Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

for parties lead to difficult conversations

And there they were, my contemporaries — eating Hawaiian pizzas in Hawaiian shirts and I didn’t know if this artistic irony belonged to them or Fate. True, there have been more definitive signs in world history, like it wasn’t as specific a pattern as the one experienced by my father’s associate, a man called possibly Alvin, who got shot through his car window in a pattern of bullets while sitting at a traffic light, just shot very neatly in his shoulder, and the next day in hospital received a card with the same pattern neatly inscribed inside — at which point this Alvin left town for good. But still, it was something.

— I still have draw, I said to Candy.

— And so I’m rolling? she said.

— But if you could –

— I’m only checking, kook.

I did say my wife was cool. She was way-out severe when she wanted and I liked that very much. So Candy made our joints and I stood there trying not to look at Romy, which meant noticing that Hiro was already here, watching a screen playing reruns of that ancient trash series about the prettiest slayer of vampires.

— Yet again I have rolled a shit joint, said Candy, exhaling.

— Is not so bad, I said.

For I wanted everyone to be as happy as they could be, which is always my ideal but at this more tense moment had a special poignancy.

— You think this weed is sprayed? said Candy.

— You think? I was saying, but then I was interrupted.

— Hola, shifu, said Romy, who had come to talk.

— What’s up? I said.

I was trying very hard to gauge the general tone. It seemed like everyone was happy and that I did not need to worry — and I suppose that’s what happens when you’re deceiving people: conversations become a surface you always suspect of being a depth. Any pattern at large seemed possible, whether numerological as according to the ancient sages or just the patterns of the weather or the flight of swifts, if I could identify a swift, which I think I can’t. Pastoral is not my habitat.

ROMY

You are such a Mickey Mouse creature.

ME

What’s wrong with Mickey?

ROMY

He’s only got three fingers on each hand.

In private I would have been able to reply, and with some eloquence. It’s true I can sometimes seem not worldly enough, I would have said, but I would also point out that I have social issues, I am very shy, and perhaps were it not for these social issues I think I could have achieved great things, but there it is, I cannot help it. But in public I was not sure if I were meant to be taking part in this conversation, or if in fact more probably I was instead meant to be teased with a quiet grace, and so as silently requested I stayed silent — because I understood what Romy was saying with this dialogue: Let’s just talk as if nothing is happening, and therefore nothing is happening .

ROMY

Did I tell you I saw your mother?

ME

My mother?

ROMY

We talked for seventeen minutes about you. It was really something.

HIRO

Everyone’s so worried, it’s crazy –

CANDY

I’m not worried.

It was like those moments when you touch down in the middle of the night and have to make some connection at an interglobal airport like Houston or Chiang Mai — not that this has ever happened to me but I can at least imagine — so you basically are manic with scanning for signs. That was the anxiety I had held over me in this conversation, like a parasol against the endless sun, this conversation where everyone I loved was just chatting among themselves, and one answer to that type of feeling is just to get even more wiped out than you are already feeling, and so I was glad to see Hiro become absorbed in doing his stacks — cutting a tablet of Modafinil into quarters, then Cipralex and diazepam. For not only did I in general applaud the fact that this was the new digital age of narcotics but also I needed very much at this precise moment to be distracted.

— You sure, cookie? said Candy as she saw me snort enthusiastically.

— Yeah, maybe that’s enough, yeah? said Romy, too.

I understood that she had only recently been in hospital and very scared, so she had her own private fears, but really I did not care, because if I needed these narcotics then it was not without good reason. I was standing there, thinking very fast about Romy and my wife and Epstein and my desires, and so it was only kind of woozy the way I realised Hiro had meanwhile drifted away and then heard him gently say to these two kids on a sofa a sentence like:

— But what if we all had an orgy?

I never said I liked Hiro. I said he was my best friend. These are very different categories.

where the surfaces seep or leak

Every day — this was the lesson to be learned from the life of Hiro — you should try doing something that might help another person. Even if it’s just guessing well when they play charades, that’s enough. Or, another of his maxims was: a party is much easier than people think. It basically just needs beer and plastic chairs and music and takeaway food in plastic boxes. While the ideal drink is the minimum of alcohol with the maximum result.

