I Only Cry with Emoticons Read online

  I Only Cry with Emoticons

  Copyright © 2022 by Yuvi Zalkow

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

  Book design by Mark E. Cull

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Zalkow, Yuvi, author.

  Title: I only cry with emoticons: novel / Yuvi Zalkow.

  Description: Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021041434 (print) | LCCN 2021041435 (ebook) | ISBN 9781636280370 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781636280387 (epub)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Humorous fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3626.A6273 I16 2022 (print) | LCC PS3626.A6273 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021041434

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021041435

  The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, the Adams Family Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, the Sam Francis Foundation, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

  First Edition

  Published by Red Hen Press

  www.redhen.org

  for anyone out there stumbling towards an IRL connection

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter One : HelloWorld.java

  Chapter Two : The Blind Date

  Chapter Three : The Gelato Situation

  Chapter Four : The New Deal

  PART TWO

  Chapter Five : The Beach

  Chapter Six : The Fucking Aquarium

  Chapter Seven : The Convention Center

  Chapter Eight : Dinner @ Wife

  Chapter Nine : Back 2 Work

  Chapter Ten : Quirk

  Chapter Eleven : Fathers

  Chapter Twelve : Devangelism

  Chapter Thirteen : Sacred Objects

  Chapter Fourteen : Serenity Later

  PART THREE

  Chapter Fifteen : To Be Uncomfortable

  Chapter Sixteen : Actually Getting Close

  Chapter Seventeen : Whiskey Soda Lounge

  Chapter Eighteen : The Immortal Gefilte Fish

  Chapter Nineteen : The Next Level

  PART ONE

  "the only thing to #fear is fear itself. and maybe also your day job. and parenting. and sex. and most of all, fear honesty. that shit is fucking terrifying." —@F_D_Arrr

  Chapter One: HelloWorld.java

  My boss tells me it’s embarrassing that I’ve been here for six years and I’m still at Goldfish status. Ever since we installed the gamification plug-in, he knows exactly how many Likes I’ve gotten from coworkers, exactly how many Comments I’ve made, exactly how many Best Answers and Virtual Pints of Beer I’ve received, exactly how many Blog Posts I’ve posted. He even knows how many animated cat GIFs I’ve giffed, which is zero. We get points assigned to these various activities and are assigned a status level based on our points. I’m a Goldfish even though some six-monthers have already leveled up to Penguin. My boss is a Blue Whale. People think Blue Whale is the highest level, but there’s an even higher level that no one has ever achieved.

  He tells me this morning that I need to @ mention more people in my Posts. The Chief Technical Officer needs to know what I’m up to. Especially after the layoffs last year. And I can’t overlook the Algorithm group. They were the ones who wrote the algorithm for the Trending Topics plugin in the first place. People need more visibility into what I’m doing.

  But what I’m doing a lot of the time is hiding in the bathroom and writing stories about my dead grandfather and failing to @ mention the people I especially don’t want to @ mention because I’m all @ mentioned out.

  Look. CollaborationHub is not a bad place to work. They’re good people. The online collaboration software they make is a good product. They give my family—or at least me and my boy—good health insurance. And they actually Help People Collaborate Effectively in This Modern World™. It’s really true that they Take Collaboration to the Next Level™.

  But I don’t happen to like collaborating in this modern world. I don’t like this level or the next one. I also don’t think I know how to get a proper job any longer. I’ve coded my way out of employability. I’m no longer a catch for an employer, if I ever was one.

  When I get back to my desk, I see that I have some private CollabHub messages waiting for me at my laptop. They’re from Anne, my coworker who has dedicated too many office hours trying to save my floundering life. She says she’d be happy to set up a personal profile for me either on OkCupid or just on our internal dating group. At CollaborationHub, we use our own software to collaborate with each other, and we have over four thousand social groups, which is pretty impressive (and pretty horrifying) for a company of 321 employees.

