Pointilism, Chapter 1

“Fuck it. Kill ‘em all,” said Johnny, and as he spoke he spat a thick expectoration that descended in a manner that seemed to defy all the laws of physics, two thick globules connected by salivary strands tumbling end over end into the mouth of the plastic bottle that had been reserved for the purpose. It was a tiny ballet, the miraculous art of fluid dynamics, one of those precious little beauties that seem vulgar, ignoble, common, and trite unless viewed by an attentive eye. The rainbow glitter of their contours, the delicate twirl, the microcosmic spires and arches: the beauty of the moment was juxtaposed against the ugly larger context, as so often happens in life.
The fact of the matter was that Johnny was spitting a viscous carcinogen the color of molasses into this stagnant bottle. At the bottom, there sat an inch of fetid saliva dyed the color of raw sewage by Copenhagen Long-Cut, in which the bloated corpses of cigarette butts lurked, ominous sharks in a rancid sea. The bottom of that bottle seemed to be the universe’s attempt to explicate everything horrible about stagnation, the inevitable entropy and decay inherent to existence. It was purely awful in every possible aesthetic sense: ugly, with a foul, cloying stench. It seemed likely that it was unpleasant to the touch as well, although I doubt that anyone would venture to test the hypothesis.
Johnny was also smoking a cigarette. Johnny is a zealot for all that is nicotine, and it seems likely that his sybaritic abuse of the stimulant in all of its avatars will one day be the death of him: his jaw lost to cancer, his lungs floral gardens of malignant growths, his cardiovascular system spurting exhaustedly from a thousand leaks caused by constant high blood pressure, the walls of his veins and arteries ravaged by errant plaque, his heart feeble and anemic. Or so the popular opinion regarding nicotine would have us believe. Once again, the true horror of the act becomes defined in its grander context: to smoke and chew tobacco seemed to Johnny, and seems to myself to a lesser extent, a pleasant enough way to pass the time, and the greater consequences seem too abstract to bother us.
“Dude, that’s not a solution, that’s the name of a Metallica album,” rebutted Andrew. Johnny looked gratified: he had recently begun responding to a variety of questions and debates with the phrase “Kill ‘em all,” perhaps in an effort to force one of us to admit that we are in fact familiar with the work of Metallica, a band that is a maligned icon and is now generally associated with illiteracy and contact sports. As if anyone in our generation is unfamiliar with Metallica.
Johnny simply likes to pick apart whatever silly pretensions we might have, to reveal the unprepossessing cores of ourselves. We are, after all, not particularly original, nor are we particularly excellent. We simply are what we are.
“Whatever. You were just arguing that because there is a finite resource base from which to finance Social Security, and that because the current wave of retirees will exhaust that resource base, Social Security needs to be renovated. One solution to this problem would be to narrow the demand for Social Security by killing off the baby boomers and preserve an entire generation’s worth of money. So yes, it is a solution.”
“Okay, I apologize. Let me rephrase myself: It’s a fucking terrible solution, although it does fit the definition of what a solution is.”
“First of all, don’t try and act like I snuck one past you on a technicality. Words do have meaning, asshole. And secondly, I don’t know why we’re even having this conversation. None of us will depend on Social Security for our retirement, and frankly, the only people who will be fucked by its collapse are the poor, who are already fucked by the government in innumerable ways, because that’s what governments of every shape, size, and ideology do: they fuck poor people.”
“Oh, aren’t you just the bitter cynic. The fact of the matter is that we all have a moral responsibility to the well-being of our fellow man. Ignoring the fact that none of us will depend on Social Security, doesn’t it bother you that millions of people will be screwed out of their retirement because the federal government can’t pull its head out of its ass?”
“What are you, a fucking communist? If you want to be charitable, look at the collapse of Social Security as you giving a gift to an entire generation of the elderly. I think the collapse of the Soviet Union and the general failure of all purely socialist governments proves that the bleeding heart tendency to coddle the huddled masses is a fucking fiction. What the fuck are we going to do, conjure magic money to feed and clothe and house and doctor every single person in the country, regardless of whether they contribute to the pot or not? And the people who do contribute the most to the pot probably won’t use the social programs, and the people who use the social programs won’t contribute shit.
“But really, the actual issue that we’re debating is the fact that social programs render the majority of the populace dependent upon the government, which is a terrible idea, because the government is utterly incapable of finding its dick with both hands, a flashlight, and a fucking anatomical diagram. I would rather have a calamity that created a more self-sufficient and independent population than reform a program that teaches the masses to depend on milk from the teat of a bloated, Byzantine organization peopled entirely by individuals who were too retarded or worthless to get a job anywhere else. Elected officials are the most useless, talentless, brainless individuals in our society. Why would you encourage people to depend on a retirement fund that can be dipped into by people who can’t even balance a fucking budget?”
This conversation was one battle in an ideological war between Johnny and Andrew that, like the Hundred Years’ War, will probably end at some point, but is so gargantuan as to seem perpetual, senseless, and utterly futile. Fortunately, this well-worn argument was interrupted by the arrival of spectacularly drunk James, upon whose arm clung a spectacularly drunk girl. We were all shocked into silence, with the possible exception of Carl, who had been silent for the last few hours as he read something by Goethe, and who was probably the most sensible of us.
It was not the fact that James had returned that was shocking, as he lived in the house, nor was it his intoxication: James participated in a caricature of his Irish heritage exclusively through epically immoderate consumption of alcohol and an equally immoderate love of the potato. Accordingly, he was rarely sober. As the evening had waned into morning with fully-fledged night passing mostly unnoticed, it was utterly unsurprising that James would return home swaying like a palm tree in a hurricane, smelling like the aftermath of some Prohibition crackdown, and with a shirt that looked as if Jackson Pollock had painted a masterpiece in the medium of condiments down its front.
It was, however, surprising that James had brought a girl home with him, as he was not particularly good-looking, tended to drown what little social acumen he possessed, and lacked a swollen bank account with which to compensate for these short-comings. It was a rare occasion when a girl was drunk enough to show even a faint glimmer of interest in James, and on those occasions, James was inevitably snubbed by the pack of female friends with which girls attend bars as a defense mechanism. Girls are herd animals like sheep or cattle, and they rely on the herd to protect the most snockered of the bunch, leaving predatory imbeciles like my dear, alcoholic roommate tragically and involuntarily celibate. I once saw a group of them laager around their drunkest friend like musk oxen with their horns pointed outward, leaving a solitary James to circle their periphery.
Even more surprising, the spectacularly drunk girl was spectacularly good-looking: unreasonably tall, unreasonably blonde, with legs that stretch unreasonably to the horizon and breasts that were unreasonably large and unreasonably defied gravity. I suspect that if there were any feminists among Barbie dolls, they would protest the spectacularly drunk girl’s existence for setting unreasonable standards for the Barbie figure.
I found myself faced with a singular moral dilemma in the sense in which Kierkegaard used the term: Should Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac to God? Should I allow James to drunkenly fornicate with a girl who was clearly too intoxicated to have any concept of the reality or repercussions of her actions, who would, in all likelihood, wake up with her recollection of the previous night’s events the most rasa of tabellae rasae? It was simply impossible to say; there was no magnetic north for my moral compass, no prior experience upon which to judge. The universal ethic simply could not apply: if any girl, regardless of how drunk she may be, seemed likely to enjoy carnal knowledge of James, I inevitably took it as divine will. Specifically, it seemed as though only God himself commanding a girl would convince her to fuck James. And who am I to argue with God?
“What the fuck’s up, guys?” said James, slurring all the words except the last into single, senseless conglomerate of impaired fine motor skills. “This is…Cindy? Cindy. Say hi, Cindy.”
Cindy said, “Hi!” She also said, “Ohmigosh, I’m so fucking wasted! I have to pee! Where’s your bathroom?” Her voice was an incredible distillation of all that is frilly, decorative, and useless in the world, an attempt to mask an obvious failure to develop any sort of intelligence or personality, superfluous as these organs are to the extraordinarily beautiful, behind cute enthusiasm. She was every high school cheerleader rolled into one person, and knew that her only hope of fucking the star quarterback was in being prettier than the other girls, as his anencephaly left him incapable of discrimination with regards to anything important about a human being, and her own uselessness left her dependent upon a man for her welfare. She was , in short, very decorative.
She was so exclamatory that we had no choice but to give her directions. As soon as she left, I seized the opportunity to pontificate against taking advantage of drunk girls, as if I had not spent several years relying upon alcohol to retard the judgment of the fairer sex to an extent that rendered me handsome, charming, and witty. Now, possessing the benefits of maturity and wisdom, I rely on the efficacy of my wealth as an aphrodisiac.
“Dude, you better not have sex with her,” I told James, my voice resonant with sobriety and moral superiority. “She’s too fucking drunk.”
“No, no. ‘Sokay. I already fucked her when she was sober. Then we went out and celebrated. I won the fucking lottery!”
I had to concede his point. We had all turned green with envy, the neon verdance of foliage on a drizzling, overcast day, when the blandness of the environment serves to heighten the vibrancy of the color through contrast. The exception to this reaction was Carl, whose natural complexion had rendered him more of an olive drab.
Johnny also was immune to jealousy’s poisoned claws, an attitude probably related to the fact that he was a famous fashion photographer, and accordingly saw the most beautiful women in the world naked or near-naked on a regular basis. I have never understood Johnny’s success, as his wardrobe is starkly utilitarian and minimalist, and he is the most deliberately uncouth and ravenously heterosexual person I have ever met, the antithesis of the archetypal fashion photographer, who would be a perfectly manicured and tasteful homosexual man who shouts encouraging things regarding the desirability of his subject, for whom he has no desire.
I have difficulty imagining Johnny saying anything encouraging to anyone.
I responded to James by saying, “Yeah, she’s pretty hot.”
“No, not her,” said James, “Well, yes her, she’s really fucking hot, but no, no, I won the actual lottery. The one with money. Like two hundred million dollars. I’m finally richer than all you fuckers.”
“Shit,” said Johnny, “Congratulations. Does this mean you’ll actually pay your bills now, instead of making us do it?”
“Fuck you, Johnny. I’m going to go fuck that hot fucking girl, and this time it’s your turn to just listen and masturbate while I fuck her brains out, you fucking cocksucker.”
“’Night, dude,” I said, and James went upstairs.
Really, his implication that he frequently has endured the horrible orgasmic screams that Johnny inspires is untrue. James moved in with us after we had soundproofed Johnny’s room. And we mostly hung our heads in shame when we listened to the screams, forgoing the masturbation.
Johnny has apparently mastered all aspects of the art of intercourse, and also fornicates almost exclusively with fashion models, who tend to be desperate for attention and prone to trying with ridiculous zeal to please a man. I realize that soundproofing someone’s bedroom seems like a ridiculous extravagance, but these two facts combined with the frequency with which he had sex necessitated soundproofing for all of our sanity. The month that we lived together without the soundproofing was one of the most horrible months of my life, mostly because Johnny’s successes made myself and my roommates all too conscious of our own relative lack of prowess. Never in my life have I seen us all so touchy. None of us own firearms or trucks, so sexual prowess was the last sanctuary in which our masculinity could take shelter, and Johnny just went ahead and built a ramp up to the top of our Masada.
It was ridiculous.
I once asked Johnny how he got laid so often, and he replied, “I always assumed it was because I was so good-looking, but now that I think about it, it’s probably because I, a notably heterosexual man, pretend complete sexual disinterest in girls who have dedicated their entire life to being desirable. That’s actually probably how I get such good pictures, too.”
Although I have a hard time picturing him feigning disinterest in a ravishing supermodel, I can nevertheless imagine how such a strategy would succeed, inasmuch as we all chase that which retreats from us, and the more insecurely narcissistic that we are, the more fervently we pursue.
Cindy returned from the bathroom full of the pep that she had thus far demonstrated, although she was a bit wobbly, perhaps a side-effect of the evening’s libations. “Hey guys,” she said, “where did James go?”
“Fucker went to bed,” said Johnny. “Do you want directions?”
“Yes, please. This place is totally huge, and I’m a little tipsy. I would never find it.”
“Just go all the way up to the third floor. It‘s the only room up there.”
“Thank you so much. Good night, guys. It was so nice meeting you.” We reciprocated the courtesy.
A while later, Cindy returned downstairs and said, quite plaintively, “He fell asleep without me.”


