By Salvatore Pane
Tony knew he was headed for trouble when Cole texted him the name of the restaurant. Schadenfreude was located on the edge of North Minneapolis in a mostly abandoned trench between the Mississippi River and a raised strip of crumbling highway. He exited the Uber with his wife and felt mildly ashamed of the blight, like he was somehow responsible. Weeds and shaggy bushes colonized empty lots. A panhandler pumped a sign near the onramp. The neighborhood on the other side of 94 was denser and better off, but launching an expensive restaurant in this particular part of the cities felt gauche to Tony. Then again, this was Cole. He should have known.
Schadenfreude resembled all the other upscale eateries Tony had been dragged to, usually by older co-workers desperate to prove they were hip. Rustic brick walls. Exposed pillars. Haphazardly hung Edison bulbs. An open kitchen where diners gawked at line cooks tackling the night’s specials. Early aughts rap bangers were flattened into acoustic ballads belted out by white boys wearing fedoras. Tony knew he’d have to endure at least one culinary deconstruction, and this physically pained him. Unlike their peers, he and Sofía never went through a foodie phase and were content to spend their Fridays at a rotating list of breweries, ordering from whatever food truck happened to show up. He hadn’t seen Cole in years, and this restaurant was the first line of demarcation between them, evidence of the many ways in which they’d changed.
“There he is! There’s that face I’ve been missing!” Cole shouted before springing from the table and wrapping Tony in a bear hug. It was this quality—Cole’s innate ability to transform himself into a spectacle—that both attracted and repelled Tony as a young man. He’d always been internal and somewhat reserved. He felt a distance between himself and the external world, a force field that prevented him from interacting with strangers in socially acceptable ways. It took Tony a great deal of time to warm up to people, and his friends often admitted that they’d initially assumed he disliked them. Despite his quiet nature, he was prone to outbursts, rare explosions stemming from his keen sense of justice. He’d been tossed out of an Applebee’s once for debating the merits of the War on Terror with friends in college, earning him the nickname the Incredible Hulk—silent one minute and seething in the next. It was something he occasionally worked on in therapy.
Cole released him from the hug, and Tony had no choice but to confront reality: They had both aged considerably. This was easier to avoid during everyday life. He saw his wife and coworkers and their small cadre of friends constantly. It was easy overlooking the changes—the thinning of hair, the widening of bellies, the shift from colorful sneakers to ugly shoes with arch support, the blood pressure and cholesterol meds swallowed before meals, talk of impending colonoscopies—but not in Cole who pulsed in his memories as a golden youth, screaming along to LCD Soundsystem in the sepia-toned bars of their collective past. Now, Cole’s forehead was lined. He wore a newsboy cap that mostly hid his baldness. Square glasses sloped down the crook of his nose. He wore baggy jeans under a loose-fitting Carhartt shirt, an awkward version of how Tony’s intern dressed. He could update his wardrobe, but Cole belonged to an earlier era: to skinny jeans and thrift store t-shirts, a uniform Tony still adhered to on days off.
“Motherfucker,” Cole said. “Boy, it’s absolutely fab to see you. And is this the little miss I’ve heard so much about? Wow! You really outkicked your coverage, kiddo!”
Sofía politely smiled. She was slightly more social than Tony, but work had been especially stressful—she was a program manager at Macalester’s ludicrously named Center for Study Away. Earlier that afternoon, she’d delivered the news that four J-Term trips were being canceled due to low enrollment. In any other situation, she would’ve hunkered on the couch to marathon Great British Bakeoff until the onset of the Sunday scaries. That she agreed to still meet one of Tony’s old friends at Schadenfreude was evidence of her love, that after two years of marriage they still cherished one another.
Cole’s girlfriend waited at the four top. She stood and inexplicably clapped. Maura’s hair was done in a side fade, and she dressed in chunky burgundy. Elaborate tattoos danced up her forearms, and Tony clocked her as a Coachella girlie who’d either fallen into the hippie pipeline or the MAHA vortex. On Instagram, he was served videos of baddies chopping firewood while discussing the dangers of vaccines. He had no idea what he’d said or done to summon this content, to find it again and again on his FYP. He tried to make light of it with Sofía, but she never found it amusing.