  Anne sits at the desk next to me. She looks so focused at her two 25” monitors, like she is doing nothing but serious work. There’s a small desert rose cactus between us, sitting on her desk, that she overwaters. She claims it has a beautiful flower, but I’ve never seen one.

  We’ve moved beyond cubicles around here. Cubicles are so twenty years ago. Even half-height walls are old school. Here we just have these big ugly slabs of pressed wood pushed up against each other—making little islands of desks, about four together at a time. Anne is on my desert island.

  I lean over and talk to Anne old school—with my actual mouth. Just what I need, I say to her. To date an effective collaborator at the next level.

  She whispers to me over the cactus, I can @ mention you in the Singles group or the Just For Fun group or the Divorcé group. She has these cute chunky cheeks with dimples but also long gray strands in her black hair, and it’s impossible to gauge her age, except that she somehow captures the best of both worlds, old and young. Whereas I’m the worst of age forty-five: too old to have fun, too young for wisdom.

  I remind Anne, again, that I’m not officially divorced.

  She says she’s even willing to @ mention me in the SSFW (“Semi-Safe For Work”) Kinky group. And Pet Lovers. And Lonely Guys.

  I hate pets, I tell her.

  She gets up and walks right next to me. I can smell her perfume. Some kind of flower that my wife—and probably my son—could identify instantly.

  Saul, it’s been two years since she left you. Divorced or not, y’all are done for. Anne’s Southern accent comes out when she’s frustrated with me. It’s comforting, her accent. Even though I know it came along with some history of abuse. And collard greens.

  I also grew up in the South. But living in the suburbs of Atlanta with Jewish parents threw off the accent.

  Anne makes it seem like two years is a long time. But it doesn’t feel so long to me. Some days I still unthinkingly drive home to what is now my ex’s house.

  I’m trying to finish my novel, I tell her.

  She takes a deep breath and then sighs.

  I love my friend. She never lies to me. When she’s exasperated, she exasperates.

  Anne thinks I’m wasting my time with my book. She likes to remind me that I’ve been working on the stupid book longer than my boy has been alive. I regret confessing that detail to her. My debut novel was published to a lukewarm audience ten years ago, and the a
udience is not even lukecold at this point.

  This book is toxic to you, she says. I see it on your face.

  I take a selfie with my iPhone and look at it. And delete it before it syncs with the cloud. She’s right.

  I need to finish it before my father dies, I say. He’s the only one still alive. I need to finish telling our story.

  So whose story is it exactly?

  I don’t watch regular TV, if such a thing still exists. I particularly don’t watch courtroom dramas. But I understand enough about entrapment to know what she is doing.

  I fall for it anyway.

  It’s my grandfather’s story. But also my dad’s story. But maybe also my story. I tell her all this even though she knows all this. I know she is about to point out that since it is my story, I can tell it anytime. There’s no ticking clock even if my dad is eighty-eight years old and going blind and deaf.

  I mean, she says, did the Klan even try to destroy your grandfather’s store?

  Anne looks at me like she won the game.

  My friend takes things too literally. She doesn’t understand that fiction is more true than what really happened. In the novel, my Polish, Jewish grandparents open up a dry goods store in 1938 in a place called Stella, Georgia. In real life, it happened in 1931 in Waynesboro, Georgia. In real life, a drunk man stumbles into the store and warns my grandfather about the Klan and then vomits on the floor, and that’s that. In the novel, this man is in the Klan. And he nearly destroys my family.

  It’s a brilliant book. It’s a disaster.

  What about your boy?

  He’s not in the book, I say.

  But he’s already seven years old.

  You’re a hell of a counter, I tell her. I’ll @ mention you in the Math Is 4 Fun group.

  Go take him somewhere fun. Get to the beach before the summer is over. Take the attention you give to the book and give it to your son. Worry about the book when your son is off to college or culinary school or the Marines or Mexico. Let the book go. Imagine what you could do if you let that turd go.

