was 5:30pm when I got the phone call, and it wasn’t until the next afternoon that I learned he had passed away. James was part of something larger… a greater high. He passed away doing what he loved: playing as the Chicago Bulls… beating up on the Seattle Supersonics. I’m not sure why he still played stuck in those years… blowing into the bottom of the cartridge and squinting at the poor graphics. What happened between those hours, that Friday night, that Saturday morning, was different from any high I’d ever seen in the movies. I sure as hell couldn’t play it as cool as James Franco.

As the game of NBA Live wound on, a controller tangled and resting next to a limp hand and wrist, with the player-1 red circle on a pixelated, immobile athlete, a boy had his last seconds on the earth. That’s a heavy enough thought. No drug could afford you height enough to clear the space between what’s permanent and what’s just passing through.

My name is Anton Duchamp. I am not French. My parents are film people. Marcel Duchamp made surrealist movies about spirals. I’ve since tried to watch these films to better understand my namesake. I can gather absolutely nothing from them. I’m not sure what my parents thought we’d ever become, but they liked those spirals enough to start a new family surname. It wasn’t enough to name me Anton, but in some fit of rebellion against whatever original last name my father had, they went ahead and gave us all a new, very European, last name. To be honest, my name had been a source of ridicule from kindergarten right on through middle school. Kids would stretch the name calling out as far as it could go. It isn’t until high school that people realize having a unique name is a strange way to gain status points. Sometimes, when I think back on high school, it seemed like my name was the only source of status points.

I met James Squire in kindergarten, when I hid his box of 64 Crayola Crayons in a different cubby space. When it came time to color, James Squire was left with a black and white picture and a stern talking to from our teacher. He never ratted or asked anyone around him what happened to his box of 64. I’m not sure why I picked James, probably had something to do with proximity, and his sitting on one side of me and the cubbies being on the other side of me. It might have also had something to do with the fact that he was a stand-up guy right from the start. Other kids, being young and unsure of themselves, would have sold me out. When the teacher asked about James’ picture, he never let on that his crayons were stolen; rather, he just said he liked to color with black pen. Maybe the teacher took him for some misunderstood art prodigy. That same day, right after the frizzy-haired teacher told us we were done coloring, James got up to use the in-classroom bathroom. When he returned to his chair, with tennis balls cut and stuck to the bottoms of the legs and the table that he shared with five other kids, his box had been returned, sharpener and all. He pushed his chair in, and as the tennis balls slid on the floor, no one heard a thing.

In the 6th grade, we graduated into middle school at a luau-themed transition party. James danced with the prettiest girl while I messed with the zip-front collar on my Paco Jeans shirt. Our roles had pretty much reversed themselves and I was the one left awkwardly trying to explain my wardrobe and myself. By then, James and I had pretty much been the best 6th grade friends of all time. I copped to stealing the crayons, and since then, things were golden. We hung out on my trampoline, watched pro wrestling, talked about the Chicago Bulls, all the while not realizing how out of style our haircuts were. Our moms talked on the phone; our dads grunted through conversations with one another, and I had memorized the Squire’s house phone number. That night, at the luau dinner, I noticed James had gotten taller. He knew where to put his hands perfectly on that girl’s hips… and he could dance. He had rhythm. When he saw me at the punch bowl later, he asked if I needed a ride home after the dance. I had been posted up by the folding chairs for most of the night. I was pretty content watching the prettiest girls in my class dance with other guys. I had unwillingly become an observer. I never even knew it was happening… the slip from active to passive.

Funny, it turned out that I did need that ride home. My stomach was full of syrupy punch and brownies made from the instant mix. I could feel it flopping around and knew I needed to get home quick. Some mom was really good at following the instructions on the side of that cardboard box because those brownies were fantastic. My special 6th grade dance ended the same way countless nights before had ended: being driven home by Mrs. Squire.

With the odds stacked in our favor, we graduated to high school. By that time, James and I had a keen interest in girls, beyond dancing with them and scooping them punch. Sex became less of a concept and more and more of a closing reality. I began regularly buying those magazines with young female celebrities, retouched and cleaned up, looking perfect in bikinis and various kinds of elaborate, impractical underwear. We started listening to music… our music. These were songs with singers who screamed, rapped, and flipped the bird in the music videos. We listened to punk rock songs about breaking up, sneaking out, staying up late, and moving away. I began to wonder about high school and the reality that only four more years separated me from this gigantic, monumental thing.