“This is amazeballs,” Cole said as they sat down. “Bro, how long has it been? When’s the last time I saw you?”
“Fifteen years ago,” Tony said. “Your going away party.”
“Fuck.” Cole slapped his head. “Well, out with it, amigo. What have you been up to?”
A week earlier, when Cole texted and announced that he’d be in Minneapolis for a conference, Tony immediately checked him out on LinkedIn. Cole had apparently spent the last eight years pinballing between one San Francisco startup after another before landing at Upgrade Scale Collective, which billed itself ominously as a neobank.
“I’ve been with MIIA for years now,” Tony explained. “The Minneapolis Institute of Italian Americana. I handle comms.”
“He does a lot more than that,” Sofía announced. “He’s in charge of development, outreach, pretty much five jobs in one.”
Cole squinted at Maura in mock confusion. “Bro, what’s with the corporate mindset? I asked what you’ve been up to. Not about your job. Spill it, man. Music. Movies. Hobbies. What are you fucking with these days, homie?”
Tony struggled to think. All his friends started any evening with a deconstruction of work, that ritualistic litany of complaints, and then and only then—after the first drink hit your bloodstream—could the rehashing of pop culture begin. That Cole wanted to skip this felt wrong. And what could Tony say that would seem interesting to Cole? He’d fallen off Pitchfork years earlier and the last concert he’d seen was the ten-year anniversary of Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion.
He was rescued by their server—a boy in a ripped tank and suspenders—who spent a staggering amount of time explaining the specials. Tony watched him and struggled to believe that he was so much older, that he was truly thirty-eight, that all the young men these days resembled the baseball sluggers of his youth, rangy with sideburns and bushy mustaches like old Don Mattingly on the New York Yankees. Schadenfreude was owned by a white couple who prided themselves on offering dishes from around the world, fusing Ethiopian and Vietnamese cuisine, plopping “Thai-inspired” dumplings atop “African stew.” Questions of culinary authenticity were prominent for Tony. Sofía spent her childhood at her parents’ taqueria in West St. Paul, and he still remembered her humiliation when they tried Centro, a gringo taco joint morally opposed to spice that took cues from Taco Bell, offering chef-ed up fast food “classics.” Don Mattingly waxed rhapsodic over the marinara glazed bánh mì. Tony made a mental note to donate a little extra to the ACLU that month.
“Do you mind if I order for everyone?” Cole asked. “It’s something we picked up in Budapest, and it’s a tangible way I can demonstrate affection for friends and loved ones.”
Tony looked at Sofía, who shrugged.
Cole proceeded to order all six vegan entrees on the menu, two appetizers, and an expensive bottle of Italian red. Already Tony dreaded the check. Cole leaned forward and asked, “Have you heard the new Algernon Cadwallader? It’s fucking dynamite.”
Tony didn’t know if Algernon Cadwallader was a singer or a band. “It’s on my list.”
“I turned Maura on to Earl Sweatshirt last month,” Cole said, “and she’s really been digging him.”
“Earl Sweatshirt is the moment,” Maura cheerfully announced.
“What do you do for work, Maura?” Sofía tried.
“She teaches yoga,” Cole said. “But I’m trying to get her to give it up. It’s painfully retro. Too analog.”
Don Mattingly returned with their Nebbiolo, and Tony chugged half his glass. All he’d eaten that day was overnight oats, an RX Bar, and a pathetic little parfait from the coffee shop across the street from MIIA.
“What’s so analog about yoga?” Sofía asked.
Maura wagged a finger. “See! This is how I know we’ll get along.”
“In-person yoga is so old-fashioned,” Cole explained. “It’s a retracting market. It’s like going all in on writing or coding. Dylan expressed it best: The times they are a-changing.”
Tony braced himself for the dullest conversational topic in modern history, the two letters that could ravage an evening and reduce all involved into an ignorant blob rehashing leftover takes from The New York Times or Reddit. “AI?” he asked.
“You’re still a clever boy, Tone.” Cole swirled his glass and watched the legs cling to the sides. “I work at a neobank, and it’s just super obvious that AI’s going to revolutionize every aspect of modern life. Plebs think it’s just students generating term papers or whatever, but AI is going to shift everything. Yoga too. Why leave your house for in-person instruction when you can just project an amalgamation of the greatest yogis throughout history from the comfort of your living room? You can either ride the wave or drown, and I do love me some surfing.” Their first appetizer arrived: deep-fried triangles of a salted edamame/foie gras quesadilla. Cole served himself first and grinned. “This looks de-lish!”