I went to an art show with Andrew. This was a mistake.
Andrew, who already tends toward condescension and ideological rants, transforms into an intolerable, pretentious juggernaut of rhetoric, snide remarks, and conceit if he so much as smells something that reminds him of a half-remembered dream that may or may not have involved the display of art.
I suspect that this reflects his dissatisfaction that his own art, while selling well and providing him with a more than comfortable lifestyle, has failed to blitzkrieg across the cultural landscape, shattering paradigms as it goes, which makes him feel like a hack who has prostituted himself to capitalism and mindless aesthetic homogeny. How he justifies this sentiment is beyond me: it has been my experience that anyone who achieves such a paradigm-shattering zeitgeist can be condemned on a variety of levels. Probably the easiest avenue of criticism is the tragic fact that anyone who shatters paradigms is not famous. Rather, he or she is poor, ignored, and probably suffering from a serious mental illness.
This may seem like an untrue statement, but the fact of the matter is that anyone who is famous for shattering paradigms is a plagiarist, a moderately talented but photogenic person of exquisite taste who has stolen brazenly from the true genius, who remains cloaked in ignominy and anonymity. The other option is that someone will legitimately shatter a paradigm, and become posthumously famous for their good work.
Presumably Andrew would not have been content with this option.
Andrew’s real problem is that he simply lacks the good taste and broad social circle of the truly excellent plagiarist, and so he earns a comfortable living with mediocre work that is bland enough to appeal to the popular palate.
It seems to me that Andrew is entirely aware of these shortcomings, and so he attempts to elevate himself in the only manner possible: namely, by making grandiose and nonsensical statements that reinforce his own pretensions, allowing him to float comfortably in a sea of delusions.
While I smoked four American Spirit cigarettes, he started to argue with himself in front of the gallery, beginning his rant with, “While line, shape, color, and composition are clearly important in any work of art, the nature of the artist is almost inevitably glossed over. This is unfortunate, because art cannot fundamentally be separated from its creator: the artist is art.”
Who talks like that?
The display of art also causes Andrew to become verbose, and he forms poorly pronounced polyglot sentences of labyrinthine structure, with the tone and vocabulary of a British history textbook from the late nineteenth century and rife with long pauses that are clearly his attempt to let the listener know that he is using a colon or semicolon in speech. I have little patience for reading this sort of bombast, much less listening to it pulled from someone’s orifices and spewed haphazardly about, and so began to examine the gallery.
It was large and brick and of obvious blue-collar heritage, peeling bland paint, every nook and cranny of its surface dark with grime. The words “Alaska Redistributing Co.” had been painted brazenly across the front, although their splendor, like the rest of the paint, had faded. Beneath them sat a restrained sign of brushed aluminum stating the name of the gallery. The doors of the loading dock had been replaced by large glass windows, and steps had been installed to transform the dock itself from a three-foot impediment into a thoroughfare.
It seemed likely that the choice in architecture had been a conscious attempt to make some statement about the relationship between art and populism, but I could not decipher the message, and instead began to regret purchasing American Spirits. They turn my rectum gelatinous, and while smoking one, I always have an uncomfortable suspicion that my familiarity with popular culture or current technology will have become hopelessly outdated before I finish my cigarette, or else that the sun will supernova and consume the earth just as I’m reaching the halfway mark.
Andrew began to talk about the importance of the alcoholic idiom in art, a favorite subject of his, and which always makes me wonder what the difference is between James, who is just sort of an alcoholic, and Ernest Hemingway, who by Andrew’s definition was a fervent participant in the alcoholic idiom. I have always felt that Andrew’s theory of the alcoholic idiom was a little trite and generally missed the point. His theory is essentially that because the artist imparts a piece of himself upon the artwork, and because alcoholism is inextricably entangled with the fundamental character of the artist, alcoholism is in itself something that is necessary for the creation of excellent art, and that it engraves its psychic fingerprint into every excellent work of art.
Personally, I feel that it is more likely that alcoholism is a coping mechanism for depression, an unfortunate affliction from which a staggering percentage of famous artists suffer, and that it is probably the depression itself that is the root of the artistic genius.
It seems to me, and obviously this is just a hypothesis, that artistic merit comes from an articulate and accurate picture of all that is wonderful and horrible about the human race, and about the trouble that we have defining exactly what is wonderful and what is horrible. In really excellent art, the human condition becomes the platform from which new human endeavors burst forth, and that malleable beast humanity reshapes itself as a reaction to the picture painted by the artist. The artist, I suspect, either uses the unusual perspective provided by depression to highlight the aspects of humanity that would otherwise go unnoticed, or else is depressed by the inevitable alienation caused by his unique point of view.
Finally, I neared the end of my ultimate cigarette and said, “Dude, shut the fuck up. Are we going inside or not? I swear to God Almighty and the entire host of angels, if you embarrass me like the last time we went to one of these fucking things, I’m going to start siding with Johnny all the time. Fuck.”
I flicked my cigarette butt into the anonymous litter, and walked inside.
Andrew enjoys art shows inasmuch as they allow him the opportunity to stroke his own ego and generally make an ass of himself: I like them because we have reached a point in our lives at which the art shows that we attend have open bars and are bursting at the seams with beautiful women of pretension and refinement, a few of whom are actually intelligent.
Intelligent people are few and far between, pearls cast among the trend-chasing, barely literate, vacuous masses of swine.
The interior of the building was demographically homogenous, populated exclusively by the upper middle class and lower upper class, garbed in what is implicitly understood to be a uniform befitting their presumably good education and high-paying jobs. The women were postmodern archetypes of poise, chicly coifed, hung about with draperies and jangling with grassroots jewelry, reviving the spirit of the sixties only to shatter its egalitarian ideology with the sweating, lecherous beast of capitalism. The alternative uniform for the chic female was a sort of jingoistic minimalism, crisp clean lines and angular silhouettes, their faces overhung by sternly cut bangs. They also wore large, dangling jewelry, but it was shining silver and very geometric.
The men were dressed in tight clothing of simple cuts and dark colors, and there was a universal expression of disdain, boredom, and decadence painted upon these noble physiognomies. They were like stick figures in black, gray, brown and navy, all with ubiquitous dark-framed glasses. They all had slender builds and soft hands, and they held their beverages with tremendous ennui.
Thinking back to my assessment of the architecture of the gallery, I thought that whatever connection between art and populism the structure may have been intended to imply, it actually demonstrated the acquisitive tendencies of those who filled its halls, who tried to steal the soulfulness from the lower classes and transform it into an expensive commodity of pretension, the way that their women tried to steal the aesthetic of the sixties and transform it into some capitalist statement.
I think the word for this is gentrification.
They inevitably failed, because you cannot simply purchase a soul. The act of purchase objectifies a soul, and it loses its vivacity to become a petrified thing. The upper strata are full of possessions and vacation homes and expensive art hanging above sofas, and its members depend on these artifacts to give them a sense of self. There is a certain sense in which their selves and their money are inseparable, because their entire identity depends upon wealth and its utility.
The lower strata know that a soul or character is something that develops in reaction to hardship: it is a sense of self that endures through trials and tribulation and takes its shape from a person’s interaction with difficulty.
If they have nothing else, at least the huddled masses have character.
The wealthy never have to overcome real difficulties, and thus they live like the undead, and they desire to take soulful things into their fold and make them their own. The art gallery had once been a warehouse, and men had spent their whole days there, working hard to feed their families and put a roof over their heads, and through their work they had facilitated the distribution of huge quantities of goods that people across the country used in their daily lives. Now it was an art gallery, and it affected only its few employees, the artists whom it displayed, and the few who could afford to purchase their works.
It had become a little closed-circuit of privilege.
I was something of an aberration in the crowd, inasmuch as my entry into the upper reaches of the social strata was an impromptu and accidental occurrence, and accordingly I had not spent my life practicing disaffected, jaded ennui. If my fiscal status dictates a uniform and code of conduct, then I am perpetually out of uniform, and this evening of cultural appreciation was no exception. My beard is unruly and untrimmed. I suspect that at night, it leaves my face to roam the forest, bringing down deer and feasting upon their flesh by the moonlight. My head is relentlessly shaved down to stubble. My eyes glow with a feral light, and although I possess a moderately built frame, there is a robust strength to it. I am heavily tattooed, and prefer speaking in monosyllables, and my speech is often in the vernacular of my ignorant, impoverished youth.
I very rarely apply the principles of deconstructionism to films or novels.
I look like, and am, the sort of person inclined to action, who appreciates the tangible, and who does not become overly intoxicated by abstract ideas, who does not necessarily associate a little money and some fancy terms with excellence.
Perhaps I exaggerate the extent to which I differ from the rest of them, but there is a certain sense to which I feel like a fox in the henhouse when I am around this sort of person.
In order to prevent bloodshed, the hens and I would have to interact while I was strongly swayed by the moderating influence of whiskey, and accordingly, I headed to the bar to placate my baser nature. Really, I am unlikely to cause any sort of trouble at this sort of thing because of my sense of courtesy, but I do carry smugness and self-congratulation on my hip while I look at all of these lukewarm people who fear conviction because it requires commitment and the risk of becoming outdated in the shifting winds of the popular and the fickle.
After having secured that potion that soothes the savage beast, I began to circulate throughout the gallery, examining the artwork. I was particularly drawn to a series of photographs, most strongly to a depiction of a stretch of industrial despair, heaps of rusting railroad ties through which grew desiccated weeds, encircled by mounds of sterile gravel and damp rubbish, depressingly monochromatic with a single red sweater quietly moldering and punctuating the monotony.
The rotting sweater seemed all the more forlorn for its isolation and for its abortively cheerful coloration.
The other photographs followed suit: each highlighted a single piece of refuse that lay in a ditch or alleyway, a single object that was used as a focal point for all of the despair and disrepair of its surroundings, and accordingly became the focus of the beauty inherent to such disregarded circumstances. There was something unnerving about the photographs, although they showed generally unremarkable circumstances, the sorts of places over which the eyes of the passerby tend to slide, but not so unsightly as to indicate anything more malicious than an imperfect sanitation system, the inability to universally dictate the vegetation of an area, the inevitability of rot and decay.
Still, there was something that captured my eye as if by compulsion, something about the choice of objects, the choice of locations, the general disarray that made the hairs rise on the back of my neck, that instilled within me a nameless restlessness. It was a subtle tendency, but it made me want to pace back and forth. Intrigued by this mild aesthetic discomfort, I scanned the label of the photograph, and noticed the name of the photographer as the woman standing next to me said, “I wonder how he picks the scenes. His work is just so beautifully haunting.”
“The one of the railroad ties and all that shit reminds him of Iraq, and the rest of the photographs are things that he thought were roadside bombs before remembering that he’s back in the U.S.,” I said, almost from reflex, certainly not from a well-thought volition, and turned to look at the speaker. She was one of those people who became more beautiful through her imperfections. This is not to say that she was in any way unattractive or repugnant, but rather that she was an entirely lovely woman, large green eyes, voluptuous figure, tastefully dressed. There was nothing about her structure that made her exceptionally beautiful, but she possessed something else that tied all of her beauty together and emphasized it, making her more than the sum of her parts.
The corners of her eyes were a fine lacework of miniscule wrinkles, and the way she held herself was somewhat disjointed and run-down, as if her soul was a little threadbare, worn thin by life’s struggles. She seemed to carry herself as if she had been struck so often and with so little provocation that she was now perpetually prepared to receive a blow.
There was an aura of melancholy around her, but the essence of her personality seemed to be one of indomitable vivacity. She seemed the sort of person who endured, not necessarily triumphantly, but without bearing too great of personal injuries. Most delicious of all was her stare, a sort of fevered gaze that was impervious to its surroundings.
She seemed to be gazing upon the face of God, never mind the capital punishment that he had imposed upon the action, and nothing else could disturb her rapture. Her eyes flickered over to my face, and even when they stared at me, they seemed to be looking somewhere beyond. As if she were categorizing the motion of subatomic particles.
“That’s an interesting theory,” she said, “What makes you think so?”
“The photographer’s actually a friend of mine from a long time ago. Do you by any chance know if he’s here tonight?”
“Yes he is; that’s actually why I came. Are you seriously telling me that you know Jonathan Smith?”
“Yeah, we go way back.” It was interesting to me, looking at this strange woman, to see how strongly that Smitty’s work had impacted her. I could understand why it affected me the way that it did: for me, it summoned up all of the demons and tragic demises that I had avoided by pure dumb luck while involved in foolish, childish activities, proving my masculinity by quixotically tilting at abstract nouns like “terror.” The pictures were a gateway through which I looked at all of the horror that war represented, all of the actions that represented everything horrible about humankind.
To me, his pictures were in some way a gossamer thread of cognition that tied me to the powerful totemic forces of battle, to the overwhelming knowledge of my existence that only occurs when all of the paltry ornamentation of civilized intellection has been stripped away by panic and desperation. He had summoned the unutterable and unshakable truth that life is given its ultimate meaning in the moment in which every fiber of your being resonates with the knowledge that you desire to live, and this thrust of a bayonet, or this bullet sent towards the enemy is an action upon which continued existence is predicated, and all existential angst falls away. He had summoned all of the furtive tribal bloodlusts inherent to humanity but that cannot be explained to those who have not witnessed battle firsthand, and because I had experienced these sanguine urges his photography was the means by which I could summon the faded specters of my memories, this raging font of vitality that has grown thin and vague with age.
There was a very tangible sense in which I looked at the piece of trash and tensed in preparation for the sudden well of concussion, the flying dirt and madness, shaking my head to thin the daze so that I could carry on. Perhaps this woman experienced some even paler sense of this meaning, tying the pictures into whatever misfortunes that she had experienced.
It was impossible for me to fully empathize with whatever she might have felt, to even really imagine it, because a photograph of an orphaned stuffed animal in an alleyway reminded me of how it feels to kill a man, of the echoes through eternity of the ultimate irrevocable action, the absolute permanence. It reminded me of how it feels to hold an eighteen year-old boy in your arms while he sighs last breath through the blood gushing from a bullet hole in his neck, dying for the sins of tempestuous youth, for his misguided faith in the benevolence of the government and its concern for its subjects, the belligerence of youth, and a mistaken belief in the goodness of humankind.
The photographs summoned for me all of the savagery of the dogs of war as they rip and tear apart the delicate facades facing the edifices of civilization, revealing the paltry self-interest of governments and establishments, the ease with which the masses may be convinced to beat the war-drums in preparation for a battle in which they will not participate, and the levity with which human beings discard their humanity in order to demonize foreign peers and rain destruction upon them.
Most likely, she did not appreciate the photography for these reasons. Perhaps she, like the majority of the patrons at the evening’s event, was ideologically predisposed to believe in all of the warm, fuzzy aspects of humanity, the fur of a beast that had been placated by bread and circuses. Perhaps she thought that its teeth and claws were fantasies because she had never seen them. Perhaps she liked the photographs because they consoled her heartache over a cheating boyfriend, or a lost loved one, or one of the many misfortunes that define everyone’s life.
Other people are a mystery that can never really be solved.
Smitty had done good work: his pictures called up the absolute worst of a person’s experiences, the foibles great and small delineate our character, that flesh us out, that make us human.
After all, it is the worst in us that really testifies to our true nature.
“Look, is there any way that you could introduce me? I’m just a really big fan of his work. It would mean the world to me.” For a moment, I could not recall what she was talking about, lost as I was in my extravagant crackpot theories. Perhaps I’m the pot calling the kettle black when I criticize Andrew’s art criticism. In any case, it was time to rejoin the world of real things.
“Yeah, sure, it’s no problem. I have a hunch as to where he’s hiding, too.”
True to form, Smitty was hiding in the back, pacing and chain-smoking next to a few dumpsters. Smitty’s nerves always more than matched his talent, and he compensated by basically smoking until he was practically vibrating and pacing until someone made him come inside. “Smitty, you filthy, syphilitic, sheep-fucking cunt! Why the fuck didn’t you call me and let me know you were coming to town?”
“Well fuck me sideways with celery! If it isn’t little Nancy. How the fuck you been, you dumb fuck?”
“I’ve been all right. I’m a little pissed right now that you were trying to sneak in and out of my fucking hometown without coming to visit me.”
“Yeah, fuck man, I dropped my phone in a glass of whiskey, lost all my numbers and everything. I couldn’t fucking remember where you live, anyway, because you got me so fucking drunk the last time I was here that I ended up fucking a dude.”
“Pretty sure she was a girl, man. Although she was unattractive.”
“No shit, she was ugly! She was Frankenstein’s fucking bride, is what she was! Jesus, some friend you are, letting me fuck girls twice my size who can bench press a fucking Volkswagen.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re a grown-ass man. You can fuck whoever or whatever you want.”
“Yeah, she was definitely in the whatever category.”
The unnamed girl with whom I had found Smitty had, quite understandably, folded inside herself under this barrage of vulgarity and general idiocy, her disappointment in Smitty as a tangible person irrevocably crushing the idolized image that she had of him.
I imagine that it was something of a depressing sensation.
It is a bad idea to meet your idols in person.
Idols are wonderful as long as they aren’t given too detailed of an examination, because when viewed from afar your imagination attributes to them superhuman wisdom and omnipotence, as well as granting to them a saintly disposition and spectacular sexual prowess. But when placed under a magnifying glass, it becomes all too apparent that they are but wood or stone, or in the case of Smitty, flesh and blood with the occasional bout of Chlamydia. The contents of his toilet bowl are scatological, the same as anyone else.
This beautiful, delicate flower had wilted before the onslaught of his overwhelming vulgarity, and probably mine as well: her knees were gelatinous, her lip quivered slightly, her consuming green stare was covered by a sheen of tears.
“Fuck, Nancy,” said Smitty, “Who is this pretty little thang, and why would you expose her to the terror of our company?”
She began to unfold herself a little, and now carried herself with the discomfort of a stranger alone with two old friends. She kept her stare cast a little to the side, and the way in which she held her head exposed the curve of her neck, like she was making herself vulnerable to a predatory bite. Fortunately, neither of us were vampires, and her neck remained intact.
“Actually, I don’t know. I met her while we were looking at your pictures, and we got so caught up in trying to find you that she never told me her name.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, reviving from her stupor of shattered illusions, “how rude of me. My name is Angie.”
“Why hello, Angie, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” said Smitty, smiling.
“The pleasure’s all mine. I’m just a really big fan, and…Nancy, is it?” She smiled slyly. Smitty began to guffaw riotously, for she had adopted one of his favorite jokes, “Anyway, he told me he knew you and would introduce me, so here I am.”
“So you are. What do you think of the show, Angie?”
“It’s wonderful, just like everything you do.”
“And how about you, sheepfucker? What’d you think?”
“So-so. Why’d you decide to take pictures of trash, by the way? I’m gonna have to drink a lot more before I’m going to fork out any fucking cash to buy that shit, anyway. Lot of pussy inside, though.”
Smitty shook his head. “I can see that what I have here are two unbiased, but genuinely appreciative critics. Must be doing something right.”
Angie began to protest the impossibility of anyone disliking anything that Smitty did, but I overrode her, stalling her good intentions in a garbled knot in her throat. “Fuck off, man. Let’s get good and drunk. I’m sick of watching you pace around like a fucking high school girl before prom, all fucking jittery ‘cause you’re going to lose your virginity to your date. I know you aren’t a virgin, you fucking faggot, so calm the fuck down and enjoy yourself.”