  It hurts when she calls it a turd. A burden, yes. A thing that is killing me, yes. Something that destroyed my marriage and has stunted my growth emotionally, maybe. But a turd! That’s going too far.

  I say, My boy isn’t the Marine Corps type. And the beaches here are cold and rocky and windy.

  When I was a kid, we would visit my grandparents in Savannah and swim at Tybee Island. The beaches there were warm and beautiful. And there was that rickety dock that I loved to sneak onto when my parents weren’t watching. I would look out at the ocean and pretend that the Germans were attacking because my dad once told me he did the same thing back in 1941. Except I didn’t know much about Germans—I had seen those pointy helmets from WWI movies—and so that’s what they wore when I imagined them capturing me on the beach.

  And how come, Anne says with that tone she uses when she’s discovered another of my flaws, you always call Auggie “my boy” and Julia “my ex”? You know they exist separately from you, right?

  Shush, I say to Anne in a whisper, like she’s my boy and it’s late and it’s time for him to stop talking and fall asleep.

  My grandmother died in 1983, when I was twelve. My grandfather— Papa as we called him—died five years later. Those five years were the years I got stuck listening to his stories. I hated being around him in those years. I did it because you have to do those things. But he scared me. His beard smelled like a rotting log, and he would weep into his ice cream cone. At the time, I focused on the wasted ice cream.

  Now that I’m forty-five years old and failing to write a novel about him, and that failure has taken me nine years and seven drafts and counting, I know that I should have been paying more attention. The poor old man.

  It’s easy, when you sense dying, to run away. But now I know that dying means it is time to come in even closer and listen to the whisper of it.

  Papa, I want to say to him, I’m sorry I only paid attention to the ice cream.

  Snap out of it! Anne says. Why don’t you do one Post about your dead granddad and then move on?

  My boss overhears us talking about me doing a Post, and so he walks up and says, If you don’t @ mention the Algorithm group, then I don’t want to hear a story about your dead grandfather. He makes it sound like a joke, but there is no joke here. What sucks is that I feel every bit of his frustration inside of me.

  The failure to @ mention the Algorithm group was an innocent mistake. They were helpful, and it was stupid on my part to overlook them. My @ mention brain was out to lunch. It isn’t necessarily one of my Top 10 Regrets—which is a type of Post we’re required to write once a quarter— but it is maybe Top 500.

  My boss also tells me he needs a write-up about the Bang Blog functionality. He says they are now spelling it as five letters: !-b-l-o-g. I try to tell him that the first character isn’t a letter, it’s a symbol. And that “Bang Blog” is a horrible name. It’s like a feature for a porn site. He says that if I have a problem with it, I should @ mention the product marketing group before the task is shifted from “In Progress” to “Done Done.”

  I tell him that it is 5:00 p.m. and I have to pick up my boy from school. He shrugs like that’s my problem, which it is.

  #

  I get in my car and drive over to my boy’s school. As a writer type, I should be able to describe things well. But I struggle with real-world descriptions. When I describe an object, like my car, I forget to say what color it is. I won’t say whether it is a sedan or a hatchback or sports car or one of those old station wagons that has somehow survived all these years, which I inherited from my mother when she died ten years ago and I keep repairing even though I should just get a new car. I don’t describe whether the car is clean or if it has stains. Like a big vomit stain on the seat from when my mother broke into the liquor cabinet that one last time and then went for a drive. None of that comes out. Just, “car.”

  #

  My boy is excited to see me when I get to his school. With his arms around me, I can totally forget about Blog Posts and Blue Whales. But he hugs me tight enough that I immediately worry if he has had one of those days when other kids teased him for one reason or another. The boy got the most-sensitive-kid-in-the-class genes from me. He’s not such a small kid, but he always struggles with the more boyish boys. They don’t like that he prefers dance to basketball. That he’d rather paint a picture of a butterfly coming out of a cocoon than of Spiderman punching a bad guy.

  After the hug, we get in the car, and I say, How was your day?