Tony knew he should let it go. Cole was an old buddy, and he’d probably never see him again. He’d never visited San Francisco and saw no reason to, and Minneapolis was shockingly isolated. Visitors rarely passed through, and he doubted that Fintech Americas would host a conference here again. There was no need to become defensive during what still might become a pleasant evening.
And yet, to remain silent felt impossible. To Sofía’s endless frustration, Tony couldn’t help but push back when he disagreed with his friends’ decisions or proclamations—their views on Palestine, moving to the ‘burbs, sending their children to charter schools, contributing to gentrification by buying property in North Minneapolis. He adhered to a strict moral code first established when he read Dude, Where’s My Country? in high school, and it rankled him terribly whenever people failed to live up to those simple parameters.
“You’re not actually pro-AI though, are you?” he asked.
“What does that mean?” Cole dipped a half-chewed shred of quesadilla into a ramekin of soy birria. “You can’t be pro- or anti-weather. It’s coming if you like it or not.”
“Sure, but if a hurricane was coming, people could put up sandbags or whatever to try and blunt the damage. You don’t have to embrace carnage.”
“What’s wrong with this guy?” Cole playfully asked Sofía. “Is he like this at home?”
“He’s like this pretty much everywhere.” Sofía laughed nervously. “Maura, are you enjoying the wine?”
“It’s de-lish!” she said. “Have you tried orange wine? It’s one of our go-tos back home.”
“I don’t have to embrace AI,” Cole interrupted, “but I choose to. I want to be part of the future. Any other decision is financial malpractice.”
“So my job,” Tony said, “is basically all writing. I do grants, social media, newsletters. And MIIA has a shoestring budget. You think they should fire me and pivot to AI?”
Don Mattingly silently delivered the next appetizer: falafel ravioli in a sweet and sour reduction.
“Absolutely,” Cole said. “It would be the best thing for all of you. The sooner you can escape a dead industry, the better.”
“And what about all the people who are gonna have a tough time finding a new job? You think they should be replaced by machines?”
“100%.” Cole announced this like he’d just discovered a twenty on the sidewalk. “Employment is a choice. If people want to upgrade their skillset, they can opt into a good life. If people want to stagnate, that’s their business. By the way, have you ever read Who Moved My Cheese?”
Tony poured himself another glass of wine. He could feel his blood pressure rising, manifesting as a throb on the right side of his head. “So you’re cool with a dog-eat-dog world where the rich get richer and the poor get fucked? You want to live in a country where the national religion is tech, and we’re all lorded over by a gang of technocrat fascists?”
His voice had gotten louder, and a few other diners turned to watch. A female folk singer was crooning over the restaurant’s sound system. “Girl, you looks good/won’t you back that thang up?/You’se a big fine woman/won’t you back that thang up?” Sofía squeezed his thigh under the table.
“I wouldn’t say I’m in favor of technocrat fascists,” Cole said thoughtfully. “But if literally hundreds of thousands of people have to lose their jobs to progress… Well, fuck those dumbasses.”
And then they were silent as they awaited the vegan entrees.
It was difficult parsing exactly how Tony landed here. He’d met Cole fifteen years earlier via their girlfriends, two history PhD students at the University of Pittsburgh, who dragged them to a mixer at the chair’s house in Squirrel Hill. Tony had earned his BA in comms a year prior but had made the mistake of graduating during the financial crash. He shared a shitty apartment with four goons and worked part-time at Terry’s Discount Movies where he casually informed customers that Garden State was overrated. He’d lost interest in the party and was losing interest in his girlfriend. He wandered to the patio and found a man showing something to two bored grad students on the very first iPhone. Tony inched closer, the light of the smartphone summoning him, until the stranger glanced up and said, “Bro, have you seen Fleetwood Mac’s ‘97 performance of ‘Silver Spring’ in Burbank? Shit’s crazy. Look at how mad Stevie gets. It’s fucking intense!”