After we returned inside, I found myself overcome by the urge to urinate, and headed to the appropriate facilities. Inside, I found a toilet that could not have been peed upon with any less accuracy. If I had, while standing atop a thirty story building, attempted to piss into a toilet, I would have made less of a mess than my anonymous predecessor. There was urine on the walls of the stall, on the seat, on the floor, and every other place it might possibly have been sprayed, including some places that I would have thought were impossible to spray, had I not the proof before my very own eyes.
Public restrooms are always something of a gamble, I suppose.

We sat together for a while at the bar and made empty conversation, but inevitably, Smitty was drawn away from us by his obligations as an artist on display, and I could not begrudge him his absence, particularly because he was forced to mingle with an astoundingly large number of variations on the same theme masquerading as special and unique and tasteful individuals, and he was bombarded by misused catchphrases with which the speaker could demonstrate his or her cultural sophistication. One woman told him that she loved the way he used a camera to deconstruct the relationships between signifiers and the objects that are signified. It seems doubtful that Derridas has anything to do with a photograph of trash in an alleyway, and even more doubtful that Smitty had read any deconstructionism at all, as his literary taste tended to run more along the lines of comic books or novels about men with guns fighting the forces of evil and communism, which are, as we all know, more or less synonymous, but nevertheless, she spoke with such conviction that he smiled and replied, “Thank you. I really wanted to break all conventional ties with this latest series of photographs.” The moral of the story here is that if you dishonestly facilitate the delusions of others, you can make a good living.
I had the good fortune to end up alone at the bar with Angie, drinking free whiskey and flirting. “Listen, thanks so much for introducing me to Jonathan. I’ve been a big fan of his for a long time. It means a lot.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it. I hadn’t seen that bastard in over a year anyway. I was glad to do it.”
“Still, thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
“So, is your name really Nancy?”
“No. It’s actually Sidney, but when I was in the Marines with Smitty, I went by Sid, so he made the incredible mental leap to Sid and Nancy, and from then on it’s been ‘Nancy,’ at least as far as he’s concerned.”
This conversation continued, but it was not a particularly exciting conversation, being rather one example of the rituals preceding mating, and it was mostly empty flirtation which expanded the conversation into a ponderous monstrosity not worth recounting in full. The mating rituals of a species are only interesting if the species is a bird of paradise or something exotic and mysterious: among our own species, they are mostly pedestrian and mundane. She asked why I had joined the Marines, which may be explained by stupidity, and if I had killed man, which I have.
She asked what my occupation was: I actually make my money by writing pulp fantasy and science fiction novels which are sold in grocery stores everywhere, but I neglected to mention this activity, which has earned me the bulk of my revenue, and told her instead that I write short fiction and poetry which have been published in numerous literary magazines, usually in an obscure section of the even more obscure periodical. This last bit is actually true, but only as an activity that I pursue to preserve my own dignity. I would hate to have to admit to myself that I utterly lack literary prowess, that I am a hack in the fullest and truest sense of the word.
I in turn asked what she did for a living, and she informed me that she had been an elementary school teacher, but now worked in an anonymous office job performing a task the description of which would be too boring to bother with. I couldn’t repeat what she said in any case, as the tedium of her daily life was so numbing that it seeped into the description she gave and immediately rendered my consciousness insensate and useless. The impetus for this change in occupation was the accidental death of her infant son and her subsequent divorce from her husband.
In telling me all of this, I asked only the single question, and then spent the rest of the conversation nodding attentively. It has come to my attention that a woman, if any slight interest in the subject is shown, will tell her entire life’s story without interruption to an attentive listener, and is even more likely to do so when distraught. I suspect that the reason for this phenomenon lies in the relative scarcity of men who are willing to maintain even the pretense of interest in a conversational autobiography in its uninterrupted form, and also in the fundamental human desire to feel that one’s life is interesting and worthwhile, and so I always listen with patience and interest to such unending verbal ejaculations. The conversation was so full of banal superfluities and social euphemism that by its conclusion, the bartender was closing the bar, and Smitty wandered over with Andrew in tow.
“But really, think about,” said Andrew. “What would a Hemingway novel be without its constant reference to alcohol? And having spent some time with you, I’m well aware of the fact that you drink heavily, and accordingly participate in the alcoholic idiom through your art.” It appeared that Andrew had returned to his favorite subject.
“I guess, man. But really, what I’m trying to accomplish through my photography isn’t really about being drunk. It’s about capturing beautiful images of things that touch the human soul in some way, and through that contact improving human beings.”
“Right, I understand that, but because you are an alcoholic, that contact is fundamentally tied to alcohol, and accordingly the importance of your art and really any art cannot escape the alcoholic idiom.”
“Hey, let’s get out of here,” I interjected. “Smitty, you want to come home with us, or do you have someplace to stay?”
“Well, I have a hotel room, but it’s just for the night, so skipping out on it isn’t that big of a deal. If it’s all right with you, I’d like to crash at your place for a few days and catch up.”
“No, that’s perfect. Stay as long as you want. We have a spare bedroom, so you won’t even have to sleep on the couch.”
“Beautiful. Let me just talk to the gallery owner for a minute, and then we can get out of here.”
“All right. I’ll call a cab. Angie, do you want to come, too? We’ll probably be up drinking for a while, and you’re welcome to hang out as long as you want.”
“That actually sounds really nice.”
“Cool.” It appeared that sex might be in the cards for me this evening.

