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.