Tony leaned in. The grad students drifted away. Cole introduced himself and asked if Tony wanted to “blast the fuck outta here.” Their fate was sealed.
Soon, they were inseparable. They were twenty-three and spent their nights at the Squirrel Cage, the epicenter of hipster culture in Pittsburgh, a wood-paneled dive bar with tatted-up waitresses, two-dollar cheeseburgers, frothy pitchers of Yuengling, and a jukebox that was legendary throughout Allegheny County. Their scene didn’t have a name yet, but Tony stumbled across it years later, while cruising Instagram late at night as Sofía slept: indie sleaze, now reduced to costumes for gen z twenty-somethings at theme parties. Smeared mascara. Messy bangs. American Apparel solids and spandex. Sweat. Hairy chests. Stunner shades. Each article of thrifted clothing two sizes too small. Vampire Weekend and Kanye—Tony regretted it now—and Daft Punk and Wolf Parade blasting from the jukebox. Tony and Cole broke up with their girlfriends a few weeks after the chair’s party and spent three nights each week getting after it at the Cage, downing pitcher after pitcher, buying rounds for the bartenders so they could stay beyond last call, stumbling home only when pink light leaked over the mountains in the east. In retrospect, these were some of the happiest days of Tony’s life—even if he could barely recall them now. Their anthem was LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends.”
Every night, Tony or Cole cued up “All My Friends” on the jukebox, a nearly eight-minute electro pop insta-classic. The longer the song, the more bang for your buck, and they gravitated to meandering tracks like “Runaway” and “Konstantine.” But “All My Friends” was their number one draft pick, and they always waited till the night was nearly finished before pulling the trigger, waiting till the Cage was spinning with the drunken revelers of Pittsburgh’s chewed-up youth. The second that recognizably insistent piano beat cut in, the whole bar whooped, and Cole threw his arms around Tony and they all sang along. It was sort of their church.
“All My Friends” was a nostalgic ballad about the rapid passage of time, about the friends you make and lose track of, the regret you feel as you approach the remote shores of adulthood. That Tony and Cole and the others had yet to experience any of this made it all the more appealing. It was the same impulse that drew Tony to horror movies, experiencing secondhand calamities one after another from the safety of his bedroom. How ironic it felt to grab Cole by the shoulders and scream in unison “Where are your friends tonight? If I could see all my friends tonight!” until their throats went hoarse.
It felt like it would last forever.
And then it all ended when Cole announced he was moving to San Francisco to try his luck in tech—Tony didn’t even know he wanted to work in Silicon Valley—and then he left three weeks later. They didn’t call. They didn’t text. And Tony only played “All My Friends” once more at the Cage, but then he actually felt sad and slipped outside before the song ended to bum a smoke off one of the girls who worked at Avalon Thrift. A month later, one of his buddies from undergrad called and said he was embarking on a road trip and could use a navigator. Tony crammed his belongings in two duffels and jumped in his friend’s sputtering Saturn. They made it to Minneapolis before the car broke down, and they were forced to crash in the friend’s aunt’s basement. At an Uptown coffee shop, Tony read about a job opening as a content writer for a startup. He landed the gig and rented an apartment in Northeast with a doctoral student he found on Craigslist. A decade passed before he realized he’d become a Midwesterner.
Sometimes, late at night, when he couldn’t sleep and was resisting the siren’s call of the blue Xanax pills prescribed to him for his anxiety on flights, Tony stared at the popcorn ceiling and wondered how the hell any of this had happened. One minute, he’d been screaming along to LCD Soundsystem with Cole between jager bombs. The next, he was married, childless, and almost forty. He loved Sofía and their home and their small circle of friends, but the trajectory of his life felt so… random and meaningless? Did everyone his age feel this way? Was it specific to his generation, those doomed souls who hit puberty during 9/11 and came of age during the financial crisis and later covid? Maybe that was myopic. Maybe his parents in the Philly suburbs felt exactly the same way. Maybe everyone did. On nights like these, he rolled onto his side and watched the rise and fall of his wife’s body. Nothing felt real. It was more like a simulation, the video games he’d consumed as a kid.