Chapter 2

Upon arriving home, I found that James had made his first major purchase with his lottery money, which was a mountain of cocaine. Perhaps this is hyperbole, and it was actually more of a foothill of cocaine, but in any case, it was a substantial amount. If James had intended to set up shop, rather than just consume the mountain in a whirlwind frenzy of narcotic consumption, he would have made a great deal of money, and perhaps had to hire bodyguards and fly to Colombia to make contact with the manufacturer to get a discount on the thousands of kilos he would have to sell in order for said mountain to be his profit sack, but it seemed far more likely that he intended to rewrite a passage in the Bible to read “as long as you have a nose, you can move mountains.”
I cannot even begin to imagine where James found someone holding that much coke, nor why he would want to buy it, but nevertheless, he had bought a quantity of blow that, pardon the pun, blew the mind, and apparently had recruited the help of a pair of buxom blondes in an attempt to snort the entire mound. These girls were pretty, and although they seemed to be unrelated in a strictly biological sense, they were twins in a more metaphysical sense, inasmuch as they were identical regarding goals, hobbies, taste in fashion, vocabulary, and basically every other attribute over which a human being has volition and which is a fundamental component of their character. It might be said that they were exceptional honest representations of the same Platonic form. Even their mannerism were identical.
I quickly began to suspect that many of their likes and dislikes were dictated largely by popular opinion, and were accordingly as fickle as that most mutable of pseudo-intellectual edifices. There is a certain sort of person who sinks into the cultural fabric. They mimic in dress their favorite celebrities. Their taste in music changes at exactly the same pace as top forty charts. Their taste in books is nonexistent, or else a vestigial thing that restrains itself to books from which popular films are adapted. These girls seemed that sort.
“It’s nice to see that you’re investing your newfound wealth wisely, dude,” I said. “What happened to Cindy?”
“Oh, she wasn’t that cool, and was surprisingly bad in bed. I mean, to the extent that I just passed out rather than deal with the hassle of trying to have sex with her. So I found some new girls that are better.” This statement was so patently untrue that I had no choice but to maintain a straight face while bursting into raucous guffaws internally. There are times when I am grateful for an inner monologue, if only for tact’s sake. This is particularly important when dealing with any man describing his sexual activity, because all of us lie in order to exaggerate our prowess and reinforce our masculinity. I myself have a penis like a freight train, and can give a girl five consecutive orgasms just by looking at her.
“Uh huh. Do they have names?”
“Yeah, this one’s Jamie and this one’s Chastity.” I don’t know how he could tell which was who. At this point, Smitty entered the house to behold the ludicrous decadence in which James was engaged.
“Sweet fucking Christ! You didn’t tell me you lived with Scarface.”
“I didn’t know. He never had the money for this shit before.”
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t look like he’ll have it for long.”
“Fuck you, Smitty! I’m just celebrating. This isn’t like, an every night thing.”
“I fucking hope not, or you’ll have a fucking heart attack at the age of, like, tomorrow.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Blow me. You want a line?”
“Sure.”
“Sid? Andrew? New girl?” General assent was issued, and a round of lines were cut and inhaled. It is my opinion that cocaine is drug on which money should never be spent, inasmuch as a cost benefit analysis shows the expense of cocaine to be deficit spending in one sense or another. Cocaine is for people who have never been frothing at the mouth with energy and enthusiasm genuinely and soberly acquired. It makes people as chatty as a good day or passionately loved hobby, keeps them awake in circumstances when self-discipline is sufficient, and the come-down is akin to the end of days: it is, in short, motivation for people who are too lazy to motivate themselves. I prefer not to spend money on something that accomplishes things that I can do for free. It also possesses the tragic tendency to erode the character of those who use it, so that they behave themselves poorly. Perhaps the undeserved and chemically induced zeal is balanced out by a corresponding degradation of morality. It does however draw the night out, and is a tidy punctuation to the massive consumption of alcohol. This last being an activity that had followed us home from the show.
“Oh, James, her name is Angie, not new girl. She’s apparently a big fan of Smitty’s.”
“Why the fuck would she do a foolish thing like that? Last time I saw Smitty, he ended up fucking that godawful abomination of aborted femininity, what was her name, Smitty? Or should I say ‘its’ name?”
“As I recall, you tried hitting on her too, and fell flat on your face. And I picked up your bar tab too, dickhead.”
“Yeah, well, things have changed. I won like two hundred million in the lottery, didn’t you hear?”
“No, I didn’t. You have to borrow money for the ticket?”
James laughed and said, “No, I robbed a bum for it.”
“Fair enough. So Angie, why do you like my purty pictures?”
“Just like you said, Mr. Smith, they’re just so pretty that I can’t help myself. Just being here with you is enough to make me want to rip off all of my clothes and worship you for the master of pretty pictures that you are.” Perhaps it was the influence of alcohol, or perhaps time had made her more comfortable with our presence, but Angie had begun to express herself quite freely.
“Oh, the sarcasm, you teasing bitch. And call me Smitty.”
“All right, Smitty. And you just met me; you aren’t allowed to slander my character yet. James, can I get another line?”
“Sure thing. Don’t take shit from Smitty, he’s kind of a pussy anyway.”
As James began to cut Angie another line, moving in the precise, frenetic motions of a man whose cup overfloweth with cocaine, Johnny burst into the room. There was a strange energy to his movements, the sort of vigor that results from some notable occasion.
“Holy shit! Do much coke, James?”
“Fuck, why does everybody keep saying that shit to me? I’m celebrating.”
“Shut the fuck up. I have the most ridiculous and disgusting story to tell all of you.”
“Well quit with the suspense and tell the fucking thing.”
“Eat my asshole. All right, all right, so I picked this chick up from a bar, this sweet little thing just oozing libido out of her pores, and go back to her place, right, and one thing leads to another, and we start fucking. But this bitch is fucking noisy in the sack, like, make the neighbors pound on the walls or call the cops noisy, so noisy that I flip her over and start fucking her doggy style just to preserve my hearing. So I’m doing her from behind, and she no shit asks me to put it in her ass. I’m thinking, fuck yeah, usually you have to coax a girl into that sort of thing, who am I to turn down this gift from God, so I start fucking her in the ass.”
“Right. It was your sense of spirituality that persuaded you.”
“Fuck off, asshole. Anyway, after a while, I get kind of bored with that, so I pull out, and she just starts sucking the shit off my dick. Straight up volunteers to do it, craziest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. So I make this mental note not to kiss her on the mouth after that, but a little while later, things are really coming to a head, and she’s starting to come and I’m like five seconds away myself, and in the heat of things, I end up making out with her shitty mouth.”
“That’s fucking gross man.”
“Yeah, no shit. But pretty funny.”
Andrew, who had been quiet since we left the gallery, spoke. “I have a story that tops that. A while ago, I was having sex with this girl, and she was on top, and I’m wearing a condom and haven’t blown my load yet or anything, just having a good time, when I feel something dripping down onto my stomach. So I look, and some other dude’s semen is dripping out of her vagina onto me.”
“Oh, that’s foul! How is that even possible? I mean, you would think that it would have slid out when she was walking around or something.”
“I don’t know. I assumed that it was the cum that was wedged way up in her uterus or someplace deep inside the maze and all the bouncing up and down shook it loose from the nooks and crannies.”
“Maybe she just has a quick turnaround time,” suggested Smitty as he lit a cigarette. He took a drag and added, “I’ve got a story that tops both of yours. A couple weeks ago, I pick this girl up at a bar, take her back to my place, you know, and we’re starting to get busy. So she says, ‘Hey, I’ll go down on you if you go down on me,’ and I start to eat her out, when I feel this tickle on my chin. I don’t think nothing of it, just carry on carrying out the plan of the day, when I feel the tickle again. So I kind of feel around her downstairs to see if I can’t figure out what it is, and don’t really feel anything out of the ordinary, so I keep going. Well I feel the tickle again, so this time I pull my head back and look, and there’s a fucking tapeworm sticking three inches out of her ass that’s been hitting me in the chin while I’m eating her out.”
“Oh, fuck that!” said Johnny. “Please tell me you’re making that shit up!”
“I’m completely serious, it absolutely happened.”
“Fuck, what did you do?”
“I grabbed that fucking tape worm and wrestled it into submission! What the fuck do you think I did? I threw her the fuck out of my place. I think her shoes might still be there, actually.”
“That’s ridiculous, and fucking disgusting. I’m going to brush my teeth.”
I spoke. “You all make me feel so much better about the women that I’ve fucked. That’s fucking ridiculous. You know what you should have done, Smitty?”
“No, Nancy, tell me.”
“You should have given her the Alabama hot pocket.” Smitty immediately burst into laughter, as he is fully aware of the meaning of the euphemism. Angie was not so fortunate.
“What is that?”
“It’s where you rub Icy-Hot on the outside of your condom, and then fuck the girl. The outside, mind you, because it would be really tragic if you put it on the inside.”
“That’s horrible.”
“I know. Her vagina would be hot and cold at the same time, and smell like menthol.”

The next morning, I awoke next to one of the matched set of ladies that James had brought home with him. Which one, I have no idea. They really were indistinguishable. The night had grown hazy at a pace proportionate to the number of beers consumed, so that by the end of the night, there were isolated islands of vague recollection floating in a sea of oblivion. This is not to convey the impression that there was anything even close to an archipelago in this sea, which appeared to be fed by the waters of Lethe. Rather, the evening was more or less one blank slate shortly after the end of the mention of the Alabama Hot Pocket. And the little that I did remember indicated gluttonous consumption spiraling into casual fornication. I had vague recollections of upending bottles of beer into my mouth and flashes of bare skin, but little else.
I wandered over to one of the guest bedrooms to check on Smitty, who I think had gone to bed with Angie. The room was empty, although the bed was unmade and the sheets bore a few suspicious stains. There was also a note on the nightstand. Smitty had written, “Hey, buddy, thanks for the good time. Went to get breakfast with Angie. Too bad you got too drunk to form sentences last night. Angie is the shit. I think I’m in love. Ask somebody about what you did with that tangerine. It’s a funny story.” He had signed his name in a terse squiggle at the bottom.
When I went downstairs, I found that every horizontal surface in the kitchen and living room was covered in empty beer bottles, in a flagrant display of irresponsible consumption of alcohol. The mess was imposing. So imposing, as a matter of fact, that it immediately killed any urge that I might have had to investigate anything that had happened the previous evening. It also precluded the possibility of making myself a cup of coffee. The coffee maker was blockaded by what seemed to be a miniature replica of the Tower of Babel made exclusively of beer bottles. How we had managed a feat of such spectacular coordination in our impaired state is beyond me. Perhaps the culprit was James, who still sat at the table, right where we had left him, cutting himself another line, ad nauseum. “Hey Sid,” he said, “What do you think love really is?”
“What the fuck kind of question is that? Seriously, man, how much fucking coke have you done?”
“Don’t interrogate me. Is this Guantanamo Bay? Am I a terrorist? No. So just answer the fucking question. I’m curious.”
“What do you mean, ‘What do you think love is?’ What type of love are we talking here? Romantic love? Brotherly love? A mother’s love?”
“I don’t know. Just love generally speaking. I hadn’t really thought to narrow the question down like that.”
“Huh. I guess that I don’t think that love generally speaking exists. I think it’s more or less all situational. Why do you ask?”
“No reason, really. The question just occurred to me while you were sleeping, and I don’t think that I have a really good answer. I thought I’d get someone else’s opinion.”
“Oh. Okay. That’s still pretty weird.”
“Fuck off.
“Anyway, I’m going to go get some coffee. Do want any?”
“No, I have coke to keep me awake. Thanks though.”
“Make sure you get some sleep man. The blow will still be there when you wake back up.”
“Thanks mom.”
“Oh, and do you know if I did anything with a tangerine last night?”
“No fucking clue, man. I went on like a five-mile walk with Jaime last night.”
“Huh. I’ll see you later.”
“Later, man. And try and figure out love, why don‘t you.”
“I’ll do my best.”