At that 8th grade dinner, James haphazardly made out with the prettiest girl in our class while I tried to figure out how to take the cardboard housing off my instant camera and turn said camera into a low-voltage taser. James Squire still hung out with me on weekends, still watched movies at my house, still walked to the comic book store with me. We were all about the three peat Bulls and watching the older guys fight each other in the mall parking lot on Friday nights. He liked video games for PlayStation. When I sold my Super Nintendo, James gave me a big speech about how he was hanging on to his Sega Genesis. He told me that, one day, playing old video games would be cool again. As usual, James Squire was right.

After 12th grade, high school ended. By that time, James had already dated and broken up with three girls. He finished third in prom king voting and, through it all, drove around with me listening to fuzzy rock and roll, watching horror movies at the multiplex, drinking warm beers from my dad’s secret garbage-bag stash with me, and never missing one of my birthdays, even if they were spent, just the two of us in my backyard. I guess I never cashed in my cool points for something substantial - like a decent girlfriend, or high school credibility. Some people, through no fault of their own, have this way of slipping through the cracks in the floors of schools across the country. They aren’t weird or nerdy, gothic or emo…rather, they are so unassumingly adult and normal that they tend to be ignored. I wasn’t bad looking, nor was I going on auditions to model in the Sears catalogue. I wasn’t fat enough to be called fat or skinny enough to pull off skinny jeans. James was my best friend, and I had some acquaintances to go along with him, but we were hardly a force to be reckoned with in hallways and at parties. I was just a guy, sitting in the middle of classrooms, staring at girls, struggling to keep a weak mustache off my face, and trying to set gauges on what would bring me the absolute least amount of attention.

James, as a senior, had found this niche. He wasn’t an athlete, nor was he particularly involved in anything. He just had a habit of showing up at parties, talking to the right people, staying up on trends. Girls liked him not because he was any more handsome than the next guy, but he developed an honest face, and an uncommonly friendly demeanor. People trusted James with things…not intimate details, but their affections and their hopes. He wasn’t the prom king you see in movies…you know, the guy who throws for 75 touchdown passes then becomes the all-time leading scorer on the basketball team while finding time to have a functional relationship with the best looking girl in the senior class. James Squire was the every-town prom king; an easy-going guy who made time for everyone, and who could always be bothered to listen to a guy’s crass joke or a girl’s seemingly life-threatening dilemma.

People knew James and I smoked pot. In fact, we were the first two people at our school who ever spoke about drug use as a recreational thing…something that could be fun. The first time we ever got high, we smoked out of an apple at a house party. It was our sophomore year and we were sitting on this ratty couch in some senior’s abandoned, parentless home. Someone passed James an apple with holes carved in it. The apple was uncurling smoke like some sick Halloween decoration. James followed the burnout’s instructions, lit one end, placed his fingers correctly, and coughed as he exhaled unevenly. James passed the apple to me and, after seeing him smoke it, I followed suit. The smoke entered my lungs and was immediately rejected by my developing body. I coughed and coughed to the point that the older kids, presumably more experienced, were laughing at me. After that night, I guess people had started talking and starting rumors. I remember classmates asking me if it was true that I had smoked two pounds of grass with a bunch of seniors. Needless to say, we quenched the rumors down to nothing by speaking of our extensive pot experience with the voices of experts in the field. When kids asked about it, we never joked or made light of it. We told them that pot had made us feel level-headed and even. In reality, we never even felt high that first night. It was one of the only times James and I shared the attention of our classmates.

The second time was out of a one-hitter that looked like a cigarette. I had bought that gem of a piece on the boardwalk on a walk by myself during my family vacation. My family, being pretty middle class, treated these family vacations with a particular reverence. We never went anywhere extravagant… usually just to a local beach where we’d rent a house for a week. After James and I had talked up recreationally smoking pot to the rest of our all-too-eager-to-listen classmates, I figured it was time we owned our own piece of drug paraphernalia. I didn’t have enough money to afford a 4-foot bong with an ash catcher, or a handcrafted hurricane. I only had enough money on me at the time to buy that one-hitter. I thought it was sleek and undetectable. It looked like a cigarette when you lit it, when you carried it and when you showed it off.

That year, we started buying bags of pretty good weed off the starting catcher on our high-school baseball team. He got it from a girl who got it from someone called Davey Grease. Our knowledge of the line of contraband flow simply ended after Davey Grease. The Grease, as he was known, was a 6th year senior rumored to be repeating 12th grade due to a