To her credit, Sofía attempted to salvage the evening. She asked Maura an endless stream of softball questions. Where did you grow up? Do you have any family? What changes have you seen in the yoga world post-covid? She even teed Tony up on three separate occasions, prodding him toward his best and most well-rehearsed stories that never failed to deliver laughs and a sense of good cheer and camaraderie. But Tony refused to take the bait. He turned inward, refusing to even acknowledge Cole or Maura, and stewed. He felt powerless to stop it. He applied his full attention to their plate of deep-fried shishito sushi wontons. Cole was finally, thankfully, quiet, and now their consumption had morphed into competition. Who could devour the refried bean sliders the fastest, who could douse the most fish sauce onto their miniscule portions of gazpacho pho? Cole swiped the bill from the waiter before he could even set it down, but when Tony said, “We’ll split it,” he didn’t protest. They slid their credit cards onto the clipboard, and Don Mattingly nodded before scurrying away.
The final awkwardness occurred outside, while both couples awaited two dueling Uber drivers locked in an unknowing race to the restaurant. Cole’s arrived first—an immense black SUV—and he looked at Tony and halfheartedly said, “Good to see you,” before climbing inside. They didn’t hug or shake hands. Tony watched the SUV pull onto 94, and he knew he’d never hear from Cole again.
It wasn’t until the ride home, however, when Tony sensed something off with his wife. In his estimation, there were only three kinds of Uber riders: 1) people who remained silent, 2) interviewers who interrogated the driver, and 3) folks who chatted with each other, completely ignoring the person whose vehicle they’d commandeered. Tony and Sofía fell into the first camp, and this was something he loved about his wife. But as they rode home from Schadenfreude across the Mississippi, something curious occurred: Sofía would not stop talking. She fired question after question at their driver, and by the time they arrived home, they knew his entire life story, how he’d grown up in Kathmandu and moved to Minnesota after the earthquake in 2015. He was terrified for his friends and family back home. Many of them were embroiled in the student protests attempting to overthrow the government. Tony immediately left a five-star rating. He didn’t know an earthquake had hit Nepal ten years earlier, and he hadn’t read about any protests.
They lived in a hundred-year-old house on the border between Midway and Frogtown, two “up-and-coming” neighborhoods in St. Paul that had been gentrifying ever since the city council voted to demolish a nearby strip mall, replacing it with a soccer stadium that beckoned fans from the suburbs. Sofía slipped off her flats and hurried upstairs while Tony sat on a stool in the vestibule untying his New Balances. He’d hurt his ankle two years earlier trying to take off his Nikes while standing, and since then he’d been relegated to a stool. He followed his wife upstairs and knocked on the bathroom door. He could hear the buzzing of her electric toothbrush.
The toothbrush stopped, but the door didn’t open. “What?”
“Are we ok?”
She sighed.
“Look, I know that absolutely sucked,” he said, “and I’m really sorry about Cole’s behavior. But I promise you, we’ll never have to see him again.”
The door swung open, and Tony was shocked by the expression on his wife’s face, beet red and irate. She was not a woman prone to anger. Whenever Tony saw a couple fighting in public, he felt humiliated even if he couldn’t explain why. Maybe it seemed too self-aggrandizing?
“I’m not upset about Cole,” she informed him. “I’m upset about you.”
“Why? Cole’s a fascist. Fuck him.”
She set her toothbrush into their ACLU mug. “So, you’re completely writing off an old friend just because he uses AI?”
“He doesn’t just use AI. He’s one of the stooges rushing us toward the fucking cliff. Just because everyone’s doing it doesn’t mean that we have to. That’s a colonization mindset.”
She started laughing and pushed past him towards the bedroom. “You behaved like a total asshat.”
He padded behind her. “I know. I couldn’t help it.”
“You didn’t ask Maura a single question.” She turned her back to him and unbuttoned her cardigan. This was when he knew she was truly upset: that she refused to let him see her breasts. “You weren’t interested in her at all.”
“She wasn’t interesting!” he protested. “If she lived here, you’d never hang out with her.”
“It was one night. We weren’t interviewing her to become our new best friend.” She slipped on an oversized Paramore hoodie from the closet. “You do realize that you’re married to someone who uses AI, right?”
He folded his arms. “You don’t use AI.”
She returned to the bathroom. Again Tony followed.
“Yes, I do.”
“When do you use AI?”