I was comfortably seated at a corner table in the coffee shop, reading Nietzsche and drinking a double short latte, which is one of life’s greatest little pleasures. For those of you unfamiliar with the beverage, a double short latte is two shots of espresso in a small cup, with steamed milk mixed in. It is potent enough to make it clear that you are drinking coffee, but smoothly delicious enough to please the palette and avoid bleeding ulcers and other gastrointestinal maladies. It is, in its own way, every bit as delicious, subtle, and delightful as a glass of fine scotch. It was the sort of little finial ornamentation that joins forces with other trivialities of its sort to make life an overall pleasant and worthwhile place. It’s strange how often this sort of minutia define a day’s merits.
I was minding my own business in my little espresso paradise, when my solitude was intruded upon by a girl.
“Hey, is anyone sitting here?” she asked, and I glanced at her and then at the proliferation of unoccupied tables in the shop. Could this perhaps be an attempt at flirtation? In my heart of hearts, I was actually hoping that she was on the run from the mafia, and that this chance meeting would lead along a string of coincidences towards capers, heists, the destruction of villains, and our mutual discovery of true love, with national fame as a great hero playing the role of a cherry on top of this ice cream sunday of delusion. This fantasy seemed unlikely, but taken in a glance, she appeared up to playing her role in the narrative. She was pretty in a minimalist sort of way, dressed simply in a pair of jeans and a halter top, displaying thick tattooed greenery from both of her shoulders to both of her elbows, baroque ivy climbing around one arm, with stylized Japanese cherry blossoms on the other, and also a smattering of smaller tattoos sprinkled about the skin in view. She had a slender build, the sort of slight frame in which the scarcity of curvature only seems to emphasize the existence of those curves, and the slightest quirk of her lips summoned to mind the line of hip and leg, the slightest suggestion of breast. She was slim, but avoided the aesthetic tragedy of the mildly anorexic, in whom every bone and neurosis bristles akimbo to the world, possessing instead a build that seemed to fit perfectly in its allotted place within the world.
There was an air of defiant eccentricity to her, as if she was the sassy but beautiful female lead who marched to the beat of her own drum or whatever the cinematic cliché is. She had beautiful brown eyes beneath cropped hair dyed an artificially neon pink, and an open manner that made it seem as though she was presenting herself authentically, which is to say that the duplicities inherent to human beings seemed refined to a subtler flavor in her, the sort of fine-grained misrepresentation that does not mar the surface of any character that it brushes against, but rather smoothes away rough edges.
For whatever reason, I took an immediate liking to her as an entire human being, which is a fairly rare thing for me. Usually when I meet a girl for the first time, the character defects to which everyone is prone prevent me from taking her very seriously. I have this problem with men also, but it bothers me less in their case, because there is no possibility of a serious romantic relationship with a man, which means that masculine flaws are not a let-down of nearly the same magnitude as their feminine counterparts, but rather speak of the sort of trouble that you‘ll get into when you‘re drunk together at some point in the future.
“No, it’s free. Go ahead and pull up a chair.” She smiled prettily, the sort of smile that gives you an entirely unjustified faith that life is not so bad after all, and offered her hand.
“I’m Maria, by the way.” As she said her name, her tongue tangoed with Anglican mediocrity, rolling the letter “r” around and around her mouth in a farcically Spanish manner. I took her hand and shook it, and she smiled again.
“Hello, Maria. I’m Sidney.” She laughed, because I had mimicked her pronunciation. Her laughter hung daintily in the air in delicate dulcet bell tones, sprinkling the air with pure and unpretentious joyfulness.
“You don’t have to say it that way; I was just being playful. I feel like you can only say the same name so many times before you have to start experimenting with it.”
“Fair enough, Maria. Sit thee doon and tell me about yourself. What do you do for a living, what are your hopes and dreams, what’s your astrological sign?” She smiled and sipped her espresso.
“I guess the pressure is on. I don’t really know if I’m up to being interrogated by a stranger.”
“Well that’s what you get for talking to strangers. We’re a bunch of ungrateful, nosy louts. In any case, consider it the price of using the chair.” Her eyes were twinkling with repressed mirth, and the twinkle simply served to emphasize their lush depths: they were the sort of eyes in which it is easy to lose yourself. I suspected that I could spend an entire day staring into them and be completely content.
“Well, when you put it that way, I guess that I have no choice but to spill my guts. I really ought to be more careful about who I talk to.”
“Probably so. I know that I’m certainly an unsavory character.”
“So it seems. Forcing a poor, innocent girl to confide her hopes and dreams to a stranger. Terrible.”
“Quit stalling.”
“Fine. Right now, I’m working as a bartender at the Drunken Peasant and getting a master’s degree.”
“Oh really? You’re just going to come right out and say that you kick ass? Just like that? So are you just starting your master’s, or getting close to the end?”
“I’m almost done, thank God. I’m about to go out of my mind, I’m so busy.”
“Yeah, that’s life.” She looked down at her coffee for a moment, as though seeking to divine something in its milky depths.
“Aren’t you just Mister Sympathy. I bet you pick up all the ladies with your charm.”
“Not so much. I’m sorry, I didn’t actually mean to come across like a dick, or to imply that you weren’t working really hard or anything. It’s just one of those things, where it seems like everyone who is getting a post-graduate education is always stressed out. It’s kind of the nature of the beast, but at least you’re compensated by the satisfaction of the accomplishment.”
“I guess so. I haven’t been compensated yet, though, so it mostly just seems like a never-ending punishment.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah, I guess it does. Hopefully it is actually worth it. What about you? What do you do for a living?”
“I basically don’t do anything for a living.”
“Oh really? Does it pay well? And what about the benefits?”
“It pays surprisingly well, actually, but I don’t get any benefits. No, I actually write for a living.” In saying this, I had reached a point in the conversation that I loath, inasmuch as I write the least admirable sort of book, and have become fantastically wealthy doing so. I hate admitting that I write the sort of books that you buy in a grocery store, and also hate admitting that I could, if I so chose, wallow in palatial splendor, especially to someone like Maria, who I suspect has been working herself into threadbare exhaustion and despair while getting a higher education, which is in all senses admirable.
The real problem is that I feel like I have basically been given a great deal of money for doing nothing particularly remarkable, for writing novels that in the worst case scenario might actually make the world a worse place. It might be argued that with the diminishing importance of religion, it is literature of the sort that I write that has become the new opiate of the masses. I create fantasies into which the masses can escape from their stagnant lukewarm lives and imagine that they are off fighting dragons or something equally ridiculous.
Also, I despise the sort of person who cannot wait for an excuse to laud their financial success, because that sort of masturbatory self-congratulation is indicative of a general failure as a human being and also spectacularly obnoxious. Suffice it to say that I’m close to being the wealthiest author in history, and that I feel guilty about the role that the sale of my books plays in the destruction of the world’s forests. Normally, I would tell a little white lie about the nature of my work, to play up my strengths and hide my embarrassing flaws, but Maria seemed the sort of person who actually deserves honesty, if only to reciprocate her seemingly honest nature.
Already, I had built an idol of her in my mind, and place it snugly atop a pedestal. Obviously I can’t follow my own advice regarding the idolatry of mere mortals. I had taken quite a shine to Maria.
“Oh, so you’ve also chosen a life of poverty.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? No, I’m actually doing pretty well. I write these fantastically awful pulp fantasy books and they sell really well, although they do have the unfortunate side-effect of destroying any claim that I might have had to dignity and integrity. I’m basically a capitalist whore.”
“I’m sure it’s not that bad.”
“No, it really is. They sell my books in grocery stores, for Christ’s sake. I’m the scum of the literary earth. The fact that my average reader knows how to read is actually kind of surprising. If I gave my publisher a manuscript for a novel that was attempting to be serious literature…well, he’d probably publish it, because I’m making him filthy rich, but he’d regret the decision as soon as sales figures came in. I don’t think anyone expects Sam Beckett…that’s my pen name…to write about mortality or love or philosophy; I just write about fucking and fighting, with a few dragons and some magic thrown in.” Her face took on a look of ecstatic mirth, the sort of laughter that manifests itself in partially strangled laughter and mild convulsions.
“Wait, you’re Sam Beckett? No, you can’t be! You’ve got to be lying!”
“It’s sad but true. I really am Sam Beckett.”
“That’s really hilarious! Your books are awful!”
“Yes, yes they are. It’s nice of you to remind me.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. You just don’t seem the sort of person who writes trashy books. Honestly, I’m kind of surprised that you even admit it. You really ought to lie and say that you do something a little more respectable. That’s really embarrassing.”
“And you so kindly continue rubbing it in, which I appreciate to no end. But seriously, I am pretty embarrassed about it. I’m kind of harboring secret dreams of writing the Great American Novel, but they haven’t quite come to fruition yet.”
“I really am sorry, but I don’t seem to be able to help myself. And I’m sure that you’ll do just fine when you put your mind to it.”
“Thanks.”
“Wow, this must really be my day. I’ve never met a famous hack author before.”
“Well, we tend to keep a low profile, for good reason. I’ve never met a grad student before, so I guess that we’re on even ground.”
“Really? How have you never met a grad student before? We’re not particularly rare.”
“It depends on where you are and who you hang out with, I guess. I never went to college or anything, and neither have most of my friends, and my job doesn’t lend itself to meeting any sort of people at all really, so I just haven’t. I mean, maybe my editor has a master’s, but I haven’t asked him about it.”
“Weird. It seems like everyone I know at least went to undergrad. Personally, I can’t imagine not continuing my education. I mean, part of that is probably just that I don’t want to actually have to deal with the real world, but also, education just opens up so many doors for me. It rounds out my life, I guess. I can’t imagine a life not having read Dostoevsky, just to throw out an example.”
“You know that you can get books from places besides college, right? I mean, I’ve read Dostoevsky, and so have a bunch of my friends who didn’t go to college.”
“Really? You can get books outside of college? I don’t believe you.” She was drinking her coffee through a straw that had impaled the mass of whipped cream crowning the beverage, and her eyes glittered as she sucked through the straw, and it seemed that part of the crinkle around the edge of her mouth was not inspired by the need to create suction but rather glee. Or condescension. It was hard to tell. “But really, just reading in your free time isn’t necessarily the same thing as an education. Like, who chooses to spend their free time reading a Marxist account of the emancipation of the serfs in Russia, for example? And even if you do, you don’t have the professor to explain Marx to you, or general trends in Marxist criticism, or a bunch of other little things. I mean, you might miss out on the concept of historiography entirely, and that’s really significant in being able to comprehend what you read, especially if you read multiple accounts about the same thing, because they almost always contradict each other at least a little.”
“That’s true, but you can also just read whoever is mentioned in something to clarify whatever it is that you don’t understand. Especially in scholarly works, because there’s a bibliography. Like, right now, I’m reading Nietzsche, but reading Nietzsche has made me realize that I need to read Kant and Schopenhauer, and also Goethe. Just follow the trail of footnotes to the next step in your education, I guess.”
“Well yes, I suppose that works, but then what about translation issues? If you were taking a class about Nietzsche in college, you have a professor who knows German and can point out discrepancies in translation, or puns that are missing in English. Little things like that.”
“So learn German and read Nietzsche in German.”
“Yeah, but are you actually going to do that? I mean, the fact that you actually read what’s cited in footnotes is pretty incredible in itself.”
“Well, I’ve started learning German, but I’m not good at it yet. Not good enough to read Nietzsche, that’s for sure. Mostly, I’m still getting the hang of Greek, and it’s proving a little more time consuming than I had planned, I guess.”
Once again, I broke my customary behavior towards the gentler sex. Usually, I try not to brag about my academic pursuits, partly because I learned in elementary school that the average person prefers for their peers to be reasonably stupid and fairly ignorant in order to reinforce the myth of egalitarianism as set down in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, and partly because it makes me seem like a pompous ass. Perhaps I had blown my own horn this time because I really liked the girl.
Women make braggarts of us all.
Also, it’s nice to talk about that sort of thing with the sort of person who has some ground upon which to stand, and who possesses keen wit and vibrant interest. With the exception of Carl, my roommates tend towards libidinous pursuits far more often than academic pursuits, which sometimes leaves me longing for someone to talk to about a certain segment of my hobbies.
“Wait, you’re actually learning Greek?”
“Yeah, I’m coming along pretty nicely. It still takes me a long time to read anything, and Thucydides is kicking my ass, but he writes so densely that even if I were able to read Greek fluently it would be a hassle.”
“Who learns Greek for fun, though? I think you might be the only person I’ve ever met.”
“I guess. I mean, I have a lot of free time, so why not?”
“That’s still really unusual. Especially since you didn’t go to college. Do you know any other languages?”
“You have to keep bringing that up, don’t you? No, I know Latin and Spanish, which are kind of the same thing, I guess. Most of the vocabulary from Latin transferred to Spanish.”
“And you’re getting passable at Greek and starting to learn German? What’s next after that?”
“Probably French, I guess. Read Sartre and Hugo and Foucault in their original.”
“That’s insane. Russian is kicking my ass, and I have to learn it to do my degree justice. Why would you subject yourself to that kind of misery voluntarily?”
“It’s really not so bad. I mean, you’re really busy, so the work that you’re putting in to learn Russian is all precious time that could be occupied in other ways. I spend most of my time just sitting around, so I might as well learn something. The whole Cyrillic alphabet thing probably doesn‘t help, either. I know that the Greek alphabet made Greek infinitely harder to learn.”
“Still. You’re probably the most surprising stranger I’ve ever met.”
“It’s probably for the best that there are still a lot of people that you haven’t met in the world; it would be a shame if I was the most interesting one you ever met.”
“I don’t know if I’m so sure of that. You pretty much just blew my mind.”
“I still think you’re making too big of a deal about it, but whatever floats your boat. Do you want another coffee?”
She glanced at the clock, and looked dismayed. “No, I actually have to go. But let me get your phone number: you’re just too interesting not to continue hanging out with.”
“Okay,” I said, and gave her my phone number. As she left, I realized that the day, which had not seemed to be any sort of competition at all, now seemed to have been thoroughly vanquished. Carpe diem and all that.

