Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

— If you want to show me something, she would say, — I’m here, cookie.

And I am ashamed to say that I was irritable at such suggestions, only because the less I could produce the more such questions made me feel inadequate and insecure. So that eventually the question was never asked, and Candy would go to work while I sat there making coffee and regarding sadly with a heavy heart the dog. In the hair salon I quizzed my cutter about the possible thinning of my hair. She seemed to be cool about it, but then it’s easy not to be anxious about the anxieties of others, I would say that is one talent possessed by every being on the planet, including the deadbeat algae and the less sensitive snails. Whereas for me, anxiety was my general medium. I was the connoisseur of failing your high ideals. Certainly I was often wrong, but at least I was always right about why I might be wrong. No one can say I have any illusions about myself. But also I think that if you become too easily preoccupied with the small impossibilities, like what to eat or how to get up on time, you never get to see the major impossibilities, and that’s a shame. It’s why whenever anyone attacks me for my drive for perfection and its seeming hypocrisy I think they are missing the point. Because of course one cannot be the perfect vegetarian or timetabler, although also you should try — but that’s no reason not to understand that on the grander scale, like love, it’s always going to be impossible to live right at all. Even if there is no other way of living. It tended to exasperate those around me.

MY MOTHER

Why do you always make such jokes?

ME

I think I’m sweet.

MY MOTHER

Snooks, you are. It’s just that no one thinks this.

ME

But shouldn’t they?

MY FATHER

He is a clown.

MY MOTHER

But if he wants to be, so let him!

MY FATHER

I’m not so sure.

That was our suburb crosstalk that gets the extra name of conversation. But I think my mother was right. For my mother I wanted to be the all-powerful conquistador.

to increase such multiple worlds

It was always very caring, the ideal I tried to preserve. So that if I was even in bed while Candy undressed, and sending a small message to Romy, which happened rarely, but did sometimes have to happen if Romy wanted an immediate reassurance, then as much as I lied to Candy about whom I was texting, I also lied to Romy about where I was — since Romy was no monster of depravity, she liked Candy very much, and if I had told her that I was reclining in the same room as Candy, among the pillows, writing violent gorgeous things to her, then Romy would have been upset, and with good reason. So that while the moralist may well want to argue that the reason lying is wrong is for its corruption, the way it turns other people into fictions without them realising, or, to be more precise, transforms the people to whom you are talking into ghosts and simulacrums, I think it’s also possible to hazard the possibility that this very ghostliness is something beautiful and to be treasured. Suddenly the world is all macaws and garish. And even if for that ideal I have had to suffer terrible things, still, it’s not without its beauty, or seduction.

for which his model is Hiro

Meanwhile Hiro was into so many tricks and schemas that I could not keep up. He’d come back late at night with recondite brands of cigarette, from various maritime countries, and tell me how tomorrow he couldn’t see me because he’d made a friend who had potentially upsetting medical tests the next day and needed his support, and while I applauded his public spirit I had this twinge of maybe slightly feeling jealous, like thinking why should this other person get the attention and not me? Why should the illnesses of this other person be so regarded? I wanted Hiro always. To be a sidekick is no fun if the original maestro is unavailable, and there you sit all alone with your breadsticks in the chequered light of the trattoria. Perhaps such loneliness was also because I was having other problems with my phone: someone would call, and when I would answer there was no one there. I know this happens often but still, it was unnerving in the circumstances. Naturally in such an atmosphere I wanted joie de vivre very much, and Hiro was my model. I wanted to follow him in his obscure explorations. If it meant that we found ourselves in pleasure spots and night dives, it implied no seediness or exploitation of those less fortunate, but only a way of trying to spend time without becoming bored, and a possibly laudable wish to talk to people one might usually ignore. Through the night roved Hiro, and I wanted to keep him company. Definitely I was also slightly worried for him, and wanted to protect him. I was all solicitude. He was in one of those manic phases where sleep seemed to him an inconvenience, and if you do not want to go to sleep and also do not want to sit at home, in the silent bedrooms of suburbia, then the kind of place you have to enter gets seedier as the night goes on. It’s impossible to avoid, so that it was only natural that one night after wandering from place to place we might be sitting side by side in towelling robes, conversing with almost naked girls. And always it’s important to enlarge your perspectives, to make the background and the foreground less separate from each other. That’s a basic moral law.

— Hey, we said. — Hey hey.

— Hey, the girls said sweetly back.

Sure, Hiro called this place a sauna , and of course I knew the reputation of such a word, and had I mentioned this moment to Wyman — who is always fearful of the world, like the platonic form of a photograph of Wyman would be Wyman in striped blazer and straw boater standing up in a sepia punt — I think he might have argued that I should have possibly been morally afraid. The word, perhaps, should have been as ominous a sign as if I were in some teen horror flick and had come across a garage in the rainy night whose electric lettering was sizzling. But always I was very brave, when considering my inner life. I would risk my inner life in any place of possible corruption, to gain the coconut slushie and the million-dollar prize.

whom our hero accompanies to a sauna

There was a changing room which was like the changing rooms in the swimming pools where I had learned to swim, and that I suppose is no surprise because presumably the capacity for variation in a changing room is very small. The atmosphere was strangely sports aquatic, with each of us bearing on our wrist a key on a plastic bracelet. And this was where Hiro and I had settled into our white spa gowns with plastic sandals — a uniform that I think is only ever humiliating, especially for the gutbucket male, not to mention the gutbucket miniature male, which was possibly its purpose, to emphasise the ugliness of the men in the presence of the women. Maybe it was a small humiliation to set against the greater humiliation of the women. Even if I am not so sure that the women are humiliated, in fact I am almost certain that there is no shame for them at all in such a place. It was more like those myths where nymphs hang out beside a pool and I now understood why these myths should end with the macho getting punished. I think punishment is only right for such a situation — to be in a salon, on a sofa, with a complimentary non-alcoholic beverage, regarding this tableau that was slightly reminiscent of the refreshment area at the bowling but only if you also admit that it had this glowing kind of extra that was the fact that every woman was naked, or almost. It was just another of the examples I was collecting of the replica that is not quite a replica, because it was so much like the portrait of a normal bar but the difference that the girls were almost naked was a total new discovery of what is possible in this world. I suppose I don’t think ever before I’ve understood what money was able to do. I don’t think I knew that this is what was possible. I had previously thought that just the greatest treats that money could buy were drugs or holidays. I didn’t realise it could totally go anywhere. And I know the argument that there are so many ways of coercion and entrapment in this world and money is just one of them, but the business of show was also very convincing. I was considering something Romy once told me she’d had to say to a boyfriend, along the lines of –