  My ex never liked how I ask these open-ended questions. She said they were too hard to answer. She tended to ask more specific questions like, Do you think you can stop obsessing over your novel in the next thirty days or should we just get separated now?

  My boy doesn’t bother to answer my question. He says, Can we watch The Octonauts when we get home?

  I tell him we can. It’ll give me a few minutes to work on my novel. I keep hoping to find the secret to this story to make it all come together, to stop it from feeling like a bunch of disparate, desperate anecdotes without a clear throughline.

  As we’re driving home, I get a text from Anne: sometimes letting go is the only way to move forward. I don’t know if she is talking about my marriage or my novel or just quoting some dead guy for fun. She is very involved in the Famous Dead Guys group at work.

  My wife and I are not officially divorced. But unofficially, we’re divorced. Big time. Our joint custody situation is good, though. We even share a Google Calendar. Things are so clean and clear that I suggested to my wife—my ex-wife or semi-ex or quasi-ex or whatever she is—that we’re so good at being separated that we should get back together again. She didn’t like my suggestion. Or even worse—she liked it enough to laugh at me.

  The boy splits his week between us. It was a hard few months for him when we first separated, he kept asking why it had to be that way, but he seems fine with it now.
At least he is more at ease with it than I am.

  #

  When The Octonauts are over, he says, Can we get gelato?

  Who wouldn’t want to get gelato? I’m no idiot.

  He grabs his scooter, the purple one that he loves with the bell in the shape of a sunflower. I grab my iPad, just in case I get an idea for the book.

  He says, Dada, can I play with your iPad at the place?

  Why? I ask.

  If I check in from a dessert place, I’ll be able to serve zombies ice cream.

  I say, We’ll see, as if what he said makes perfect sense.

  My favorite Octonaut is Tweak Bunny. Who’s your favorite?

  I can’t remember their names. My favorite is also Tweak Bunny, I say.

  I knew it, he says. Tweak Bunny talks just like your dad.

  My boy’s whole life has been here in Portland. He doesn’t know much about accents, other than the Japanese girl and the Nigerian boy who are in his classroom. And that his grandfather talks differently because he’s from the South.

  I worry often about my father. He survived cancer, heart disease, three marriages, a depression, the Depression, twelve Bush years, Trump, but now it is his failing vision that is killing him. You can only increase the font size so much before it becomes impossible to read a digital book about quantum physics.

  My son asks me if rabbits can swim. I tell him I don’t think so, and I think about Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction boiling the pet rabbit. I shake my head to make the image go away.

  I remind him to stop at each intersection so many times that he finally says, Dada! I know! I do it right every time. He stomps his foot and his scooter on the sidewalk. He has a clip to keep his long hair out of his eyes, and it falls to the ground as he stomps.

  I choose not to use a clichéd parenting speech here about safety, save it for another day. There are so many confusing and scary things about being alive. Sometimes I want to hug my son and never let him go.

  I pick up the clip, and he grudgingly accepts it.

  Before getting the gig at CollaborationHub, there was a six-month period when I was unemployed. My boy was just a baby and my ex—nearly ex, almost ex, virtually ex, viciously ex—was my happily-ish-married wife back then, just getting her social work degree. She made it seem like it was good timing because I could take care of the baby while she wrote her papers. And you can work on your book while he naps, she said with a smile. I knew it scared her. At best, I was a reluctant parent. At worst, I resented her and the baby for what they took away from my once quiet life. Plus, we had nothing in savings. Of course, I didn’t write a damn thing. I worried. I stared at my sleeping, snoring, pooping boy, and I thought about how I would manage to take care of this creature until he became an adult. My so-called skills are very particular, and I worried that I’d never get a job again. It didn’t help our life that, at night, I’d drink, and instead of writing, I’d order crap online that we didn’t need and couldn’t afford. An R2-D2 robot that (supposedly) responded to voice commands. A six-(but-really-three)-in-one step stool. A two-(but-really-one)-year supply of razors and wet wipes. A zucchini spiralizer.