Chapter 3

Carl invited me to a rock show, as he is wont to do, and I invited Maria to accompany me, as it seemed like a lovely step in the direction of forming a relationship with her. And, knowing the way that road leads to road, it seemed unlikely that I would ever return to this particular fork again. No one really likes missed opportunities. This particular opportunity also proved that I can’t navigate for shit and had no idea where we were heading, inasmuch as the show turned out to be the sort of rock show in which the music expresses, through shredded guitars that are highly distorted and gutturally roared lyrics and mildly satanic or mythic themes, all of the horror of human existence, the cruelty inherent to humanity, death, destruction, economic disparity, starvation, and the four horsemen of the apocalypse in all their manifestations.
This is a lot to ask of one song, and so the plethora of discontents tends to manifest itself as a tsunami of sonic rage, as a murky amalgam of too great a content in too little space, threads and themes interlacing themselves until all that is visible is a tangle and the audience thinks that they are participating in some sort of undirected, disembodied anger. The members of the band usually take themselves quite seriously, and will talk at great length about the purity of metal and their rebellion and the importance of Satanism in overthrowing the stale clichés with which Christianity has bound us all. They generally seem the sort of people who have read too much Nietzsche and too little else. I suppose that Nietzsche might argue that they represent the Dionysian aesthetic principle quite strongly, but he also transcended intoxication and violence as the means of human overcoming in his later works.
Practically speaking, it seems unlikely that Satanism will ever really catch on, and certainly a species of music that is beloved by a minority of the most misanthropic sort is not the best means of evangelism. This mistake is not their fault, inasmuch as they tend to have replaced a significant portion of their brain with tattoos, piercings, and youthful angst. Their libidinous laxity, general intoxication, high rate of suicide, and frenzied behavior, while wholeheartedly embracing the mythical Silenus’ statement that it is best never to have been born at all and second best to have died young, but it is safe to say that there are few classicists among us anymore, and the more pedestrian segment of the population has little use for aesthetics as a means of higher truth, and condemns that sort of behavior as foolishness and irresponsibility.
I did not expect to take a girl on a date to this sort of show, but tragically assumptions often prove to be unfounded. I had assumed that the headlining band would be the sort of critically-acclaimed, bourgeois-darling sort of ensemble with which Carl is usually associated, a band that was a single point of perfection without much temporal elongation at all in the plastically mutating landscape of trend among a demographic of a certain wealth and education. In short, I expected it to be a one-hit wonder for trendy rich kids.
This was not the case, because Carl had decided that the pigeonhole in which his producing was confined was just a wee bit too confining, and accordingly had begun to produce bands of a much different character than was his habit. Thus, a metal band, which was rapidly collecting laurels from a variety of different music reviews. Carl will never fully escape his upper middle class sensibilities, I suspect, which tend to make him care a little more about critics’ opinions than he probably should.
Carl is in many ways a slave to his upbringing, but also has the potential to be the most surprising of my roommates. Johnny will always be vulgar and always fucking strange, beautiful women. James will always be a drunk and a little bit of an idiot. Andrew will always pompously pursue political correctness. Carl, however, has a tendency to decide that he will take his life in a different direction with little or no warning, and he always seems to do so for arbitrary reasons at arbitrary times. Such was the case when he dropped out of college, an Ivy League college nonetheless, although he has never mentioned which one, after only a single semester.
I am surprised that his parents allowed him to, but knowing Carl, he probably calmly and reasonably explained to them why he was doing what he was doing and then expected them to be completely in agreement with him, a tactic which renders argument fairly ineffective. It’s hard to maintain an argument’s momentum when your opponent calmly explains his side of the story and then elucidates in smaller words and simpler terms if you continue to argue, making it clear that he thinks that the only reason for your continued disagreement is some sort of mental impediment on your part.
Carl is something of an enigma in the house, because he bears the natural social grace and equanimity of one born to privilege, avoiding Johnny’s deliberate vulgarity, Andrew’s overwrought pursuit of social sensibility, James’ general drunken laziness, and my own uncomfortable accommodations with both my proletariat heritage and newfound self-education and wealth. Carl, because he was born to wealthy parents in an island of affluence, and attended schools that, in addition to essentially guaranteeing academic excellence and the ability to attend any university in the world, carefully cultivated a sort of cultured poise and grace that can only be acquired in childhood. He is that often unmentioned capitalist nobility, the child of at least second generation wealth, whose parents were interested in fostering the wasted remnants of Victorian courtesy. So Carl, with his effortless ability to avoid vulgarity and faux pas, remains somewhat separate from the rest of us, who can only badly imitate what comes naturally to him.
His parents belong to that group of people who still fall prey to the fallacy that to be cultured is to participate in an immutable absolute, and chosen as their absolute that wretched undead edifice of manners that dictates that elbows must not be placed on the table and profanity is to be avoided in public. I have always wondered why we still gravitate towards this intricate code of conduct, preferring sterile nuances to the vibrant and dynamic process that is the constantly shifting cultural landscape. There will always be Pharisees among us, I suppose.
Rather than resuscitate the long-dead corpse of these putrid vestiges of ages past, more effort should be spent on the examination of the relationship between our actions and the culture in which we live. There is a mutual influence there, I think, because our cultural landscape is constructed from the consensus of its occupants, and although the occupants bear its indelible mark, they also have the tremendous opportunity to reshape the geography. Because it is the consensus of the many, every individual action reshapes this fabric, and the visage of a civilization is the cumulative product of the actions of its individuals. The shape of our characters is the cumulative product of every single action that we make, and so there is a certain sense in which every action, no matter how minute, must be considered a decision between good and evil, change and stagnation, and infinity of binary oppositions. We all choose whether we are Malcolm X or Gandhi or Pol Pot or Martin Luther or Martin Luther King, Jr., and the decision of the majority is to live lukewarm lives and to allow their orthodoxy to be dictated by politicians and priests and the ghosts of generations past.
I suppose that our fondness for static etiquette stems from the distance that seems to exist between our individual choices and the generally accepted ethics. Minor cruelties are far from pogroms, never mind that they are a pogrom’s progenitors. We are hesitant to attribute to ourselves the potential for greatness because we must also take responsibility for our own mediocrity. It is really responsibility that makes freedom such a terrifying thing, because to create a new face for the world is also to take responsibility for that face, and to expose ourselves to the slings and arrows of the placid rabble who have bound themselves in the adamantine chains of orthodoxy, never mind that fire is no longer innovative and eagles are eating their liver. Things left to sit too long wither and putrefy.
For reasons that are unclear to me, probably because Carl has never explained them, instead preferring conversational minimalism, Carl embraced his freedom and abandoned his socially mandated course towards comfortable wealth and professionalism, and instead spent several years fornicating with a woman who had been his English professor and from whom he developed the love for literature and exquisite thought that he has passed on to me.
On the rare occasions when I imagine the professor and the time that they spent together, I imagine a waif from whom the rounded tones of postmodern criticism, Marxism, and feminism spring in the crisp elocution of educated Queen’s English, Carl listening silently, with the pair cocooned in a Bohemian apartment that begs to be called a flat, the air thick with incense and marijuana. They speak in hushed tones, and there are peals of laughter like church bells cutting through fog on a Sunday morning, and while they lie naked together she props herself on one elbow and leans toward him, her soft Saxon belly folding over itself in three angled folds at the waist. There are hours of conversation between them, and although much of what she says follows the lines of a young academic, the scripted complaints about environmental disregard and sexism and racism, the poorly educated throngs of humanity, the importance of the humanist’s line of work, the superiority of European culture, Carl hears only her passion for what she studies, for the written word, for delicately spun tales of complex emotions, of the nuances of thought, and when their time together ends, that is what he takes with him.
But he has never said, so maybe I’m borrowing scenes from a movie and replacing the actors with people I know.
He spent the rest of his time learning to produce and then actually producing an album for some friends of his. These friends became modestly famous and critically acclaimed, and the work that Carl had done on their album was particularly notable, or so I have been informed, and by reputable authorities, nonetheless. I once found a collection of old music magazines at a barbershop I used to frequent, back before I started shaving my own head, all of which had reviews of this debut album by an unmemorable band. All of the reviews took special care to note the excellence of Carl’s work.
This was the beginning of Carl’s career as a producer of music, which has garnered him much fame and wealth. As I have previously said, Carl primarily produces bands which, in my humble opinion, need an excellent producer to compensate for lackluster lyrics and mediocre musical technique, and which generally have a microscopic life-span, inasmuch as they never quite reach the level of massive, talentless fame that perpetually lurks near the top of popular music charts, but are not excellent enough to gain a cult following, and accordingly inhabit some amorphous limbo between excellence in an artistic sense and excellence in a capitalist sense. They tend to create delightful ethereal soundscapes that connect poorly to human experience except inasmuch as they sound pretty, which I suspect is the reason for their inevitable condemnation to limbo. And sometimes they don’t even sound pretty, but are interesting more as novelties than anything else.
I once had a conversation with the frontman for a band that he was producing called the Cerulean Olfactory, and he told me that the band’s goal was to sonically reproduce famous abstract expressionist and cubist paintings. While an interesting proposition in an academic sort of way, this sort of endeavor is nevertheless unlikely to do anything besides alienate basically everyone who might have looked at their name on a concert poster and thought, “I wonder what they sound like?” Sonic reproductions of abstract paintings do not let you mourn the loss of a loved one, recover from a break-up, celebrate love, pass the time, make a drive more enjoyable, or really do anything except for stroke some part of the personality of the band members. The name for this part of their personality is their ego. Their efforts are masturbatory.
The Cerulean Olfactory were something of an aberration in Carl’s endeavors: usually he produces the sort of band that is a few layers removed from the next big thing in music. They hack away at the rough frontiers of the musical aesthetic, and at some point a band will put all of the rough pieces together to form the sort of band that is too good to ever become popular, and this band will inspire a band that renovates the cultural landscape.
Metal bands, however, almost always are largely critically ignored, but inevitably have massive cult followings. Although I cannot claim to have any definitive explanation for this phenomenon, I will nevertheless pretend. Metal bands rarely get critical acclaim because they fulfill the emotional needs of a minority of the populace, and this minority does not pour money into the economy. Thus, critics, whose function is to facilitate the consumer’s purchase of new music, ignore metal fans because metal fans have very little money to spend. The fans themselves make up for this shortcoming by just spreading the word among themselves and sidestepping the filthy capitalist middleman. The shorthand description for this process is “cult following.” Every once in a while, however, a metal band comes along that has just enough pizzazz to get critical acclaim. Or maybe metal because fashionable again periodically. Who knows? In choosing a band with both a cult following and critical acclaim, I suspect that Carl had found a comfortable middle ground in which his deeply instilled trust in institutions facilitating the transfer of money from place to place can make peace with his desire to participate in something that will echo eternally in the souls of at least a segment of humankind.
In any case, we attended the show, and a quick glance at the people waiting in the line indicated that we were going to watch a concert that probably would be ill-suited to traditional romantic practices. It would be hard to imagine, for example, attending dinner at a romantic restaurant, dressed in our Sunday best, myself in suit and tie, Maria in dress and heels, and then proceeding on to a metal show. I resigned myself to failure. Maria, however, upon realizing exactly who it was that was playing, said, “Oh, my fucking God! How do we have backstage passes to a Smoking Lunch-Ladies show? The tickets have been sold out since they went on sale. They seriously only lasted like two hours.”
It appeared that my date might go unexpectedly well.
“Oh, Carl is producing their new album. He got the tickets.”
“This is the best date ever! I’m really fucking glad that I forced my conversation on you at that coffee shop.”
“I’m happy that you’re so excited, but I don’t know if it’s really fair to say that you forced your conversation on me. As I recall, you just sat down and then I bombarded you with questions.”
“Shush. I want to pretend like my own choices are responsible for this good fortune.”
“Fair enough.”