— And anything else? I said.

— Then you just need to get the right atmosphere, he replied.

In everything he did, he liked to add to what was normal. And already two kids had got naked very fast. They had hardly been so dressed already, so the difference was arguably small. Just as I suppose I could at least envisage a perspective from which the difference between the clothed and the unclothed would be minuscule — but at this moment I couldn’t quite believe in it. I still think clothes are a major difference, like the way skin is as well. I know once again this makes me as old-fashioned as an ice-cream van, in the same way as my inability not to begin and end an email like I’m writing out a letter, but there it is, that’s how I think. It was about as soft and minuscule as the warmth a person leaves behind on a toilet seat, the manner in which Hiro proposed this orgy, and how it began. But then that’s how things happen and it’s why it’s so difficult to talk about any event you care to mention. It was like if you imagine everything’s a surface — and after all everything is a surface — but then something disturbingly still manages to seep through. These are the kind of actions I think happen most often nowadays, these kinds of small seepages or cracks in the general sheen. Everything feels so fleeting that it’s almost impossible to notice an event when it occurs, like someone giving you a jacket they no longer like and it goes so well with your new pair of jeans, that’s one way a story can work and when it stays like that it’s fine — but also too late you can find yourself inside something much more supersized, like what is really taking place is Godzilla greenly emerging from the radioactive waves.

& become, for instance, an orgy

It was like I was looking at a scene from one of those envellumed Renaissance prints — the secret kind known only to the pervert connoisseur, with giant muscles and endraped beds. Had I ever thought about it, this word orgy would have been something very different, belonging to other ages, a time of swingers clubs and plumed moustaches, with a softcore piano score. But maybe the fact that this was so different was because this is no more the time of swingers clubs than a time when things are really obscene. As soon as you’re in bed with someone you can do anything you like, that’s the basic arrangement nowadays — there is no disgust or danger. Maybe that was why the scene before me was so peaceful and so different from my previous assumptions, and maybe this is true for so many words, for most words we happily use are in fact outmoded, or exaggerations. If the atmosphere was crazed, it did not seem that way. Whereas now, from this distance, when everything has disappeared, I wonder if I should have thought about it more. For the problem with happiness is how often it requires the cooperation of other people, and it’s never clear if they’re cooperating for the right reasons, by which I mean the same reasons. Sure, everyone has their reasons, as the swami has it. But the fact that there are overlapping reasons in a situation is no guarantee at all that the consequences will be overlapping, too. But at the time I was not thinking with such detachment. Instead I was just marvelling how different things were from how I ever imagined them, and I liked that discovery very much. This orgy was quiet and industrious, a whole you wanna take over or — no no, I’m cool, you cool? — no problem, let’s stay like this — that salon talk, just kindly and methodical. I liked it, the way people were considerate of each other. They’d get up for water and sit around chatting and sometimes just take over for a little, if someone needed a break from licking, or kissing. It was charming, the way people went about it. It’s so easy, I was thinking, to multiply yourself. I was the same person who had arrived at this party; the self in me was the same. This is not a surprising situation and happens very often. But now inside that self, occupying the space which earlier had only the haziest notion of how the word orgy might have been fulfilled, there were these two naked kids just shyly or lazily kissing in the most laid-back way, and a cigarette that the girl had put aside was unravelling itself unnoticed in an ashtray. And perhaps if it had just been this, a general escalation of a blissful vibe, then I could probably have accepted it. But this was to ignore the fact that an orgy among people with whom you have many secrets is a difficult social encounter. I did not blame Hiro for this. If Hiro was sweet then he was sweet like the most catastrophic kitten. If now he does perhaps seem to me like one of those space invader demons leaking down poison in pixels, it’s not as if those pixels were luminously visible. I was very sure that Hiro had no malice in him, but still, it made me wonder if therefore I should have considered much more carefully the issue of Hiro’s pills, e.g. the issue of whether his sporadic taking of the medical pills that were said to stabilise or ameliorate his general condition was in fact as useful for the common good as Hiro always maintained. There was no time, however, to consider this, I had to consider it only in retrospect, when it was in a way too late, when whether or not Hiro’s manic behaviour was a danger had been proved beyond all measure.