“At work. I use it all the time. They’ve cut our staff by fifty percent. We don’t have time to review all the applications, to write copy. Half the time we’re using AI.”
“AI is going to put me in the unemployment line, and it’s going to torch the earth even faster than we’ve insisted on torching it.”
“Remind me. Do you drive a gas car instead of taking the bus to work? Don’t you still shop on Amazon? Didn’t I catch you listening to Kanye last week?”
He pouted. Then he realized he was pouting and tried to look serious. “Individual choices aren’t the same as, like, fucking Mark Zuckerberg building a sentient AI that’s going to upend the economy.”
“So, what makes Cole’s individual choices so different from yours?”
He undid his belt and let his skinny jeans pool around his ankles. He slipped out of them and scratched at the same ratty boxers he’d purchased back in college.
“Sometimes I forget that you’re absolutely one of the most judgmental people I’ve ever met,” she said.
He pointed at himself. “Io?” he asked, an inside joke, reverting to his poor Italian.
“Everything’s in black and white. You know better than everyone, and if someone fails your unwritten purity test then bam, fuck ‘em for life.” She squeezed by him and returned to the bedroom. It was unclear to Tony why she’d even gone to the bathroom in the first place.
“You know what your problem is?” she asked, voice settling, becoming colder.
“Didn’t you just tell me?”
“No, your real problem is that you grew up believing that this was actually a good country, that this place operated under a benevolent system where justice was always served. Then you became an adult and discovered that was a lie, and now you absolutely can’t fucking handle it. Everyone needs to fit your completely fabricated definition of justice passed down to you from your parents and your teachers and TV and everyone else, but the truth is this country was always cruel right from the very start. It’s always been rigged against people like me, and now it’s rigged against people like you, and you think that if you complain enough or protest or whatever that things might actually return to the way they used to be. But it was never that way, Tony. Everyone’s just trying to survive in this completely fucked up terrible place. Stop judging them, put your head down, and be quiet. That’s what I’ve been doing my whole life, so just suck it up and stop whining.”
She shut the door in his face, and it felt like being slapped. Had this been swelling up between them for months? He didn’t know, but he was certain he had to give her time and space, that the worst choice was opening the door and apologizing. They both needed a few minutes apart to cool down.
Tony retreated into the basement. It was what sold him on the house and the inconceivable six point five percent interest rate on their mortgage. One side was Sofía’s: a thrifted school desk for knitting, a cozy armchair where she read for book club. And one side was Tony’s: an alarming number of cheap shelves housing his immense and forever expanding record collection.
He opened the liquor cabinet and poured himself a finger’s worth of Eagle Rare, the good stuff he only indulged during special occasions. Just a nip. He knew he’d have to face his wife and apologize, but how could he apologize for his entire lived experience, a fabricated sense of America that had warped his adult worldview? He thumbed his glass and sat on his cheap Ikea chair that had survived four different moves. He slid on expensive headphones and plugged them into the record player, scanning the shelves for something suitable, something that could bolster him after a total failure of an evening.
He immediately found his answer. Sound of Silver. LCD Soundsystem. He removed the third record from the cardboard sleeve. The needle dropped, and he knew he wouldn’t have to wait long. It was the first track on side c.
That piano hit his ears, and if he closed his eyes and sipped his bourbon, he could almost fool himself into believing it was 2008 again, that Obama was marching on the path toward victory, that he was still young and brimming with hope, that Cole and everyone like him could rewind themselves from their disappointing lives and become born again in that final precious breath between childhood and adulthood, the fantasy of college and the grim landscape of the real world. He closed his eyes and listened. He closed his eyes and listened. He closed his eyes and fell asleep and did not wake till morning.
Salvatore Pane is the author of five books, most recently The Neorealist in Winter. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Short Fiction, and Indiana Review. He’s an associate professor of English at the University of St. Thomas and can be reached at www.salvatore-pane.com
Josh Kennedy is a homegrown photographer from Long Beach! He is a nerd first, photographer second, and college student third (he just got accepted into his first choice college!) He’s been learning and doing photography since just before the pandemic. He hopes everyone loves his photos, and if you want to check out more please check out his Instagram (@john_photographer_kennedy) and check out his Cara if you wish to see his portfolio! (You can find the link on his instagram bio!)