I found myself at the peak of frenzy, trapped within the nugget of tumult that is the heart of a metal show. For whatever reason, I didn’t perceive things the way that I normally do: rather, everything came in flashes, as if there was a strobe light in my brain that chose to flash flailing limbs and blows from knees and elbows and fists and foreheads. I was generally disoriented. Not myself at all. To be completely honest, my sense of individuality seemed to leave me just a little bit every time I touched someone else, which was perpetually. We were packed like sardines in front of the stage, packed so tightly that it was necessary to throw blows just to preserve a space in which to stand, and even then, it was constantly infringed by feet which trod on toes, and also body odor.
There was a rising sense of elation, and the individuality that was threatened was not the banal sort of individuality, individuality as manifested through a few choices and a particular wardrobe and which piece of popular culture I chose to view as the most significant, but rather individuality in an ontological sense, as if my very existence as something distinct from the rest of its surroundings was threatened. It felt like I was ceasing to be a person and starting to become an indistinguishable component of a mob. It was strangely satisfying.
A very large, very tattooed man punched me in the face and shouted, “I fuckin’ love you, man!” so loudly that it could barely be heard over the cacophony of the band. I was sweating, and the pinstriped button-down that I had worn, on the assumption that this would be a more romantic setting, had ripped in several places, and no longer had any buttons.
I don’t know why I had worn the fucking thing in the first place: it’s not as thought anyone would be fooled into thinking that I was the sort of person who attended clubs in New Jersey after talking to me for more than one sentence of conversation, no matter how convincingly I dressed the part, never mind the beard and shaved head. To be honest, I was a little surprise when I found the designer jeans in my closet.
The center of a mosh pit is not a location for the faint of heart, nor for anyone who values their health and the structural integrity of their wardrobe.
The longer I spent in the frenzy, the more I could feel myself dissolving into the crowd, into an amalgam of hundreds and thousands of individual discontents that had transformed itself into a palpable sensation, an entity separate from each of us, that hung heavy in the air, titillated by its freedom from the limitations of social convention, the overwhelming imperative to carry on, to make the best of things, to endure the inherent injustice of existence, the inescapable fact that what is and what is desired are very different things.
We pushed away our cares, separated them from ourselves, and when removed from our substance, the pulsating mass seemed foreign and irrelevant. It did not matter. Only our selves as they existed in that moment mattered.
I had entered a chrysalis in which I no longer need to carry on, in which the simmering discontent of a thousand pulled punches for a thousand minor offenses boiled over onto the ambiguous stranger. Within this mob, we all hurt mutually and we spread the mutual agonies of our souls evenly in a tangible form, as if our intangible substance, whatever a soul or cogito may be, whatever our ids and our egos may be, as if this immaterial essence of every individual was lashing out at the material surrounding it, in which it is inherent, to which it is always forced to bow. It was as if Sartre’s unlimited human freedom was lashing out at Sartre’s own fallacy, that consciousness can never escape the biological mandate, can never truly define itself except in opposition to that which it is not.
It was a tangible expression of frustration caused by the fact that human freedom is forever imprisoned in the domineering edifice of humanity, with its economic and social and agricultural accoutrements. We are forever trapped by the need to eat and use a bathroom, the laws of physics and our inability to become the superheroes that we imagine ourselves to be. The voice of this frenzy shouts, screams with veins popping, red-faced and hoarse from its outrage, it shouts, “I want to be free! Freedom!”
But we are chained by the necessity of choice, and our freedom is like water in a bowl, forced from formlessness into the shape of a bowl through no fault of its own. Human freedom hates its slavery, hates the fact that it is always a bound freedom, that like Prometheus it is destined to give humanity the fire of life, the impetus to accomplish its idiomatic endeavors, but it is also constricted by tight bindings to an immovable anchor.
So freedom beats itself bloody against the limits of its existence, learns to hate these limits and it is through this hatred that it truly begins to understand itself, to discern its own shape, its own capabilities. Freedom is usually disguised as the rash caused by the knowledge of what we cannot do.
And we come together for a moment, then surge apart, in tidal chaos, a mob that forms and dissolves as each person reinterprets this ineffable collective outrage, the simmering discontent that has boiled over, and through his or her reinterpretation, changes the substances of the inconstant whole, in one of the few instances in which a moment becomes a perfect infinity, a perfect mutual acceptance that it is we as an individual who construct the fabric of the human experience, until the entire affair achieves a state of almost religious ecstasy, until the pleasure of anger becomes an aching in the bones, until the aching is lost, we rise up together in the intoxicating flood of our elation, we are drunk on our own abandon, and the yearning dissolves into a perfect moment in which everything is right in the world, all of the world’s disparities and iniquities have been remedied, if only for a few hours.
This strange union has forced the howling wolves of existence out of this venue, to prey upon the passers-by and wait for the Dionysian mob to break its trance, to return to pettily grubbing for food and rent money, to work and accommodation and compromise. In the frenzy we brushed against the slightest hint of an unconditional freedom, and though the experience might pass through us unremarked upon, we would never be the same for having brushed our lips against this strange thing.

I stepped outside for a moment to smoke a cigarette, and while standing among the wolves, with my few but overwhelming concerns beginning to nip at my heels, tentative only because of Orpheus’ song floating through the walls of the building, reminding them to fear that which can vanquish them, I noticed a flower. It was a tiny flower that had struggled through a crack in the cement, and for company it had only garbage and cigarette butts, but no other flowers, a frail and bruised thing, bedecked with a forlorn countenance.
There are flowers everywhere, but they are rarely noticed.

After the show, I rejoined Maria backstage; I was sweaty and disheveled, and she reciprocated the disarray. She had the contented aura of a cat stretching after a long nap in the sun. I imagine I looked equally content. Her hair hung lank and plastered to her temples, and her eyes shone like the sun. “This was the best date ever!” she said, her melodious voice raspy from screaming, and she leaped into my arms and kissed me.
“I’m glad that you liked it: honestly, it was a complete accident. I had no idea what sort of music was playing, much less what band.”
“Ah, serendipity.” Secretly, I felt that some larger force had arranged coincidences perfectly in my favor, as I had done very little to deliberately curry her favor. I have also found that this is usually how I woo the fairer sex as a potential boyfriend: accidentally and through no fault of my own. It would be nice to think that some divine hand was moving people around in my life to arrange true love, but this seems like a petty way for God to spend his time. I would hope that he was devoting his efforts to something a little more important than my love life, in any case.
“I guess, so. Do you want to go hang out with the band? I know that Carl was talking about needing to have a conversation with them after the show, and I think that if we play our cards right, we could probably end up hanging out with them for the rest of the night.”
“That sounds awesome! But don’t be mad if I ditch you and sleep with one of them.” This last was spoken with a grin and a giggle to indicate sarcasm, and I responded in kind.
“That is one of the prerogatives of being in a band. Far be it from me to keep them from the actual reason anyone learns to play guitar.” She laughed again, and took my hand while we walked backstage.
It was backstage that I learned something very important about all of the members of the Smoking Lunch-Ladies, not that I had known anything about them prior to the evening’s festivities. They are enormous. Their sheer physical size is overwhelming in much the same way that the size of the ocean is overwhelming the first time you see it. Not a single one of them was shorter than six feet and four inches, and they had frames that supported spectacular muscle mass, all of which was tattooed in an intricate lacework of the macabre, a sort of hieroglyphic hagiography for pagan demigods. Although I have never been in a locker room with a professional football team, I suspect that it is a similar sensation.
They were simply significantly larger than average. I suspect that the largest of them might have been able to bench press a small car. They appeared to be a grim, leather- and pentagram-clad parody of comic book superheroes, down to the oversized bulge in their collective crotch. I can only imagine what their superpowers would have been.
On stage, their size was inconspicuous, overwhelmed by their elevated position, the frenzy in which I participated, and the suspicion that these prophets of rage had been made literally larger than life by Dionysus or whomever. In person, I felt as if I had just entered a room in which four mountains were seated, drinking shots of whiskey. Carl looked especially out of place, a carefully manicured, professionally dressed man talking softly about mixing tracks and the nuances of acoustics to a man literally twice his size who was soaked in perspiration and hoarse from spending the last four hours screaming guttural lyrics about Satan or human sacrifice or whatever.
He looked like a small, well-dressed boy talking to an adult who earned his living through human sacrifice.
He noticed us enter and said, “Oh, hey guys,” then addressed the band. “Gentlemen, this is my roommate Sid, and his friend Maria. Guys, these are Jonah, Paul, Ryan, and Jake.” They gave greetings.
The one named Jonah, the largest of the four, who I think played the bass, looked at me, and said, “You want a shot, motherfucker?” There was something in his tone that made me think of myself in middle school, the epoch of my life during which I did the stupidest things the most frequently at the urging of my male peers. It was implied that to decline the shot would be to irreversibly undermine my masculinity. It was the sort of situation in which I could not honorably decline the challenge.
“I’ll fucking drink what you give me.”
The rest of the band cackled maliciously, and Jonah poured what may have been a full pint of whiskey into a glass and handed it to me. I suspect that they were an insular group, and my shredded finery had caused them to assume that I, like Carl, was a refined gentleman of the upper classes and accordingly couldn’t drink for shit. This assumption in turn led to a wry challenge in the spirit of harmless fun, presumably at my expense. If I had the drinking abilities of Carl or a preteen anorexic girl, they would spend a little time laughing at the sight of me falling down and vomiting. If I could hold my own, they would probably be a bit friendlier.
The gauntlet had been thrown down, and the stakes were low, as per usual in this sort of situation.
Although I’m sure they would have had a wonderful time laughing at my expense, I am accomplished at drinking, having started practicing in high school and continued my efforts with extreme and unceasing diligence. I am also the sort of person who will rise to a challenge, regardless of its stupidity, especially if the challenge involves drinking. Accordingly, I quaffed the whiskey, ignoring the burning bile that roiled in my stomach, the stomach’s shout that it had been injured by too great a quantity of a toxic substance.
“Ya’ll wouldn’t happen to have any beer, would you?” This last request was necessary, as the mind can only overpower the stomach’s limits for so long, and that glass of whiskey felt like it was about to eat a hole in my stomach, explode in a geyser of vomit or explosive diarrhea, or some combination of the above. As soon as I finished talking, I clenched my teeth and swallowed the vanguard of a tremendous regurgitation, routing my stomach’s contents back where they belonged. The only thing that makes a man do stupider things that male peer pressure is love for a woman, and the idiocy resulting from the former tends to be more self-destructive than that resulting from the latter.
“Fuck, man,” said Jonah, “You fucking deserve one. I’d be puking my fucking guts out if I’d done that.”
“Pussy,” I said with a saucy grin. “You should practice more. Apparently it makes perfect.”
“Fuck. How much do you fucking drink, dude?”
“Not that much anymore, but I used to drink a lot.” They started laughing.
“I’d hate to see you drinking a lot.” It is a tendency peculiar to males of a certain age and lifestyle to immediately respect anyone capable of drinking foolish quantities of alcohol. This fact has often worked to my advantage, as massive consumption takes little more than patience and a little practice to get the drunken coordination under control. In any case, with the ice broken, we began to drink heavily and socialize about nothing in particular.
As the evening wore on and became comfortably draped in the delicate gauze of intoxication, perception rendered hazy, speech and motion indistinct, oblivion creeping in along the pathways of murdered neurons and the distress of an overtaxed liver, there entered a gaggle of tittering girls who seemed to have tied their libidinous inclinations exclusively to men with the ability to play a musical instrument in front of a crowd. The lust of these girls was bound by the adamantine chains of youthful foolishness to the attributes rather than the character of a man: it was directed at the hobby or occupation of the man rather than man himself in the full bloom of his human complexity. They, like so many others, had sacrificed themselves on the altar of some idea , and there was a synonymy to all of their actions. It was as if their idiomatic mannerisms had been subsumed by this infantile imperative, this fledgling braggadocio, as if they had abandoned their selves to become hollow avatars of some archetypal entity that thirsts eternally for the attention of another archetype, the archetypal rock star, and will thirst eternally, having never tasted the water of life.
There is a certain sense in which we are all Shiva the Destroyer, and the thing that we destroy most often is our self. We take something of infinite complexity and nuance, a vibrant, dynamic life, and we whittle away at it until we exist as some sort of caricature, reflecting the shallowness with which others perceive us. The real tragedy in the case of these girls was not the fact that they had made themselves into so little, but rather that their failing is so common that it cannot be considered a grievous sin.
One of these avatars caught my eye, and I could not avoid noting her movements and tiniest gestures, her erratic orbit around the room. She was beautiful, with lush curves and an artful mane of dirty blond hair, and also a sort of infectious vivacity that made her beauty more than simply the sum of its parts, but it was not her beauty that caught my eye, for she was no more beautiful than any of the other avatars. She was certainly not more beautiful than Maria, who was softly and intermittently kissing my neck, and who had individuated herself to a greater and more attractive extent. It seemed, in my humble and biased opinion, that Maria was trying quite hard to live up to the responsibility of humanity, while this other girl seemed to have subscribed to Shakespeare’s theory that all the world’s a stage, and she could settle for simply being a cameo actor upon it. Nonetheless, I felt compelled to archive the minute nuances of her presence, and was at a loss to explain it.
This archival urge was made intelligible when she turned and saw me. “Sidney!” she exclaimed, “How have you been? I haven’t seen you in so long!” She was in fact a girl that I had known for quite some time, having been introduced through Andrew at one function or another. She was important to me in the way that a high school acquaintance is important to me, which is to say hardly at all, except inasmuch as she lent a little familiarity to the situation.
“It has been a while, hasn’t it? No, I’m doing pretty well, same old, same old. How about you? You look great.”
“Thanks. I am great. I’ve been keeping busy, I guess. I mostly just work a lot, which is probably why we haven’t run into each other in so long. So are you going to introduce me to your friend, or are you just going to keep her for yourself?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Ashley, this is Maria. Maria, Ashley.” Maria had stopped kissing my neck when Ashley noticed me, and begun to bristle like a cat that had encountered another, strange cat in an alleyway. For whatever reason, women are capable of conveying an incredible amount of emotional information to each other through very little conversation. In this particular case, the amount of conversation was utterly negligible, but the tone of Maria’s eyes seemed to be No Trespassing signs, and her body language was as welcoming to Ashley as a bacon cook-off at a Baptist church would be to a Muslim. It is likely that the all-too-common failure of intergender communication lies in the fact that men, like rocks, are insensate to the nuances of this sort of communication.
“Hi, it’s nice to meet you,” said Maria. It has always amazed me that girls can be friends at all, because they lie to each other so flagrantly and so frequently. In any case, Ashley noticed Maria’s less than warm reception, and reacted accordingly.
“Well, I’ll leave you two kids alone. You take care of Sidney, Maria. He’s a real sweetheart. Bye, Sidney! Be sure and give me a call sometime!” She threw me a conspiratorial wink, the sort that said the she knew exactly what I was up to and wished me luck, and then she returned to the fray.

