Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

— You are kidding me, said Candy.

— Ignore him, said Hiro.

— I am telling you, I said, — we were totally in an armed situation.

Not that at this time I examined the precise nature of this gun, partly because although I know that guns are the most modern thing available that still doesn’t mean that it’s easy for the average Joe, and by Joe I obviously mean me, however modern this Joe or me might be, to be familiar with the items. I think it’s no exaggeration to say that being wised-up is no easy matter. And yet Hiro was making it feel very restful, to enter a bodega and pull out a blunderbuss.

(— That reminds me, said Candy. — You remember my friend Epstein?

— Epstein?

— My friend Epstein, she said.

— Darling, we’re telling you a story here.

— OK, she said. — OK.)

It was all the more exciting because Hiro’s look is not obviously brutal. This is another thing we share. That Hiro was brilliant or goofy or both together you only needed to look at him. He sported square spectacles with black rims, and a dark brown corduroy jacket with a shawl collar and various zips, underneath which he wore a brown plaid shirt, but the detail that marked him out was that on his feet were two tan deck shoes but without any socks, like a riviera mogul. He was a pure product of modern chic. That was why the picture was a little outré: in the background, the television behind the counter was on a rerun almost definitely of the famous cat-and-mouse revenge saga, for everywhere you look there are cartoons, it’s unavoidable, and meanwhile Hiro was slowly backing out of this very bright kiosk with the horizontal gun in one hand and the vertical prawn snax in the other. And I at least agreed with this idea of an exit because I was wanting to get right out of there and demand an explanation from Hiro as to when precisely he decided that holding up bodegas in our area was a way of spending time. I do accept that in theory there are no better or worse ways to spend time, the point of time is just to waste it, but also there are limits.

— The fuck was that? I said.

— It isn’t real , said Hiro.

And he showed me the blunderbuss which on examination I now understood to be a water pistol, and plastic, but very realistic. And I guess that did calm me, to discover that no harm was intended. I had no idea how little you ever needed to be a convincing copy, and not only was that knowledge reassuring but it was also, in retrospect, very tempting and seductive. I wonder if everything that happened from then on happened because of that seduction, the realisation that it doesn’t need to be much to be the thing itself — so that even as we looked up and down the silent boutique vista, even then we were transformed into watchful mafiosi. The threat to us, I had to admit, was small. There was one lone street sweeper in the distance, paused on his cell phone. It was as if the street were a beach, like the blank beaches when you come heavily out of the sea among the plastic seaweed, and you stand there, and look at the crowd and suddenly you can’t find anyone. Above us koalas or pigeons were playing in the jacaranda trees. And so we walked away, while Hiro gazed pensively at this pristine bag of prawn chips. Then generously he handed them to the first infant we went past on the street.

which is a seductive knowledge

Surely this was a form of utopian thinking, this small improvement to a person’s life? I found it very charming in my friend. Maybe in some far-off century if you wanted to reinvent the social contract you would have done it with more squalor, living underground in isolation, and losing yourself in crazy monologues and financial worry and hunger; but in this very bright time it also seemed that you could do it more softly — just in this desire to create a more adventurous existence: with friendships, love affairs, extra or extended families. Because I guess that although we now have so many forms of utopia, we have computers and space travel and TV and telephones, all the impedimenta of the recent future, still, there is more utopia available. It’s just maybe now it’s in something smaller, like the distance between thinking of something and in fact doing it — like tying up your boyfriend, then using him until he cries out in dark pleasure — or even smaller, just in the beginnings of sentences, like if only it were so … or something’s missing … You have to start small, I suppose I mean. And if your best friend was recently out of the hospital for difficult emotions and very vulnerable and with nowhere obvious to go apart from on his own then I think it’s only logical that we had a duty to take him in. For really what you adopt can be loved as truly as what you create and in fact perhaps more so. Or at least it always seemed to me that adoption of foreign elements was one proof you had a soul. Long ago, when I was much smaller than I am now, I was in some store with my mother and was apparently very intent on pointing out an ugly person, who had dark hair that was distinctly bushy inside her nose. My mother took me away and for ever after told this story as a very bad thing I had done. So what was I meant to think? From then on I thought that you should definitely not be mean to other creatures. Not that my thoughts were always on the oppressed of other nations, but I did try not to be cruel to those around me who did not have as much as we did. We are not rich , my mother argued, but I think this was because around us were houses with rose gardens and swimming pools and when that happens your perspective might get scrambled. Whereas when you start to think about things a little more closely you realise how limited you might have been in defining what you think of as the good or beautiful or charming, you realise that so many things you thought of as not possible, like sending messages to a girl in the middle of the night who is not your wife, or removing items from a store without permission, can also have their beauty if you only consider them right. That was how I now reasoned — as if previously I had inhabited some happy gated compound, that protected its inhabitants from the drug-crazed depredations of the maquiladoras without, and now I was in the open and also pleasantly surprised. I was admiring the cactus trees, buying myself a mango juice and enjoying the blissed-out vibe. Transformations, it turns out, are possible. A lot of the time maybe you’re doing something and it seems like nothing — just dense and pillowed like one of those perfumed puffy Care Bear stickers and then BAM! it’s mayhem.

for everywhere it seemed like nothing was happening

Not that at this time it felt like mayhem, not precisely. It was only softness and the colours softness comes in: pistachio, vanilla, peach. That kind of softness was something I appreciated very much in those around me. Like one day we ran into our school friend Nelson. Nelson was often in the newspapers as an essayist in showbiz and the cinema. When the film stars came in by helicopter from the north or south, Nelson was there to greet them. And now here he was on some very sad backstreet, explaining to me happily how he very much appreciated that he could take part in his child’s breastfeeding. It was beautiful, the way he described it. He held the baby very gently so it could suckle at his wife’s breasts, because the one thing to avoid was specific roles for the mother and the father. As much as you could, he said, you should therefore do everything together. And I adored this happy thinking very much, and wondered if deep down this wide-eyed aura, the way this world we all inhabit is lit according to the pastel colour-palette of chemicals and candies, was an effect of our education. For our school was basically a country club, if by country club you can also imagine the hypereducation at a small Renaissance court. And also that it was devoted to the various halfies and mestizos, the octoroons and griffes: all the anxious children and grandchildren of immigrant peoples. Everything we were taught was to erase all differences between people — and here were its fruits in front of me in the sadsack figure of Nelson, and in our bright environment more generally. There were trips to watch the sailing boats, or frescoball or snooker, or to the park with its lemonade stalls. While Hiro and Wyman and I pursued sprezzatura pastimes like getting fat, or fatter, eating peanut-butter waffles and vanilla shakes, or sometimes both together, in some deliquescent form of sundae. And yet still, this was how the mayhem happened, as softly as it could, like the mayhem came in on tiptoe. Hiro for instance had taken to sporting a variety of wigs — the blonde, the retro, the goofily creative. Personally I found his energy liberating but not everyone saw it that way: they saw it as worrying , or dangerous , or other therapeutic terms. He was spending time on the Internet and comparing kinds of firearm, and if Wyman expressed his worries at this development, Hiro was unruffled and unconcerned.