I went outside to smoke a cigarette, and had an unexpected moment alone with Carl, who finished a phone call as I lit up. Moments like these are little gems, because Carl is so busy that it is hard to find much time to talk to him, but the things that he says are usually pricelessly useful.
“Thanks for these tickets, man. This was the perfect date.”
“I’m glad it worked out. This new girl seems nice.”
“Yeah, I really like her.”
“That’s good. I haven’t seen you with a girl that you actually liked in a while.”
“They are few and far between.”

Eventually, we returned to my house and had sex, an unexpected boon tagged onto the end of a surprisingly excellent date. Thank God that things had worked out, because it would have been really unfortunate if my own lack of attention to detail had caused things to fall apart with Maria. She was the sort of person that turned spending time with her into an end in itself, rather than a means to some higher end.
Maria’s limbs wrapped around me, enfolding me into herself, clutching me desperately as if she wanted to somehow unify our substances, her nails raking my back, teeth nipping my neck and shoulders, her mouth sucking voraciously to burst capillaries, leaving that small but embarrassing placard on my neck that would announce the previous evening’s activities to anyone who saw them, the sort of advertisement that would have necessitated a scarf or turtleneck were I to try and camouflage their existence. Fortunately, I don’t have a day job that requires any pretense of decorum at all, and so I would not have to camouflage anything.
On the whole, it seemed that it was fornication with an ulterior motive, laden with possessiveness, as if she were branding me and planning on surveilling my activities in case rustlers tried to make off with her cattle. A small portion of my mind wondered if this heralded mild doom to the relationship, but mostly I enjoyed her fervor and savored my stinging back.
When we had finished, we lay intertwined in a sweaty, post-coital stupor, our limbs and the bedding tangling into a lacework of simple, physical union, and Maria initiated the inevitable conversation, that inescapable epilogue to the physical act of love making. This conversation is of preeminent importance, because it is the attempt to extend the physical unification into higher realms. The sexual act is, generally speaking, little more than an instinctual urge, and although this conversation occurs after casual fornication, it is a tepid and anemic thing, lacking any force or importance, or else it becomes tragically lopsided because one party looks at the evening’s activities as being the first step to a long and happy future while the other party views them as a lucky night and nothing more.
But when it occurs within the framework of a relationship, or a potential relationship, its visage is transformed into one of vital importance, and its potency lies in the fact that it attempts to conjoin two separate instances of humanity. Physical union is simple, requiring only the correct equipment and a little motivation. The unification of two human beings in their entirety is a far more difficult feat, one which may never actually be accomplished, because it is an attempt to synthesize habits, hopes, likes and dislikes, and plethora of minutia which form the whole of a human being and which must, in a successful relationship, be forced to come to terms with the collection of minutia that is the other member of the relationship.
In any case, this conversation uses physical congress as the pivot around which to whirl separate lives, habits, hopes, dreams, aspirations, separate emotional vulnerabilities, separate rough edges into some semblance of unity. It takes advantage of a purely physical nakedness to make more comfortable a baring of souls, uses physical intimacy to press forward into a degree of emotional and intellectual intimacy that would be difficult to broach in other circumstances. It uses one giving and taking to facilitate another, more important giving and taking. The initial overtures of the conversation were essentially small talk, but Maria soon got to the point.
“Ashley seems nice. How long have you known her?” I immediately lit a cigarette.
This question was not the simple query that it seemed, but rather a long succession of queries using a particular occasion as a focal point for what was essential a temporally extended delving into the entire potentiality of the relationship. Implied in and inherent to this simple question was also the question, “Have you had sex with her?” as well as, “Will you cheat on me?” as well as “How jealous will you let me get?”
This last was in itself a much more complex question, as it was actually demanding a reciprocal accommodation of both of our emotional needs, in which she realized that she would probably be jealous for no reason from time to time, and regardless of any factual illegitimacy, her jealousy would nevertheless be necessary for her emotional health or else reflexive. I would appropriately resent this causeless jealousy, but the manner in which I handled this resentment was important. Would I be a callous to her emotional needs and ridicule this jealousy, or would I commit the equally lamentable sin of allowing myself to be walked upon like carpeting in a heavily trafficked hallway? Or would I rather accept a healthy compromise? And it covered not only the issue of jealousy, but all of the compromises necessary to successfully coexist with another person.
The question really was the trellis upon which the imagined future of our relationship grew, and my answer would change the shape of our relationship’s potentiality, until the trellis was insufficient to support the weight of her hopes, or the relationship grew into a healthy and actual vine, with perhaps a few unexpected twists and turns that added character to its lush and fruitful verdancy. Really, every single moment, ever word spoken and every choice made within a relationship is temporally elongated into the relationship’s potential future: every moment is a prophecy of the future. Every moment exists with the question, “will this be a healthy relationship?” hidden within it, begging to be asked.
Earlier in the evening, I had made the decision to turn what was essentially a casual acquaintance into an attempt to synthesize two separate entities into a single entity greater than its components, a decision which was made almost entirely on a bit of conversation and a perfect aesthetic moment. I don’t know if anyone else experiences these moments, where it seems like the entire universe has conspired to create a circumstance to profoundly and fleetingly beautiful that you cannot help but raise your opinion of whatever it is that you’re viewing at the time, a moment that encapsulates all of eternity and projects itself forward into all subsequent moments.
It seemed like the tumult of the crowd froze for a second, and in freezing it left a path for my line of sight that led directly to Maria. She was dancing on the periphery of the crowd, swaying in time to the music like a rush cradle on the Nile bearing within it the harbinger of freedom and prophecy, the key to people unfettered by the mores of their neighbors but who rather fall into a particular identity, a self defined through its covenant to something greater than any one person, to an omnipotent and omniscient love, and she was too frail to participate in the madness closer to the stage.
A smile flickered across her face, unselfconscious, unnoticed, perfect. She was shrouded in an unfolding phantasmagoria of shadow and stage lights, veiled by backlit motes, and the light caressed her.
She undulated as though returning the caress, she turned her head to one side to reveal the curve of her neck and one hand wiped sweat from her brow, and it seemed as though she expanded to take everything within her fold, as if there was nothing that was not her, as though the entirety of creation was transubstantiated within her.
Her face was composed into an icon of ethereal joy, her eyes awash with everything that I felt as I flailed wildly, and for a moment, it seemed as though she was beauty incarnate.
Then the moment passed as moments do, but it had irreversibly shaped my opinion of her. Forever after I would be able to think of her and think of perfection at the same time. Perhaps this is a frail thing from which to base a relationship, but on such trivia are the choices of men and gods made.
I lit a cigarette in response to this question that was so pregnant with implication, because while I had committed to this new endeavor, it was a fledgling choice that stumbled forward on toddling legs as yet unvindicated by experience. It is a heavy burden to accept, to attempt to accommodate someone else, to bare your breast to their knife or their lips and hope they reciprocate your sentiment. Relationships are a pain in the ass.
“I’ve known her for a few years.” She turned to face me more directly, and in the darkness, only the barest edge of the curve of her cheek and her bright eyes were clearly visible. “She kind of comes and goes with no rhyme or reason, but we run into each other from time to time. We tried dating once, but it was one of those dates where everything that possibly could go wrong did, so now we’re just friends.”
“Oh?”
“You’re jealous, aren’t you?” At this question, she withdrew from me slightly, separating physically, I think so that she would have at least the physical space to pad too strong of an emotional rebuff.
“No, I think she’s a nice girl.”
“Oh, you’re totally lying. No, it’s okay. It really was just one really, really bad date, and it was a long time ago. You don’t have anything to worry about. And anyway, I don’t have any reason to pursue any other girl when I could just date you. You’re pretty fucking awesome.”
“Are we dating?” She asked, but as she asked, she snuggled closer.
“We are if you want to. You’re more or less perfect, so…”
“Flatterer,” she said, “How do you know that I’m not just waiting to burst into jealousy and insanity as soon as I have you roped in?”
“I don’t know. But it seems worth the risk.”
She wrapped herself around me once more, and the world seemed to disappear for a while, and when we had finished, it seemed like the world was an entirely different place than it had been before.
It’s nice how women can do that to you, sometimes.